43 :

Sometimes the life we live is not the life we choose to live ; merely the life that is imposed upon us by circumstance.

Whatever we are, whomever we are is defined, not by what we own, or what we owe, but by what we do. The eternal question is, is evil something you are, or something you do?

Am I intrinsically good, or am I good by doing merely good things?

The problem with questions is that there is the assumption that someone somewhere has an answer.

There were no answers to these things. No answers. No masterplan. And so, here I am. Trying to work out a reason when there isn’t actually a reason.

There was no reason.

But I had to do something. If there was no reason why I was here, why I was stuck, then I had to make a reason. Give myself something to do. I couldn’t just sit around and wait for something to happen. Wait for me to somehow ascend to heaven.

But more than that. That cunt murdered me. I can try to be circumspect, thoughtful, rational. But fuck it. Anger is an energy. Revenge, hatred can be as pure, as divine, and righteous as love. One cannot know love without knowing it’s opposite.

Somehow I was going to take that bastard out. Stop him doing whatever it is that he was planning to do it. Make sure that he could never hurt again.

I don’t know how I’m going to do it. I don’t know the where or the when. Being dead doesn’t open up a world of knowledge – you’re just as ignorant, except you know about death. If you were an asshole in life, you’re just a dead asshole. If you were a good person, you’ll be just another good, dead spirit.

Time was running out. I don’t know how long I had, or how long she had. All I know is that no matter how long it was, a week, a year, a lifetime – it wasn’t enough. Somewhere, someday, someone was looking for my love.

And here I was. Alone. Powerless. Possessing only a paranoid wit and a rising sense of panic. Panic is always irrational. If I could keep my head clear – If I could somehow think clearly about what to do – If. Is the middle word in life. Life as I knew it ended some time ago. Whatever this was, it wasn’t a life. It wasn’t even an existence. It was just some kind of odd state, neither living nor dead, but something else.

I had to get to her. I had to get to our home. I had someway to guard her. I didn’t know what to do, what the right thing to do was. But doing nothing wasn’t an option.

Even if I did something, even if it didn’t work, at least I would’ve known that something had been done. Worse than doing something that failed, was doing nothing.

And so, I left the cinema. It was surprisingly easy to slip out from there, with these drunk, apathetic bums, these broken souls that just drift through life, aimlessly on the tides of events. Sure, some of them were my friends, in so much as one could have friends in there.

It was a prison. You didn’t choose people. They didn’t choose you. You were just stuck into this.

I didn’t know how to get out of this. How to get off this plane of dull existence. Samuel didn’t know either : if he knew how to get out of this, he wouldn’t be here now. Neither would I. There is the theory, that a spirit remains on this earth until it completes it’s unfinished business, but none of us knew what that was, and what to do. I figured I knew what my unfinished business was, but I didn’t know if I could finish it.

And so, I knew the only thing I could do was somehow try to make things better for others. It’s not as if I could direct my energies towards improving my own life : I didn’t have one.

I could never get over the feeling of life without a physical form. I still did the same things I always did. I still tried to pick things up, sometimes. I still tried to turn doorknobs, sometimes. I still tried to fumble with travelcards and wallets and keys. A gamut of things I didn’t own and couldn’t use.

Somehow by expecting to touch these things, by expecting to feel, sometimes I did. My hand occasionally no longer fell through the steel, fell through the wood. Sometimes I touched. Sometimes I felt like myself again.

But, in my own way, I had a superpower. I could walk through things. I could pass through walls. I could travel through locked doors.

But I didn’t want this role. This power. I just wanted to be normal. I wanted all the things I didn’t think I wanted six weeks ago. I wanted, needed, craved debt, boredom, and commuting.

What a strange life we lead, where the perverse becomes the normal, and the normal suddenly becomes the strange. And it always felt strange to do this.

I was standing at the foot of the stairs that lead up to our front door. Seven hundred yards from the local tube station, down a side road and an alley, round the back garden, and before a wooden gate, I stood looking at that most innocent, yet most terrifying of things.

Our front door. The cream painted wooden door, with its shrunken letterbox, the small, double glazed, frosted opaque window set at eye height, the chipped wood and the old, seventy year hinges.

I fumbled the key in my pocket. I could feel it, but it wasn’t real. Not real the way that anything tangible, anything physical was real. The key in my pocket was just a fantasy ; a series of electrical impulses across synapses, but yet not real. And if it wasn’t real, yet felt real, was I hallucinating? Was I really here? Was I really me?

And if I wasn’t me, who am I?

The key was meant to be there. I remember it being there. Even if it wasn’t actually there, there it was. As real as I was. That is, not very.

I haven’t got days to think about that. I know what I fear : knowing that I have to go through there. Know that my heart, leaping within my chest, my hands shaking with a fear that I, who has somehow conquered death, cannot conquer.

I stared at the front door. An ordinary door. An ordinary life. Just like everyone else. And yet, it seemed so alien. It could be a happy family on the other side of that door. It could be anything. You just don’t know.

And whatever was on the other side of that door, I had to be there.

I took a deep breath, knowing that whatever I was doing, I wasn’t actually taking a deep breath. My heart wasn’t actually racing. My hands weren’t actually shaking. I wasn’t actually walking through the door.

I could never communicate, I could never really accept how this worked. I felt as if I was being sucked through the door. Could feel every splinter, every shard, in the way that a body could feel a dentists needle, as if somehow I wasn’t really here, that this wasn’t really happening, that as if I was an observer in my own life, watching my own self as I was no longer myself.

And so I walked through the door. I felt the cold, frozen brass of the doorknob grate against my fillings. That cold chill that travelled through my every vein, my every pore, and made me involuntarily shiver and shake. At the same time, every last splinter, every last shard of wood was somehow being poured through me, passing through me, and somehow coming out through the other side. I felt the way that I was a human pincushion, I could feel, in a time that felt like seconds and hours at the same time, thousands of tiny wooden lances pierced my soul. Sucking me in and pushing me violently out.

And then I was free. I was out the other side. I was looking at our hallway wall. The neutral, pastel cream. The anonymous, characterless décor. Naturally we rented this place. We didn’t own it. Who could afford to buy these days?

It looked lighter. Emptier. I turned right.

I was looking at an empty hallway. An empty bedroom. A bedroom, with the backwall some twenty feet away, the door casually laid open, stripped of everything. No wardrobe, no clothes, no television. As if the house had been stripped bare, as if everything had been sucked out of existence by a black hole when I wasn’t looking.

She was gone. My girl had vanished again.

Never live a life you can’t walk out of in thirty seconds flat, a wise old man once said. She had done just that. Always on the run. Always looking over her shoulder. Always waiting for the unknown stranger in the hall.

It’s no way to live a life. It’s no way to be alive.

“Hello?” I asked. I don’t quite know how I could make a noise without vocal chords, but I did. My voice reflected off the empty walls. The echo came back at me, no longer absorbed by material possessions, such petty things as televisions, sofas, books, and CD’s.

Nothing here. No one here.

At my feet I felt a strange, musty object. Some post. Dated until five days ago. Spam. Junk mail. Loan offers and phone statements. She must have got a postal redirection notice. These of course take seven working days to come into effect. And therefore –

I must have been dead twelve days. She must’ve moved out – or decided to move out less than two weeks ago. So near, and yet so far.

There was nothing in the kitchen. No post it note spinned to the chalk board. No “I have moved to : - “ sign. Not even any fucking Pizza shop leaflets. Clearly she had stripped this bare of traces. Any last trace of her existence stripped clean.

If I hadn’t known better I would never have known that anyone had lived here. Let alone that this was the place we had once chosen, once hoped, would be the building block, the foundation, of our beautiful life together in a future we never had. The place where we would love and live again.

I stood, waiting for something to happen. I could wait here I suppose. I could sit in the corner, bored out of my mind, waiting for Him to pay his respects. I could hope and pray that he would arrive.

And there’s no guarantee he would arrive anyway.

And then what would I do? Fuck all. I didn’t know how to do anything. I didn’t know how to touch, I didn’t know how to grip. I didn’t know how to feel, or to throw, or to hit. It could only happen when I forgot I was dead. That is, not very often, and what I least expected it.

He probably had a better idea where she was than she did.

I needed to find her. He was out there right now, breeding contacts, making connections, looking at bits of paper, emails, trying to find her footprints, her trail in a world made of credit card purchases and CCTV footage. There was always a trail. We always leave a mark even if we do not mean to. The infra-red glow of a warm footprint in the sand, no matter how heavy and thick our boots are.

Wherever she was, whatever she was doing, she was running out of time and she knew it. I had to do something. I had to find out where she lived.

But where to look?

I looked down at the envelope below me.

Everybody knows their local postman, right?