Dead Funny

by Robin Ince

  A sound.

  Senses jangle, dulled, but suddenly focused on this single, perceivable thing. And again. A sound. Like a ball of waxed paper collapsing in on itself, a pause, then its sonic antonym, that crushed thing expanding – or rather struggling to expand; the air needed to fill it, dawdling; not rushing. To nullify the vacuum with a long, slow wheeze. These are not reassuring sounds. Whatever answers they lead to are the kind that make the question wish it hadn’t been asked (‘What do you mean ‘She just disappeared’?’, ‘You were screwing him the entire time?’, ‘Are you sure it’s cancer?’). And again.

  And again.

  Something is breathing. Something is struggling to breathe. You.

  Were it not for everything else, maybe the oddness of that realisation would stab home harder; that, for a moment, you existed outside of matter – a ghost, a temporary angel – but no longer. Now, you return to being, the formerly abandoned machinery within, pressed once more to function. Redundant nerve endings now re-employed, each dendrite ferociously awakening, furious, meting out barbs of white hot pain, a biological ‘fuck you’ to the impossibility of your current situation. As the circuitry of your central nervous system shrieks into operation, your brain floods with frantic feedback. Pain. Such incredible pain, blood replaced by broken glass. You’d cry out but the best you can manage is a short, wheezing moan as legs and arms spasm, joining the torture chorus with fresh verses of their own.

  Hands, thumbs, fingers all log in, the electricity jolting through them, heralding their connection to this . . . body? Person? Yes. Yes! That’s right! You are – were – human. These are human things, aren’t they? Hands, legs . . . people have those! The fragile thought is almost drowned by the merciless anguish, but you cling to it. You are a person. You are a person who is on fire? It feels like it, but no. No flame. No smoke. The burning’s internal, inextinguishable, a thing to be endured.

  You endure it, terrified. Not just of the pain, but that the pain might cast out what little knowledge has been won. How long will it last? How long has it been going? Questions pop like sparks from an open fire, but fizzle out just as quickly. You have no space for them. With nothing to do but wait – alone, blind, ravaged – you wait.

  Minutepainhourpaindaypainmonthpainyearpain. You wait.

  Throbbingsearingtearingstabbingboilingbursting. You wait.

  And then, at some point, it fades. Whatever terrible thing visited you, it’s leaving, new details strewn in its wake. You’re a person. You’re . . . lying down? In the dark? No . . . inside . . . something? Devoid of context or intellect, each thought exists alone. Stringing these together, weaving sense from these thin strands of knowing, is beyond you. Though increasingly less so. You take a deep breath, immediately regretting the effort, as you fill with thick, foetid air; your newly operational lungs ill-prepared for the onslaught. Deep, wrenching coughs crack through aching muscles, punch through heart, lungs, ribs. More coughing, more pain, stars seen.

  You try again. Where are you? New, old fingers feel plush, cushioned softness. Stretching is impossible, in any direction. A soft cell, not much bigger than yourself. That’s where you are, now wh–

  Lightning. Pure white, blindingly so, striking from within, your brain full of it, spiking with sincere violence. No thoughts, nothing other than a billion bright burning banshees, an unholy choir of light and pain, an opera of a million migraines. You thrash. It continues. You continue. It doesn’t care.

  At some point it ends, and in ending, the first of its gifts is revealed.

  You can cry.

  How could this happen to you? You’re dead. You died. You remember.

  You remember.

  Your full autobiography, pages disordered, the story fragmented, chapter titles, paragraphs, photographs, glimpses of the path that lead to this, this . . . coffin. The cuttings begin to order themselves and the cerebral slideshow begins.

  Drizzle. Cold. Bare brick walls and kin already sick of them. A fug of trudging drudgery waiting for you to come of age; that its slog of grim, respectless toil may claim you too. Automaton sickness masquerading as life. This is all there is for you. Their sadness, your future.

  The only softness, her. What part duty, what part love? Irrelevant. Love. Respite in her bosom, safety in her arms. Did she know? As you were pulled from her into the world, did she realise she had birthed a titan? That her job was to conceal you while you grew strong enough. To stand guard over your potential, to protect you from the big boys. To hide you. So important to hide.

  Manhood, and ditched humility. That which doesn’t kill us and all that, yeah? A lion should roar. Everything’s changing, but that’s good. Change. Be different. Rock and Roll! Pretty girls! Fucking Teddy Boys. There’s a power to that music. It stirs things up, lets the lightest and brightest float to the top, and you are so light; so beneficial, emptiness.

  Oh, your beautiful rise! From the shit on their shoes to the jewel in their crown. Master of his own path, usurper of fate. Who could resist a man so much bigger than destiny? No one. Come Kings! Come Queens! Come the great and the good! Usher forth the lowly, that they too might gaze upon this knight’s divinity! Come keepers of secrets!

  Such delicious secrets. The secrets of an untouchable man. Of tears snaking down plump, young cheeks. You don’t bother putting a hand over their mouths. They could scream, but the sheer disbelief of anyone hearing it would render any sound mute. If they ran, who would they run to? Who would dare entertain such vile lies, so clearly borne of jealousy, or a broken home, or mental illness? You had fashioned your disguise perfectly. A man of such permanent, beneficent sacrifice, a common man of royal approval – a man of music! Not for one second could anyone consider that such a man might be busily raping an inhuman opus through the small, the vulnerable and the dead; a thought so sickening that the world would rather blindly refute it than engage with its possibility. A monster pointing at the ceiling, before slithering back under the bed. So important to hide.

  Whilst you escaped their accusations you never quite escaped your humanity. Though not for the lack of trying. There was always ‘that’ moment. That dreaded few seconds of self-awareness as the semen finished pumping its way into the defiled thing. That rush of orgasm, ruined by a concurrent wave of guilt and horror. Every victory rendered hollow by that tiny voice inside, screaming at you to stop. Not that you ever would. If there was one thing you had mastered, it was the ability to ignore tiny voices screaming ‘Stop!’. You had trusted that it would only be a matter of time before that internal protest was permanently quashed, imploding under the weight of its own futility. Exorcising that sliver of spoiling shame would allow you to enjoy each conquest, untarnished.

  It was the thing you wanted most, but – alas – the one thing you never managed. In truth, the wretchedness increased each time, and the more years and victims that amassed behind you, the harder it was to wade free from the tarry pools of mortification. If you let your mind wander, sometimes your gut would clench and your breathing would fail as the guilt blindsided you. To be so utterly appalled by yourself, yet so proud of having shrugged off whatever version of ‘normal’ it is that damns cowards to small, servile lives. Running was the only balm. So you ran. And ran. And ran – your disguise so perfect that no one ever asked just what it was you were running from.

  And now, the realisation. There’s nowhere to run. Not in here. No distractions of any kind. Now there’s just you and the tiny voices, hundreds of them. Sobbing. Screaming. Begging. Tortured sounds of stolen innocence. Howls of despair. You try screaming yourself, but there’s more of them and they’re louder. There’s no sound you can make that will drown out this anguished chorale; nowhere to look that you might distract yourself from the clammy faces, the furrowed brows and wet eyes, glinting repositories of violation and betrayal. All yours.

  All yours.

  You scream. You shout. You cry. You thrash. For a
s long as this continues, what else could you possibly do?

  The man in the raincoat looked out of the window as the old lady gathered her things. ‘Did it work?’ he asked.

  ‘We’ll never know for certain. Short of digging him up,’ she chuckled. ‘And that would rather ruin the effect, wouldn’t it? But from what I can tell, yes.’

  ‘So, he’s alive? Right now?’

  ‘Not alive, per se. Just not dead. If he was alive, he might die again. And we can’t have that, can we? Not ever.’

  In Loving Memory Of Nerys Bag

  danielle WARD

  Nerys Bag awoke in total darkness. Her head was pounding. Each heartbeat making her wince as her thick, sticky blood coursed its way to her fragile brain. She felt clammy, her back as wet as her mouth was dry. Reaching beneath the ratty blanket that covered her, Nerys realised she was still fully clothed. Relief washed over her. ‘I’m going to be really late for work,’ she thought, as she vomited over her alarm clock.

  As it turned out, Nerys was only fifteen minutes late for work that morning, having decided against a shower and grabbing a can of Relentless and three bags of Monster Munch from the newsagents for breakfast. Nerys knew someday soon she’d need to take a long hard look at her life. But she wasn’t going to do it today as she felt like shit and it was her occasional friend’s hen weekend soon and she planned to get absolutely wankered then. But after the wedding maybe she’d start saving again for a deposit on a nicer flat, rather than stay in her crappy bedsit with its tiny window and mouse problem. Nerys could only ever afford places with mice. She was certain that’s why she needed to sleep with her pants on. ‘What if a mouse got in there and laid . . . baby mice? Mice don’t lay eggs do they . . . ?’

  Once at work, Nerys started her usual morning routine of deleting emails without even reading them before being jolted from her banal and frankly idiotic train of thought about mice eggs: the date at the bottom of the screen. Today? How had it not registered? She’d not really thought about it for years, dismissed it as a stupid childish prank. But today’s date, those were the numbers that as a teenager had terrified her. ‘It hadn’t even crossed my mind . . .’

  ‘Talking to yourself again?’ Candy was the only other person in the office. Everyone else was more important so they were always in meetings . . . probably. Nerys assumed they were in meetings. She didn’t really know to be honest. There might have been a memo once but she more than likely didn’t read it.

  ‘Fuck off,’ replied Nerys.

  When Candy first started working at the homeless charity Nerys couldn’t even speak to her, she was so in awe of the leggy blonde’s beauty. But after three months she realised Candy was a complete prick and from then on, conversation flowed a lot easier. Nerys made herself a cup of tea and sat back at her desk. Staring at the date on the wall clock this time, an uneasy feeling crept up inside her. Starting in her stomach, passing through her chest and resting in her throat, like heavy concrete moths dancing in her digestive system. You see, when Nerys was fourteen years old she was told today would be the day she died.

  Twelve years ago, Nerys Bag had been – what the kids at her comprehensive school called – ‘a weirdo’. She wasn’t really that weird, she just liked indie music, watched a lot of horror films and wore black jeans instead of the regulation blue. But in a school where everyone else listened to R&B, still watched telly and smoked pot, she supposed she was technically weird. ‘Techni­cally’.

  One evening Nerys and her small band of fellow ‘weirdos’ thought it would be a lot of fun to sneak their way into a screening of The Exorcist and scare themselves until liquid came out (tears/nosebleeds/wee – anything goes). Marian swore it was the most frightening thing she’d ever seen. Even more frightening than that time her uncle had a seizure in Morrisons. She couldn’t touch scones after that. The problem was, The Exorcist is not at all scary when viewed in a cinema surrounded by a hundred cynical teenagers who all think it’s hilarious to see a child rubbing her bits with a crucifix before being sick on her own mother. Disappointed, they went back to Nerys’s house looking for a cheap thrill. And they got it via the Ouija board they found in the cupboard under the stairs.

  Marian, Katy, Nerys and their other friend Mo laid the board out on the kitchen table – Nerys’s father had already gone to bed, knowing the little gang would be up all night chatting about hair and soap operas and quilts. No, he didn’t really ‘get’ women. None of the girls knew what they were doing so they’d just lit some candles, held hands and called upon the spirits to communicate with them – just like they’d seen on telly – and waited.

  Nothing.

  Happened.

  Marian was terrified; the other three, more amused at her fear than anything else. ‘What was that noise?’ she whispered.

  ‘The wind? From my dad’s bum?’ Nerys and the others were in hysterics.

  ‘Take it seriously!’ cried Marian. ‘They get angry if you laugh at them.’ The three other girls suppressed their giggles enough to each place a finger on the upturned egg cup they used as the counter.

  ‘I’ll go first,’ said Katy. ‘Is there anyone there? And if so, please do tell us your name. Thank you. From Katy.’

  ‘You’re not dictating a telegram,’ whispered Mo.

  ‘What’s a telegram?’

  ‘Shush!’ Marian interrupted the pair. ‘Look.’

  Sure enough, the egg cup started moving around the letters. ‘H.U.G.H.’

  ‘Hugh! His name is Hugh!’

  ‘It’s still going,’ Mo said, looking at Katy and Nerys.

  ‘J.N.U.S.’ Marian’s voice was trembling. ‘We’ve made contact with Hugh J Nus . . . huge anus. Oh, very funny. I’m going home.’

  Nerys stood up. ‘Please don’t. Look, let’s do it properly this time.’

  ‘Well . . . OK.’ Nerys remembered they’d asked a few innocent questions, the egg cup whizzing round the board. None of them admitted to pushing it – she certainly wasn’t – but she hadn’t really believed they’d been in the presence of anything supernatural. Until Marian got brave that is.

  ‘I’ve got a question. When will Nerys Bag die?’

  ‘That’s horrible,’ cried out Mo.

  ‘Are you scared, Nerys?’ Marian asked. ‘Shall we ask something else?’

  ‘Ask what you like. It’s all bollocks anyway.’ Nerys took her hand away from the counter. Followed by Mo and Katy, until just Marian had a finger gently touching the ceramic pot.

  Nothing happened nothing happened nothing happened.

  The egg cup started to move towards the numbers at the far side of the board.

  ‘This isn’t funny, Marian,’ said Katy.

  ‘I’m not pushing it. I promise!’ A look of genuine terror crossed Marian’s face.

  ‘Stop it!’ cried Nerys. ‘I’m sorry we laughed at you.’

  ‘It isn’t me!’ Marian tried to move her finger away from the cup but something was stopping her. ‘I can’t move my hand!’

  ‘Stop!’ yelled Mo, leaping to her feet.

  ‘I can’t,’ Marian was sobbing now as the counter got faster. Nerys didn’t want to know, she tried to look away but her eyes remained glued to the egg cup making its way around the kitchen table, repeating the date over and over and over until . . . everything stopped. Marian pulled her hand away and ran upstairs to the bathroom. Nerys was in a state of shock. The three sat in silence for what felt like an hour. (Seven minutes.)

  Finally, Katy spoke.

  ‘She was playing a trick on us? Wasn’t she?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Mo. ‘A trick.’

  Nerys looked at her two best friends. Neither of them sounded convinced. But she could tell they wanted her to reassure them. She was the smart one. She was doing double science in her GCSEs.

  ‘Yeah. A trick.’

  They never spoke of that night a
gain. Not for spooky reasons – a week later they found out Katy had been shagging Mo’s boyfriend behind her back. Mo was devastated in only a way a fourteen-year-old virgin can be, and the close-knit little group of friends never really hung out again.

  So now here Nerys was. On the day that had been chanted by an egg cup twelve years ago. Nerys didn’t even believe in ghosts anyway, stupid idiot ghosts.

  ‘What’s up, babes?’ Candy sounded genuinely concerned. Which was a first for her.

  ‘Nothing. I’m hungover.’ Nerys immediately regretted saying she was hungover. Why didn’t she say food poisoning and take the afternoon off?

  ‘No, babes. You look really, really, really shit. Not hungover,’ Candy grabbed Nerys’s face and stared at her, examining every inch of skin.

  ‘You look like you’re dying.’

  Nerys rushed to the bathroom and looked in the mirror over the sink. It was a unisex bathroom so the mirror was hung just a tiny bit too high for her five foot stature. But she saw enough of her eyes to know she looked exactly the same as she always did. Not great, admittedly, but five-a-day is expensive and she had booze to buy. Nerys stormed to the kitchen where Candy was making a low-calorie Cup-a-Soup.

  ‘Bitch!’

  ‘It was a joke!’

  But Nerys wasn’t in the mood. She hesitated, thinking of the correct punishment, before punching Candy’s mug out of her hand.

  ‘That’s my best mug! It’s from the Isle of Wight! Look: Cowes you can’t milk, Needles you can’t thread . . .’

  Nerys returned to her desk. She slumped down. Confused.

  ‘Candy. Do you believe in ghosts?’

  ‘What? First you punch my best mug ever out of my hands and now you’re asking me about ghosts? What’s wrong with you?’