4. AN ESCAPE FROM CONFUSION

Our heroine finds out, slowly, who and what she is...

Elaine Blockley might have been confused, but wasn’t. Somehow the shift from what she had been to what she was now hadn’t been as mind-blowingly momentous as you might think. She had been alive and in a dark cellar and now she was dead and in a place called the Past, and it was anything but dark. Or light. It was neither, and yet everything was plain as day.

She smiled to herself as she looked around. Everyone, and there were loads of everyones, looked so happy to be where they were, as if this place was a paradise.

“So you like it here?” asked Bunji. Nobody had told her the old man who flashed into being next to her was called Bunji but somehow she knew that’s who it was. He was dressed in khaki shorts that were plainly too big for him because he was perpetually hitching them up, but that didn’t matter because nothing so trivial mattered here. They could have fallen down and that wouldn’t have raised so much as an eyebrow anywhere.

“I do,” she replied, “very much,” she added.

The words had come out in her native tongue which happened to be English, but that didn’t matter either because language didn’t matter. Maybe, she thought for a casual moment, maybe there was just one language and it wasn’t French or German or Chinese or even English, but something universal. Something wonderful in which confusion over translating one thing into another wasn’t possible because it was totally unnecessary.

“That’s right,” agreed Bunji, “you’ve hit the nail right on its head there, pretty lady.”

“I’m Elaine,” she told him.

“Maybe that’s what you were back in the crackpot times, but I’m going to call you Pinky,” Bunji told her, “I like calling pretty ladies Pinky. You can be Pinky the dozenth. Though it could be hundredth or thousandth or any number you care to attach to it. I don’t care.”

“How sweet,” she murmured.

“So you’re a newcomer do Death?” he asked, “not that it’s a word we like to use. It’s more like a past life and the bonus is it doesn’t seem to end! I’ve been here for ages, you know, absolute ages, though I couldn’t tell you how many.”

“How many what?” she asked politely.

“Ages of course. I measure them in dozens.”

“Like you count your Pinky ladies?” she teased.

“Like everything. Excuse me.” And in the least of instants he vanished, just like Peter Piper had.

“Confusing,” she thought.

“Don’t mind him,” advised Petra. At least that’s what she thought the woman who nudged her might be called.

“Oh,” she mumbled, short of anything more positive to say and a tad confused.

“He’s as mad as a box of frogs,” nodded Petra, “but who could blame him? In the bad old times, and you’ll find that the period before we died is just about always called the bad old times, he was what they called a teacher. He taught things. Lessons, he said they were. Yes, he was like an encyclopaedia full of words and he taught them to sprogs. You know sprogs? Peter Piper’s a sprog. And others as diminutive as him. It’s our word for kiddies. We never call then anything but sprogs. And it was a pack of sprogs that helped him from that place to this place, if you see what I mean.”

“It was?” She thought she really ought to contribute more to the conversation, but for the time being and what with everything being so new to her she was lost for words.

“Indeed. There he was, about to take a stick to a sprog because that sprog just wouldn’t learn… he tried to, but he wouldn’t, it was something in his brain that stopped him, well, old Bunji, which is what you call him and I quite like it, old Bunji thought he’d try beating it into the twerp of a sprog. It was like that back then. No account was given to such nonsenses as disability, beat it into the devils, that’s what was the order of the day, and he set about beating the Tudors into the thick sprog, and the rest of them saw what he was up to and because for some reason they were fond of the stupid sprog, each and every one of them, they set about old Bunji with such a violent anger that they sent him to the Past with his own stick! And here he is. Able to meet and greet as many Tudors as he wants to. They’re all here, you know, kings and queens and lords and ladies, all like you and me…”

“What’s that?” asked Elaine Blockley, making sure she kept a firm grip of her own name, “I mean, you said like you and me, but what’s that exactly?”

“Why, dearie, don’t you know? Fancy that! Coming all the way from life to the Past, and not knowing what you are! You’re a ghost, dear, and so am I and so are all the throngs around you, and we go round and round in happy circles all day long. And all night long too, if that takes your fancy.”

“Oh,” stuttered Elaine.

“Take me, for instance. In the bad old times I was a washer woman who lived in a dell down Dewey way, and they all thought, at least the priest thought and you you know priests, how they put thoughts into ordinary folks heads? Well they all thought as I was in league with the devil and therefore a witch! I ask you, as if there was ever any such thing! Anyway, they tied me to a stake and lit a fire under me and all around me, and I sizzled. That’s what I did: sizzled. At first it came a bit keen, the hot flames scorching my flesh, and I cursed them. That’s what I did: cursed them!”

“Oh. How awful,” whispered Elaine, “did they really do that in those old days? I thought it was just stories to entertain sprogs!”

“You’re catching on, dearie!” laughed Petra, “getting to know the lingo! Anyway, it hurt for a while and then, with a tremble and a hissing of blood turned to steam I closed my eyes and when I opened them I found myself here! In the past! But with the right to nip back to the bad old times for a few ticks now and again, and put the fear of the devil in the heart of that priest! And he does not like it! Especially when he’s in his cot at night and trying not to have wicked thoughts about choir boys, and I tickle his fancy with a woo and a wail!”

“You mean, you’re a ghost?”

“We all are, dear, all of us in the Past: we’re ghosts when we nip back across the border into the bad old times. If we want to, that is, if we want to. You know, to put things right. To straighten old messes, to put the fear of hades into wicked minds!”

“And I can do that?” asked Elaine.

Petra cackled! Of course you can!” she chortled, “and have a mighty big bit of fun doing it! If there’s anyone as hurt you, that is. If there’s any pain to heal!”

Elaine remembered the way she’d been bricked into the cellar by the man she’d married, William of the unkind ways.

“But there is,” she nodded, grinning, “there is indeed!”

“Then you’ll have to get about it!” cackled Petra, “and have some fun!”

© Peter Rogerson 26.08.21

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Author's Note

What started as just a simple one episode story has grown beyond that so I've gathered the four parts together and they have become a book. Sort of.