Box Set - Chapter Three

I can feel the point in the distance; like a lighthouse reaching out of the mist.

I see the world in a different way. When I closed my eyes when I was alive, I remember the soothing darkness. The simple closing myself off from the world that would soothe a headache, help me focus or coax forward the quiet of sleep.

I remember the echoes that light would leave. Spots of colour that I could never pinpoint. Flashes of fractured light that would pulse and then fade. Now though, the world appears as a single continuous immeasurable feeling, neither sight nor touch, but something tantalising and in between.

I focus on the feeling and the ground beneath me feels like it moves. The more I feel it, the faster I travel forward. The world widens before me, away from the road I stand beside, away from London, the UK, Europe and the earth.

The Sun, millions and millions of miles away, is a brighter beacon than I have ever seen, and still my mind expands, rushing and rushing towards the twinkling desolation of infinite stars… systems… galaxies…

I can feel the turn of the earth…

I’m nauseous and unsteady all at once. There it is again. The edge of this plain, everywhere and nowhere. The unknown is all around me. They are sensations that I am not quite ready to experience and with that, my eyes snap open.

I can feel Penny’s home calling to me. Maybe if I concentrate, and let the lighthouse see me, I will be there in an instant, like Benjamin said. It is fear keeping me rooted to the spot.

Slowly, I turn away from the road and decide to walk.

I have spent my whole life living in the pages of science fiction and the subject which saw sense in the world, knowing how fast the planet speeds around the sun, and the solar system through the galaxy. I have loved the world of superheroes, of the Iron Captain, The Bullet, Diviner, Titan, and all the others I love.

I love them because they are mighty, brave and powerful, but have the repeated experience of the real world humbling their alter egos. The mild-mannered men and women who found life hard despite their obvious superiority over everyone else.

Now, I feel like I have a power, but it is too much, and I ache for the return to my human body.

I want to see my parents too and I’m torn between who I should visit first. Seeing my parents upset will only upset me, but there is no way to avoid it. But they might not know about the accident yet.

I feel the change in my stance as I realise that I can see them happy, just for a little while.

I break into a run, past the standstill traffic. None of them know what’s happened. I wonder who the driver of the van was. There were three body bags. Me, Penny and the driver. And there was nowhere to place fault. A van had blown its tyre at high speed. It swerved, we collided, we died. There was only one survivor from the crash and it was the screaming woman. I can’t imagine being her. The lucky one.

Is that ever lucky? Surely she’d feel the imprints left by the dead until the end of her days. Not to believe in the presence of people hanging over them forever, but a memory every now and again. When she least expected it, over breakfast, or stressed at work, she’d close her eyes and see the van, spinning out of control, the road a blur before her. I know I’d feel a cold fist around my heart every time I thought of it.

My house isn’t far away. As I enter the high street, slowing to a jog as I run out of breath, I see the afternoon shoppers, ducking in and out, umbrellas blustering above them.

I think of Benjamin, looking as solid as any living person before me and I wonder – how would I ever know anyone is dead? I can walk down the street and see everyone and any person I pick could be a spirit, but they could easily be alive. I could reach out to touch them and bring a moment of discomfort.

I’m reminded of parties at school. House parties I was invited to by association, before I even met Penny that day by the smoking hut. I would feel lonely in a roomful of people. Penny was the one person who saw me when she looked at me. She wasn’t my friend and then my girlfriend because I helped her with schoolwork, or because she could hide behind my good behaviour to gain favour for themselves. She was my person.
                I realise that I’m starting to think of her in the past tense. I don’t want to. I feel alive. I still have sensation in my fingers and toes. I can pinch myself and I don’t wake in my bed. I have thoughts and feelings and dreams and desires. If that isn’t still alive, then I don’t know what is.

My house is close to town so it doesn’t take me long to get home. I’ve walked this street so many times. With its neatly arranged, identical semis with the trees arranged either side.

I walk down the middle of the road. I don’t see a point walking on the pavement. I can’t die again.

My restraint breaks and I start to a run again, the parked cars, trees and houses whipping past like paintings smudged by a clumsy hand. I live at the other end of the street.

Number forty-seven looms up at me like a castle. Exactly the same as every other house on the street, with a matching green door and gable and a perfectly kept hanging basket over the porch. I feel afraid to walk in. And how do I get it? I didn’t exactly get to keep my keys when I passed over to the other side.

I cross the driveway, tentative as though someone will jump out at me any second and catch me being naughty.

I place my hand up against the door. I know I can even ring the doorbell, but I know Dad will moan about the annoying kids down the road when it’s just his son trying to make contact. The green paint is smooth, solid. I’ve seen so many films about ghosts. There’s the most amazing graphic novel called Spirit, which I must have read a thousand times. I know the realities of ghosts now. There are no demons to fight, no other realms and universes to cross to.

I try to avoid thinking about the edge.

But in Spirit, like almost every other story about ghosts I’ve ever read, ghosts can walk through walls. I close my eyes and concentrate. I notice the feeling of detachment from the living plain. But instead of fear, I try to embrace the feeling.

I know the wood of the door is a perplexing concoction of atoms, with an electrical signal holding it all together.

As I touch it, I feel the signal. The vibration, like a continuous static shock, courses through the wood, through my fingers. The atoms are uncountable, tiny, but I can see them. It’s like the surface of a planet built like a honeycomb shell.

I choose a gap, one of many trillion and I push, trying to make it wider. The atoms don’t move, so the forces compress me as I push forward with my hand. I don’t want to stop, my hand is inside the door, a part of the door, so I step forward, pressing myself between atoms, becoming a signal myself until the sensation of static leaves me. I am whole again.

I open my eyes and I’m in my hallway; the feeling of soft carpet beneath my trainers.

 ‘Make me a cuppa, Jude,’ calls my mum down the hallway.

             Dad strolls into the hall. In his slippers and his dressing gown. He’s having a day off. Skiving, just like I was when I suggested taking the Spitfire out for a spin. We were supposed to be in class. Me in Physics, Penny in Lit.

But the freedom of the open road had been too tempting to ignore. Neither of us had skipped school or college before. That day, I’d woken up with the idea in my head. The Spitfire was ready. A year of tinkering in my best friend Tom’s garage had paid off. She had been gleaming, green and showroom clean.

Dad’s Triumph Spitfire is a cup of tea and slippers in front of the sports channels. His love is his wife. I see him turn to the kitchen and then Mum emerge from the living room. Smiling with a glint of mischief in the eyes we share. She attacks from behind tickling him on the sides in the place she’d shown me he was vulnerable when I was little. We’d spent good long whiles pinning my dad to the floor in fits of teary laughter.

Then they turn and kiss. I’m gripped by a moment of natural repulsion to see my parents display passion. But I force myself to open my eyes and see them happy.

‘Where did that come from?’ Dad asks.

‘It’s just nice to have you home.’ And she hugs him.

 I recall weeks of arguments all including the same headline. You’re working too much Jude. Only to be met with. I have to Faye, living’s expensive…Don’t you think I know that?…The list goes on in my head. Like a film I’ve watched too many times I can quote every line.

‘Now,’ she says. ‘Water, teabag, splash of milk, four sugars.’

‘Careful, that might all go to your hips,’ my Dad replies. Darting out of the way of the flying hand aimed at his side.

‘Old bastard,’ she taunts.

‘Sexy cow,’ he says, aiming his own hand at her backside.

He clips her as she walks back into the living room, smiling a secret smile never seen by anyone else.

I feel uncomfortable and happy at the same time. Sharing a moment never shared.

I walk into the living room, and sit. I will spend as much time as I can with them. Sitting in the comfy armchair I’d always claimed as my own. My homework chair, across from Mum and Dad on the sofa.

               I am home, and it is enough to make me feel alive.

           I don’t know how long I have until the police call to inform my parents I’ve died. I don’t want to be around to watch. The reality of seeing my parents upset and not being able to do a thing to comfort them and tell them that their son has lived on in some way, would be too much to bear.

So I sit with them. Watch them watch films they’ve seen a thousand times. They watch the film they saw on their first date nearly twenty years ago. It just appears on TV and their day is brightened. They sit and chat, my mum’s blonde hair falling over my dad’s dressing gowned lap. It is a happy moment and I understand what Benjamin was talking about. I know now that I would never mind a single spirit sharing any one of my happy moments.

In this new place, where simple existence and standing up straight can be scary, it’s important to stop and remember what it was like to be human.

Because it’s tempting to visit all my favourite memories, to see me at my happiest. But that’s the easy way out. I have a new world to explore, with people I’ve loved and lost. My grandparents are here somewhere. Out in the world, hand in hand. And Penny is too, and I know she’s the same as me. If I would go and see my parents first of all, then that’s where I’ll find her.

I stand up just as the phone starts ringing. The landline in the hall we never use anymore. Mum stands and walks past me, straightening her top. I know who’s on the other end of the phone.

I follow her and watch her pick it up. I can’t listen, I can’t, I can’t.

‘Hello,’ she says, still laughing at a joke Dad just told.

The voice on the other end is indistinct, but his tone, official and calm, tells me enough.

I watch her face fall. I have to comfort her, I have to. I raise my hand, three inches from her shoulder. But I know the discomfort I will give her.

‘Jude!’ she almost screams.

I panic. I retract my hand as she runs back to the living room. I run in the opposite direction. I plough headlong towards the door and pass through it without even meaning to.

            I hear her before I leave; the cry of unexplainable sadness that escapes her. It stays with me. I know it will always stay with me. 

            The rain that has been falling steadily all afternoon has retreated to a steady mist of drizzle that sprays my cheeks.

How can I feel? The rain clearly falls on me, but I leave no footprints on the wet ground. There’s no water collecting at my feet. I clearly exist in some form, but I defy every law of physics I take for granted.
I scream , infuriated to have upset my parents. I am powerless. What is the point of living on? Is this punishment? Have I done something to deserve this?
The ground beneath me caves in. Splintering out from the point beneath my feet as though a single stone has been holding the world together. Screaming still, I fall through utter blackness, spinning past flashes of light.
Memories, good and bad, exciting and pointless reach out to grab me, to settle me somewhere stable, but I slip through their fingers like a fish caught out of the water.
I try to concentrate on my memory from before. But all I can hear my heart beat thumping in my ears, faster and faster by the second, drowning out any hope of remembering my mother’s. Her cry follows me down, feeding the Edge. But this isn’t the Edge. The chaos is receding, this is something more…
‘Take me back!’ I yell into the darkness. ‘Back!’
I feel the darkness closing in, as my panic  intensifies.
I make no sense, I make no sense, I make no sense.
It closes in with tangible shadows, darker even than the blackness that surrounds me. The flashes are blocked one by one.
I try to close my eyes to ignore the darkness. Creating a place that is mine, the only place I have left. But my eyelids refuse to close, tempted by the shadows. I wonder what it would be like to fall forever… says a voice in my head.
Frightened by the very prospect I tense myself with all my might and my eyes snaps shut.
The pavement feels wet, gritty and glorious beneath my hands. I get up, shaking. I have to control my emotions. As difficult as it is, every moment of panic or despair feeds whatever lies in the gaping maw which taunts me in the Edge and beyond.
I don’t want to believe in that either but I have no choice. All that lies there is emptiness. Because I feel that’s what lies in the darkness. It scares me that part of my mind, buried in my unconscious or deeper, wants to take me down there.
The fear of that is all the fuel I need to carry on.

Penny’s house isn’t too far from mine, so I set off at a jog to keep myself warm. I know desperation can make people do a lot of things which are out of character. I did an out of character thing this morning and ended up dead.
But I have to avoid the Edge at all costs. It brings the kind of danger I’m not accustomed to and I don’t want to know it any better. If I was to guess, trying to keep as much science as I possibly can to calm my questioning mind, I would say that though I’ve left my body, my mind, or consciousness has remained intact. A mind isn’t a tangible thing hence my invisibility.
I am clearly dead, considering I’ve seen my bloodied body, but it appears as though there is life after death. My continued interaction with the physical world is still a mystery to me. As a mind though, I am clearly prone to slipping into other areas.
I’m still scared to try and transport myself the way Benjamin said I could. The sensation feels so Edge-like, that I’d much rather walk, and experience the pleasure of still being able to.
I reach her house in a few more minutes. I wish I could have an hour in a Library. I could research all the accounts of ghosts, apparitions, poltergeists, spiritual visits and everything in between.
With a start, I realise that I can. I can visit any library in the world after hours and read to my heart’s content. I can do a little bit of haunting.
I want to know how I have come to be this way, but no more than my need to find Penny again.
I arrive at the front of her house. Her red front door is like an open mouth ready to accept me. I imagine the raven hair waiting  for me on the other side. All the things I love about her: the way she wears the same shoes every day despite their falling apart, the towering stack of books she keeps by her bedside in case she fancies something different.
Unable to contain my excitement, I dart towards the door and pass through.

I’ve stood in Penny’s house a thousand times. It opens straight into her living room and it’s deserted. I take in the bookcase, well stocked by her librarian father. The shelf devoted entirely to her chef mother, with cookbooks big, small, old and new. The sofas are well worn and comfortable, the TV small and unimposing. We’ve cuddled, a million times in front of the DVD player tucked underneath it, or just sat with her parents and chatted. I was the son they never had, just like Penny was a daughter to my parents.

I walk through the room, still excited, ignoring my early setback. A small knot of worry tightens in my chest. I haven’t seen her yet, and somewhere in the house, her parents will be in distress. And it’s my fault.

I try to push the thoughts from my head. The accident was no one’s fault, but it feels like I’m the one to blame. She was in my car, skipping school was my idea.

I walk into the kitchen and there’s no one. The tiny utility room looking over the empty garden, the old swingset moving in the breeze, like there’s a ghost even I can’t see swinging back and forth, without a care in the world.

I turn and start up the stairs in the living room; instantly I hear voices. They’re in her room.

I run up the stairs. I almost don’t notice the no sound my otherwise heavy steps don’t make. Her door is right at the top of the stairs, and it’s slightly ajar. I can’t open it, they’ll see and instantly be scared, and I can’t reach out to try and walk through it, I don’t trust myself not to move it physically.

But I can see through the gap. Penny’s mum, Irene, sitting on her purple bedsheets, her dad Frank stands by Penny’s own modest little library. All arranged but still haphazard, the occasional trinket or nick nack wedged in like bookends.

But I can’t see Penny. Then again, I can’t see half the room, she could be just standing behind the door. We could be separated by a single plank of wood.

‘I just can’t believe it, Frank.’ Irene’s face is streaked by tears. ‘I only spoke to her a few hours ago, and now I’ll never see her eyes again. She had the prettiest eyes.’

Tears start falling again and Frank instantly crosses over to her.

‘I know, Irene.’ He’s crying too, and now so am I. I can’t wait any longer. I know they can’t hear me.

‘Penny!’ I whisper, urgently.

            I wait, listening to the sound of my own breathing, growing heavy with anticipation. Penny’s parents have gone silent for a second, and I worry for a second that they’ve heard me.

            I watch them because they’re the only thing I can see through the gap in the door. They hold each other, Irene’s shoulders shake. I watch Frank’s hands going up and down with them, trying to fight back the tears himself,  trying to be strong for his wife.

            ‘Penny?’ I say again. Worry filling my thoughts as I greet the silence.

            She has to be here. She would go visit her parents.

            I was so sure she’d be here.

            Unless she doesn’t want to see me.

            Starting to feel sick, I take a deep breath and dive through the wall, feeling the compression and unclenching as I emerge on the other side.

            The room is empty. A pile of clothes on the chair. A desk, overrun with paper and notebooks.

            I lose my breath and stumble backwards. I’ve felt the rug pulled from beneath my feet. I shouldn’t have been sure. I should have given myself other options to calm myself.

            I’m back through the wall in seconds. Down the stairs, through the front door and into the street.

            Where is she?

            The world spins. The impossibly big world with every person who’s alive and every person who’s ever died. The biggest haystack I could have ever considered.

            I collapse to my knees. The world fades to blackness. I hit the ground, my knees squelching into wetness. My eyes don’t focus.
            I don’t know where I am.