46 :

There was only one way I could find her. Only one way I could trace her. Only one way I could follow the river upstream. I had to learn how to walk again. I had to learn how to walk backwards. It felt like I was going to crawl back into the womb. It felt like the hardest thing in the world. And I had to do it.

The only way I could this was to find her name. Her address. This new place she was living. Find her new life, the one she had built without me, on the run, without warning. To do the thing that He was doing. Trying to find the one who had run out of my life without warning. Try to find where she was, what she was doing, who she loved. Who was not me.

She was gone. Two weeks. That was all. I’d only been gone two weeks. But she can’t have been gone long. Just long enough to set up a postal redirection service and vanish off the face of the earth. Even if she left the day I went missing then it still takes a week for the redirection to kick in.

She was probably here today. This morning. Picking up a handful of envelopes. Picking up junk mail and hate mail and dull, normal, boring mail.

So close. And so far. Even if my hand crossed through hers, I’d never hold her again.

I had to find the local Post Office. I didn’t even know where it was. In the short time we’d been together in this flat, alive, I’d never been to the Post Office. I’d never needed to. I still hadn’t managed to unpack all my CD’s.

Every second of my new life I was aware that she had lost another second. Come another second closer to the end of hers. Possibly dying peacefully, in bed, surrounded by her grandchildren, going to join her departed husband, someone else, some other fucking lucky man, in his heaven, sixty years from now. Possibly at the hands of some fuckface called Steve few weeks from now.

I didn’t know, but I had to.

I walked up and down cold morning streets. I wandered down streets of parked cars, down past the near comatose, near zombiefied figures of commuters, our own living dead, as they sleepwalked through exhaustion to train stations and traffic jams. I cursed the lack of time I had spent investigating the local community. I didn’t know where I was or what I was looking for. I just knew that when I saw it, saw that fateful red and yellow sign, I would find what I had been looking for. I think. And then I would changed my mind. Be looking for something else. It’s what humans always did. It’s what we all always did. You find what you want and then you find you want something else instead.

The cold, grey light of dawn made this exhausted monochromed world beautiful. But beautiful only because I could never have it, never experience, never touch flesh again with a warm, unwashed palm.

I saw a streak of red and yellow, a mail van, and my eyes followed it intently as it travelled down the main road in deserted streets, delivering mail from the centre to the Post Office.

I followed it. Minutes passed as I tried to follow it. Like a plane chasing a sun that’s always sinking.

I stood at the steel shutters that sealed the Post Office branch in. The steel padlock at the bottom of the door, locked into the ground. The cold, imposing door. Cut by grey, invisible sunlight.

And I needed to be on the other side of it. I needed to do the thing that I always hated, the thing that I never wanted to do.

I needed to walk through that door.

I never got over the shock of it. The strange, alien feeling, as if I was being sucked in and pushed out of the door at the same time. The feeling that every shard of this was passing through me.

I took what I thought was a deep breath and jumped through.

In the longest second of my life I felt more and less than I had ever hoped.

I felt the cold, frozen steel pass through me. I felt the atoms of ice metal and the space inbetween them, so small that you could not detect it even with a microscope, pass through my flesh, my bones, my teeth, as if I was being injected into a needle, poured into a cage, ripped from a metal womb.

My fillings grated, felt as if they were somehow being dragged slowly across miles of open nails. My world shrank to a vaccum, a black hole, pulling me in reluctantly because it knew it had to pull me out.

And behind the steel shutter, the 5 millimetres of compacted glass, the letter box, the handles, the steel door frame, the lush, soft carpeting that felt as if your veins were full of cotton wool, your arteries full of melted sand, the spaced between your skull and your brain full of dust and grit and dark oil.

And then.

And I was inside the Post Office. I was slumped, fallen, on my knees, before the counter. Aware that the tips of my feet were still, at a molecular, sub-atomic, miniscule level, still inside the steel shutter. I yanked my leg, my dull, unresponsive limbs, out, and it felt as if – that sudden feeling of pain and relief that one feels when you find the world biggest splinter and yank it out of your leg. Like a soldier pulling a bullet out of his wounded side in the trenches.

And I was – of a sort – alive.

And here I was. Involuntarily I yelped. And nine feet above me, the sleeping form of the Post Office Manager, curled into the voluptuous limbs of his wife, started, opened his eyes briefly at some sound he probably couldn’t have heard, and his lids resealed themselves with the exhausted last effort of the weary.

And for a second, I forgot that I was dead. My sleepless limbs weary, my tired body drained. I reached up, my hands limply, desperately connecting with the nearest, lowest shelf. I pulled myself up on it.

I pulled the shelf off the wall. It came crashing down.

Oh fuck. Fuck. Fucking fuck. Fuck Fuck Fuckety Fuck Fuck.

I’m rumbled. I’m busted. I’m grounded.

I stood up. My heart was beating like cannons in my head. All I could hear. The frantic, stuttering thump of a heart that no longer worked.

I couldn’t hear the dull mumblings of the sleepless on the floor above. I couldn’t hear the dull creak of a tired, wooden bed and cheap floorboards and thin carpets as someone sat up in bed, rotated, placed tired, cold feet on creaking floorboards.

I froze. Hands shaking. Nerves jerking like the body of a convict frying on an electrified, Colditz fence in the rain. Breath came in short, stolen gasps, lungs unable to fill themselves with air, drowning in short bursts of oxygen.

And from upstairs a mumbling. A tired, soft voice. A gruff, weary voice. Someone was up.

And I had to disappear. In the darkness of this room, lit only by a thousand thin strands of light streaming through the steel grating, the air moving in effortless circles of dust, I tried to find somewhere I could disappear. Somewhere I could hide. Somewhere I could not be seen.

Even though I did not exist anymore.

I tried to slide against the wall. I tried to blend in. I tried to disappear through the concrete, hid in plain sight, be visible to none.

And I waited.

A strip of yellow, naked light shot through the windows inside the room. A spotlight, like a camp searchlight from a Steve McQueen movie. From the naked 60 watt bulb at the bottom of the stairs, through the reinforced glass window set inside the locked, steel door that led to the inner office. That led to the counter and the back room where Helen’s name was written on a piece of paper.

I had to be in there.

A step creaked at the top of the stairs. I waited. A baseball bat that normally lived underneath an old bed was being gripped tightly, too tightly, by tired, sweaty hands. The air moved, vibrated, with each swing by a nervous wrist.

Another quiet creak.

I didn’t know how many steps there. I just had to wait until there was no more creaking. Or until the door opened. Until I was found. I heard the dull mumble of a tired shopkeeper talking to himself. I heard the tick, the tock, the tick tock of the seconds that dropped like hours from the old, plastic clock that hung from just above me.

I heard the slow creak of someone in slippers trying to avoid the bad floorboards, trying to avoid the seventh step, trying to slip down the steps un-noticed.

No cries in the dark of “hello?” now. No one telegraphing their appearance, warning their assailants of their whereabouts, telling their killer where they were. This guy had seen too many bad horror movies to know what he should and shouldn’t do.

He should’ve changed that stupid lock, he should’ve taken back that key, he should’ve stayed in bed and slept until it was time to get rise for work.

Creak. Shit.

I could smell his fear. I could hear his breathing, controlled yet uncontrolled, tired yet awake, fearful yet brave, scared. He tiptoed down the corridor, the longest nine feet in the world, waiting at every millimetre for something unseen, something dimly heard and not understood to come out of the shadows.

I heard a door open. Another think shaft of light distended, projected starkly against the far wall. I could see the pale yellow of tired walls that were last painted years and years and years ago. I could see a grey shadow, two limbs, a bulging shilouette, a thin white stick against it.

And even though I was not here, even though nothing could touch me, I felt fear.

The head moved. Eyes scanned the office, looking for signs of disturbance, looking for any trace of anyone here who shouldn’t’ve been. Hoping not to find these traces.

Silence. Tick. Tock.

I could hear breathing. I could hear the machine gun patter of my heart.

The creak of ungreased hinges. Through the window of the locked steel door I could see his shilouette, each wild, unkempt, uncombed hair, upright in the insomniac minutes of early morning. A face peered through, trying to see with eyes blinded by light, trying to peer in the darkness. Trying to see me.

I waited. I had to get through that door.

I heard the jingle of keys. My heart, my mouth. The steel taste of fear. Slowly, a lock ground to a halt, unfurled, a latch opened. And streak of light arced down and out into the room I was in.

The bat entered the room first.

And suddenly I saw it. The door was open.

This was my chance. And, my heart beating in my mouth, forced me to move.

He couldn’t see me. Could he?

And this faceless man moved into the room. Quietly. Slowly. Step by step. A nervous face creeping into the room. And first, foot by foot, he moved across every inch of wallspace. Moving closer toward me.

And all I could do was breathe. All I could do was fear.

So slowly. Toward me. His face, tired, his eyes unfocused yet focused, streaked with the red of exhaustion. I could feel the heat of his breath, the stench of his breath having sat stagnant for hours in his prone form, his eyes trying to focus yet unable to see.

Surely he would’ve seen me by now, if he could see me. If. The middle word in Life.

And Maybe he could. Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe he could feel me, feel some change in the air, some odd perversion of the atmosphere, his hair standing up on end, whenever he came near me.

Maybe not.

But I wish he’d stuck some deodorant on. There’s nothing as vile as the smell of stale flesh and dried sweat. He passed in front of me, his face hanging for a second in front of mine, pausing on something vague, undefined, something that he couldn’t identify in front of him, something he could not see, something his senses could not find, but something that was not right.

Breathing in short, sharp gasps, my heart thumping in my head like the ticking of a bomb, I saw right into his eyes. I saw a mixture of confusion and exhaustion and acute awareness that lasted only for a second in the eyes that were merely inches from mine.

He saw through me, as if I was not there, as if I were one of the dead.

And then he moved on.

Spurred into action, in a second I was movement. I was gone. My soul darted through the thin sliver of open door, into the inner sanctum, behind the counter, in the thin, small nine feet between the door and the staircase, inside the white anaglypta funnel, staring at the shut door beyond which I would find my destination.

I had to be in there. And I listened to the sound of feet moving through rooms feet from me. The sound of a dull, racked cough from a throat that had not drunk for hours.

Footsteps coming closer. I leapt through the door that sucked me in. I was going to find my love. Find my heaven.

Here I was. Where was she? All mail from the main mail centres was only re-directed when it arrive here. All that effort, all that hard work, and all for nothing. Moved at the last minute to another place where it really belonged.

I stood there, trying to decipher the scrawled numerals, the digits, the imprinted, ingrained details, typed, printed, shot out by laser, by inkjet, forced on by inked imprints, trying to find someone.

Looking for her postcode. Looking for our postcode.

Forgetting that I was dead, that I had no form, nothing, I stood there. Floorboards buckled imperceptibly under the weight I suddenly gained then lost. I waited until those footsteps had creeped up the stairs, each creaking floorboard, each tired, exhausted exhalation by old lungs, I waited until the bat had been put down slowly underneath the bed, until those slippers had been shaken off, until those tired mumblings had been exhausted and the rhythmic breathing of sleep had resumed. Like the tides, the rise and fall of each wave, the rise and fall of each breath.

I waited until the world had fallen back into its blissful sleep again. Slowly, my fingers fumbled for the light switch, tried to bring back some light, tried to activate the switch without the conspicuous clack of a metal switch clicking over.

Let there be light.