Nobody True (22 page)

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 wandered, 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 animals 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.*) 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.

*Time itself seemed not to be having any proper continuum for me. One moment it might be broad daylight, next the deepest—and even lonelier for me—night, my mysterious “blank-outs” filling the hours between. I had the idea of seeking out a medium in the morning, but when I arrived seemingly uncoerced at the house where the séance had begun, guided by nothing more than a self-wish or the medium’s dragnet for lost souls, the sun had given over to a half-moon in a cloudy sky.

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.