Dead Men's s Boots

I dozed off at last, into the kind of fitful sleep where you’re sort of aware that time is passing and it’s passing slowly.

I had muddy, tedious dreams where I was walking down long streets that I didn’t know, looking for a train station because I had to go somewhere and time was running out. Night was coming on. If I missed the train I’d be stuck there, and in the dream that seemed like a very bad option. I turned corners at random, sure that I’d see the station in the distance, but each turning was either a blind alley or an avenue that stretched into the distance with no station in sight.

Then I passed a man sitting at the side of the road – in the same attitude, I guess, as Doug Hunter when the cops found him and took him in. But this wasn’t Doug Hunter, a man I’d yet to meet: it was John Gittings.

I sat down next to him. It would have felt rude to just walk on by.

He gave me a look – more in sorrow than in anger, which came as something of a relief considering his propensity for violence on the spirit level.

He was dressed in the shabby brown jacket and tan chinos he’d worn on the day of the Whipsnade Zoo debacle the year before, when he’d taken his eye off the game during a tag-team exorcism and I’d come within an eighth of an inch of having my head bitten off. It was the last time I’d seen him alive.

He showed me his hands, which were bloody. My subconscious mind was definitely raiding Doug Hunter’s story for narrative guidelines here.

‘Not much left of me now, Fix,’ John said lugubriously. Psychologists tell us that you can’t really hear voices in dreams, but this sounded like the John I remembered: as much vaguely comical self-pity as Morrissey, but John played the drums when he was ghostbusting and no group he was in ever stayed together for very long, so in most respects you’d have to say he was more like Johnny Marr.

‘No, mate,’ I agreed. ‘You’ve seen better days, that’s for sure.

’

Since it was my dream, I checked my pockets for booze. Nothing there but a sprig of silver birch: okay, that was the ward that was stuck up on John’s door to keep the restless dead out. I felt almost ashamed: as dreams go, this was turning into something of a busman’s holiday.

I offered John the silver-birch ward: it was looking a little ragged now, the white thread that bound it starting to unravel, but he didn’t seem to notice it in any case.