23. Only the Good Die Young
twenty-three
Only the Good Die Young
“It wasn’t Angel,” I say to Trystan when I arrive at his beach later that day.
“Why? How do you know?” he says, hopping off his ghost surfboard. He shakes invisible seawater from his hair, which is beautiful and soft and one hundred per cent dry.
“I . . .” I think about the video. About the looks shared between Angel and Jeanie.
About their covert liaisons, and the heart?wrenching sadness that they can’t be together physically.
“It’s not my place to say, really, but .
. .” A glance over my shoulder tells me we’re the only ghosts in the area. “Can I tell you a secret?”
“Of course.”
I look around once more. “Angel could see me and Jeanie. He could chat to us.”
“Wait, for real? You actually spoke to him?” Trystan asks, his hand closing on my bicep.
Okay, he’s touching me. “He said that Gabriel misses you.”
I feel it again. The mercury in my emometer shooting right to the top.
“Gabe?”
I nod. Swallow the lump. “He lives in California now with his wife, Caitlyn. He has three grown-up kids. Kelsey, Mitchell, and Trystan.”
Trystan’s expression crumples. Eyebrows drawing in, lip wobbling.
“Fuck,” he says, wiping away tears that have instantly formed, and turning his head, obscuring his face. “I’m sorry. I just didn’t . . . expect that.”
This time, I don’t hesitate, don’t second-guess myself. I wrap my arms around him and hold him as tightly as my ghost strength will allow while he sobs.
Eventually he pulls apart and wipes his eyes again. “Sorry. I’m not sure what came over me.”
“I am. And I get it.”
Because I finally understand it all.
He’ll never grow old. Never get married.
Never have kids. Never see his friends again, his childhood home, his family.
Every day is Groundhog Day. The same people, in the same place, whilst he deals with the knowledge that everyone he’s ever known and loved is living their lives without him.
He wants to move on, and I should just deal with it, but . . . I’m gonna fucking miss him.
“If you need to cry some more, I’m always here,” I say.
He half laughs, half sobs. His fingers reach up, and as gentle as a breeze, he cups my cheek. It all happens in slow motion. I suck in a breath.
“Thank you,” he says, and I think for one heart-stopping beat he’s about to kiss me.
But he doesn’t. He takes his hand away, and I’ve never known grief like it. It aches from the inside out. I want to cry with him. Lie in a ball on the floor while he holds me.
“Wanna surf with me?” he says.
My brain short?circuits for a moment. “Uh . . . I don’t have a board.”
Not I don’t know how to surf. Not I’m wearing a boiler suit for fuck’s sake. Not I can’t even swim. But I don’t have a surfboard.
“We can share.”
Oh, god.
“Have you ever surfed before?” he asks. I shake my head. “Okay, well, let me teach you the basics.”
For a decent hour my new surf instructor has me lie on his board on the sand, and then when he tells me to, I have to jump from lying to standing in less than a second.
Living Gary would have a tremendous problem with this, but living Gary doesn’t exist any longer, and the prospect of sharing an eight foot by two foot space with Trystan keeps me pushing forward.
“How does the board stay on the waves? How does it not just drift through everything like we do?” I ask. “Since it’s also a ghost.”
“I dunno,” Trystan says. “But it’s weird. Objects behave more like they did when they were real, but obviously they don’t exist, so how does gravity pull them down? It’s very strange. Okay, pop up,” he commands, and I jump inelegantly to my feet. “Did you know you can possess objects too?”
“You can possess objects?” I’m aware that I’m just repeating what he’s said to me, but I can’t quite wrap my brain around it.
“Lie down again,” he says, and I don’t think I’ll ever tire of Trystan Retallack ordering me to lie down. “As a ghost, you can possess almost anything. People, animals, stuff. Surely you’ve heard of cursed mirrors and dolls and whatnot?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“It’s kinda the same thing, I suppose.” Trystan looks out over the waves. “There’s a lot of white water today. Good surf for beginners.”
“Can we cycle back to the possession of objects?” I don’t know why I’m hung up on this, but I feel like people keep forgetting I’m just a baby ghost and don’t know the ins and outs of everyday ghost life yet. “You can possess any item? Like, anything? Have you ever done it?”
“Sure, all the time. It’s not as morally squiffy as possessing a person or animal.
So, okay, if you want to feel solid for a while, you can go into an object and just .
. . sit there. Like, if someone leaves their board in the water, I’ll become the board and let myself float for a bit, get tossed around a little.
It’s not like being alive, but you can feel the world once more. ”
Again, this is another one of those things I feel like I should’ve been told at the beginning. Although I’m not sure how much I want to be slapped about on the ocean surface, it’d be nice to have the option if the ceaseless void ever becomes too overwhelming.
“You have to be careful, though. Like, I’ve heard of spirits getting trapped in things, and if you get too worked up inside an object, you could break it.
Smashed mirrors, popped light bulbs, that kind of thing.
One time, Camille possessed a tennis ball in the gym and when the racket hit them, they exploded. ”
Trystan’s laughing, but I’m thinking it’s probably best I don’t possess any objects. I don’t want to accidentally blow someone’s fingers off.
“You ready to surf now?” he says.
“You’ll tell me exactly what to do and when to do it, yeah?”
“Of course.” He pulls on my arm, kicks his flip-flops off, and runs into the shoreline. “Get on,” he says, holding the suspended board out.
I clamber stiffly on top of his ghost surfboard, lying flat like a sea lion atop it, while he pushes me out so far into the water, I can no longer tell if he’s touching the sand still or floating along.
“I feel like an absolute turnip,” I say, though I’m glad the splashes don’t land on my glasses lenses.
“Why? You seem scared, but otherwise you look great.”
“No I don’t.”
He stops the board. “Granted your death clothes are a little . . . sombre, but that’s hardly your fault. It could be worse. You could be stark bollock naked like Magnus—”
“Wait.” I try to sit up, but my hand slips, and I immediately give up, flopping like a walrus back onto it. “Angel said when he was a kid a naked man pulled him out of the water and since then he’d been able to see dead people. That was Magnus. I’m willing to bet ghost money on that.”
“That’s not possible. Magnus died in twenty twelve.”
I can’t prove it. There’s zero proof whatsoever, but I just have a feeling. “He’s a poltergeist, or a mage, or something, I swear. He’s not like all the other ghosts.”
“Do you think he’s the one killing everyone?” Trystan asks.
“No idea. Probably not. I guess I’d need to find a motive before I know for definite.”
“You still surfing with me?” he asks.
“Yeah, of course.”
“Good, because here comes a wave. Pop up!”
I hop to my feet the way we practiced, but I slip forward. Before I faceplant the ghost board, arms close around my waist and Trystan’s pulling me upright.
He’s behind me, holding me up, his body moulding to mine. Or mine to his. His chest against my shoulders, stomach along my back, his thighs following the curve of mine, his . . .
Okay, Gary, be civilised, but Trystan’s dick area is pressing into your coccyx.
I’m not civilised. Internally, I’m freaking out. It’s right there. Oh my god, it’s right there.
I become weightless, letting Trystan take control of everything. It feels wild and free, and the wind is actually touching my face and—
“Gary, do you have your eyes closed again?”
“Yes!” I yell.
“You need to open them!”
I do, and immediately turn around to look at him, but the shift in my weight pitches us both forward, and we fall into the foamy white sea.
I can’t drown, but Trystan holds me tightly, like he does when he carries me down to the beach from the hotel, and I can’t help it, I close my eyes and nestle my head against him.
Please don’t finish your unfinished business, I think.
I hope he hears my thoughts, because I’m too cowardly to say them aloud.
“Ready to try again?” he asks.
“Sure,” I say, instead of “I would do absolutely anything you asked me to, so long as I get to spend another minute in your presence.”
While Trystan’s gentle snores echo from the hut, I decide to test my boundary lines.
Really, I want to speak to Jeanie alone, and I figure the quickest way to get to her would be to walk out into the ocean as far as I can and evanesce into her room.
I’m also curious about triggering a lacklustre orgasm when I vanish.
It’s a solid fifteen minutes of walking straight out into the sea before I feel anything. I can’t see fuck all in this light, and for all I know, I’m spinning in circles, but whatever . . . might as well explore the possibilities of my undeath.
Never have I ever walked on the bottom of the ocean before in the middle of the night, so I suppose I can cross that off my bucket list.
My fingers start tingling, then my toes, and I think it’s the cold until I remember I’m three hundred metres below surface level and I’m not breathing or using my eyeballs and the tingling is probably because I’ve hit the point where my boundary lies.
And now my whole body is tingling, and it feels like .
. . it feels like I need to be rubbed a little harder.
Oh my god, that’s frustrating. I want more, faster, give it to me . . .
Like a fairground goldfish in a clear plastic bag, I’m dumped onto Jeanie’s rug. There’s no longer a bed in the room, nor a chandelier, and there are no lights on.
In that moment, it dawns on me that Jeanie may still be with Angel as she was the night of my death, but as I get to my feet . . .