Being Dead Part Three

An old friend with a gun...

It was market day and for some reason Megan and I found ourselves wandering between stalls all of which held very little interest for either of us, though I did hang my nose over a small and otherwise boring stall in which a man that I recognised was doing his best to make male cosmetics seem interesting.

“You smell nice enough without using that stuff,” whispered Megan.

“I’m sure I know him,” I whispered back, “from you know when. He was in my class at Junior school and we often spent out playtimes walking around and talking nonsense.”

“Like boys do,” she smiled.

“The girls were too busy doing handstands against the dining room wall and doing their best to tuck their skirts into their knickers!” I smiled.

“Touché!” she replied.

Our whispered conversation slithered to an end when the man behind the stall interjected with “Hi! It’s Peter, ain’t it? Peter Rogers?”

“David Stokes,” I replied, his name springing back from the depths of my memory, “what are you doing here, mate?”

“I dunno,” he replied, sounding sombre and altogether unhappy, “I found myself here and wondered what in the name of everything holy was going on! For goodness sake, I was on my bike! Is it your fault?”

David Stokes had been a really good mate of mine at school years back, in Juniors, when good friends were precious things. But we still occasionally looked back with fondness at some of our childhood shared interests, not that we met very often. But looking at him now he seemed to be troubled and I guessed its because, like me and Megan, he was dead and not at all happy about it. And by dead I mean as a citizen of the world where he was born and where he had lived since crawling out of his mother’s womb, but not dead in what must be an alternate world such as the one Megan had hesitantly tried to describe to me last night.

“Nothing to to do with me, Dave mate,” I replied, “it’s just that you died, and I didn’t even know you were poorly or I’d have popped round to cheer you up and make things better. You know, chat about old times and make the sort of plans we used to make.”

Not, I knew, that I could do that,

“I was on my bike,” he grunted, “my new five hundred cc bike and on the straight mile, you know the one that runs out past the college and through the countryside…”

The straight mile was a stretch of the road a mile or two out of town. It was supposedly a measured mile left over from the Romans who had built all sorts of straight roads back when they’d been here, we were led to believe. But in this modern age it was used for kids with their first motorbikes to race against each other even though it had a low speed limit, imposed because too many kids had been mangled or killed on its inviting surface, not that there much enforcement going on. But when nobody was looking the kids still roared along it, usually against each other. Such is the folly of youth!

“And some swine came at me!” he added, “straight at me in a van and I hadn’t a clue… but I saw through its windscreen, at the last moment, who it was. It was you, and to think that way back we were best mates!”

“It wasn’t Peter,” put in Megan, “because he was dead.”

He shook his head and scowled at her. “I know what I saw! And look at him! He’s no more dead than I am! And when I charged into an oak tree at eighty miles an hour it bloody hurt! Then when the pain went and I opened my eyes the tree was gone and I was here. And the straight road, that had vanished too. Instead I was doing this. Selling this crap! And it was all your fault! But look here, Peter, my ex-mate and long ago best friend, look what I found under this grotty counter, waiting for you to come along…”

And he produced what looked like a gun. A pistol, Something probably terribly deadly. And he grinned at me. “And I’m going to give you one last chance to tell me why you did it,” he grated, “and if you don’t maybe a bit of lead in your gullet will help you see sense, for old times sake.”

“But I wasn’t anywhere near you!” I told him, “For goodness sake, Dave mate, because I was here and that means I was dead and probably six feet under with all my loved ones weeping buckets! And anyway I haven’t even got a van!”

Megan stared at him through eyes that were unusually angry. “You’d best take note of what Peter says to you or you’ll find yourself in trouble when you try to wake up!” she said firmly.

“Bah!” he croaked, “old mates taking a chap for a fool just ain’t on!” And to my enormous shock I watched his finger as it squeezed the trigger, and the very last thing I knew on that day as my senses left me in a shock of unbelievable pain was that he had fired at me and then he had moved the pistol and fired straight at my lovely Megan.

We both blindly slithered to the ground, and when I opened my eyes it was to see a hairy and unkempt stranger looming over the two of us. But worse than that, if anything could be worse, was the way the market we’d been strolling through, David Stokes and his stall, the streets, the traffic, had all morphed into a ragged, green and stoney yet sunny world that looked like nowhere I had ever been before.

But the stranger, I almost knew him.

Way back when David and I had been at primary school I had seen his face in a history book that was full of colourful illustrations. I frowned as I tried to remember his name, and then it came to me.

It was something like Cro Magnon…!

© Peter Rogerson 25.08.24

xxx