Being Dead: Part One

A simple idea, and I've no idea whether it will grow into something a little bit bigger. Better wait and see, though I've called it part One. Part Two may come any day if I actually do die!!!

There’s something spooky when it crosses your mind that you’re probably dead. I mean, at my age I’ve had a hell of a lot of years to contemplate what my final moments might be like, and it’s always been fanciful day-dreaming, a kind of almost obscene morbidity combined with the ultimate mystery. The kind of selfish self-awareness I’ve always been critical of in others.

Then, about half an hour ago, out of the blue I knew that I was dead.

I knew because Megan told me, and I know for a fact that she died a couple of years ago. I attended her funeral, for goodness’ sake! I wept because she was gone after a long and painful battle against a malignancy that wouldn’t go away and wouldn’t respond to any treatment that medical authorities wanted to try on her. So she was dead. There could be no doubt about it at all.

“Fancy seeing you here!” she cooed at me. Megan. And she wasn’t in the coffin I’d last seen her in but walking down a road to the shops, swinging a bag like she always had. And by the look of her she can’t have been as dead as I knew she certainly was.

“You look like my best friend, but she died,” I told her. “Megan she was and always will be, when I think about her, which is ridiculously often seeing as I was at her funeral!”

“That’s me!” she said with that silly but lovely laugh of hers, “Megan, and I vaguely remember the coffin. But that went away in a strange and magical instant, and the sun shone down and everything was suddenly all right.”

I couldn’t understand why somebody was trying to claim to own the life of a dead friend. No, more than friend, lover. She had been my lover. Loads of times.

“But Megan’s dead,” I told her, “I was there at the funeral. I cried like the best of them. And I loved her. I probably still do.”

“And then you died,” she said, “I went to the library as soon as I realised that something was wrong. Here I was, and the pain, the cancer had gone away all on its own, no surgery, no nasty medicines, just gone! So I read about it and I realised I was dead like I’d wanted to be for oh, weeks on end. I was living a different life in a different place, a different dimension, the book said. A home like the old one, but so different I could laugh with joy! But everything was just like I remembered from before the pain went. The shops were almost the same, the school where I was a dinner lady was there, but the kids were different.. But you, my lovely man, weren’t there! Not until this very moment when I saw you standing all confused by the park gates wondering what was going on, as if you’d lost something, and so I spoke to you. How did you die, Peter?”

“Me die?”

And then I remembered. That swine Bryan Goatspunk had knifed me! I’d seen the machete he tried to hide behind himself as he walked idly towards me, then I’d watched him gird himself up to leap, to come at me for no better reason than because he could, and for a splintered second I’d left the pain, the terrible, stabbing, tearing pain.

And then Megan had said fancy seeing you here…With her voice, the voice I knew so well despite her terrible funeral a couple of years ago

But I couldn’t be dead! Could I? My eyes were working, and my ears: all my senses if it came to that. But Megan shouldn’t be there.

“So where am I?” I stammered, knowing full well I was standing outside Beamish Park and walking in the direction of the town centre.

“There are dozens of places like this,” she said with a smile, “and when you die you sort of slip from one into another. And then your life carries on from where it was, just about as if you hadn’t died, only when I slipped over to here you didn’t, and that fair broke my heart! But look: you have!, come at last after two long years! Come on, let’s go to my place and make glorious love like we used to!”

“You’ve got a place?” She’d lived with her parents before the funeral. They’d been so cut up about her passing that they’d joined a church and seemed to spend most of their lives saying prayers and singing hymns in the hope that worship of that kind would bring Megan back to them.

“Of course I’ve got a place!” she laughed, “and I’ll make you a nice hot cup of tea while you get your bearings, and then, when the sun sets, we’ll nip to bed and spend the night together like we sometimes used to!”

“I don’t understand,” I mumbled, and I must have sounded as pathetic as I felt because she, my dead lovely Megan, put one arm round me and actually kissed me where we were, in the street. And what’s more, despite my confusion, I kissed her back.

“When we dream at night,” she said, “we’re looking through a window that isn’t there to a life we either have lived or will live. That’s all there is to it. People more clever than me say it’s a matter of dimensions, and there are countless of them, all interweaving or interlocking. But come on! Its not far and I’m dying for a cup of tea!”

And she grabbed hold of my hand and pulled me along To Barker Street where old McGuinness lived. Old McGuinness was an old school master of mine, Geography, a subject that he told us times many that he hated and proceeded to ignore the syllabus by explaining as much as he could about the Falklands war, which in a previous employment he’d been involved in. Anyway, we’d got to know where the Falklands were!

But when we passed his house it wasn’t there. Neither was the row of houses it was attached to.

Everything seemed so wrong. Except for Megan, and she was so right.

“Where are we?” I begged her, “am I going mad?”

“No, silly!” she laughed, and I knew that laugh, teasing as it had always been. “We’re in a parallel universe, on a world almost exactly like our own, but not the same, if you see what I mean. And we’re alive, not dead!”

My head was still buzzing trying to see around her words and make sense of them when she dragged me through a gate and into a small house that I knew for a certainty had never been there because it was on the exact spot where I’d played as a boy under the lovely old conker tree, hurling broken bits f wood in order to dislodge horse chestnuts, hoping for a magic one that would win me playground games the next day.

“Here’s home,” she said, smiling like she always had, “come on in! I make a wicked cup of tea!”

So I followed her in. If I was dead I didn’t feel it, but then neither did she look very dead either.

© Peter Rogerson 20.08.24

xxx