Sunday, January 01, 2006

50 :

“You’re gonna like this boy. You need cheering up.” He said as he lead me into the walk-in freezer.

I always hated going through walls. The worst thing was forgetting that I was dead – my body sticking in the stone and the concrete. And then remembering that I wasn’t and slipping through, being sucked out of the other side into whatever was on the other side.

It never got any easier.

We were on the other side of the freezer wall, inside the immaculately preserved lobby of Aldwych tube. On the walls, restored, repainted, recreation posters form the forties. A thick layer of dust.

It didn’t look like this the last time I was here, it just looked… dishevelled. But then again, Aldwych rarely looked like it did the last time the public saw it. Every month it changed. Every month the floors were dusted, cleaned. Every month technicians from the BBC, and ITV, film production companies and advertising firms opened these gates, trawled in their cameras and lights into this building, hand carried every camera, every light, every generator and frame of film, down hundreds of steps, to the depths and the caverns.

Last week they were filming some BBC drama from the forties. Couples huddled together as technicians dimmed lights and shook dust on them, as children wailed in improvised bomb shelters called Tube Stations. Never knowing if a bomb would land on them, never knowing if, when the shaking of bombs stopped, there would even be a tube station to crawl out from. Would they crawl out from the platform, hoping to see stairs, and face a wall of rubble?

That explained the noises and lights that we ran from. It disturbed us. Even a ghost needs a home, even our status as permanent exiles, we had to have somewhere we go to and call ours. But there was nowhere.

We paid attention closely, we always did, to the comings and going of the public. On the rare occasions a bolt opened, a shuffling member of staff peered in, a thin shaft of light cut through the darkness, and a thick cloud of dust swirled in the air, we always took notice. There was always someone in the foyer. Always, even when most of us were sat, talking shit and hanging out down on the platforms, bored, fed up, there was always one or two of us who liked to sit away from the others.

Every class and office has it’s token Weirdo.

Recently I’d been spending time, when not trying to save the world – or at the very least Helen – talking up here with Samuel. But he was a popular man, the informal ringleader of this elastic band of outcasts, and he always had someone new to usher in. His absence was a presence as much as when he was here. When you feel you’ve found a friend you also often lose something else.

When Samuel wasn’t here I practiced alone. I sat. I thought. I tried to pick objects up. I tried to write in the thick layers of dust on the floor. My boots never left footprints, but sometimes I crouched down and I drew a line in the thick dust.

When I brought my finger I looked at it, and there was no dust on it. As if it had fallen off the tip of my finger, like snow, when I wasn’t looking.

I stretched time out, worked whilst He was sleeping, honed my skills, what little of them there were, tried to find my way through them, work out what they were, what I could do, if I could do it. I did things and I didn’t know how, or why, and could not replicate them. I moved cups. Opened doors. Lifted discarded bits of paper and put them back down.

Someone somewhere must have noticed this at some point. People always do.

Sometimes Karen came up to see me. Her lank, tired hair, cut to her shoulder, her face that creased with the smile of a woman who’d lived a life full of laughter, and her eyes. I liked her. I liked her a lot. When she smiled it looked like her face had finally found its purpose.

In another life? I could grow to love her. But not in this life, whatever this was.

But we were lost. Both of us stuck in some weird limbo, some empty, dull state neither of us could understand, like being stuck in someone else’s nightmare. And all our hours of talking, we couldn’t work it out. Why us? Why were we singled out, chosen, excluded from the afterlife, the one that we’re told from school is our birthright?

Hours of talking didn’t bring any answers, only more questions, and with each questions, another answer we were never to have. She too bored, frustrated, confused. And like all of us, we just survived whatever this was, and we tried to bring meaning to – or from – a meaningless state and make it somehow important.

Sometimes we would hold each other. She was warm. And somehow, in our community of the confused and the lost, we felt just a little less alone. There is comfort in finding your fellow victims.

Sometimes we would talk. Sometimes she would watch me as I did these things, these dull hours, where I somehow transcended the world around me. She understood why I was doing these things. To try and forge out of the nothingess, something. Where there was nothing let man bring forth something. Meaning.

I needed to do this. I didn’t want to. But I needed to. In a place where one tries to make sense of the senseless, hope of the hopeless. Because our minds are automatically drawn to construct meaning from the abstract. My life, of whatever this state was, was a Rosarch inkblot test, and it was not what was there that mattered, but what sense we brought from it.

We make meaning out of activity. In life, its known as hypermania.

She understood this was something I had to do. I couldn’t necessarily explain it, but I knew I needed to do this, I needed this, and when I had done it, I would never need do anything again. And maybe when I had done it, whatever our lives were would be very different. Some spectral romantic paradise, or some dull loveless state. I didn’t know. Admittedly I didn’t know very much at all about this current state – after all, they didn’t have handbooks, and it’s not as if I’ve been dead before.

And it wasn’t just something I had to do - the human desire for revenge is not inconsiderable. The first thing one always wants to do is settle the score. Get even : not take more than one had taken, but ensure that whatever happened can never happen again. And the satisfaction of revenge is important. The slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown.

Though, if you are going to kill someone, its not exactly going to hurt to make sure they truly are dead.

After all, that fucking cunt murdered me. It was time to restore the balance. Time travellers have this theory that where one timeline is altered, another different event of equal import occurs elsewhere in the world. To restore the balance.

I’m only human. Well, I was only human anyway.

Where hours of co-ordination and practice and dull meditative thought brought not tiredness, not exhaustion, not the strained tension of tense muscle, but brought a sense of purpose. As if somehow I knew what it was I had to, what my purpose was. In all this time, all those dull years alive, those years I would trade anything for just one more second of, I knew that whatever I was I had a meaning. A role. To make the world a better place, to act kindly, to –

And sometimes I thought too much.

She would sit and talk to me whilst I tried to do these things. The things we often take for granted – picking up a pen, opening a door. I had to train myself to think through these things, to learn when to be solid, and when to be opaque. It wasn’t easy. I still hadn’t got the hang of it. I often forgot. I often kicked cans in the street and pass through them. It still stung, the cold, paperthin aluminium shooting through what used to be my foot. Often, but not always. I was learning. Samuel was my Yoda – and he was proud of me – I could see the pride within his eyes.

So often I saw the first chink of light and the dull clunk of the lock being released. We stayed, skulking in the shadows, listening to the conversations. Our eyes blinking too in the sudden flash of the old, flickering bulbs as the tube guy escorted some video director, TV show guy, photographer, or a gaggle of occasional train enthusiasts through our home. We listened carefully to the mumbled conversations, the agreements to film, the conditions, the redecorative costs of the Props Department, the flashes of digital cameras as someone decides where to put the old, reproduction posters, change the logos and repaint the foyer to match up the dreadful cream and brown colour scheme of the era.

But today, there was an entirely different set of visitors.

And in the corner, five dishevelled figures.

Humans. Mortals.

“We have to talk quietly,” Samuel said.

They’d noticed. Missing items. Moved cups. Doors open a crack. Fingerprints on the surfaces.

One of the figures, in a blue uniform with the familiar logo of the London Underground, shook his head nervously. Around him, a tense, shaven headed man. Holding a boom mike. Another, with a camera on his left shoulder and a battery pack. A woman. And a nervous looking man in a tired leather jacket.

Yep siree. London Underground had brought a cable TV channel’s very own Ghostbusters to come and check us out.

Aldwych was, like many a tube station, a place of not just history, but a place where unseen footsteps walk through ceilings. Where Roman soldiers appear where walls used to be and where shadowy coats stand nervously by entrances and exits. Where the memories of commuters live forever in the shadows.

We knew these people, they just didn’t like us.

Naturally, being closed to the public, this was easily the most accessable and easiest one to bring a camera crew to.

Samuel spoke quietly.

“Man, we love this shit. They can’t see us, but we can see them.” He pointed to the guy in the tired leather jacket. “He’s the psychic. Probing our minds right now as we speak.” I nodded. I watched his ruffled, greying hair, his nervous fingers twitching in the half-light.

“I’m gonna think about being a World War 2 Veteran called James who died in a plane crash during the Blitz.” Samuel smirked. “Fuck with their heads.”

The guy in the leather jacket turned round and mumbled.

He said something I couldn’t really make out, but mentioned the words Jack, Blitz, and fighter pilot.

I felt an evil, prankish smirk. Samuel was right. We do love this shit.

The camera focused on two small, slow moving orbs that passed in front of them. Us. I remember watching programmes like this when I was a student, growing up in Leicester where TV reception was dreadful, and everybody had cable. Long night watching bad television in freezing rooms, and now it was our turn. I remember sitting in circles with my posse, talking shit, drinking and smoking, and laughing our heads off at Ghostwatch as they pranced around haunted castles on Halloween. Fucking plonkers.

I felt a mind crawl into mine. I felt the guy in the tired leather jacket try and feel his way into, through me. I think I should’ve been thinking about something stupid. I decided to play along.

Hitler, has only got one ball, the other is in the Albert Hall…

I wish I knew more of the words. But it made me laugh. And it was like shooting fish in a barrel. Samuel laughed.

“There’s joy in this place”, said the guy in the leather jacket, “Jack feels happy he’s home.”

Samuel glanced over at me. He knew I was getting the hang of this. They were gonna have one hell of a TV show.

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