The Trouble with Being a Kindly Spirit

*** TW: death by sky-diving ***

No rest for the wicked? You’re having a laugh. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt since (quite literally) crash-landing on the ‘other side of life’ so to speak, it’s that while the truly evil spirits might have their work cut out when it comes to the number of guest appearances they’re obliged to make in the minds of the living (and which, let’s face it, only serves to boost their already over-inflated egos) it’s rarely the case that us run-of-the-mill, inherently good, peace-loving souls are compensated in kind.

‘Sit thyself down, lad,’ old Bartholemew tells me as I whizz past his cloud in my typical job-to-job visitation tizz. ‘I can see thou hath earned and deserveth it.’ But the star-gazing shepherd and one-time seer has been on standby so long (and eternally so since his name just happens to appear in some dusty old tome worth its weight in Bitcoin) he’s forgotten what it’s like to have people on Terra Firma remember you, to call on you regardless of the hour, and just how freaking often some are inclined to do so.

‘Sorry, old man, no can do. No vape-breaks or breathers or time-outs for me. Not a minute to chill.’

‘Begging thine pardon? Thou art curiously warm?’

I forget sometimes that Bartholemew, who arrived with his crook and a flock of Anthrax-ridden sheep in 1652, doesn’t quite speak my language. Professor Gernstein down there – and the string of professors who went before him - have much to answer for, if only they knew it.

But what probably riles me more – even more than the truly evil ones retaining their celebrity status when really they should be put to permanent task clearing out the sewage from the River Styx or shoveling up the smoldering slag heaps of The Underworld – are those nasty little nobody spirits who loll around (and lolling’s the word when it comes to those former keyboard warriors with their crying-with-laughter yellow emojis and spitefully toned vernacular) stinking in their pits until whatever ungodly hour they choose before rising, smug as you like, in all their rancid phantasmal garb. A law unto themselves they are, gatecrashing human minds, making nightmares of their dreams. Next to no effort required. Merely pop in a calling card stating the relevant username, put on a face every once in a while just for the sheer, ghoulish hell of it, and mwah ha-ha, skulk on home time. Job done. Oh, don’t they just love it when they see me run ragged, trying my utmost to please and fit everyone in…

6am, Mother calling. Give a little pep talk. Again, at eight, and nine and twelve, then regular as clockwork before she goes to bed, manifesting myself as a little lad now and then in her dreams. Fine, not so bad. Don’t mind checking in if it helps. Same when it comes to my brothers, and sometimes my friends, except often their times coincide, and if those of others do too, it does involve a lot of ‘spreading thin’ and there’s only so much of me to go round, so as day and night converge free of boundaries and borders, I’m permanently shattered. And believe me, this is not a good look for a ghost, especially one whose human form ended up that way on his last day on Earth. The floating head that appeared to my best mate, Steve in the midst of his 'needing the toilet' dream scared him shitless.

‘Pull yourself together, that’s the spirit,’ I hear myself cry, painfully aware that I’m not done yet – far from it – because as well as popping into her head whilst she’s chatting-drunk with friends (which sends me spiraling into their minds too), or doing the dishes, or standing over my grave, hesitant as she is to leave that Valentine’s rose she insists is for her Nana Blake who’s buried three rows up, and whose workload isn’t nearly as heavy as mine although she invariably receives the bloom in the end – I still have to pay my nightly call to Janice. Just please, please, let it be in the confines of her dream this time and not whilst she’s having sex with her husband. Don’t know what was more awkward – this or when I was called upon to appear in his dream as well, and we ended up naked wrestling with Janice looking on. Small comfort that he kept confusing me with Lawrence Olivier, and that we shook hands afterwards, when the prize that was meant to be Janice turned out to be someone (or rather something) else entirely – a gorgon of a woman whose head opened up like a soft-boiled egg at breakfast, but with extending legs, and all these snakes and lizards came hissing and writhing out. ‘You go first.’ ‘No, you go first. I insist...' 

Yes, all things considered, my regressing into spotty adolescence, dressing up in school uniform and talking to Janice in class (at length these days, unlike what we did in life) or even stripping off and flying hand-in-hand above the playing fields, man-bits dangling, blown by the wind, isn’t nearly as bad as that, so in spite of my recently acquired fear of heights, perhaps I should count my ghostly blessings. I even met King Charles once at one of Janice’s dreamscape dinners, although, unlike the most unworthy of A-lister Evils, I doubt I’ll be invited back to his.

Indeed, if I were to look on the bright side, away from the idle ghost-trolls and horror-show apparitions, who I try to avoid in any case, the only thing that worries me, besides my being worn right through with exhaustion, is that on my last daytime visit to Janice, I discovered the existence of her journal. Couldn’t bring herself to write it since hearing of my death, she said, but there she was starting it up again. For posterity, she reckons. To pass on to her children and subsequent generations after she’s gone. She’s got a photo of me too – must have been taken mid-noughties – one of those everyone has to sit for in High School, which rather explains why Mum was a picture short that year when it came to receiving the pack. It’s dog-eared and crumpled like hell, and there’s our initials on the back looped together inside a heart.

‘My secret love’, she called me, ‘my shy regret’, and then ‘the one who died too young, who I guess I’ll keep crying over until the end of my days.’ And, just like my mother, she’s kept a scrapbook, all those newspaper cuttings about my charitable endeavors. My ‘daredevil’ stunts. Page after page of stories and pictures of ‘the sky-diving hero’, the tragic one whose parachute failed on that fateful day last March, but whose name will surely live on.

'Rest In Peace, my love, my son, my brother, my friend, my everything. Forever in our hearts, you utter legend.’

Oh lord, I bet Bartholemew’s people said much the same about him... in their way.