I didn’t return to the house that afternoon. I didn’t want to look at Andrea. I just couldn’t. As much as I hungered to be with Prim, I wanted to be as far away from my unfaithful wife as possible. Love should be an honest thing, but how often is it? I wanted to scream with rage, howl in despair, but what would be the point? No one would hear, no one would care.
I drifted away from my home.
Ask yourself how you’d feel if you became invisible. What fun, right? The places you could go, the people you could spy on. And imagine you weren’t even solid anymore, that nothing could touch or harm you. A lot more fun, yeah?
Well, you’d be wrong. Doesn’t work that way, you see. At least, not if you’re traumatized like I was. In my own view, I was the walking dead on a journey of discovery and disillusionment, the main discoveries so far being that in my lifetime I’d been betrayed by my mother (How could she have hidden my father’s letters from me? How could she rip up the photograph of her only son with such loathing in her eyes, just because I’d had the audacity to die on her and, to make it worse, in the most public of ways?); by my own father who, despite those unread letters, had run out on me when I was only a child; betrayed by my best friend and business partner, and by the woman I’d loved all these years and who had borne my daughter. People I’d loved and respected during my time on earth (except for my father, for whom I had no feelings whatsoever) had deceived me.
With that heavy load dragging on me, I made my lonely way back to the city.
I visited places: the cinema, theatre, bars and hotels, family homes, the zoo (where tigers growled as I went by and monkeys yattered; most animals ignored me as I passed their cages and pens, only a few showing an awareness of me, watching suspiciously as though my presence disturbed them). I became an observer of life, of people, singling out particular individuals who looked interesting, sharing their day or night’s routine with them.
I sat at the side of theatre stages and watched great actors perform, even stood among the back chorus line of one musical production and sang along with them; I strolled through parks and took bus rides; I watched children in playgrounds and classrooms, and thought of Primrose, yearning for her, desperately wanting to see her again, to hold her, kiss her chubby little cheek, to whisper how much I loved and missed her . . . But I resisted the urge to return home, still consumed with anger and dismay because of Andrea’s adultery and Oliver’s treachery, telling myself that going back would only worsen my pain. For the best part of one day I travelled on the underground’s continuous Circle Line, studying the commuters, listening to their conversations, envying them their physicality, their humanness. Occasionally, I’d meld into one or other unsuspecting passenger, just to get a feel of life again, glimpsing his or her thoughts, sensing their emotions. And it was all rather uncomfortable and dull, through no fault of theirs though; the dullness, the disinterest, came from within myself. Even one young guy’s lurid reverie of the sexual activity he and his girlfriend had enjoyed the previous night and his daydream of its continuance this coming evening failed to spark anything in me. It was like watching a blue movie with better production values, yet I felt neither desire, nor envy – the images didn’t even cause me an erection (although it seemed to work for him okay, but I wasn’t part of that). Perhaps if I’d possessed pigment the embarrassment might have coloured me red, but as it was, I merely slipped out of him, bored with his private imagining. My guess is that when you no longer have the power to procreate physically, then your psyche dismisses the arousal instinct, renders such urges redundant. Certain paraplegics might dispute the point, but then they’re still flesh and blood; when you are nothing, you become detached – literally; you don’t lose emotions such as love and hatred (witness my resentment), and you certainly can yearn, but sex isn’t in the game anymore. Believe me, I’ve tested myself (you don’t forget the memory of desire).
You may wonder if any individual I invaded felt my presence and I’d have to answer no, not really, save for a slight shiver each one gave. The merest frisson of interrupted energy, the slightest tautness of neck muscles. I had no control over these people, you understand, I wasn’t a bodysnatcher, I couldn’t make them obey my will in any sense; nor did they pick up on my thoughts and emotions – it was strictly a oneway street.
Now comes the part that I’m truly embarrassed over and it’s about the self-testing I mentioned a moment ago; but, if this is to be an honest account, it has to be told. You see, after the Circle Line disappointment, I was keen to discover the limits my condition had imposed on me. I mean what would any red-blooded male do if he suddenly had the power of invisibility? I still had the memory of desire, I still appreciated beauty, especially when it was to do with the female form, and I still had low inclinations – or I suppose you might be kind and call them human failings.
I followed a beautiful young blonde girl home. And I watched her undress, then take a bath. She was not a natural blonde, I discovered, but even without make-up and stylish clothes, she was gorgeous. I appreciated her great looks well enough, but I was not aroused: it was only the admiration of a dispassionate observer. I suppose I viewed her in the way an octogenarian gentleman might: evaluation without lust. It was how I learned another aspect of my condition, which is why, shaming though the voyeurism was, it had to be mentioned here. A less disheartening example is that although the sight of good food remained pleasant to me, it no longer whetted my appetite, because I didn’t feel hungry anymore. And while I trudged the streets and parks, gliding when I wanted to, taking long hops when it pleased me, I suffered no aches or pains or tiredness; rather, my soul became weary and I soon came to understand that this was because of the mental anguish with which I’d been burdened and not the miles I’d travelled. So although I took pleasure from the blonde’s nakedness, I was not exhilarated by it, was not turned on in the least. The curves and dips of her flesh were delightful, the sheer graceful length of her thighs delectable, yet in me it led to nothing more than appreciation. So it seems the Pope may have been right when he pronounced several years ago that there is no sex in Heaven.
I had quite a few periods of vacuity, by the way, occasions when I found myself not where I expected to be. If I’d been my mortal self, I would have assumed these were times when I just blanked out, or fell asleep, but if now I never became physically weary, why should that occur? Everybody dreams, we’re told, even if we remember nothing upon waking, but we do not dream throughout our slumber. Dreams take up only a small percentage of our unconscious state with longer periods of utter closure in between. Where does our mind go? Our bodies certainly don’t shut down entirely – how could our lungs breathe, our hearts beat? But we appear to sink into oblivion and I could only wonder if that was still happening to me even without a functioning body. The mystery intrigued me; but again, there were no answers.
It was mainly because of these blackouts that I began to lose more track of time – as well as any interest in time itself – but I believe several days went by. I walked alone with no purpose, only the occasional cat or dog having some sense of my presence, humans completely unaware of my existence.
But one day an idea occurred to me.
25
Possibly it was because I had that feeling of slowly withdrawing from the world I’d known, observing it more and more objectively rather than subjectively, almost witnessing events, situations, distractedly, very gradually becoming detached from the reality of living, that I became anxious about making some kind of contact with Primrose. I just wanted to reassure her, to let her understand how much I loved and missed her, that there was no pain in this dimension, only emotional suffering (I think it was my unbearable anger that fed the suffering; and maybe, I wondered, it was also the reason I was still tied to this earth). Perhaps most important of all was that I had to say goodbye to her, unlike my own father, who had left without even telling me he was going when I was but a child myself.
What occurred to me is this: if certain animal
s could sense my presence, then why not spiritualists, mediums, clairvoyants, psychics, whatever they preferred to label themselves? They claimed to be the few people who were able to contact the dead and relate their words and messages to the living. It was worth a try.
But how to find one?
I couldn’t exactly thumb through Yellow Pages. So I just kind of wandered around a while, searching.
Don’t ask me how it worked, because I don’t know. In desperation, I just thought of what I was looking for and within a short time I found myself outside a small terraced house in an unfamiliar part of town. (Strangely, it was night-time; I’d lost most of the day somewhere, another one of my ‘blackout’ periods I assumed.10) My location could have been Camden. Could have been Peckham – it was of no importance. I just arrived at the place (or was drawn to it) and somehow knew the person I sought was inside. On reflection, I think either I tuned into the medium, or she tuned into me. I floated through the brick wall to find myself in a largish, dimly lit parlour, where seven people – five women, two men – were seated around a circular table covered by a burgundy-coloured velvet (or something similar) cloth, all their hands splayed on the tabletop, the tips of their fingers connecting them all to one another. It was apparent that the séance had already begun.
The curtains, I noticed, were drawn tight and only a low lamp illuminated the room. I quickly surveyed the faces there, looking for the medium, and settled on a plump woman with a heavy, heaving bosom and closed eyes, dressed entirely in black and wearing big dangly earrings, but it was another person on the opposite side of the table who spoke up. She was a grey-haired sparrow of a thing, far different from the archetypal notion of a clairvoyant, the friendly, favourite aunt, Doris Stokes kind. Her face was skinny, gaunt even, with high jutting cheekbones and deeply sunken cheeks, her neck as scrawny as a plucked chicken’s. The wrists that projected from the tight-fitting sleeves of a faded paisley dress were spindly, wrist bones prominent, and her fingers trembled slightly on the deep-red tablecloth. Dark-blue veins were clearly embossed beneath the limpid skin of her wrists and hands. She wore no makeup and her eyebrows, below an unfurrowed forehead and above a large narrow nose, were too heavy for such an otherwise fragile face. Her age in this dim light was undeterminable, anywhere between fifty and seventy, probably towards the latter end if I had to guess, and her voice was as thin as her features, high-pitched and reedy. Her heavy-lidded eyes were closed, her face pointed slightly upward as though the person she addressed was in the corner of the ceiling.
‘Andrew? Can you hear me, Andrew? I can feel you’re near. Catherine is waiting for a message, Andrew. Do you have a message for her?’
The plump woman who, mistakenly, had been my prime candidate for medium, was now watching the speaker across the table intently, unlike the others, a motley band of varying ages and attire, who either stared at their own hands or kept their eyes closed and heads bowed.
The frail clairvoyant spoke again. ‘Andrew, we’re here for you and wish you nothing but peace and love. Do you want to speak through me?’
Only silence followed and one or two of the sitters shifted in their chairs, either out of embarrassment or discomfort.
Suddenly, the medium’s eyes opened – they were blue, almost faded to grey – and for a moment I thought she was looking directly at me. But before I could speak, she invoked the name again.
‘Andrew?’
Now I looked over my shoulder, thinking Andrew’s spirit might be standing behind me. There was nothing there. But I thought something might have moved somewhere in the shadows.
‘It is you, Andrew, I can hear you telling me your name,’ came the trembling voice of the thin woman.
At the table, other eyes opened and heads turned in my direction. I returned my gaze to the shadows behind me again.
There was definite movement, something looming larger, a shadow disassociating itself from other shadows. Although impossible, I swear I felt the hairs on the back of my neck bristle. Like a slowly developing photoprint, a face began to appear, followed by the shoulders.
It was hard to focus on it at first, because the shape was nebulous, the features hazy. But with more encouragement from the medium, it began to resolve itself. Soon I was able to tell that the face belonged to an elderly man, his hair white, but his skin relatively unlined, as if the troubles of this world had not followed him into the next.
‘So many,’ I heard the medium say. ‘There are so many present today, all with messages for their loved ones.’
Sighs, gasps, even some moans came from the group around the table. I could feel a tension and it felt like a precursor to hysteria. I was pretty near the edge myself.
I half-thought that when the medium had remarked that there were so many present today she was referring to the sitters, but when I looked past the emerging apparition, I noticed that there were others taking form behind it. The leader was the clearest, even if on occasions the image wavered and threatened to disappear, along with his more timid companions, who continued to linger behind him.
‘So many,’ the medium said again, with something like gratitude in her shaky voice. I turned to her once more and she was smiling, mouth open, thin lips pulled back to reveal yellow teeth. The smile failed to warm her expression; in fact, the smile was almost a rictus. ‘Come forward,’ she intoned, ‘we’re waiting for your communication.’
By now, I’d backed away a little, not wanting to get between the medium and her ethereal guests. But these looming ghosts had frozen in their manifestation. I saw faces, pale, wide-eyed faces, faces that most definitely were from a realm other than this, because there was nothing solid about them, nothing of substance, only vaporous incarnations. Bizarrely, they looked frightened of me.
They reversed their development, began to be absorbed by the shadows, consumed by them, their gaze never leaving me. I opened my mouth to say something, but I couldn’t think what. Call them back? Tell them I was one of them? In that instant, I knew the truth of it: I wasn’t one of them, not a ghost, not as I should be. Nevertheless, I held out a beseeching hand; wherever they were going, I wanted to go with them. But disbelief was evident on their waning faces, joining the fear already there, making me feel an abomination.
My God. It suddenly struck me that I was haunting ghosts.
‘Please don’t leave us.’ It was the desperate reedy voice of the medium. ‘Your loved ones are waiting to hear from you. Andrew, tell me what’s wrong so that I can reassure you. We are all as one in this room and wish you no harm.’
Distracted, I turned to her, and when I looked back at the apparitions, they were all but gone, just dispersing mists. Except for one.
I wasn’t sure if it had stood its ground, or if it was a new spirit, freshly arrived at the séance and had not yet become aware of my presence. But that couldn’t be, because he was looking directly at me.
There was something familiar about him and I suddenly realized why: he was the spook I’d noticed on the small rise at my funeral. He had been familiar then, but still I could not remember how I knew him. If alive, he would have been just past middle age, somewhere in his middle or late forties, because there was knowledge in his eyes, and experience in his features. His hair was full but almost colourless, and he wore a suit, a little crumpled, but not shabby; he also had on a white shirt with a dark tie (his suit and tie were too vague to suggest any other colour than grey). I knew this man. I knew this man.
A warmth denied to me since my demise emanated from him. I lost my own trepidation, if not my astonishment, as I watched the spectre become clearer, grey flushing to weak colours, the image itself more clearly rendered. I saw that his tie was red, his suit brown.
He smiled – at me – and the warmth engulfed me. His mouth opened to speak.
But the voice came from behind me.
‘Jimmy.’
It wasn’t his voice, for it was female, high-pitched and querulous. I looked back at the medium once again as she spoke
my name three times.
‘Jimmy . . . Jimmy . . . Jimmy . . .’
I hadn’t been called that since I was a child.
‘You must listen to me.’
Too surprised to know where to look now, my eyes went from sitters to ghost, ghost to sitters. The medium’s mouth moved again and I noticed her lips were wet with spit.
‘You must go back, Jimmy,’ she said and only then did it dawn on me that the apparition was talking to me through the bird-like woman, whose hands remained flat on the velvet cloth, her end-fingers still in contact with other hands around the table. It was her voice, yet it wasn’t quite the same as before when she had called to the spirit named Andrew. For some reason breath vapour was emerging from her mouth with the words, as if the temperature in the room had suddenly sunk dramatically, something I couldn’t actually feel myself.
The other sitters were looking at each other with perplexed expressions.
‘Who’s Jimmy?’ I heard one of them ask. There was a general shaking of heads, a few negative murmurs.
‘I’m Jim – he means me,’ I said, perhaps hoping that the medium, with her sensing powers, might hear me.
It was plain that she didn’t, for her head rolled round her shoulders, the pupils of her pale-blue eyes disappeared up into her head; she froze, her back arched, her scrawny neck stretched to its limit. For a moment, I thought she might topple, but her hands remained firmly on the tabletop.
‘She can’t hear you, Jimmy.’ The words came from the same source, the medium herself, but I knew they were from the ghostly man behind me. Turning directly to him, I saw his eyes were still on me, the woman a mere conductor for his message. Shapes cowered at his back, the other ghosts wavering in image and, apparently, wavering with fear also; I could feel it emanating from them. I should have been the one to be afraid and I couldn’t help but shake my head at the anomaly, even though I wasn’t quite without fear myself.