Being Dead Part Fourteen

We come to what I suppose it the expected end...

Megan, as if she was a shadow of the school’s Matron resting on the boy Peter’s Victorian mother, took charge. This was something that working at the school had clearly equipped her to do because it came so easily to her despite the incredibly primitive hovel she found herself unexpectedly in, and at such unusually short notice at that.

“Nobody’s going to punish you, Peter,” she said in a decisive but kindly voice, “because, young fellow, you’re coming with this gentleman and me! But first you can spit out that willow bark you’ve been chewing! It’s helped bring you to this moment in your life!”

“Where… what…?” the poor child stammered.

“I’ll tell you all I know later. But first, laddie, what do you feel?”

Peter frowned and struggled to find the words. “It’s like a wind that isn’t there,” he said at last, still frowning. “What’s happening to me?”

“We don’t know,” I said before Megan could make promises she couldn’t keep. “Now what do you see?”

“My home, my bed, everything… it’s fading, but I don’t know, it’s going away… am I dead?”

“Dead boys don’t talk,” Megan told him, avoiding an answer, “but I suppose it’s kind of like being dead without the dead bit.”

I grinned. She’d put it so well. But I knew where we were going all right. We were going home. To where we started, and Peter? I’d never know.

If I’d thought about it I’d have remembered that whereas Megan and I had died in a small town in twenty-first century England, Peter had been born and lived solely in the poverty of Victorian working class England. And he’d died here, yes, I know he had. The willow bark couldn’t have pulled a boy as sick as he’d been out of the grip of death. Though was it the same England that I had come from? I struggled to wonder if it might be a parallel one? If there was such a thing, of course. Lands in which similar soils gave birth to similar lives, but not identical?

My mind fogged up. Maybe it was because the possibilities of all the things I’d seen whilst being somewhere outside life, or maybe because a dream was over, a last beautiful dream that had shown me that once upon a time there had been a man I called Cro with his pretty and attractively pregnant woman, a man struggling in the early millennia of human life, but one with imagination and love for that woman, the two of them learning what it meant to be human and in love.

They’d had a child, for goodness’ sake! A child that was the stuff of pure love.

And then I’d been plunged somehow deep into the struggles of a people in the grip of a deadly pandemic, superstitions trying to explain their situation in terms that required a benevolent and kindly deity idly watching the population being decimated in the cruellest imaginable way. A deity whose minister lay dead in a small scruffy church and whose believers thought that punishing and burning those they suspected of being against their lives in a celebratory fire.

Then there was a public school with its toffee-nosed boys charging around on a rugby field, a school which taught a skewed version of history and actually taught it by the me of my dreams until I was sent somehow back to the hovel in the nineteenth century and seen for myself the consequences inherent in inequality. And the contrast was evil and made a mockery of humanity and love. How could anyone who sat on a throne in an ivory towers with his hands dripping with hard cash know anything whatsoever about human love?

And now here I was with Megan like I had been when I had started the dream. I was still me, though the shorts I was wearing were those of a schoolmaster turned rugby referee and not the comfortable well-fitting shorts I’d become so fond of.

But at least they were shorts...

And suddenly out of my consciousness, everything went black. Darker than dark, blacker even than black.

“It seems a shame,” came a voice I’d never heard before, “to waste such fine timber as this in the fires of the town crematorium.”

“But if we must, we must,” said his female assistant “but I wouldn’t half like those shorts! They somehow rmind me of a man I loved..”. Did I recognise that voice? It couldn’t have been Megan because she passed away two whole years before the Goatspunk hooligan had leapt upon me with his revolting blade, and sent me into the eternity of dreamland.. And that was when I had died. Was murdered. Began to dream.

And now I knew the dream was over. For me, for Megan and for the young Victorian boy. And somewhere in the vastness of a universe that’s spanned across eternity, our brothers and sisters, like ourselves, so very much like ourselves, were on the road to dreaming our dreams.

But I hadn’t really dreamed: I’d died.

THE END

© Peter Rogerson 09.09.24

xxx