4. THE OVERWEIGHT GHOST

Did you know that ghosts have ghosts have ghost of their own?

Death became a very cold affair as I slumped on my sofa in the front room listening to a haunting rendition of where have all the flowers gone from just outside the closed front door. That sunflower had the sweetest little voice and I suddenly felt that, too late in my life, I was in love.

I wanted to tell that enchanting sunflower to find another song, but the dead can’t speak, not even to make essential requests like that.

I was almost blind (though somehow I’d navigated my route home, and on roller skates at that), my ears seemed to be slowly giving up the ghost (I shouldn’t be mentioning ghosts, not now with mine missing) and any sense of smell was a thing of the past. On my race home on well-oiled wheels I’d overheard quite a few people muttering about the smell as I passed them by, but I was totally oblivious to is.

Though a little bit of residual knowledge suggested that the smell of death is something nobody likes or can ever forget having sniffed it once.

“You stink,” said a voice at my elbow, and I heard it plain as plain. It would have made me jump, but I’ve already explained about myself and movement. “In fact,” it continued, “I’ve never known anyone stink quite as awfully as you do. Here, let me stand in front of your melting head so you can see who I am. You can see, can’t you? But no: of course you can’t. That randy old pathologist disconnected your eyes, didn’t he. I watched him as I prepared to leave you.”

I wanted to cry out, beg him to tell me who he was, but my entire self was incapable, by now, of any kind of motion, so I just lay there, slowly rotting away. And I was doing just that! I could hear the plopping of all manner of body fluids as they dripped onto the floor under the sofa.

“You think you’ve had it bad,” he rumbled, and I could make out every syllable of every word, which was a blessing, “but I’ve had it a darned sight worse. It’s not easy being the ghost of a ghost, you know.”

A ghost of a ghost? That was a new one on me and I wanted to say it to him but nothing that was me was working.

“Ah, I see you don’t know what I mean when I say a ghost of a ghost,” he continued, and I got the impression he might be smiling at my ignorance, but I couldn’t see so much as the shadow of a shadow anywhere.

“Let me tell you then,” he rumbled on, and by the boring nature of his voice and the way it contained a nuance of false superiority I knew who it was: it was me, and I was listening to me and judging me like everyone I’d known in life had done when I spoke to them. I was a boring nerd. I’ve had five wives in twenty years, and they all discovered that single fascinating trait of my character. So here I was, then, and part of me was talking to a different part of me, and boring it.

“I was taken away in the coffin meant for you,” he said, and there was anger between his words when he said that. “That pathologist was too busy touching up his assistant when the funeral director came in, and he, too, was in one hell of a hurry. He dumped me, all of me and not just this pale shadow of me, in the coffin, nailed the lid on, nailed, mind you, not screwed, and raced his hearse around to that old cemetery, the one next to the public loos, and it was there, right next to the gents so I could smell misdirected male urine on every bit of breeze that whistled past. I mean, it even made me sick!

“A lad in his teens had dug the hole, all six feet of it, and had even pulled out a tangle of old bones from previous burials. I was in the coffin, you understand, but I could hear them clattering as he made a macabre pile of them.

“Then he dumped our coffin, remember, it’s the one you and your mangy flesh should have been in but wasn’t, in the hole and without any kind of ceremony he shoved the soil back in on top of it. It would have been nice to have had a few words muttered in a sombre apology for a soul taken before his time, but no, there was nothing, just the undertaker barking his orders.

“’Hurry up, lad, we’ve got the big one to do next,’ he yelled, and, yes, he did yell. I could hear him through the thickness of cheap chipboard and six feet of soil!

“Then there was a period of silence marred only by the sound of zips being yanked down, wee being pumped out of bladders and those same zips being pulled back up. I tell you, when we’re together we’ve just got to put in a complaint. That dank corner is no place for a body to have to spend eternity, and someone needs telling.”

He paused, clearly aggrieved at the treatment he (or was it we) had meted out at us. And I could understand his anger even though it was almost impossible for me to understand anything, what with my state of decomposition and general debility caused by death, We had been treated like peasants and serfs in the bad old days, not like corpses in the twenty-first century.

“Anyway,” he continued, “to cut a long story short I discovered that I wasn’t alone in that coffin. I found out, when the other fellow nudged me, that ghosts have ghosts of their own and I was the ghost of your ghost, and your ghost was still happily snoozing in the chipboard box. And when he woke up he was far from pleased.

“You’ll have to go and tell him,” he grunted, “and tell him to hide himself away somewhere hard to locate because if they find that rotting corpse of his they’ll take it to the incinerator, sure as sure, and he’ll be cremated without doubt. And that can’t be allowed to happen because you and I really must be incinerated with him!”

I didn’t want to be cremated! That was a very final thing to do to a body, burn it so that it’s no more than a vase full of ashes and some slightly smelly smoke.

“The thing is,” he said, “my boss, your proper spirit, wants you to come with me to the graveyard where he’s struggling to force his way through six feet of muck. I could do it because, well, there’s nothing of me, so to speak, but your own ghost proper is quite a hefty fellow (see steak pies and too many chips) and is finding the going somewhat difficult.

“So tell, me, how far might you be able to walk?”

© Peter Rogerson 25.08.19