Authors: Curtis Jobling
I looked down at my feet. There were my trainers, staring up at me: scuffed, battered, but in one piece. The same pale blue glow that ran through my hands emanated from them, running up my legs
through my intact trousers and the rest of my body. My eyes drifted over the figure on the trolley. I moved further into the room to get a better look, the white light in the corridor dimming
behind me.
There was no hiding from it. The truth was there as plain as the nose on my lifeless face. I looked down at my body, laid out on the bed. My skin was pale, the colour drained from it, and my
lips had already taken on a blue hue, different to the glow that currently shone from my flesh. These lips were cold and bloodless. The left side of my temple looked depressed, as if it had been
hit by a heavy object. The hair was matted with blood and gravel. Gravel from the road.
I reached a pale hand out tentatively, allowing my fingertips to brush my still face. No connection, no sensation. I recoiled, the full ramifications of my situation dawning on me. I made for
the corridor again, quickly now, my cold corpse abandoned. Mum, Dad and Ben sat there in silence still, parents hugging, brother’s foot tapping, each in their own broken world. I looked back
down the corridor, knowing that I needed to go into the light now.
But the doorway was closing, the visible glimmer narrowing all the time. I hurried towards it, willing myself to fly as before, but my feet were too connected to the world of the living now. I
stumbled and staggered, hands reaching out before me as I surged towards the light. Ten centimetres, five centimetres . . . the gap of light was closing. Orderlies and doctors walked past, chatting
and laughing. I ran through them, through any obstacle, as I sprinted towards the fading glow.
Two centimetres.
One centimetre.
The light blinked out and the doorway disappeared, replaced by a featureless magnolia wall. I hit the wall and passed right through it, out into the night beyond. Ambulances hurried by, lights
flashing and sirens wailing as they went about their business. The illuminated exit was gone, replaced by the stars that shone down in the black night sky.
I looked at my hands once more. Pale blue. Ethereal.
Spectral.
My predicament was all too clear.
I was a ghost.
I’d never owned a suit, and never wanted to. It took my dying to get me into one. My wardrobe was full of jeans and indie T-shirts, which I suppose was hardly appropriate
attire for the great hereafter. Mum and Dad fitted me up in a nice black suit instead. I looked like a gangster, laid out in my coffin – albeit a pretty small one with floppy hair and a
smattering of zits. You could hardly see them, to be fair – the make-up artist in the funeral home had done a decent job. I thought I’d never be seen dead wearing make-up. Turns out
that was wrong.
Sanderson and Sons was the oldest funeral home in Warrington and had taken care of my grandparents before me, so the place wasn’t entirely alien, though my memory of running about the
venue as a five-year-old was quite hazy. Ben and I had been gathered in a back room with my cousins, where we’d played with our Action Men. It was a bit like a Christmas family get-together,
although everyone was miserable. Actually, it was
entirely
like a Christmas family get-together.
Those cousins who I’d played with ten years ago were here now, dressed in black and suitably sombre. Mum, Dad and Ben were sat in the front pews, my extended family surrounding them. Ben
was holding up well. He was tough, always had been. He might have only been two years older than me, but emotionally he was twenty years senior. Teachers always mentioned how he had his ‘head
screwed on straight’, which is pretty handy, anatomically speaking. He’d help Mum and Dad deal with their grief, and they’d be there for him too. That’s what family did.
There were a few relatives and family friends who I didn’t recognise, but I wasn’t bothered about them. I was keen to see which of my school friends had turned up. Leaving the coffin
and my folks at the front of the funeral home, I wandered between the pews towards the back of the room. I could see Mrs Fulleylove, my form teacher, and, sitting beside her, Lucy Carpenter.
Lucy’s face was white, her eyes all red, like she’d been crying. Mrs Fulleylove had a consoling arm around her. She could clearly tell that Lucy had just lost the love of her life.
That’s what I was going with, anyway.
Lucy had a dozen of my classmates with her. Dougie was in the middle of them, deep into a whispered conversation with Andy Vaughn, another of our roleplaying game mates. Along with Stu Singer,
they were the only ones I’d call proper friends – the rest had obviously taken the school up on the chance of missing a double German lesson. Melanie Shuker was there, the class mean
girl, sobbing into a handkerchief. She looked terribly upset, which was odd. I’d barely said a word to her in the four years we’d been at High School together. I suppose German lessons
can do that to you.
Stu Singer was the class clown, a daredevil and proper all-round mentalist. He was what you’d call a force of nature, although my old man had more choice words for him. A waste of talent
really, as he was actually frighteningly smart, according to his grades. Simply put, intelligence and common sense don’t always go hand in hand. As the founding (and sole) member of the
Damage Squad, his duties included running around school shouting ‘
damage
’ a lot, while tipping stacked chairs off tables or throwing yoghurt pots out of the third-floor windows
of Upper School at passing Year Sevens. It wasn’t hardcore vandalism by any means, but it clearly gave the unlikely rebel Stu a lot of satisfaction, especially considering his dad was a
vicar. Indeed, Rev. Singer had run the proceedings an hour earlier at church, having been our family vicar throughout my life. As my nan would have said, it had been a lovely service, and all that
was left now was the final curtain, so to speak.
There were no more speeches, all the kind words had been spoken back at St Mary’s Church. Someone at the front of the funeral home hit
play
on the CD machine and a piece of
classical music suddenly kicked in. This was most definitely not to my tastes.
I Am The Resurrection
by The Stone Roses would’ve been nice. Perhaps that’d make me spring back to
life, leaping out of the coffin with jazz hands and shouting, ‘Ta daa!’ Like this was all a big joke I might wake up from at any moment. Talking of my coffin, when did they put the lid
on it? Preoccupied spying on my friends as I had been, I didn’t even see that happen. A curtain in the wall suddenly swung open, revealing a dark tunnel beyond. The coffin began to slide back
along a bed of mechanical rollers, the music playing all the while, now accompanied by stifled sobs from my family and friends.
For the first time since the night of the accident I suddenly felt a sickening feeling hit me in the pit of my stomach. I’d found the whole business of fluttering around, eavesdropping on
people’s conversations and watching how my family dealt with their loss quite surreal. I’d been dipping in and out of the living world, as if awaking from naps to witness key moments as
my body made its way inexorably down the home straight. The hospital, the church, the funeral home: I’d turned up in time to watch proceedings, a spaced-out spectator who was forbidden from
joining in. The closest thing I could liken the sensation to was when I’d foolishly raided my dad’s drink cabinet with Dougie and Stu. I guess I’d felt drunk up until the moment
the coffin moved. Now I just felt sick.
I didn’t want to go. It was too soon. I hadn’t had time to say goodbye to anybody. There was so much more I was going to do. I was going to learn how to speak French, to visit Paris.
I was going to buy a Mini Cooper when I was old enough to drive – you can blame
The Italian Job
for that one. I was going to grow a bloody
moustache
!
I ran forward towards the front of the room as the head end of the coffin began to disappear into the wall, the tiny curtains rustling as the wooden sides brushed past. I tried to take hold of
the polished brass handles, to slow the coffin’s progress and buy a little more time, but my hands simply trailed through it, connecting with thin air, the box and my body continuing on their
way. I started to panic now. I looked back at the room; nobody could see me . . .
Except Dougie.
Every face in the room was forlorn and tearful, seeing me off on my final journey. All except one. I could
swear
Dougie was staring
straight at me.
His jaw was slack and his eyes
were wide, and his elbow was hammering into the ribs of Andy Vaughn at his side. He whispered something frantically into Andy’s ear, our friend following Dougie’s gaze and squinting as
he looked straight at me. He shook his head: negative. Whatever Dougie was looking at – that is, me – Andy couldn’t see. Dougie’s face drained of colour. I might have rushed
over to him, if not for the pressing business of preventing my coffin from being swallowed up by the wall.
But then the curtain fell back into place with a pathetic
whoosh
,
and I was left locked out, separated from my body. I could hear people rising from the pews behind me, going to
speak to my parents and pass on their condolences. The stupid classical music kept playing on the funeral sound system – who chose that track anyway? More tunes flew through my head that I
would have preferred:
Good Riddance
from Green Day perhaps? If I’d had my way I’d have been shuffling off the mortal coil to the accompaniment of The Clash –
Should I
Stay Or Should I Go
. Though right now, it looked like I was staying, whether I wanted to or not.
If you had to choose a location to live, there are a few places that would naturally make the top of the list. The flat above Domino’s Pizza and the house across the
street from Lucy Carpenter are givens, but a more imaginative mind might conjure up fancier settings. Swanky penthouses on top of skyscrapers, a house in the Hollywood Hills; those kind of things
would be top of the heap. Next door to a graveyard would feature somewhere near the bottom, below a slaughterhouse but above a sewage farm.
Dougie had lived his entire life beside St Mary’s cemetery, his bedroom window overlooking a sea of gravestones. As the crow flew, there was a shortcut I could take to Dougie’s house
from my own that would take me past our school and straight through the field of the dead. I never took it. I’d seen and read too many films and books to know that it was a risk not worth
taking. It made far better sense to take the long route round, pretty much negating all possibility of being attacked by zombies. It added five minutes onto the journey but I’d always arrive
in one piece.
Dead or alive had ceased to be a concern of late. I couldn’t pinpoint the exact time I’d awoken after the funeral – the trauma of witnessing my own cremation had caused me to
somehow black out – but I became slowly aware that I was at home again, my parents and brother having returned there after the wake. Mum had gone to bed early and Dad was downstairs, staring
at the television, flicking mindlessly through the channels. I’d walked upstairs to Ben’s room. He was online, chatting to his mates on Faceache. I hung over his shoulder for a moment,
watching him reply to the sympathetic posts of his friends. He was having a private message conversation with his best mate, Sam. I felt like a bit of a snoop, spying on him as I was, but
opportunities like this hadn’t come around too often in life. I watched as Sam let Ben know he was thinking about him. I watched as Ben told him he loved him.
Loved him?
What the heck?
When did this happen? How long had they been an item? Scratch that: how long had my brother been gay?
I was overwhelmed by guilt. Not just for eavesdropping on something as private as Ben and Sam’s conversation, but for the fact that I truly didn’t know my big brother at all. Had I
ever known him?
‘
Ben
,’ I whispered, my lips millimetres from his ear, hoping for some kind of response. His fingers tapped away on the keyboard, his face showing no recognition or reaction
whatsoever. I stepped back, retreating from the room and creeping into my parents’ bedroom. Mum was trying to sleep. Her brow was knitted and furrowed, despair etched on to her face as she
struggled to find refuge from the day’s events. In her knuckled hands she still held my scarf, alongside my knackered old teddy, the one I’d had since I was born. He was missing an eye
and his nose had worn away many years ago, but he’d always been the most precious toy I’d ever owned. Of course, I’d never have owned up to this when I was alive – this was
a teddy, for flip’s sake – but somehow he always managed to find himself on the foot of my bed. I’d been wearing the scarf the night I’d died. Mum had knitted it for me
because I loved
Doctor Who.
She mistakenly thought that meant Tom Baker, the scarf-wearing fourth Doctor from the Seventies. It was still a groovy scarf. I glanced at my chest and there it
was, oversized and overlong, still tied about my neck, trailing down to my knees. Mum never had been good at knitting, but it was the thought that counted.
Why was I still here?
I moved away from Mum, not knowing where to turn. Surely I should have ‘moved on’ when my body went up in smoke? If I was stuck here, trapped in the
living world, I needed to find out exactly how being dead worked.
I’d heard of ghosts having to stay in one place and haunt their own house for ever, but there was no way I was settling for that. I paused to look at my bedroom for one last time before
heading out. Tatty posters on the wall, a cluttered bookshelf full of fantasy miniatures, books and CDs, an open wardrobe that looked like a bomb had hit it. Mum hadn’t even bothered to make
my bed. It was as I’d left it, a shrine to all that was me. I felt a strange, nagging sensation that I didn’t belong here. I knew where I needed to go, where I belonged. I stepped
through my bedroom wall, phasing through the brickwork, seemingly leaving my stomach behind in the process. I was learning fast – it seemed as though passing through solid objects made you
feel as though you were going to throw up. If ghosts
can
throw up.