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listening had been enough. How it did something. How people came out of that house lighter, like a weight’d been taken off them. Like they’d been healed.
     
    I was still standing at the back of that crowd, listening to the commentary filter through it, when I heard other voices, further off, towards town. I stepped away to try to hear them better, but still couldn’t make sense of them. It sounded like more of a droning than a conversation, like the ebb and flow of a hive. So I took a few more steps away from the people milling around the house, walking, as I did, through the imaginary walls of Alfie’s dream terrace, past a woman making a bed, a granddad struggling with his braces.
    From what I could tell the voices were coming from over by the graveyards. And not just voices either, but lights too. Flickering lights like a slow strobe, flashing up under the underpass. Taking onemore look at the crowd behind me, I decided to go and see what was going on. Maybe, I thought, the Teacher had done one of his disappearing acts and was already at work over there by the graves, conjuring up some more of his listening brand of healing.
    But I was wrong. There wasn’t any kind of healing happening over by those graveyards.
    Just hurting.
     
    Legion we called them. The Legion Twins. Couple of scrawny kids living in the underpass between the cemeteries of St Mary’s. No one remembers why they got that name. You know how it is with nicknames. Something you did as a kid, or your dad did, or your cousin way back, and bang, you’re stuck with it. Well, theirs was the Legion Twins and always had been as far as I knew. Every town has people like them I reckon. That bloke you see every day, wandering round the streets, mumbling. You know who I mean, don’t you? Might stick out a skinny hand now and then, ask you for change. Ever talkedto him? No, course you haven’t. Why would you? Can’t get a bloody word in edgeways with them types, can you? So busy talking to themselves. And that’s how it was with the Twins. We all knew them but no one ever spoke to them, and they never spoke to us either, just to themselves or to each other.
    Turns out though, as I discovered when I came round the corner towards the underpass, we’d been wrong about the Twins all along. All those years they weren’t talking to themselves but to them, the Dead. And to us, I suppose. The us we’d already forgotten. Even talking for us in a way. And we’d never known. Until that day, when coming round the corner and seeing them in the underpass hurting like that, it had all made sense.
     
    I say sense, but that’s not really the right word for what I saw. I’m not going to even try and explain it, so let me just describe it for you instead.
    All through that underpass, the same one I’d walked through a thousand times before, the Dead were coming out of the ground. Not in that Zombie waymind, not like in a film, but in film. Home movies, that’s what those flickering lights were. Home movies coming out of the ground, hitting the walls and roof of the underpass, loads of them. Weddings, christenings, children’s birthday parties, a boxing match, long-gone families and friends. Some in black and white, others in 60s and 70s colour. It was like a kaleidoscope under there, it was. A swirling kaleidoscope of gone lives in a gone town. Some of them were only coming partway through, squeezing their light through a tiny hole in the ground. Others, though, were on full show, shining from great big gaps in the tarmac, as if it was the pressure of the years that had pushed them through. But it hadn’t. Not on its own anyway. It was the old Legion Twins that had let them through, you see. I’d never seen them move so fast. Running from here to there, panting, manic-eyed, one carrying a big old pickaxe, strong as a miner, the other just working with his hands – doing whatever they could to open up that tarmac and let more of those memories out from under