3. A FLOWER'S WORDS OF WISDOM

This is either getting deep or its getting shallow...

My journey home was awkward, to say the least. Remember: I’d been stripped naked by the pathologist (who was still struggling into his trousers whilst his assistant giggled and pulled her own underwear up), and people almost always take exception to nudity.

I don’t know why that should be. After all, everyone is naked every time they get undressed. It’s only natural.

Anyway, that aside, I soon discovered that nudity wasn’t the only thing that caused my fellow man to be alarmed: they weren’t that keen on watching dead people roller-skating along the street, reeking of death and the beginnings of decay, enhanced by gently falling rain. And that was me. As I hurtled along, going past the plate glass windows of shops purveying all manner of modern things, from baby-wear to shining white goods and huge flat screen television sets. Even to me my reflection looked incongruous, the acreage of my skin a nasty pallid grey and my eyes rolling meaninglessly as I jostled, out of control, over bumps.

But I did have one advantage: I was on high quality roller skates and they weren’t. And somehow I managed to weave round groups, doing my utmost not to collide with anyone because if I did I was afraid bits of me might fall off, and that would never do.

Policemen got involved with my mad race through town and once again I found I had an unexpected advantage: they weren’t quite sure why I was doing something illegal. I mean, was it illegal to be on roller skates stark naked under the sun (which had decided to come out and banish the rain, which helped) or was there a problem with me being dead? I couldn’t work it out, and neither could they, or they might have tried to arrest me, which might have been interesting.

So by hook or by crook I got away with the escapade without more than the odd finger nail falling off. I could manage without finger nails. They’re not much use to a corpse.

I live (or should that be lived?) in a terraced house that was built in the early part of the twentieth century and hadn’t had much work done to its since then. It had a tiny garden out front (lucky if it was a yard deep), but it was sufficient space to allow me to get off the pavement and onto my own property. But I was known round there: I’d been born in this house and there are old gaffers and dames who had watched me grow from a babe in arms to a corpse. Nosey devils.

“Ho there, Phil, left your togs at the cleaners?” asked one old fellow, cackling at the depth of his own wit and mirth as he made a rude gesture indicating that not all my shortcomings were in my head..

“Who would have believed it, and at your age!” snapped a geriatric woman who happened to live next door to me (I think, though certainty over the residence of anyone other than myself had never been my best suit).

I didn't know how to reply, which was fortunate because I don't think my mouth worked any more and if I spoke there was a considerable risk that my teeth might fly out like missiles from a machine gun. They did feel loose and it was too late in my life for me to face the nightmare of being sewed for the kind injuries flying teeth might cause.

“You don't look so well,” contributed a third neighbour, and truth to tell I wasn’t feeling A1. You don't when you’re dead and your spirit, a life-long ghostly companion, has been separated from you by an unfeeling undertaker, and put in a coffin.

I normally kept my key in my pocket, but as I didn't have a pocket I had to resort to the spare key that I kept under a flower pot. I could see that pot, right there in front of me, inches away from my rather grey foot that was still clamped in a roller skate. The trouble was I had no idea how I was going to get at it. My increasingly flaccid body was incapable of responding to any directions my brain sent to it and there was no way I was going to make a single voluntary movement. The key, teasingly close, could stay that way and I must spend whatever time left to me (before my system clocked that I was deceased) standing on my own doorstep with strangers gawping at my naked crotch. They were, you know: gaping, actually gaping. And you know what at.

“What you’ve got to do, sonny, is get reunited with your ghost before you’re no more than so much worm fodder,” said the flower in the flower pot, swaying in the breeze.

“He’s talking to weeds now,” snapped the next door neighbour who was too fascinated to do anything but remain where she was, ogling. “I saw him out here on that same front when he was a sweet little bairn,” she added to anyone who cared to listen, and then she sighed, “his bits and pieces aren’t much bigger even then. Too many wives, I dared say. Not good for a man, having too many wives.”

She knew that I’d had five wretched women in my life, and that five wretched women had been unable to cope with my nightmares, and had made breaks for freedom while they could But she didn’t know why they’d left me. She was making unfair assumptions.

“If you don’t find that ghost you’ll regret it,” suggested the flower. It was, I think a dwarf kind of sunflower and it had such a cute face I could have kissed it.

No I couldn’t. There was to be no more kissing for me.

It was at that moment that I had a real stroke of luck. My old house, built as I said over a century ago, had been constructed when the heaviest passing vehicle had been a horse-drawn brewery dray loaded with full barrels. But things have changed a lot since then, and at that precise moment, and I was thankful for it, the Number 101 bus rattled past. It was a double-decked vehicle and full to squeaking with passengers. There must have been a dozen standing on top of all those with seats.

And it made everything on our street rattle as it passed along.

And my own front door rattled. It rattled open and I somehow flowed through it before it slammed shut of its own rattling accord.

Finally I was alone in my own home with nobody cheering my nakedness or fearing my grey, cold flesh or turning their noses up at the unfamiliar reek of death that emanated from me every time the wind blew over me.

“Don’t forget,” hissed the sunflower from the other side of my front door, “find that ghost of yours before it’s too late.”

© Peter Rogerson 24.08.19