39 :

He told me too much. More than I could remember. More than I wanted to know. About the long hours of boredom. About the fact that you can’t ever sleep. That there’s no such things as dreams anymore. That you’ll never feel hunger. Never eat food. Never be able to kiss a human being again. There’s so many things I’ll never do again.

I’ll never be happy again. Even if I could be happy, I couldn’t forget this. I can’t wipe my memory clean. Even when you delete something in a computer it’s never deleted. There’s whole industries geared towards Data Recovery. It’s still in there. An unwritten patch of memory. A nought or a one. A negative or a positive. That’s all there is.

Death. Life. So was I dead, or alive? Was I alive in a form beyond the physical?

You never see nude ghosts because they have no physical form, and what you see is formed within the observers eye. If I want people to see me, they will. But sometimes, when I want people to see me, they don’t.

I don’t know what I am. Neither living nor dead. I’m somewhere in some netherworld. A place without feeling. With neither heat nor cold. With neither day nor night. What is a ghost?

What am I? An image? A sound? A smell? A feeling? A state? Some bizarre force that causes the movement of objects, a drop in temperature? I’m still alive. I’m not ready to go. And yet, I have already gone.

There’s so many questions that will never be answered. So many things that scientists can’t explain. How a mind without a body can somehow reach or touch anything else. I am the voiceless. Without vocal chords, communication is speechless. Between minds. I’m told I can appear with far less effort than it takes for me to speak.

I don’t look like some white-sheeted figure. I look like me. I seem pretty solid, though Samuel tells me I sometimes look faded, opaque, fuzzy, blurred, around the edges. This might be how I see myself. It might be because I don’t yet know how to make myself visible. I don’t even know how it works.

You don’t need to know about the combustion engine to drive a car.

Theory is that a ghost is simply a part of the human mind that can coexist in the physical world outside the physical body. Either whatever it is that constitutes my intellect, my spirit, my soul is split off during life, or somehow survives, transcends physical death. I could have become an energy field that exists in a pure, psychological sense. I have become electricity.

Is it then when mortals see me in the future, if they are to ever see me, that somehow that image of what they see, who I am, is who I remember being? Am I sonmehow telepathically reaching forth and placing my self inside their mind. That I simply do not exist at all, that somehow whatever I am only exists within their perceptions as a set of electric impulses. If I’m somehow, involuntarily projecting telepathically, sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and anything else can be impressed into the minds of those around me and translated into sensations and perceptions, giving rise to experiences interpreted as "real."

Some people are more receptive to ghosts than others. Some of us have a heightened snese of smell. Some of us have more sensitive responses to having our ears kissed. Some of us a more acute sense of spatial awareness. Some of us too, by the same token must have a heightened perception, a heightened awareness, a more receptive state for paranormal activity. Some people - who don't even know they have this – can see what people do not normally see. Feel what we don’t normally feel. Hear what no one else can hear. Some people call these things a ghost, a haunting. Some can witness a record of events trapped in time playing back at some time in their own perception.

Some people wish that God would strike them blind of this unwanted sight. This ability to see what has been, not what is. A hotel room where a gruesome murder took place will one day, forever, be doomed to endlessly repeat the traumatic event. The human mind is uncharted, unknown. Sometimes it leaves haunted footprints in the sand. These haunted steps. These haunted bricks. These haunted stones.

I’m haunting myself. Neither live nor dead, I merely battle, suspended in limbo, for one or the other.

I was not alone. Samuel’s punishment was pretty vile considering his crime. His wife left him after his business collapsed. He’d been fucked over by everyone. His partner embezzled funds and the business collapsed. When he realised that he and his wife and children had to give up their house and move into his parents whilst he tried to refloat his finances, she left him.

Not without tears. Not without screaming and shouting. Not without reconciliations. Not without long dark nights of the soul. But without any money, for sure.

Living at your parents at 47. As poor as when you were 16. Not even the hope of a better life ahead of him, as his bright future just hadn’t worked out. So one day, whilst returning from the dole office, and without much aforethought, he jumped in front of the tube in Zone 1.

For this crime, for doubting like Job when everything fell apart, for realising the ultimate emptiness of life when everything you ever believed, everything you ever trusted, is a lie, he walks the earth in a resigned, foul temper.

Lifes what you make it. Death even more so.

I could see who he used to be. A happy, hopeful man. Who through hard work and perseverance had slowly pulled everything together, risen above the confines of his upbringing.

And it was all gone. Through the deception, the fraud, the malice and cruelty of others. The Devil and God had tossed the dice, decided to fuck him over, see if he would lose faith.

When you do everything you’re meant to do, everything you’re told to, and life never turns out the way you expect it to. You lose faith.

How can you have faith in something when nothing computes? When your actions and their effects seem to have no correlation whatsoever? When life has lied, been unfaithful? A moment of weakness, a moment of doubt, and your soul is damned.

Not for eternity. But for long enough to regret it. Long enough to know that the Devil definitely exists, and its just another face that God wears. Why would you spend your time in this dull afterlife, this first level of Hell, for losing the will to live after all God’s put you through? You wouldn’t bow down before him and thank him for that type of cruelty. You’d demand answers.

God didn’t see it that way. He saw in Samuel a good man who suffered bad things. After taking his money, his wife, his children, his reason to live, his life, he gave him just one thing - a second chance. To deliver lost souls and point them the direction.

Every ghost is looking for redemption. To do the things undone, so they can get out of here.

What he found hardest, was the knowledge that all the souls he had to process could redeem themselves. Could, when they’d finished their undone business, somehow be lifted out of this level and into the afterlife.

And yet he was here, stuck. He didn’t know what it was he had to do. He just knew he had to do something. But he didn’t know what.

And the afterlife was crowded. Think of how many generations of humans there were. One hundred at least. One hundred ghosts for one of us.

The number is, of course, far far less than that. Probably one in ten. But the fact is, these ghosts are bored. They have nothing to do, nowhere to go. Can’t sleep. Can’t eat. Can’t even get drunk.

Some of them actually like it. No work. No money worries. But no love. No home. No-one. Just aimless, drifting. The invisible homeless. A life without responsibility.

They’re fucking nuts. The solitude would drive me mad. I hate it. Knowing that here, on this planet, right now, the woman I love is worried. Wondering where I am. She doesn’t even know yet that I’m dead. She hopes that those footsteps in the hall, up the stairs, the key in the lock could happen right now.

Knowing that soon, she will be visited at home by policemen who have to tell her that I’m dead. That she’ll never hold me again. Never kiss me again. Never complain about my unshaven skin giving her a chin rash. My roll-on deodorants will never again be used. And If I wanted, I could go in and see her cry, see her fall to pieces, see her curse God for taking this one good thing away from her after such a short time - a matter of months.

Just when life comes together, it falls apart.

I don’t want to see her pick up the pieces and rebuild her life, start again with someone else, to look at another man with eyes of vague hope, to feel her skin against his. For them to move together in the same room, and for one of them to think that yes, this could be love.

To be one of the unloved.

Tell me what it is I need to do. Whatever it is, I’ll do it. It’s not a case of choice - in life options narrow down so much that there is no choice. You do things you don’t want to do because you have to. There is no choice in a world where Pepsi and Coke are the only options.

It’s what happens when we downgrade from Life to Existence v1.0. This world is my prison. I’m free to do anything I want. Able to go anywhere, yet never be able to do the one thing I wanted to do. Live.

Samuel told me something, something he knew may damn him for all eternity. But what the hell, in for a penny, in for a pound. If he’s already damned, whats the risk? When you’ve lost everything, you’ve got nothing to lose.

“God sometimes make mistakes”, he said. “That’s why you’re here.”

It didn’t make sense.

A normal conversation has ebbs and flows, highs and lows, responses half-formed by us before we open our mouths, trying to say something, whilst the person we’re talking with is talking near to the subject we are, but not in response to what we actually say. It’s how every conversation works. People don’t listen - they try to convince other people that they’re right.

I never understood that comment. In time I would. In time I would learn that what he said was right. God, whom-what -ever he/she/it was wasn’t infallible. Nothing is perfect. It’s an impossibility. Everyone’s definition of perfect is wildly different, and besides, look at the creatures, the Lord God made them all.

The aardvark. The wasp. Useless, pointless creatures. Wasps don’t make honey, or die after a single sting. They serve no purpose in the ecological scheme of things. God is an engineer. To a sentient computer, a programmer can be God.

God made many mistakes. Being God he doesn’t have to admit to them though - whatever we believe he is. But an omnipotent being without accountability frightens me. Especially when there’s no way of anyone wronged ever getting a satisfactory conclusion. God is a dictator - we are his prisoners in a world not of our making.

But we try. We try to make it better from the things we have and can use. Mankind has Guns, Drugs, Weapons and the portable MP3 player. Maybe that’s why the dolphins are superior.

“You weren’t meant to die. You weren’t meant to die there, and not that way.” he said whilst we spoke. How did he know that? Did he have a hotline to God? A telephone number? Fortnightly Soul-briefings? Did God e-mail him?

“…. It was meant to be a warning. But God took his eye off the ball for a second too long. He lost concentration, and screwed up. And that’s why you’re here.”

So this was what life was like as one of The Living Dead.

We’d been walking for quite a while. It was raining - the cold grey sheets of rain that exist in movies and newspaper headlines, but we were as dry as a bone. As dry as an Ethiopian field in the drought. I did not feel it.

The physical world did not affect us. No cold, bar the cold inside. No rain, no hunger, no sleep.

Going without sleep was the hardest thing. No dreams. You never got tired. You could lie down, try to sleep, but it was the worst case of insomnia there is. A whole night sitting in the darkness, bored, waiting for dreams that never come, and occasionally looking at massive red letters as they tick over to 4:44, 4:45, 4:46…

Jesus. The Time! I never had enough of it when I was alive. And now too much. I could see the Twelveth Of Never and be none the wiser. There was no sleep. No respite from this world.

Never sleeping again, but resigned to endless, long, dull nights without any sleep, any excitement.

As comedians say, dying is hard.

had a mission. Though admittedly, I actually had no choice whatsoever in the matter. It wasn’t a choice - it was an instruction. When the options are so limited, there is no choice.

Whatever it was was my unfinished business, whatever my raison d’etre for remaining on this awful immortal coil was, I had to find out what it was and close it off.

The world was full of millions of souls like me. Millions. And in his years, Samuel had met hundreds of them. The first one he met was his redeemer, his deliverer, if you like - his spiritual midwife. This guy was so pleased to see Samuel - because he knew he was being replaced, he was going to ascend to the paradise awaited.

Samuel waited too, for The One. The next one, the next deliverer of souls to relieve him of his post. Who knows how long he would wait? The gentleman before him, had waited twenty seven years. Nobody seemed to know quite how it was calculated, be it on an accumulative bank of spiritual misery experienced, on the heartache he delivered, or simply, like a prisoner awaiting parole, on His Time.

Samuel had stopped counting the days. Time is meaningless when it’s infinite.

Some of the ones he delivered didn’t want to take this quest. They wanted to remain on this earth, with what they knew, even if they didn’t know anyone to start with.

It would’ve been easy to join them, as they silently lived their lives in the spaces where we were. The unused bus seats were occupied by souls without flesh. Those empty cinema seats? Only physically empty. You could watch movies forever in the afterlife and no one would know.

Of course, discretion is the better part of this existence. Any soul stupid enough to show off instantly gets damned forever. Samuel saw it happen once.

Black Shapes that could once have been human took him away. They arose, four of them, from the ground, ascending through the concrete.

He ran. But they glided effortlessly, as if they had all the time in the world - which of course, they had, and they secured this brave, exhibitionist soul, and took him. Nobody really knew where or what it was like. Nobody who went there had ever been seen again. A glimpse of its gatekeepers was enough to convince anyone who had seen them that you didn’t even want to look there again.

You don’t fuck with the afterlife. You don’t show off. The two worlds are separate for a reason.

Samuel tried to stop them - standing in their way. But the Black Shape had travelled through him. And he realised that to these, he was Nothing. A powerless little insect on the face of the world.

The cold, the despair, that belonged to The Shape that ran through him for that brief second was such that he knew, instantly, whatever doubts he may have had, however long he had to wait, he would wait rather than risk another second of that. Cold like death. Despair like suicide. Without empathy - as if the soul itself had been burnt black by cancer and chemotherapy.

This explained why I hadn’t seen any other ghosts yet. They hid away from others, from people, unless they were exceptionally brave or exceptionally stupid. They walked the earth, amongst us - sorry, amongst the living - and yet were invisible. Like electricity and radio waves, they were around us, surrounded us, and we could not see them.

Everywhere and nowhere. Like God himself.

My eyes had been opened before, and now I could see everything. I couldn’t look away and pretend I couldn’t see it - my eyes were so open I had no choice but to receive, uncomprehendingly, everything. I craved my long-lost ignorance of this world.

We were walking down the back alleys of early morning. Past closed pubs and inns. Past rapidly filling carparks, past hurrying commuters - and we glided through them without haste or discretion. For the first time in a long time, I didn’t have to go to work on Monday Morning.

Being dead has its benefits.

And this was the first one. He looked at his watch. He smiled and we stopped walking - I was not tired, not out of breath, hadn’t even notice the effort and strain that normally went into walking. I imagined that was what astronauts felt like without gravity. Their muscles atrophied and shrunk through neglect until they were as weak as a baby and unable to lift even a pencil in normal gravity.

This was one weird day.

He looked up. We were stood outside an old-fashioned building in the heart of the city. It’s traditional, offwhite stone entrance, the wooden and glass door, left open by the students, surrounded by these twenty somethings, these beautiful people with their enormous loans, their bedsit flats, their cheap coffees and bar jobs, their student ID’s. Kings College, London.

It was one of the new, 24 hour colleges, barely sleeping, closing at 3 thanks to a burgeoning nightclub trade that oversaw the river, the city, Big Ben, all seen with the insomniac eyes of a drunk, a desperate young soul hoping for love, or a fuck, or some last celebration of not going to work, opening at 6 in the morning, the red eyes of sleepless youth. Built around creating another generation of the indebted to please the bank manager, another generation of the young, qualified, and skint. All that studying, all those exams, for a career working in HMV, or Lloyd Bank, or Starfuckingbucks.

As culture shifted to a state of permanent, demented acceleration and never stopped even for one second, I found that everything stayed open twenty four hours a day, three hundred and sixty five days a year. Like hospitals, shops and colleges were now judged the modern essentials. Cinemas, all night malls, and restaurants.

A nation that never sleeps is a nation of zombies. The only difference being, I didn’t want to be dead. Just my luck.

“Wanna go back to school, Sport?” he said, and opened the door, gliding into another world.

I followed. In the foyer, we were the only lost souls there. I can’t explain it. But one looked around, and you just knew when you saw the dead. They looked different. As if they somehow didn’t belong. I couldn’t really ever explain it, but you just knew. As if they were a cardboard cut out in the real world. A world that I could never go back to.

The security guard did not see us. He never even looked up from his newspaper and his cold coffee.

He ducked and dived through the rows of students. Past the girls in their cool, tight jeans and youthful jumpers, gabbing into mobile phones, trying to find the meaning of life in a cup of double espresso fraupuccino filter, past the boys in their baseball caps, their scruffy retro jumpers, their immaculately sculpted, random haircuts.

We passed through the restaurant made of a handful of tired, morning bodies and the stench of a thousand cups of brewing coffee. Past the security doors, into the kitchen, into the pale white tiles of the early morning breakfasts, the roar of a thousand rashers of bacon, of boiling lumps of fat, of carbohydrates, toast, milk, and vegetarian sandwiches. Past white uniforms, chefs hats, rows and rows of buns, stacked, frozen meats, ledgers, forecasts, orange juice fountains, sterilised chefs hats, workers lockers, to the walk-in-freezer.

Samuel looked around for a second.

“Mortals don’t like this.” He said mischievously. “We should be glad this place is mostly deserted this early in the morning”.

He opened the door, for a fraction, for a fraction of a minute, and walked in.

I looked at him as he were mad.

His head popped out. Looked at me, exasperated, annoyed.

“Well, what are you waiting for? An invitation? Get the fuck in.”

It was the most annoyed I ever saw him. But what was I going to do? Freeze to death?

His hand grabbed hold of my jacket and he pulled me inside the walk-in freezer. The door slammed behind me.

I started shivering. He laughed.

“Jesus Jack. Don’t be such a fucking pussy.”

I was shivering out of instinct, not out of any misguided sense of loyalty to a reality I was no longer part of. I wasn’t actually cold. There was no breath to solidify and crystallise. No cold to be felt.

It wasn’t that dark inside. Although somehow there was no actual light, no way out, I could see perfectly. It wasn’t as if I had to wait for my eyes to adjust to the light or anything. I just had to see.

Rows and rows of shelves. Rows and rows of stacked high, long life milk, of frozen meat, frozen pizzas, tins, cans, and the bodies of animals stacked on hooks, their necks severed, kosher, halal, whatever, murdered facing towards Mecca, or Battersea.

“OK. Let me show you something”. His voice didn’t echo in the chamber. There wasn’t really a voice and I only heard it in my head.

He opened a door, letting a shaft of thick, yellow light through.

And inside I could see something. He walked in and I couldn’t help but follow.