45 :

“Hey Hey Motherfucker how you doin’?” he asked me.

I walked into the abandoned station, into the deserted foyer, and the first pair of eyes I saw was Samuel. The look on his face was hopeful, drunk even. A smile split his face like a sunrise.

I’d failed. A failure. Just a fucking bum.

Hoping for some good news for a change.

He was sat on the steps leading up to screen 6, next to Clive’s semi-comatose figure. He actually seemed to enjoy being in a bad mood. But right now I think Clive was drunk. Dry drunk. That is, drunk without the alcohol.

I don’t quite know how a ghost gets drunk. I presume it must be something to do with perception. Something to do with thinking you’re drunk, and expecting to be drunk, and then, somehow being drunk. At the moment he was in his rare state of vegetative, intoxicated half-sleep. I suppose the best thing about being a ghost was that you never had hangovers.

Sometimes you need to do anything to take the edge off being alive. Sorry, take the edge off simply being.

“You ain’t exactly a happy camper are you?”

I grunted. Damn fucking right. He stood up. His clothes rustling with neglect. Long slow steps came towards me as I stared, for seconds at a time, at an unfocused point somewhere on the red felt wall.

His arm came around me. His voice subdued, a slow whisper. Upstairs I heard voices. Karen giggling about something. Karen was another one of the ghosts I’d met a few days before.

“Look man, it’s not so bad up here.” He said. His voice soft, the rolling syllables lulling me into a false sense of security. I knew he didn’t mean me, or anyone, any harm. He wanted us to be happy. All of us. He as Shepard, we as a flock. All of us. A motley crew, a rare assortment of mismatched souls.

We were a community. Naturally at first everyone in the community, every new soul, was reluctant. We clung too much to our past lives, the worlds that no longer existed, the place we could not forget, but could never return to.

And this too, these were my awkward first steps.

“You soon get used to it. It isn’t easy you know.” A pause. “The first few days, the first few weeks are the worst”. His eyes went somewhere else.

He knew what I was thinking.

“I know, you don’t want to let it go. You’re still too near to the world to accept you’re not part of it”. His hands wide, an expanse, one day Simon, all of this will be yours, “But this is your world now. This is where you live. This is Your Home.”

And each word was a bomb being dropped on my head. This is my world. Of fucked up, undead ghosts and permanent limbo. This is no way to live. Or die.

“I know, I know. You don’t want to be here. But listen up Buck, nobody does. We’re all exiles. We’re all refugees. We live in this world now.”

And so that was it. My choice. Live here in some fucked up community of losers and dead people or somehow try to find another way. I didn’t even know if there was one.

“And you know what? You’re not unpopular. We like you. We like to see new faces.”

A pause. A second or two – but long enough to make a point.

“Karen likes you.”

I barely knew her. I’d met her a few times. We’d sat, talking. Trying to understand what was going on. She was new as well. Not as new as me. She’d been here a few months. Going through the same things as I was. Fear. Denial. Boredom. Loneliness. The story of the waking life.

We’d spoken - properly - once or twice. Plenty of casual chit-chat, but it always dried up. What was there to talk about? So,what do you think of being dead?

But I needed friends. I didn’t know what else I could do. Who else I could talk to. When you don’t have to sleep, time becomes largely meaningless. We’d spent hours, far too many hours, talking the kind of bullshit people talk. The kind when people sit around for far too long. Having all the time in the world can be a sentence in itself.

If you’ve ever been stoned and talked shit as the sun rises you’ll know the type of conversations. The type of conversations between people who don’t share much, but share something. Share a proximity. A loneliness. Some kind of vague hole in their lives that they are trying to fill with something, knowing that they are lost, wandering aimlessly, meaninglessly through whatever this experience was, hoping to meet someone else, and simply bored and talking shit.

And so we got to know each other. We were both lonely souls. But I didn’t want that. I didn’t want anything special. I just wanted her back. The old girl. My girl. Not the new world, the new way, this bizarre alien way of life, whatever it was.

We were trying to make a connection. Fool ourselves that there was some meaning to all this. We assign the meaning from what we do.

She placed her hand on mine. It was warm in the night. I felt something. I don’t quite now what but I felt it. Warmth. Heat. Skin. I didn’t quite understand how I could feel flesh that didn’t exist, but I was getting used to living in a world that didn’t quite make sense.

I was trying not to feel anything. In this world, the one that tore people apart because it could, not because it was cruel, not because it was kind, but simply because that was the way things were, I didn’t want to meet anyone new. I didn’t want to find a new life.

I wanted her back. I was the dumped. The abandoned. I was free, to do whatever I wanted, but for the one thing I wanted to do, I could not do.

I could not hold Helen in my arms again. I could not grow old with her.

I would never age. Never grow old. I was always going to be the age I was twelve days ago. Never older. Frozen forever. A fucked clock poised permanently on the edge of the past.

Karen was strikingly pretty. The type of woman who made your head turn when she walked past you. The kind of beauty that intimidates you – the kind that you catch her eye and you know, she’s just a girl, just a woman, just another person with hopes and loves and lives, but the type of beauty that makes your heart race in your mouth, your hands shake, your soul tremble in fear, and your eyes have to look somewhere else with a sudden rush of adrenalin to your body. The type of woman that some people don’t even see, with the type of beauty that makes some want to serve their heart on a spoon, and others serve dinner. The individual beauty we all see in our loved ones that no one can see. She had that.

She was older than me. But when you’re going to be dead forever, a few years really doesn’t matter. Well, not that much anyway.

I admit, if I wasn’t so tied to my old life, this new one wouldn’t look so bad. Life is all about making the current situation acceptable.

What if?

Never. Don’t stand a chance. Never have. Never will.

She was that type of girl.

And so, she liked me. Those dark eyes, like pools of water glinting in the midnight, that sucked you in with a vision of a beautiful world. But a beautiful world that was so very wrong. Beautiful, but not my world, not the one I chose.

“Yeah but –“ I tried to cut him off.

“But nothing flyboy. This is your world now. You can’t leave it. We have to live within it. You can make a beautiful life here”.

He glanced around.

“Look at this. See these sad, lonely saps here.” He pointed at Clive, his sleeping form that was angry even in its comatose, ignorant trance, his body twitching and jerking with an unspoken, infinite fury. “This poor bastard’s never going to find love – or even anything near it – here.”

He shrugged.

“Now, there’s nothing to say that he did when he was alive. But I’m not like that. The thing is, right, that too many people live in this world alone. Too many of us. We are all born alone and we die alone. But we don’t have to spend the time inbetween alone. You don’t have to be alone.”

Fuck it. I was almost convinced. But before I could look to the future, I had to solve the past.

I know. I was lucky. I was blessed with the chance of something, something more than the loveless life, the empty tedium that endless hours bore into your soul.

But I did not want that. I didn’t want more. I was not greedy. I just wanted something else.

Is it wrong to want more?