9. Man Down
nine
Man Down
We wait for Angel’s men to collect my body. A tall, skinny guy and a short, fat guy lift me onto a gurney, place a stiff black sheet over me, and wheel me out.
And that’s it. There’s no longer a corpse in the room with us.
Just eight ghosts, Helga the front of house manager, and a hell of a mess for someone else to clean up.
Sergeant Davies packed up all my belongings, including all of my ExorSquad kit and my recording gear, so besides the gallons and gallons of congealed blood and the odd piece of bone or soft tissue, there’s no trace of me.
Like I was never here.
Helga stands in the centre of the room, hands on hips, heaving the world’s weightiest sigh. “I really thought you’d get to the bottom of this for me.”
“He will,” Pixie says, which Helga obviously cannot hear.
“Of course he will,” Camille adds. “Haven’t you ever listened to Unalive on Air?”
A thought suddenly occurs to me. It knocks aside any suggestion of grief I may have been feeling. “So, you’re The Youngscares?” I don’t ask anyone in particular, but secretly I’m hoping Trystan answers.
He doesn’t. It’s Pixie. “Yup, big fans. We’ve been listening to you every Monday since you first started your radio show.”
“But how, though?”
“Francesca Driscoll,” Jeanie says. “Her office is right next to Helga’s. Only it’s much smaller. It’s mostly where the camera screens live, but . . . anyway Franny always does the early shift on Tuesday mornings, and she’s a huge fan of Eglentina. You know, the woman who—”
“The crazy birdsong woman!?” I don’t know why I yell it, or ask like it’s a question. I’m well aware of Eglentina and her fucking menagerie of squawking beasts and her uncanny ability to outrank me in listener numbers each week.
“Yes, that’s the badger,” Jeanie continues. “Franny likes to sit in her office, cup of tea, two sugars, and a couple of biscuits—”
“What kind of biscuits?” I interrupt. One can always get a decent measure of a person by their favourite biscuit.
“What difference does the biscuit make? We’re dead, we can’t eat any more,” Peter says. He’s taken his top hat off and his eyes haven’t left his wife—ex-wife?—since the moment she arrived on the scene.
“Digestives, usually,” Trystan says. My heart leaps. Finally, someone who handles the gravity of teatime confectionary with the considerable weight it deserves.
Digestives are good. Dependable. Hearty, filling, nostalgic. From this information alone, I already know Franny likes comfort and routine. Doesn’t strike me as the biscuit choice of a serial killer—that would be the sociopathic rich tea—but I’m always open to plot twists.
“Okay, continue,” I say.
She does, without the slightest hint that my cookie detour has irritated her.
“Anyway, every week Franny gets her cup of tea ready and listens to Eglentina, and then after that, she’ll start setting things up for the coming week.
But she always leaves the radio on in her office and, lo and behold, who should take the slot immediately following ol’ Eggsie?
You, darling. Trystan and Pixie were floating around lightly haunting guests when they heard you chatting about some guy who got chopped into pieces and left behind the high street butchers.
They stopped and listened to your episode and later we found them dissecting it, providing their own theories.
The next week they waited in Fran’s office to hear you again, and then again afterwards they spent a few hours discussing your ideas.
“Now, darling, what you must understand is that being dead for ten, twenty, thirty years and being confined to the same few acres of space with the same half dozen other people, one quickly burns through their cache of discussion topics. We’d become stagnant, and then you were there.
A breath of fresh air, you gave us zest for conversation again.
Not just conversation, but debate. It was bloody wonderful, and after a few short weeks, you had us all addicted. Even Josh.”
Something—emotions probably—swell inside me, and I swallow down a lump. Pride, and gratitude, and a feeling of being appreciated for what I do. Or did. That was all I’d ever dreamed about when I started Unalive. If only Barry Prestwich and the Swindon Sounds executives could see me now.
They can’t, though. Because I’m a ghost. And I’m see-through.
But it’s nice to know that somewhere out there I’ve inspired at least a few people and sparked a conversation or two.
“It was Camille’s idea to get you involved in our . . .” Jeanie waves her hands about like she’s a circus performer spinning plates. “In our mess.”
“Oui, but I didn’t think you’d be so stupid as to join the ExorSquad and get yourself killed,” Camille says. It feels a little too “stones in glass houses,” but I keep my mouth shut.
Behind us, Helga pulls out her phone and dials a number. It rings and rings, echoing through the trashed room until it’s picked up by an automated answering machine and switches to hold music. She sighs again, swears, sets the device down on speaker, and begins pacing.
I turn back to the group. “Okay, so you all wrote the letter to me, you summoned me here. What I want to know is . . . how? How did you type it out? How did you get the paper into the envelope? And then how did you get that envelope into the post box when we can’t touch anything?”
“Pixie did it,” Jeanie says, letting the rock star filter to the front of the group. “Remember when we said that to move objects you need to be fired up? Well, nobody has more rage than Pixie.”
“It’s her superpower,” Trystan adds.
“You try being a Black woman in the eighties and nineties,” Pixie says.
Having had none of those experiences myself, I can only nod in sympathy.
“It took her a few weeks,” Camille says. “We’d sneak into Franny’s office, and there she has this big old-fashioned typewriter, and we’d listen to the news on the radio, and that was enough to trigger Pixie’s rage.”
Until very recently, I’d been living through that news every day, so I fully understand where Pixie found the emotions to type out a full letter.
“There’s a post box in the hotel foyer for sending out holiday postcards and such,” Jeanie explains. “Peter’s the best at possessing people, so, as morally ambiguous as it is, he took hold of Fran just to get the letter in the box.”
“Possession?” Excellent, we’re back onto this subject. I turn to Peter for an explanation, but Stove jumps into the conversation on Peter’s behalf.
“Pete’s the only one of us who can actually do it for long enough. And it’s tough. Possessing someone is really hard, it properly wipes you out,” he says.
“All I did was walk Fran from her office to reception. I don’t think I’d have managed much longer. It’s not like it was a big upset for her. As far as she knew, one moment she was at her desk, and the next she was standing beside Hel, completely unaware that she’d lost three and a half minutes.”
“I know it sounds ethically . . . questionable, possessing somebody without their consent and using it for our own means,” Jeanie says.
“But sometimes, needs must, and this was just something we had to try. You should understand that it really takes its toll on Peter’s well?being.
Possession can be traumatic to our incorporeal spirits.
It took him weeks to recover his strength from that brief episode.
Whereas there are next to no negative aftereffects to the fleshie.
Memory loss, sure. A bit of a headache. A little dizziness for a few hours. Vertigo.”
“Bright red face,” Trystan suggests, as though they’re now playing a game of listing side effects. “Like they’ve been drinking.”
“Ooh, yes, I’d forgotten about that one, but really, it’s fine. They’ll live to see another day. That’s the main thing.”
I say nothing. I haven’t been dead long enough to form an opinion on possessions and consent or its moral integrity.
Besides, I’m secretly chuffed to bits that as a group they decided contacting me was worth all that trouble and personal upheaval.
Nobody has ever gone to that much effort just to speak to me.
“After that,” Jeanie says, taking my silence as acceptance. “It was just a case of waiting and hoping the letter would arrive okay, and praying that you’d respond. We never thought you’d come in person, and although it’s all terribly sad that you’re dead, I for one am thrilled to finally meet you.”
I feel the buds of a blush rising in my cheeks. “Uh, thanks, I guess.”
“Thank you for calling Dead Good Cleaning Services. Do you have your account number to hand?” a tinny voice from Helga’s phone says.
Helga rushes over to pick up her device from the comparatively blood-free desk, turns it off speaker phone, and presses it to her ear. “Hello? Yes, it’s four . . . seven . . .”
“Specialist cleaning company all the way from London,” Peter says over his wife’s chatter. “She always uses them. They’re the absolute cream of the crop. Will have the hotel back to normal in no time.”
One of the benefits of being the quiet, observant, lonely, only child is the unrivalled ability to really hone your people?watching and evaluating skills.
There’s something unsaid in Peter’s body language.
It could be a sense of pride in his wife’s efficiency and dedication, or it could be longing or grief, or guilt, but there’s definitely something I need to spend more time dissecting.
I guess it must be difficult to see the person you love every single day and not be able to hug them, or kiss them, or say hello and ask them how they’re coping right now.
I wonder if Peter’s ever Oda Mae Browned Franny so he could chat with Helga, or hand thrown a misshapen vase to the dulcet sounds of The Righteous Brothers.