41 :

Welcome to the Army of The Dead.

Look at them. This ragged army. Like pressganged mercenaries. Like useless old men who found the coin at the bottom of the cup and then realised they were at war.

These were the rejects of heaven.

They’d given up trying to get ascension. They spent their time like homeless bums - wandering in and out of cinemas, watching television in department stores, sleeping on roads, and eavesdropping private conversations. Occasionally they’d sneak onto a train and go for a day trip to the sea side.

And we, the Dead, were the only ones that could see them. We were the only ones who could see our fellow spirits, our kindred souls. To those who had not yet died, we were the invisible. As if we were never were. Life goes on, until it doesn’t.

Being Dead was a holiday to these people. A plentiful existence where you could have everything, never pay for it, never sleep. A holiday yes, but the worst one you have ever been on.

Some standing, some sat, this collection of souls. Far far more people than you’d ever imagine you could see in a room like this, and yet, at the same time, a room deserted, empty yet full. Truly, the Lost Souls.

As we walked there were jeers and laughs. I began to notice something. All these people were Dead. I used to pass through places like this all the time. I never saw anything like this. One never does. One always sees what one always has, more out of a sense of familiarity than reality. The normal, dull, bored tube station, a place of tedium, of the same, sickly cream walls, of the same, dull bored barriers, of escalators and trains and long minutes of waiting.

Black walls that raced past as I closed my eyes in exhaustion on the way home. That was what I used to see. But I was blind. Now I can see.

I was in a place of dead roads. I was inside the immaculately preserved ticket hall for Aldwych tube station. Born 1917, died 1994. A useless station now, condemned by its antiquated lift shaft mechanism, destination of only a handful of commuters a day, now used only by film crews for irregular jaunts making films and adverts and music videos – and The Dead.

Around this room, mocked up with 40’s era adverts for a recent TV show, immaculately clean, lay the prone, the relaxed, the loose commune of the East London Dead. Like a bunch of bums sitting around late at night, these ghosts, these lost spirits, clung together. Because there was nothing else to do. And if you’ve got forever, you better have company.

“Hey Samuel! Who’se ya new boyfriend?” said a voice behind us.

“Simon, this is Clive.”

Clive shook my hand. He smiled. An affable, likeable drunk, Bobby was just a sizzled old man. A dry drunk. Like a President. A man who had spent so long drunk that even when he wasn’t drunk, he was a drunk.

“Looks like Bobby De Niro, doncha think?”

Clive’s face creased up, the whiskers on his chin turning in on themselves. Looked like someone was screwing up a paper hedgehog. He winked at me –

“You looking at me?” He asked.

And before I had time to respond, his soft brogue –

“There’s no one else here.”

Bingo. His face cracked up. I stood, mortified, looking at him. Is this what the afterlife was? A gaggle of jokers and clowns? Happy fucking zombies?

Clive held my hand. I could feel the warmth of flesh, even though I knew – or I thought I knew. He touched my shoulder and whispered.

“It’ll be alright,kid. It probably a bit of a shock now though”

I said nothing. This was too much. Too much information, too much stimuli. Someone, stop this. This shitty nightmare, this crap, perverted soap opera called my life. My death.

“I’m here if you want to talk.”

I didn’t want to talk. I wanted out. But you take what you can get in this world.

I was scared, but I knew that he was trying to help. I don’t know how, but I just knew. I felt it. Bobby turned round and waved at a girl. Pale, sallow. Lank dark hair. And very very bored.

She looked up and waved back. She didn’t really smile. You don’t tend to have much to smile about when you’re dead.

“That’s Karen.”

I raised my hand in polite habit, reflex. Her mouth turned up slightly, but still not enough to be called a smile, and without thinking, so did I. She had lovely eyes. If I had a cock it would’ve twitched slightly. But I didn’t. And its hard to desire someone when you still love someone else.

Clive turned away and said softly : “It’s not so bad, you know. You’ll get used to it”. He winked. “I’ll see you later.” And he turned towards Karen, rescuing her from the amorous affections of some other spirit that she was looking thoroughly bored by. She was the type of girl that always had someone talking to her that she didn’t want to, and never had someone talking to her that she did.

Samuel looked me in the eye.

“I know it’s a lot, flyboy.”

Jesus, I wish he’d stop calling me that. It’s starting to fuck me off. On top of being murdered. And probably never seeing Helen again. And being trapped forever in some shitty fucking hellish afterlife.

I needed a drink.

“He’s only trying to help, you know. He’s a bit fond of boys your age, but he remembers what it was like when he first came here : he’s been around for ages He just doesn’t want anyone to hurt the way he did.”

A pause. The way he did? To be lost alone in some fucked up place you can’t understand or explain? Yeah, sure. Or to live in a world where everyone jokes about the fags burning in God’s Hell, and you know you’re one of them? The love that dare not speak it’s name.

“But you know, it’s not so bad. Everyone goes through this. I can’t bullshit you – it’s not easy. But it gets better. Come on, let m-“

A hand grabbed the back of his shoulder and he turned around by instinct.

I turned around and recoiled in horror. My immediate reaction was to puke, I felt my gut tighten, but nothing came out. I didn’t even have air to puke. I had nothing, as I was nothing. There was nothing that could reflexively respond anymore.

“Hey Hey Jumper! How you doing?” Samuel broke out into a smile.

I wanted to see my girlfriend. My love. I didn’t want to live in this world. This weird underground world of tubes and suicides and ghosts.

I’m living in a fucked up world of ghouls and monsters. And I’m meant to fit right in. I’m meant to pretend that this is eays. That it is normal. That I’m not freaked out.

I was about seven hours into my life as a zombie, and it was shit.

He was called Jumper for a reason. Nobody seemed to know his real name : at least, nobody mentioned it. His face was distended. He looked completely normal, except for the part of his face which had landed in a grate when he jumped from a tall building. His face, at intervals of one inch, was pushed back by the impact and flattened to a stone, obsidian surface. Grates one inch thick, every inch, made his face look unnaturally accelerated like a cartoon character or a Horror movie outcast. As if someone had ironed his face.

One eye was fine. The other was in shrunken retreat behind his nose, and set back about three inches. The rest of his body was fine, bar his stomach, which suffered an unnatural kink at a 30% degree angle where the flesh had intersected the pavement curve at the force of impact. His stomach receded by about four and a half inches at an angle running roughly from his fifth left rib to his second right rib. If he had ribs.

He smiled, and a set of broken teeth and squashed bone structure came out to play.

“I’m having a great time. Haven’t seen a movie this funny since Ghost,” he said. He looked at me and caught my glance with his one working eye.

Some people go mad here, underground. They think their life is a movie, and they wait patiently for the credits. For the time they can leave and go home.

Everyone copes in different ways.

“Hey kid, you new?”

Samuel intervened.

“Yep, he’s new.” Samuel warned with the tone of his voice. “Be gentle with him”. He called my name.

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

Jumper’s real name, as much as any of us had real names, was David. Without love, there is a life, but not a life worth living. I can’t live, if living is without you.

Maybe that Carpenters song was about money. Not about a girl.

Just another obituary. Just another unreported suicide. Just another wasted life. I’d never heard of him myself. Go figure.

He wasn’t all right in the head to start with. Even less so now. Typical man. Most women commit suicide in discreet ways. The overdose. The sleeping pills. The open wrist. Men are more aggressive : the subway train, the tall building.

Too laid back to be a suicide. A suicide comprises of tension. He had changed then, at least in this life. Still, time is a great healer. Death does kind of put everything in perspective. It levels everything, and one then sees only what truly matters.

People mellow with time. The ideals that we held, burning brighter than a thousand suns dim imperceptibly with each passing moment as our lifeforce is slowly but carefully extinguished. This guy was a shell, a shadow, an empty vessel, of what he once was. But what was left, once his old self had been scooped out, was the human being that remained inside us all, the child that had been slowly chipped away by years of responsibility and decades of experience.

So Jumper admits these days that jumping from a high building after losing his wife and his company a few hundred million pounds was probably the stupidest thing he’s ever done. But as he says, the view coming down was wonderful, even if the journey was short.

Hindsight is a great talent. If I were a Superhero, maybe I would be Hindsightman, able to see forever into the past and wish I’d done things slightly different

It’s easy to regret impulsiveness. It’s easy to regret stupidity. It’s easier to regret the past than it is not to make that mistake. But regrets are meaningless. You can’t change yesterday or today, only tomorrow. Do the best you can tomorrow. Just trying to make the world a better place is enough to make a difference.

About a quarter of the way down from the Tower, he changed his mind. One third of cadavers attributed to “Suicide” show signs of severe muscle tissue damage in their upper arms where they reached up to the sky and grab back hold of the ledge they had abandoned just a second earlier.

Reflexes. You can’t avoid them. Even those who try to hold their breath so that they suffocate eventually black out througha lack of oxygen and the body kickstarts their breathing mechanism automatically. This is known as the Auto-Protection Reflex.

Like most male suicides, he put his hands up in front of his face to protect himself from an impact speed of a few hundred feet per second. Didn’t do much good. So these days he wore gloves. It avoids the need for unpleasant reminders and awkward questions. Except when he tried to pick his nose.

These people, they didn’t look like people to the naked eye. Even under the harashest, most powerful of cameras and scientific equipment, all one would’ve seen here were orbs. Dozens and dozens of white, floating orbs. And each of these orbs meant something, was somebody, someone loved, someone hated, someone’s son or daughter.

And most of them were male.

And through this Dantean inferno, this moronic babble of fools, I wondered.

What the hell was I doing here? Why am I here? I wanted to be somewhere else. I wanted to be with her. My love. My life. The life I no longer had.

Jumper broke my dumb gaze for a second – and that was all I needed. I took Samuel to one side, and asked him a question. He mumbled something – and I had to wait a second or two longer. I got my answer, the one I wanted, and set off on the long walk.