POSSIBLY A DREAM...

Are there really ghosts?

The Prime Minster lay on his bed wishing that the good Mrs Prime Minister would sneak from her room to join him because, well, he felt like what he’d once called a bit of the other and now he’d grown out of such frivolities didn’t like to call it anything but still almost enjoyed experiencing it. But she had a room of her own, had insisted on it months ago, had almost provoked an argument on the subject, and all since she’d watched that programme on the television about the bedroom habits of past royalty and how they had rooms of their own and rarely shared a bedroom romp unless... She trended to forget some less desirable aspects of a life she almost idolised, like the way there were servants within earshot, especially if his royal highness was bedding her royal highness. She didn’t fancy an audience witnessing their fumbling.

The trouble was, the prime minister’s wife had notions above her station. She might have been one of the richest women anywhere on the planet, but she wasn’t royalty. She was just a woman who, through a variety of good fortunes, had a amassed a great fortune she could call her own.

The floorboards outside his bedroom creaked.

“Ah,” he thought, “here she comes at last!” and he wriggled out of his pyjamas because he knew that a gilmpse of his prime ministerly chest would titillate her. At least, she pretended that it did and he didn’t mind pretence if it made him feel good.

He had once cursed those floorboards for being old and noisy but now he rather welcomed the way they announced what he hoped was a new adventure that might fill him with joy before the dawn. It would be his good lady wife out there because nobody else had a room on their floor. Others in the house, servants, of which there were very few these days and certainly not enough to make an audience hovering out side the boudoir, lived several corridors away. In fact, the three servants who lived in were on the second floor and as the house had wings, they had the west wing whereas he and Mrs Prime Minster slept or occasionally enjoyed life in the east wing.

The floorboard stopped its squeaking.

What was the woman up to? He had built himself into just the right mood for expressing something to her, not love, he hadn’t loved her for ages, but desire maybe, or frustration.

“Who’s there?” he demanded of nobody, yet a shadowy figure, barely visible, seemed to detach itself from the far wall, the one near the window (that was shuttered) and slowly, malevolently. glide into the room.

If it was a man it was dressed absurdly for a male in long flowing shadowy skirts and was wearing a most unmanly hat. But it sported a beard if that shadow round its face was actually hair.

“Who in the name of pounds, shillings and pence are you?” he demanded, reaching for his emergency alarm button which had somehow gone missing. Ah, there is was, under his bottom pillow. But he hesitated. He needed to know who the fellow in front of hism was before he ordered him to be arrested or, failing that, shot.

Then his nocturnal visitor opened his mouth and a stream of something rancid oozed out together with words he couldn’t begin to understand. Then the mouth closed leaving just a foul and bitter stench in its wake, and the Prime Minister knew who he was.

“You’re dead!” he exclaimed. “There was a documentary about you on the television only last week. You’re the bloke who had six wives! And you’re in your nightie!”

The large head perched on top of the night-dress clad body nodded, threatening to fall off, and the Prime Minister hoped and prayed that he wouldn’t open his repulsive mouth again. But if even a prime minister hopes and prays for something not to happen there’s no guarantee that it won’t, because not only did the figure take a small step towards him but he opened his mouth to speak, and mixed in with the rancid stream tumbled some words.

“Beware,” he said, and to make sure that the quivering prime minister understood he elaborated. “Be warned,” he added.

The prime minister couldn’t help it. He needed to know if this apparition had escaped from a Dickens novel or was in actual fact the last remains of a long dead king and had actually become animated in imitation of life by some trickery, probably of the Russians. So, “are you really the ghost of an old king?” he asked.

He shouldn’t have used the adjective old because the apparition in front of him jerked in peudo-anger and “I’m not an old king!” he hissed. “no man can live and keep his head if he thinks I’m anything but young! I have lived but five and fifty years, and have plenty in front of me, believe you me! I only have to order off with your head and it will be so!”

The Prime Minister was fairly quick-thinking at times, in is job you had to be when explanations had to be manufactured out of pure fiction, and he was being quick-thinking when he stuttered “You and whose army?”

The apparition opened its mouth yet again and clearly tried to roar, but all that emerged from that fetid orifice was what might have been half-digested and clearly ancient sausages and a waft of the foulest breath imaginable.

“Don’t do that!” snapped the Prime minister. “You stink!”

“That is no way for a peasant to address a king!” came the reply, a creaking kind of voice that sounded like it might to have travelled across a dozen universes before it reached him.

Now, the Prime Minister had watched a television documentary on the subject of Tudor kings, particular Henry the eighth, and so he knew a thing or two about the apparition in front of him.

“You’re dead, though,” he said, enunciating clearly because he was aware that the English language had altered somewhat since the sixteenth century and he wanted whatever it was in front of him to understand what he was saying.

“How dared you!” snapped the foully aromatic deceased monarch.

“You were fifty-five when you passed away, in the year 1547,” the Prime Minister recalled, accurately he hoped, “and as it’s not centuries after then there’s no doubt that you’re dead.”

It was at that point that the ghost or whatever it was started weeping. “Oh dearie me,” he wept, “I had everything, power, loads of wealth, precious jewels you could count in their hundreds, and you say that I’m dead…? And, you might know, being dead, I have nothing. Not even a wife prepared to lose her head for me. Oh such is the folly of my existence!”

“But you have your memories, so don’t be such a misery-guts,” muttered the Prime Minister, who had never spent a moment sympathising with those who were busy feeling asory for themselves.

The apparition shook its head so that a few teeth fell out.

“What good are memories if they are based on the dislike, even hatred, of others,” he moaned, and with further ado he retreated to the wall and melted into it so that there was no sign that he had ever disturbed it.

“That’s worth thinking about,” thought the Prime Minister, “the man, according to the documentary I saw was feared and hated in equal measure, and those are the qualities he took to the grave with him, his wealth meaning absolutely nothing once he was dead...”

He might have gone on philosophising at greater length because he enjoyed philosophising, and he was deciding that he’d just possibly had a very moving dream, when his bedroom door rattled.

“Now what’s this?” he thought? “A headless dead queen? I do hope not…”

But it wasn’t anything quite as gruesome. It was the Prime Minister’s wife, her baby doll night-dress sliding off her, and she looked expectantly and smiling at him, then wrinkled her nose.

“What’s this smell? Have you farted again, dear?” she asked.

“I’ve been given food for thought,” he replied, “in a dream. Do you think I’m universally hated?”

© Peter Rogerson 04.08.23