59 :
Paul looked up.
“He’s here.” He said.
Who? What? Why?
Eh?
I felt as if confusion was my natural state of being, as if there was nothing else I could do, nothing else I was capable of, as if comprehension was some kind of superpower I had yet to attain. Maybe that was my superpower, the invisible S inside a red shape on my blue spandex chest stood for “stupidman”. Maybe not.
I didn’t want a superpower like that. I’d quite like a normal superpower, I could be WashingUpMan, so I’d never have to do the washing up. Or I could be Ironing Man and all my clothes will come out automatically, pristinely ironed.
In some respects I already am – there are certain types of shirt you can buy that don’t need ironing. Slowly I am transforming, evolving, my wardrobe becoming Non-Iron.
A cleaner, more efficient, fitter, happier way of living.
But my wardrobe didn’t matter. Whilst I was dead, which looked like it was going to be forever on the grounds that I don’t agree in the concept of reincarnation, my wardrobe would always looked perfect. Well, maybe not perfect. But my shirt would never need ironing. There are small advantages to being a ghost, I suppose. Never shave, never grow old, never have to eat, or sleep, or go to work.
A knock on the door. A gentle tapping. Outside people were leaving for work. Doors were slamming, deadbolts were locking on and heeled shoes were clacking on steel floors. Postmen, like doctors, were going house to house.
The steel on steel, the sound of keys penetrating the grooves of locks, slipping in like flesh. The turning of bolts, ungreased steel, the opening of doors.
And again, I was not alone. I’d quite like it if people stopped turning up wherever I was.
The voice asked, carefully, hesitantly –
“Hello?”
And in the empty, mostly unfurnished flat, the voice echoed back. Only for a fraction of a second, but it sounded wrong. As if the rooms were the wrong shape. As if the world were wrong, which, for me, it was.
I recognised that voice from somewhere. I recognised that voice from –
Behind me, someone laughed.
Him. That laugh. The guy who held me down as I kneeled, tears stinging in the rain, dying in the shadow of a ghost of a power station. The fucking cunt.
He’ll be next against the wall. All of them. They all – each and every one of them – they’ll all – what? Pay? Oh, revenge is the best form of defence, is it not. So you will never hurt again. How easy it is to confuse revenge with some form of justice. Some form of it.
In he came. The knight in shining armour. Another young thug, one of the many, skipping school, making shortcuts, running rackets, never playing by the rules, but making his own cruel rules. The type of cunt that made me scared at school. The type of bastard that respected nothing and no-one. That saw everyone around it as a victim.
Everyone grows up young these days. We’re born jaded.
He couldn’t see his. The kind of person whose so out of touch to the reality of his surroundings, so insensitive, that instead of a world of people he sees a world of opportunities.
So there was no way he could us. We were invisible to him : just like tramps, bums, charity workers. The things he did not want to see. He was an AM receiver, we were FM transmissions, and he could not see us, feel us, receive us, even as we were there in front of his eyes.
He looked down at the sleeping figure. He was all he could see in this room.
“Jeez,” he said. The facade cracked for a second. “Drunk again” he mumbled, over the rising and falling tide of snoring. “Wake up boss” he said, to the comatose figure.
He shook the sleeping figure. It stuttered, gulped, grunted.
“Come on,” he said, shaking him, his body sluggishly moving with the rocking motion, “Come on, wake up Boss.”
And his eyes opened, in a second, suddenly vividly awake, a sharp gasp of air.
“Uh – “ He said. “What time is it?”
Paul looked at me with jaded, tired eyes. I suppose after a few years of living like this, haunting a spirit like a poltergeist, invisible, innumerable, it got boring. Eternal life is so over-rated.
It soon settled into a tedium as dull as commuting.
“Hey boss,” he said. And The Beast spoke back, between the foggy confusion of exhaustion and sleep :
“I said, what time is it Rufus?”
“8.20. And don’t call me Rufus.” And in his mind I could hear three distinct words, you fucking cracker.
“Yeah, um,” He yawned, showing the first sign of anything even approaching humility, “Sorry Cliff”. Lidded eyes focused on the point where I was slowly, but acted as if nothing was wrong. Because he was blind to the world around him.
Cliff? This guy was called Cliff? I mean, how polite is that? Too darn polite, but what can I say?
He stood up, ignoring Cliff, a whiff of almost visible, unwashed odour rising from his body as he walked towards the bathroom, his stubby fingers scratching yawning, exhausted skin, ruffling his hair into some form of behaviour, some form of fashion, even if fashion was only ever temporary. Fashion was forever, baby.
And here we were. Me and him alone in the bathroom.
“You fucking cunt”, I said. He stared at the bathroom mirror, the small shaving mirror set up on unwashed, unclean tiles, crusted with toothpaste and with shaving foam.
He ignored me, as he would. He yawned, his yellowed tongue descending out of an animal jaw, his eyes squeezed up by folds of flabbed flesh, his yellowed fingers pulling down his eyelids as the yawn closed, exposing red lines, tired skin. At least that is one thing I will never have to go through again, the Insomniac years.
Time crawled like an old man or a child.
He couldn’t hear me. He came out of the bathroom – walking through me as if I didn’t exist, as if he didn’t even know I was there – and my soul felt as if it was being pulled out of itself, as if I no longer owned my soul, as if I was the figment of some overactive, bizarre imagination, a consistent hallucination so real it even confused me. I was being sucked inside out, then suddenly, my soul was elastic and snapping in on itself again. Feeling the way you do when your body refuses to respond to even the most basic commands (stay sober, don’t throw up, etc etc) and here I was, hostage to someone that no longer was.
“Yo R- Cliff!”
“Wassup Nigger?” He asked
“Just gonna have a shower.”
“’K boss. We ain’t got long.”
And then we were alone again.
“He’s here.” He said.
Who? What? Why?
Eh?
I felt as if confusion was my natural state of being, as if there was nothing else I could do, nothing else I was capable of, as if comprehension was some kind of superpower I had yet to attain. Maybe that was my superpower, the invisible S inside a red shape on my blue spandex chest stood for “stupidman”. Maybe not.
I didn’t want a superpower like that. I’d quite like a normal superpower, I could be WashingUpMan, so I’d never have to do the washing up. Or I could be Ironing Man and all my clothes will come out automatically, pristinely ironed.
In some respects I already am – there are certain types of shirt you can buy that don’t need ironing. Slowly I am transforming, evolving, my wardrobe becoming Non-Iron.
A cleaner, more efficient, fitter, happier way of living.
But my wardrobe didn’t matter. Whilst I was dead, which looked like it was going to be forever on the grounds that I don’t agree in the concept of reincarnation, my wardrobe would always looked perfect. Well, maybe not perfect. But my shirt would never need ironing. There are small advantages to being a ghost, I suppose. Never shave, never grow old, never have to eat, or sleep, or go to work.
A knock on the door. A gentle tapping. Outside people were leaving for work. Doors were slamming, deadbolts were locking on and heeled shoes were clacking on steel floors. Postmen, like doctors, were going house to house.
The steel on steel, the sound of keys penetrating the grooves of locks, slipping in like flesh. The turning of bolts, ungreased steel, the opening of doors.
And again, I was not alone. I’d quite like it if people stopped turning up wherever I was.
The voice asked, carefully, hesitantly –
“Hello?”
And in the empty, mostly unfurnished flat, the voice echoed back. Only for a fraction of a second, but it sounded wrong. As if the rooms were the wrong shape. As if the world were wrong, which, for me, it was.
I recognised that voice from somewhere. I recognised that voice from –
Behind me, someone laughed.
Him. That laugh. The guy who held me down as I kneeled, tears stinging in the rain, dying in the shadow of a ghost of a power station. The fucking cunt.
He’ll be next against the wall. All of them. They all – each and every one of them – they’ll all – what? Pay? Oh, revenge is the best form of defence, is it not. So you will never hurt again. How easy it is to confuse revenge with some form of justice. Some form of it.
In he came. The knight in shining armour. Another young thug, one of the many, skipping school, making shortcuts, running rackets, never playing by the rules, but making his own cruel rules. The type of cunt that made me scared at school. The type of bastard that respected nothing and no-one. That saw everyone around it as a victim.
Everyone grows up young these days. We’re born jaded.
He couldn’t see his. The kind of person whose so out of touch to the reality of his surroundings, so insensitive, that instead of a world of people he sees a world of opportunities.
So there was no way he could us. We were invisible to him : just like tramps, bums, charity workers. The things he did not want to see. He was an AM receiver, we were FM transmissions, and he could not see us, feel us, receive us, even as we were there in front of his eyes.
He looked down at the sleeping figure. He was all he could see in this room.
“Jeez,” he said. The facade cracked for a second. “Drunk again” he mumbled, over the rising and falling tide of snoring. “Wake up boss” he said, to the comatose figure.
He shook the sleeping figure. It stuttered, gulped, grunted.
“Come on,” he said, shaking him, his body sluggishly moving with the rocking motion, “Come on, wake up Boss.”
And his eyes opened, in a second, suddenly vividly awake, a sharp gasp of air.
“Uh – “ He said. “What time is it?”
Paul looked at me with jaded, tired eyes. I suppose after a few years of living like this, haunting a spirit like a poltergeist, invisible, innumerable, it got boring. Eternal life is so over-rated.
It soon settled into a tedium as dull as commuting.
“Hey boss,” he said. And The Beast spoke back, between the foggy confusion of exhaustion and sleep :
“I said, what time is it Rufus?”
“8.20. And don’t call me Rufus.” And in his mind I could hear three distinct words, you fucking cracker.
“Yeah, um,” He yawned, showing the first sign of anything even approaching humility, “Sorry Cliff”. Lidded eyes focused on the point where I was slowly, but acted as if nothing was wrong. Because he was blind to the world around him.
Cliff? This guy was called Cliff? I mean, how polite is that? Too darn polite, but what can I say?
He stood up, ignoring Cliff, a whiff of almost visible, unwashed odour rising from his body as he walked towards the bathroom, his stubby fingers scratching yawning, exhausted skin, ruffling his hair into some form of behaviour, some form of fashion, even if fashion was only ever temporary. Fashion was forever, baby.
And here we were. Me and him alone in the bathroom.
“You fucking cunt”, I said. He stared at the bathroom mirror, the small shaving mirror set up on unwashed, unclean tiles, crusted with toothpaste and with shaving foam.
He ignored me, as he would. He yawned, his yellowed tongue descending out of an animal jaw, his eyes squeezed up by folds of flabbed flesh, his yellowed fingers pulling down his eyelids as the yawn closed, exposing red lines, tired skin. At least that is one thing I will never have to go through again, the Insomniac years.
Time crawled like an old man or a child.
He couldn’t hear me. He came out of the bathroom – walking through me as if I didn’t exist, as if he didn’t even know I was there – and my soul felt as if it was being pulled out of itself, as if I no longer owned my soul, as if I was the figment of some overactive, bizarre imagination, a consistent hallucination so real it even confused me. I was being sucked inside out, then suddenly, my soul was elastic and snapping in on itself again. Feeling the way you do when your body refuses to respond to even the most basic commands (stay sober, don’t throw up, etc etc) and here I was, hostage to someone that no longer was.
“Yo R- Cliff!”
“Wassup Nigger?” He asked
“Just gonna have a shower.”
“’K boss. We ain’t got long.”
And then we were alone again.
posted by Mark at 6:55 AM
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