Every Touch (5 page)

   Oliver was sitting to the left of the door when he got there, back leaning against the glass of the window, watching the world pass by on the street.  Denny tapped on the glass, or rather the barrier beyond the glass, to get his attention.  He sat down cross legged on the floor on the other side of the window from his new friend.

   Oliver turned to see him and grinned, pushing his sunglasses up onto the top of his head.

  “Hey, man.”

   “Sorry,” Denny said, “I fell asleep.”

   “Oh yeah, I did a lot of sleeping when I first woke up.  Like a newborn baby, I guess.  Your soul is adjusting.  You’ll need less of it after a while.”  He chuckled.  “At least you have a bed.  The first few times, I used that bench down the street.  Not too uncomfortable, but believe me, you never want to know what it’s like to wake up with your head in someone’s butt.”

   “So where do you sleep now?” Denny said, baulking at the image that brought up. 

   “The park mostly.  It’s just in my zone.  Well, some of it.  The grass isn’t too bad to lie on and it’s nice waking up to the birds singing, even when it’s summer and they’re getting you up at four in the morning.  Kind of like camping without a tent.”

   “Don’t you get cold in the winter?”

   “Not if I keep metaphysical.”

   “Metaphysical?”

   “Yeah, you...”  He stopped, looking at Denny.  “Okay, maybe we should begin at the beginning, or you’re going to get all this stuff all swirling around in your head all mixed up.  You have questions.  Fire away.”

   He sat up straight, giving Denny his full attention.  He was reminded of Cassie, a girl he dated when he was twenty-six who was a primary school teacher and had developed a habit of listening to him intently when he spoke, staring straight into his eyes as she would with her pupils.  It could be a little disconcerting, especially during foreplay.

   His brain was still feeling a foggy from the sleep and he struggled to remember what he had wanted to ask, wishing he could have written it down. 

   “Okay,” he said, “first, what day is it?”

   Oliver laughed.  “
That’s
your first question?” 

   Denny shrugged. 

   “It’s Thursday.”

   He nodded.  “Will I need to shower?  And how can I wash my clothes?”

   “No and you won’t have to.”

   “What, never?” 

   Denny raised an arm and sniffed.  He didn’t seem to smell bad and he’d been wearing the same clothes for a day and a half, but still, he found it hard to believe that could last indefinitely.

   “From what I can gather, this,” Oliver waved his hands up and down at himself, “this is like a memory of our bodies, like it’s etched into our subconscious mind what we should look like, so we do.  But all the usual stuff isn’t really going on inside.  So we breathe because we’re used to it, but we don’t have to, there are no lungs working and we don’t need the oxygen.  We don’t need to eat, which is handy because we can’t anyway.  We sweat, but it’s not real so we don’t get rank.  And when we, shall we say, indulge in some self gratification...  Well, you get the picture.”

   Denny did.  He had wondered about that.  He was relieved to hear he still could and that he hadn’t lost
all
of life’s little pleasures. 

   “Will I be here forever?” 

   It was the question he’d been most afraid to ask, not really sure what he wanted the answer to be.

   Oliver suddenly looked uncomfortable.  “Short answer, no.  Long answer... are you sure you want to hear this?”

   Now Denny was nervous.  “No.  But tell me anyway.”

   “Okay.  I’ve spoken to quite a few spooks since I left the land of the living, the ones who have zones around mine, and this is what I’ve been able to learn.  We have a certain amount of time here, how long is different for everyone.  Can be anything up to around five years.  But when our time is up, we start to... fade.”  He winced as he said it.

   “Fade?”

   “Yeah.  I saw it happen to this woman, Rachel, whose zone just butted up against mine.  She’d been there for over four years and we used to chat a lot.  She liked to hear the gossip.”  He smiled.  “Or maybe I liked telling her it.  Anyway, one day she showed me her hand.  It was, like, flickering in and out. Really weird.  She said it didn’t hurt, but it was creepy.  It got worse and worse until it was happening to her whole body and then, one day, about two weeks later, she just disappeared altogether.  Faded away right in front of me.”  He shuddered.

   Denny was horrified.  “What happened to her?”

   Oliver shrugged.  “Don’t know.  No-one I’ve spoken to does.  Maybe they’re still here, but just as, you know, pure energy floating around or something.  Maybe they move on to wherever they’re supposed to go next.  I just know it happens to all of us, eventually.  Otherwise the place would be wall to wall spooks.”

   Denny thought about it.  On the one hand, he wasn’t going to be stuck here forever.  On the other, he had no idea what was coming next.  Kind of like life really.  At least he didn’t have to worry about that for a while.  Maybe after five years of hanging around this one building, he’d be dying to move on, so to speak.

   “Okay,” he said, “thanks for being honest with me.  No sense in worrying about it now.”

   “Now that,” Oliver said with a grin, “is a very healthy attitude to have.  Just ignore the inevitable.  It’s what we did in life, right?”

   He was right.  It’s what Denny had done. 

   “The buzzer,” he said, changing the subject, “how did you press it?  I can’t touch anything.”

   “Really?  ‘Cause you look very much like you’re touching the floor.”

   Denny looked down.  He put his hands flat onto the floor, feeling the cold tiles beneath his palms.  It hadn’t actually occurred to him before. 

   “Oh yeah.”

   Oliver snorted at his surprise.  “And you went upstairs, so you were touching the steps.  And where did you sleep?”

   Denny’s eyes widened.  “On my bed.”  He frowned.  “But yesterday, I fell through the sofa.  At least, I sat on it
then
fell through it.”

   “What happened just before you fell through it?”

   He thought, trying to remember.  “I was watching my sister and brother-in-law pack up my kitchen, then I looked at the sofa and wondered how I could be sitting on it when I had just walked through a door, then I was on my ass on the floor.”

   Oliver laughed.  “I would have liked to have seen the look on your face.”

   “Hmpf.” Denny smiled.

   “Thing is, just like with the breathing and everything, touching stuff is now a choice for us, even if we’re not thinking about it.  You walked up the stairs without falling through them and slept on your bed because you didn’t expect to not be able to.  Other stuff can be more tricky, don’t ask me why, it just is.  I’m still having trouble wrapping my own head around the ins and outs of it.”

   “So, I can touch things if I want to, but I can also choose not to?”  Denny looked around for something on which to try out this new knowledge.

   “Yep.  Pretty cool right?  We can be substantial...”  He reached out and grabbed hold of the rail which ran up the steps to the door.  “...or incorporeal.”  He passed his hand straight through the rail.  “But I prefer ‘metaphysical’.  It sounds cooler, like a superpower.”  He grinned.

   There was a large, fake potted yucca near the door and Denny shuffled himself over to sit in front of it. 

   “So, how do I do this then?”

   “You have to believe you are solid.  Then you will be.”

   “Okay.  Believe I’m solid.”  He stared at the plant, focusing all his attention on it.  “I am solid.  I can touch this plant.  I am...” 

   The front door opened and a middle-aged man walked through.  Denny looked up at him in irritation, and momentary self-consciousness over being on the floor until he remembered he was invisible.

   “That’s the trouble with the living,” Oliver said solemnly, “they are always getting in the way.”  Then he laughed.

   Denny shook his head and turned his attention back to the plastic plant. 

   “I am solid,” he said, willing himself dense. 

   He reached out his hand and touched his fingertips to the pot.  They passed straight through.  Frowning, he withdrew them and tried again, again failing to connect with the pot.  After several more goes and a final frantic flurry of waving his hands uselessly through the plant, he looked at Oliver. 

   “It’s never going to happen,” he said.

   “It’ll happen,” Oliver replied, “you just need practice.  Believing is a strange thing.  You often think you believe things when you really don’t.  But you will.  Every ghost can do that.”

   A thought came to Denny.  “Poltergeists?”

   “Some people can’t take the differently manifesting and eventually lose it,” Oliver said.  “Start throwing things around for no reason.  Others just like scaring the crap out of the living.”

   They talked for a long time.  Denny had no desire to go back to his empty flat and Oliver didn’t seem to mind. 

   He liked Oliver.  He was sure if they had met when they were alive, they would have become friends.  He told Denny about his year of differently manifesting, what he’d learned, the other ghosts he’d met, what was going on in his zone.  Denny was impressed at how he seemed to be making the most of his time.  Apart from protecting the local school kids from any drug dealers who made the mistake of trying to sell to them (“I actually made one lose control of his bladder once.  One of my proudest moments.”), he often patrolled the area at night, making sure anyone out on the streets after dark was safe. Denny got the feeling he was trying to make up for what he’d done. 

   It gave Denny hope.  If Oliver could make being dead work, maybe he could too.

   Eventually, Denny felt sleep beginning to overtake him again and he started to yawn.  Another automatic reaction, he thought, as he wasn’t using the oxygen anyway.

   “You look like you need some more Z’s,” Oliver said.

   Denny smiled.  “Yeah.  This being dead stuff is really taking it out of me.”

   “I’m going to head back to the park anyway,” Oliver said, “watch the sunset.  Maybe I’ll be lucky and get to see the hot girls on their evening jog.  There’s this group of women who sometimes come through.  Watching them in their shorts and tight tops, everything bouncing,” he closed his eyes and sighed, “almost makes being dead worth it.”

   Denny laughed.  “Is it pervy if they don’t see us watching?”

   Oliver shrugged and grinned.  “Not like I didn’t do it when I was alive.  It’s just much easier to get away with it now.  I guess once a pervert, always a pervert.”

   “Ghost perverts unite,” Denny said, grinning and holding his hand up flat against the barrier.

   Oliver high-fived the other side with an exuberant “Hell, yeah!”

Denny slept soundly all night, from the moment he lay down on the bed, not stirring again until it was morning. 

   The first few seconds after he woke, with his eyes still closed, were blissful.  When his brain was still clouded with sleep and he could almost think that nothing was wrong.

   Then his death hit him again.  The loss of his life, his family, his friends, everything he knew, came flooding back.  That was the worst moment, the first few seconds when the pain was raw and devastating and despair threatened to overwhelm him.  He squeezed his eyes tight shut against the tears and took a deep breath in, letting it out again slowly, practising the relaxation technique Ingrid, his yoga instructor ex-girlfriend, had taught him.  After a couple of minutes he opened his eyes. 

   He supposed that waking up would get easier one day, when he got more used to his situation.  Hopefully that would be soon.

   He wished he knew what time it was.  His watch was still on his wrist, but it wasn’t working, at least not properly.  From what he could tell, it said the time he thought it was, not the time it actually was.  He had asked Oliver about it the day before and he had said the watch was merely an extension of his own self image, not a functioning timepiece any more.  It therefore just went with his own perception of the passage of time.  He wondered if there was any way he could get hold of a clock.  That was, when he could get hold of anything. 

   He decided that was going to be his mission for the day, changing from the incorporeal state he was now in, to the physical.  Having a focus, that was the key to getting through the pain and shock he was still feeling acutely.  He was trying not to think about Trish and his family.  All thinking about them did was make him want to cry.  He’d been the same when his parents had died.  People had kept telling him he should talk about it.  He didn’t see how talking about a life-shattering event made it better.  For him, it just made him even sadder.  Focusing on something else until the raw pain lessened, it had worked before, so he was going to make it work again.

   He sat up and looked around, picking a good candidate.  The chair by the window, that would work.  He remembered holding onto it when he’d first woken as a ghost, so he knew he could.  He stood and walked over to it, swiping a hand at it.  It went straight through.  Two more tries produced the same result.  Closing his eyes, he tried to expel all doubt from his mind, which seemed to have the opposite effect and only made him feel more doubtful.  He opened his eyes and tried again, just in case.  His hand passed through without any resistance whatsoever.  He subjected the chair to his fiercest glare, as if it somehow was to blame.