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bush!”
    Johnny took down the volume L-MIN and was silent for a few minutes. Granddad had a complete set of huge encyclopedias. No one really knew why. Somewhere in 1950 or something, Granddad had said to himself “Get educated,” and had bought the massive books on the installment plan. He’d never opened them. He’d just built a bookcase for them. Granddad was superstitious about books. He thought that if you had enough of them around, education leaked out, like radioactivity.
    “How about Mrs. Sylvia Liberty?”
    “Who’s she?”
    “She was a suffragette, I think. Votes for women and things.”
    “Never heard of her.”
    “She’s not in here under ‘Liberty’ or ‘Suffragette.’”
    “Never heard of her. Whoa, look here, the cat’s fallen in the pond!”
    “All right…how about Mr. Antonio Vicenti?”
    “What? Old Tony Vicenti? What’s he up to now?”
    “Was he famous for anything?”
    For a moment, Granddad’s eyes left the TV screen and focused on the past instead.
    “He ran a joke shop in Alma Street where the multistory parking garage is now. You could buy stink bombs and itching powder. And he used to do conjuring tricks at kids’ parties when your mum was a girl.”
    “Was he a famous man?”
    “All the kids knew him. Only children’s entertainer in these parts, see. They all knew his tricks. They used to shout out: ‘It’s in your pocket!’ And things like that. Alma Street. And Paradise Street, that was there, too. And Balaclava Terrace. That’s where I was born. Number Twelve, Balaclava Terrace. All under the garage now. Oh, dear…he’s going to fall off that building….”
    “So he wasn’t really famous . Not like really famous.”
    “All the kids knew him. Prisoner of war inGermany, he was. But he escaped. And he married…Ethel Plover, that’s right. Never had any kids. Used to do conjuring tricks and escaping from things. Always escaping from things, he was.”
    “He wore a carnation pinned to his coat,” said Johnny.
    “That’s right! Every day. Never saw him without one. Always very smart, he was. He used to be a conjuror. Haven’t seen him around for years.”
    “Granddad?”
    “It’s all changed around here now. I hardly see anywhere I recognize when I go into town these days. Someone told me they’ve pulled down the old boot factory.”
    “You know that little transistor radio?” said Johnny.
    “What little transistor radio?”
    “The one you’ve got.”
    “What about it?”
    “You said it’s too fiddly and not loud enough?”
    “That’s right.”
    “Can I have it?”
    “I thought you’d got one of those ghettoblowers.”
    “This is…for some friends.” Johnny hesitated. He was by nature an honest person, because apart from anything else, lying was always too complicated.
    “They’re quite old,” he added. “And a bit shut in.”
    “Oh, all right. You’ll have to put some new batteries in—the old ones have gone all wonky.”
    “I’ve got some batteries.”
    “You don’t get proper wireless anymore. We used to get oscillation when I was a boy. You never get it now. Hehe! There he goes—look, right through the ice!”
     
     
     
    Johnny went down to the cemetery before breakfast. The gates had been locked, but since there were holes all along the walls, this didn’t make a lot of difference.
    He’d bought a plastic bag for the radio and had sorted out some new batteries, after scraping out the chemical porridge that was all that was left of the old ones.
    The cemetery was deserted. There wasn’t a soul there, living or dead. But there was the silence, the big empty silence. If ears could make a noise, they’d sound like that silence.
    Johnny tried to fill it.
    “Um,” he said. “Anyone there?”
    A fox leaped up from behind one of the stones and scurried away into the undergrowth.
    “Hello? It’s me?”
    The absence of the dead was scarier than seeing them in the flesh—or at least, not in the flesh.
    “I brought this