Orpheus on the Underground and Other Stories, page 7
Only my wife can solve the mystery and I make fitful efforts to locate her. Not fitful in the sense of foaming at the mouth and jerking my limbs in violent spasms. But I only make such efforts in my spare time. A ghost has lots of spare time, or so one might be inclined to believe, but it’s simply not true. I don’t. No more than before, perhaps even less.
I find death thoroughly exhausting.
I haven’t properly introduced myself. Toby Knott’s the name and that’s what my colleagues call me, not because it’s the proper thing to do but because my nickname’s the same as my real name, a bizarre coincidence that requires explanation. Too busy now. Later.
I’m an obituary writer for The Tombstone Examiner, a newspaper that specialises in stories about death but isn’t actually targeted at dead people. Bad marketing strategy, in my humble opinion. I’m sure ghosts are just as hungry for news as living readers.
We often receive threats of legal action from another newspaper with an identical name located in a place called Tombstone on the American continent. Even though we are based in Chepstow, a Welsh town where the only available tumbleweed rolls inside the thick skulls of the docile inhabitants, our newspaper’s name is perfectly descriptive of its contents and we refuse to change it.
Let them take us to court and sue our collective ass!
I wonder for a moment exactly what that might entail. I have no idea. Maybe it’s the cue for a tired joke, maybe not. Always suing asses, those Americans. They must really hate donkeys.
I’m burning up with enthusiasm for work, straining like a lobster at an avant-garde leash. Today I have to finish the obituary of a notorious trickster. I don’t write obituaries when famous people die, but at the moment they become famous. Uncompleted obituaries are kept on file and updated as necessary, ready for the day they’ll be published. That’s how it works.
Some obituaries wait for decades. Half a century or more can pass before a date and cause of death can be added. Patience is an essential requirement for this job.
The subject of my new article is Scurrility Forepaws—not a pseudonym, but a real name. Can you imagine! He’s not Welsh but he did pull a few stunts around here years back and so he’s rather more than just a celebrity façade with no plumbing behind.
What I mean is that Mr Forepaws has genuine relevance to the people of Chepstow, and my readers will therefore devour his obituary with relish.
I enjoy filling in the blanks. Under his absurd name at the top of the page (1976-20??) I’m able to replace those two question marks with solid numbers. High time. I personally suffered from the sly and cruel attentions of the scoundrel long ago, when I was alive and young. I haven’t forgotten.
This is my revenge. Not sweet but adequate.
If he’s dead then perhaps he’s also a ghost and I might get a chance to meet him and tell him what I really think. Mr Forepaws fell into a ravine after his pocket rope-bridge was pecked by rooks. I gleefully add this final sentence to the text.
I know what you’re thinking. Yes I did. I did exactly that. First day back at work after my death I bought a copy of The Tombstone Examiner from a vendor. I turned straight to the obituary pages, but my own obituary wasn’t there. Weird.
When I got to the office I searched the relevant files and found the text incomplete and without inclusion of the final details—the cause, whether it was an accident, murder or poor health. Mills and Spoon were playing poker on a desk near a window, acting like nothing was wrong. I didn’t show them how upset I was.
Clearly the senior management had decided that their most productive obituary writer wasn’t important enough to merit an obituary of his own. That angered me. Unused obituaries are shredded and discarded with the other office rubbish, but I refused to let that happen in my case. I was stubborn. Still am.
It remains in its file, a one page article with its potted history of my prematurely ended life, my dreams, frustrations, achievements. I try to update it whenever I have a spare moment, but I can’t finish it until I know exactly how I died, and even then no-one will ever read the piece. It will always be for my eyes only, despite my contribution to human culture. I weep to think of it. If only ghosts were allowed obituaries too!
It has occurred to me that I’m not really dead, that I misinterpreted my wife’s final words, that I’m still alive, that she left me for a mundane reason, the sort of domestic reason that living wives leave living men for all the time, that the microscopic but existent sympathy of my colleagues has more to do with the collapse of my marriage than my physical extinction, in short that I have duped myself.
Such a farcical situation is not beyond the bounds of possibility. That’s what this world of ours is like—the perfect stage for ludicrous mistakes of status and being. Mills, Spoon and Hacker have all dropped hints that my demise hasn’t happened yet, and at one point I was on the verge of believing them, turning my back on my supposed ghostliness and laughing at my own foolishness.
But I remain unconvinced, because this scenario too strongly resembles a contrived fiction. Some years ago I read a short story about a character called Billy Belay who thought he was a ghost but wasn’t, a condition fully exploited for its rather facile humour. I can’t accept that real life has anything to do with comic fantasy and so reject the non-death theory.
There’s a new girl in the office, a replacement for Hacker who sunburned his face on the photocopier—nobody knows why—and now volunteers full time in a skin graft clinic in Bristol.
She has high cheekbones, a red sweater and striped woollen stockings. These items are to my taste and I decide to enable her to help me forget about my wife. She agrees to join me for lunch at a nearby café and we sit in a quiet corner while a conversation begins. Her name is Ursula.
‘What’s your name?’ she wants to know.
‘Toby Knott. Toby.’
‘That is the question,’ she replies.
‘I just answered it.’
‘No. It was a pun, or an allusion.’
‘I also have a nickname,’ I confess.
‘What is it?’ she asks.
‘Toby Knott. Same as my real name.’
‘That’s quite unusual.’
‘Well, I’ll tell you how it came about. I fell asleep at my desk in the height of summer and a rascal sneaked into the office and played a trick on me. He tied a bee to my toe with a length of knotted string. I woke up, saw what was what and panicked.’
‘Any idea who the rascal was?’
‘Some say it was none other than Scurrility Forepaws. The nickname has remained with me ever since. Toe. Bee. Knot.’
‘I really don’t know how to react.’
‘Good. Have some more wine. Do I fascinate you?’
I got off lightly compared with most of his other victims. I won’t repeat the contents of the obituary I wrote for him. If you’re interested, seek out the relevant issue of our newspaper and you’ll learn every significant thing he did, all his most depraved tricks and escapades. I willmention a few of his more minor misdemeanours to give you a flavour of his twisted psychology. Please don’t glamorise him. My toe was painfully swollen for days.
Mr Forepaws was the publisher of a newspaper that bore a superficial resemblance to our own. It was called The Suicide Review, and it reviewed suicides. The casual cruelty of that mustn’t be underestimated. I couldn’t stoop so low, however high the pay—neither could Mills or Spoon, and I can’t imagine Ursula contemplating the idea. For example, a musician who deliberately swallowed a flute in order to protest the low wages paid by provincial philharmonic orchestras was advised by the reviewer to ‘try harder next time’, because his death rattle was too ethereal.
That’s the insensitive trash Mr Forepaws considered acceptable to put into the public domain. He was the sort of person who sends letters to the Environment Agency saying things like: ‘Dear Sir, I am writing to complain that this letter of complaint probably won’t be recycled but will end up in a landfill site. Yours Faithfully.’ Truly vile. The sort of man who looks up the word ‘dictionary’ in a dictionary. Who looks up the meaning of ‘Wikipedia’ on Wikipedia and after learning it’s an inaccurate online encyclopaedia wonders if this inaccuracy paradoxically applies to the definition of its inaccuracy.
Toby Knott hates to be tied in knots.
Metaphorical or real . . .
Which reminds me. I once looked up the word ‘panurgy’ in a dictionary to be informed that it meant the same as ‘legerdemain’. This left me none the wiser, so I looked up ‘legerdemain’ and found it to be identical to ‘prestidigitation’. Enlightened to no degree at all, I proceeded to look up ‘prestidigitation’ and was told that it was another word for ‘panurgy’.
Since that moment, I’ve suspected that movement in any direction is ultimately pointless, that everything is part of a loop, that nothing really goes anywhere, that all objects and feelings and thoughts are the same as each other but positioned at a different point on the rim of a vast cosmic wheel. I went all the way through life only to discover that death takes you back to the beginning.
A ghost in an office, jumping up to answer the phone, striking a knee against the edge of a desk, spilling coffee over his trousers, experiencing a simultaneous double pain, a triple pain if you include the wound to his pride occasioned by the chuckles of his colleagues, isn’t a welcome sight. No afterlife should be like that. I feel cheated by the system, deceived by ghost stories and horror films.
Mills and Spoon are a seriously drab duo with identical moustaches and a penchant for lank hairstyles. The work they do is something of a mystery, though Lord Bohumil insists they are indispensable. I watch as they trim aerial photographs of overgrown cemeteries with a large pair of serrated scissors. Often they vanish for days on end, returning with inappropriate souvenirs of their secret travels, usually a gravestone with a disturbing or illegible inscription, sometimes a stone urn full of fine white powder that isn’t crushed bone.
I generally leave them in peace. Their business isn’t my business. I am more interested in Ursula and her work. She is employed in Research and Development, which is the section of the office nearest the kettle, and it’s her responsibility to invent and promote new and unexpected methods of corpse disposal. Burial and cremation are so passé. Even sea burials aren’t particularly refreshing. It’s time our society adopted radical measures and I’m always ready to applaud every suggestion Ursula makes and to praise her intelligence and contours.
Exploiting the dead as a source of protein for the living isn’t a radical concept. In fact it’s a hugely overworked idea, but I don’t deflate her innocent delight when she puts it forward as a solution. That’s my Ursula, shiny as a toffee apple when her blushes sprawl on her cheekbones like wounded climbers on icy hills. I nod like a pseudoplasmodium in the breeze and say, ‘Yes, that’s brilliant! Homemade meatballs will be deep fried fists. I won’t mind if my own body is used that way now I’m dead. Will you go on a date with me?’
I smirk a little because I can make that statement with complete spectral authority. But it makes me wonder, what did happen to my cadaver. Did my wife run off with it? Her packed suitcase was broad and deep to a suspicious degree.
Lord Bohumil is the rich visionary who began The Tombstone Examiner in the confines of his own mansion less than ten years ago. Back then, the newspaper employed fifty domestic servants doubling up as writers and typesetters, and the machinery used to publish the rag was big and made of iron. We’ve come a long way in a decade, for now we use just one laptop computer and four employees to create and distribute the product. That’s an increase in efficiency in the region of 92%. We’ve successfully streamlined our readership by a similar percentage.
By the way, not all ghosts are the liberated souls of dead people. I’m referring to symbolic phantoms, spooks only in the sense of a chronic and profound disassociation from life and society. I know that the population of this planet is larger than official census figures suggest. There are a large number of human beings, mostly men, who never emerge into the natural light of day but remain indoors, who take no part in public life and rarely enter the consciousness of ordinary folk. My own name for these unfortunates is Trouser Hermits, but they are conventional ghosts to all intents and purposes.
All Trouser Hermits are created spontaneously, but the process leading to this creation is incremental and insidious. A man is a little overweight—that’s not a crime—his inner thighs rub together when he walks—that’s not immoral—holes are slowly worn in the underside of his trousers—that’s not surprising. Soon he can no longer decently wear those trousers outdoors, so he reserves them for casual interior lounging and switches to a backup pair. All is well. In time he wears holes in the backup trousers also. That’s inevitable. A final chance is now granted for him to avoid his fate, for he can buy new trousers from a shop.
He puts off that chore and starts wearing his third and final pair of trousers. Everything now hinges on that single garment. When holes appear in these he is lost—even tertiary syphilis has a more positive prognosis. He wakes up one morning, ready to dress and go out, realises his trousers are unusable, that they are obscene, that he needs to purchase a new pair, but how can he go out to get them? From the rear the holes are glaring. Upper thigh flesh, blotchy and wobbly, will be visible to whoever walks behind, including girls, even his dangling shirt won’t cover the selective nudity. A reputation as a gross pervert awaits.
So he doesn’t go out again. He stays inside. Forever. He has become a Trouser Hermit, a member of a damned clan that receives no attention at all from the popular press, that has no dark glamour about it and is feared by no governments or established religious organisations. I imagine I was on the verge of swelling their ranks myself, for I was down to my last pair when I was rescued by death from that sartorial worry. But I still feel pity for them. On my way to work I see their faces peeping through curtains in the high windows of silent houses.
Trouser Hermits. Ghosts who can’t float.
My obituary of Scurrility Forepaws is published to no acclaim and I begin work on a new subject. But it catches the eye of an intrigued party. I don’t know this until later, when it’s too late in fact, but it’s always too late for a ghost, so I guess the timing is perfect. Mills and Spoon fill the room with tobacco fumes, smoking cigarettes so long that each paper tube rests on the shoulder of the other smoker as they sit on opposite sides of a desk as wide as a country lane.
Why does my shadow keep following me here?
Ursula and Toby Knott at fencing class. Together. I chose an unorthodox location for our first romantic rendezvous because I’m a ghost and can do stuff like that without feeling awkward. Restaurants, cinemas, dancehalls—the venues of living lovers—are not for me. We meet outside the building and go inside with an exchange of curt nods. There’s no chance for me to ply her with wine here but a sweat can certainly be worked up. The sweat of a girl is sweeter than the sweat of a ghost. Logical. We wear protective clothing, masks that resemble sieves.
She turns out to be skilled. I have made a mistake.
I could never scar those cheekbones with my rapier. They are too high, both of them. A ladder would be required, plus her mask would deflect the blow. Not to mention the fact that my weapon doesn’t end in a true point but has a button on the end that couldn’t pierce the most papery flesh. I flourish like a buffoon.
‘Are you sure you’re an expert?’ she asks.
‘Yes. I utilise a highly abstruse fencing technique that mimics ineptitude. But let us change the subject. Imagine a world without mirrors. How scruffy we’d be!’
‘Shaving would be an entirely tactile matter.’
‘Indeed. That is already the case for vampires and other beings without reflections. However, I’m not entirely satisfied with this alteration of topic. Let’s find another.’
‘As you wish. Lord Bohumil’s latest efforts to promote his newspaper have failed. First he decided cheap advertising was the key. Then he was spotted forcing airline pilots to go home with random people because he was handing out fliers. Insane!’
I stroke my sheathed chin with my free gauntlet. ‘Interesting. But my own change of subject is as follows. Imagine if we all knew the dates of our deaths when we were still alive. For instance, you could consult your unfinished obituary and read something like: Ursula Gluck (1981-2022) and you’d know exactly how many years you had left before your clogs popped. You’d assume you couldn’t die until that date, so a reckless life would become attractive. Crossing the road without looking, jumping off tall buildings, things like that.’
‘Sounds ideal to me.’
I shake my head sadly. ‘Ah no! On the very first occasion you stroll across a motorway you’ll be hit by a speeding vehicle. Sure enough you won’t die until the year 2022, as your obituary promises, but you’ll spend all those remaining years on life support in a hospital, paralysed from the eyebrows down, a throbbing husk.’
‘You’ve got a point there,’ she agrees as she impales me through my left bicep, the one I use to raise and lower my coffee mug. Somehow the button has fallen off her sword.
A surprise is waiting for me back at the office. A newcomer. He’s sharing my desk and as I enter he looks up with a toothy grin. I had no inkling Lord Bohumil wanted a replacement for Hacker, I thought we were going to do without a death-themed crossword compiler. Evidently not. I gaze at him indecisively and chew my lip.
He extends his hand. ‘Wormhole Kidd.’
‘I’m Toby Knott,’ I answer as I return the cool shake, ‘but why is your name so familiar to me?’
‘I was a journalist on The Suicide Review, chief reviewer in fact, in its heyday.’
‘And you’re working for us now?’
‘Yes. Well, no actually. I’m only pretending to work here so I can get access to you. I’ve got a proposal that might be to your taste. An offer of work. Listen. The article you wrote on Scurrility Forepaws was noticed, your style approved of. A superb reward will be yours if you agree to expand your present text into a proper book. An autobiography.’
