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plane on his bed. Then I looked back at Johnny, my head still spinning.
    ‘What you on about Johnny?’ I said. ‘How did Alfie do all this?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ Johnny said, all bulging eyes and high brows. ‘But I’m telling you mun, he did. I saw him. I was out giving that stray some milk see, when I sees Alfie step out of his front door. I know he’s always been an odd one, but he was looking even odder today, staring over there at the pillars. And not just staring either, but speaking too. So I goes nearer, didn’t I? An’ he was saying numbers and names, over and over, the numbers of houses and the names of the people who’d lived in them I reckon.’
    I put my hands out again, stopping him. ‘What makes you think that?’
    ‘Because,’ Johnny said, pulling himself up like this was his big moment, ‘when he said their names, they arrived, didn’t they?’
    ‘Arrived? From where?
    ‘I don’t know,’ he said, stepping closer to me, and dropping his voice. ‘But they did. All of ’em. Just appeared from behind the pillars. An’ that’s what I mean. Alfie, it was him who done it, him who built the street again, just by talking.’
     
    I looked back at the street. It was all too much, and too much of a coincidence too. This had to be the Teacher. I knew it in my bones. The Company Man was going to take more of the town away so, to piss him off, the Teacher, with a little help from Alfie by the looks of it, was bringing other bits of it back. I didn’t know how, and like I said when you first came to listen to me, I still don’t. But I just knew it, deep down. This, the cricket game, the terrace of dreams, it was all him.
     
    So for once I wasn’t surprised when I saw him. Because of course he was there, wasn’t he? Just as he was always in the middle of things yesterday. Only this time, there wasn’t just him. There were his followers too.
    From what I could tell they’d started tagging along with him right from the start. Everyone knows that when he left the slip on Friday Joanne had followed him along the beach, stepping her feet in the prints of his. And we know, too, how he picked up Peter not long after, bumping into him when he was on his way back from fishing off the rocks at the end of the prom. But all the others? People find it hard to believe now, just how many there were. Bloody hundreds of them – most, by the look of it, fresh (or not so) off the mountain where he’d slept that night. He was walking out from one of the houses, one of the real ones mind, not one of Alfie’s, towards the front door of another. Walking steady and slow just like any normal bloke taking a morning stroll, only this one happened to have a wedding train of people in his wake. And so many of them.Old and young, men and women, poor and poorer.
    I stepped away from Johnny to get a closer look at the Teacher. He looked the same as when I saw him yesterday, but different too. On the beach and then again in the secure area, he’d looked like a lost child. But now he wasn’t. He was walking with direction, and there was a light in his eye. Not of knowing, but of wanting to know. Like he was starving for stories, for voices. Which, it turned out, he was.
    I couldn’t get into the house he entered. There was no room, what with the followers, the families who lived there, and now the TV crews too, the ones who’d come for the Company Man but who reckoned they’d sniffed out a juicier story with the Teacher. I still know what happened inside that house though because it all came back to us like Chinese whispers, running through the crowd like a voltage. How the Teacher had sat down and taken a cup of tea with the old woman who owned the house. How she’d told him her stories and then how everyone else did too. A blind boy. A young girl who cares for her mam. A mute girl, tapping out her talefor him on the arm of her wheelchair. How all he’d done was sit and listen, nothing else, and how, somehow, that