Chapter Two #2
I’d been dead for three days when Gabe finally bothered to show up.
I’d spent most of that time walking – couldn’t tell you why, exactly.
Couldn’t tell you much about those three days at all.
It wasn’t because I had anywhere to go but, I guess, I didn’t know what else to do.
Apparently, when you die and you’re so shocked and can’t process it, and don’t want to believe it, your legs just keep going …
and since I was in Kent, London was the direction they’d picked.
I was slumped on a bench in front of some old docks, in a place called Wapping, when he casually waltzed over and plopped himself down next to me, interrupting a perfectly good stare at some ducks I couldn’t feed.
‘Who the fuck are you and why are you sat so close, mate?’ I muttered to myself, thinking he couldn’t hear, but then he turned, a smirk on his face.
‘Cheery fella, aren’t you, Jake? Thought you’d be happy for the company and the explanation, but I can leave …
’ So then, obviously, I begged him to tell me what kind of hell I was living in.
I followed him back to his ‘house’ and nearly lost it when I saw where he was taking me.
I asked him if he could be any more of a cliché, haunting an old woman’s attic.
He looked at me, annoyed and hurt in equal measure, and mumbled something about having had plans to convert it.
But when I got to the top floor, the place was actually impressive – well beyond my limited IKEA tastes.
A wooden writing desk was nestled under the eaves; embroidered tapestries hung perfectly aligned and spaced on the walls; and, as if to show off, Le Creuset bowls were dotted around for decoration.
Light poured in from a skylight above the desk, making the whole place look like something from an oil painting. Even I found it a beautiful space.
‘Really bucking the horror-film aesthetic,’ I quipped.
‘Thanks, love,’ he replied with a covert wink.
Once I’d made myself at home on his sofa, it didn’t take him long to start hinting about my ‘mission’. How I needed to work out why I was being held in the ‘in-between’ and what my punishment would be if I wanted to get out of it.
I honestly thought one of the best things about being dead would be not having to have a job anymore.
I told him I just wanted to swan my way around London, riding the Underground and getting into nightclubs for free, but turns out, thanks to Gabriel, I can’t rest easy – as if real life and dying weren’t tough enough.
He’s like the annoying parrot that my grandad once had – except, instead of repeating the Eastenders outro drums, it’s always ‘mission’ this and ‘righting your wrongs’ that, and ‘you should be spending more time working that out’ instead of ‘dicking around’.
And only then would he let me pass on to the next life.
Years passed and I simply couldn’t be bothered to work it out.
It’s been like the worst escape room ever: confusing, lonely, and unending.
He promised that – depending on how successful my punishment is – passing on to the next life will be better than the limbo we’ve been living in, but how in sweet hell does he know that, since he’s only ever been to the gates and never inside?
And what’s limbo life without a little bit of rebellion? So instead of getting on with the deeply tedious business of righting my wrongs, I’ve spent the last ten years winding Gabe up as much as possible, which, unsurprisingly, has been way more fun.
‘What if my life’s mission is to watch every film ever made?’ I teased him one afternoon, and that turned out not to be such a bad idea. I blitzed through IMDB’s top 250 films in just two months … but that started to become boring, so I changed tactics.
Maybe my mission was to haunt and prank ghost hunters.
I’d start small, just trying to appear in their peripheral vision when they had stopped recording.
I spent a whole month haunting this particularly posh podcast duo (they had matching fleeces embroidered with their logo, Ghoul Talk, and everything – took themselves way too seriously).
I’d wait until the woman was alone and then try to appear right in her eyeline …
Ta-dah. She never saw a thing. But once, I knocked a lamp by accident and she screamed so hard, she dropped her camera down the stairs.
Three years of haunting yet a lamp did more damage than I ever could.
Gabe would always have me meet him at his favourite pub, The Bell & Hound.
The kind of place that puts tinsel up in November and you can still spot remnants of Sellotape stuck to the ceiling come July.
I’d fill him in on my antics, but he was never impressed and, with a potty mouth just as bad as mine, he’d grumble, “Stop fucking around!” He didn’t even look up from his needlepoint.
‘Well, just tell me what the hell to do, then,’ I’d reply.
‘Is it really so hard,’ he’d say, pulling his thread through, ‘to think about what you did wrong in life, Jake? And don’t use hell’s name in vain.’
I’d retort with something clever. He’d ignore it. And repeat.
So, I changed tactics again. What if my mission was to tap the shoulder of the world’s top ten most beautiful women?
Number one on my list was, obviously, Zendaya, who walked right through me in Harrods.
Not past me, but literally … through me.
Like I was a draught from a shitty air-con unit.
She got goosebumps and everything. Small win for this sexy ghost. Saying that, I’ve never felt as invisible as I was then, standing next to one of the most beautiful women in the world and barely registering as a breeze.
I went back to Gabe’s attic after that and didn’t leave for a month, until I decided it was time to try Margot Robbie, at which point Gabe flipped out at me. ‘How about you focus on the one woman you actually fucked up?’
I spent a while trying to figure it out, I did.
Did I bully someone at school? I didn’t think so.
I once overcharged a bloke for his MOT because he called me a muppet in front of the garage, but my spidey senses told me that wouldn’t warrant eternal damnation.
There was also the time I stole a tenner from Mum’s purse when I was fifteen and also that time I copied someone’s homework instead of actually reading Of Mice and Men, but none of it seemed soul-destroyingly bad.
And I was always the perfect boyfriend so … I went back to watching movies.
After nine years back and forth like this, Gabriel sat me down and stopped being cryptic.
‘It’s eternal damnation,’ he said.
I told him that it would be way creepier if we were sitting in a dark attic filled with candles and cobwebs rather than bold woven carpets and faux-fur throws.
He told me that there are multiple afterlives.
Not one. Several. He takes souls, like mine, to their gates by boat.
Literally rows them up to the doors and lets them make their case for which afterlife they best deserve.
Most people, he said, are decent enough that it’s not much of a contest. But for people who’ve done something genuinely bad, he had another option. He could destroy their soul instead.
No doors, no boat, no case. Just nothing, for eternity.
Finally, an explanation. Delivered with the energy of someone reading a bus timetable.
I asked him how the fuck a guy his size managed to row a boat without sinking it. He didn’t laugh.
Then he told me what my punishment was. The one I’d been supposed to be working on this whole time.
He said that I’d taken something from someone in my life – something that I had no right to take – and before I could pass through any river or door, I had to put it right.
A trip down memory lane, he called it. Something about revisiting what came after me.
Just as woo-woo as the sage incense my mum occasionally burned or the tarot cards Belle and her aunt used to love, right?
He said I’d know the right person when I found them, because they’d be the only one who could see me.
That I’d be able to touch them – like actually touch, not just float through – and that when I took their hands and got them to think of a relevant time and place, we’d go to that memory together.
If it was irrelevant, nothing would happen.
I asked how I was supposed to know what was relevant. He looked at me like I was a drunk who’d walked into a glass door, twice.
He said there was a deadline: midnight on 12 December 2026.
‘Well, you could have said all this nine years ago, mate,’ I retorted, rolling my eyes.