Yours Ghostly: An eternal love

Prologue The moment Mark woke up, he knew that something was wrong. He rolled over in bed and ran his fingers through his hair, emitting a painful groan. Last night…..what had he done? Little by little memories seeped into his consciousness. His thirtieth birthday….the party…the pub…Olivia, his best friend, had come….and he had declared his undying love for her. Told her all those feelings that had been locked up tight inside him for so long. Remembering, Mark felt a blush crawling across his cheeks like a rash, and his stomach contract into a tight spiral of embarrassment. Had he said she was the cutest girl he had ever met? Had he really made sweeping poetic comparisons between her spring her and, um, Curly Wurly chocolate bars? He didn’t want to dwell on it anymore. Besides, his alarm clock said 5:30 am. If he didn’t hurry, he would be late for work. He got out of bed, his feet curling on the cold boards. His Flat was a one-bedroom studio in west London. It had the bare, lonely feel of an undomesticated bachelor threatening to topple over his huge collection of black-and-white movies, carefully stacked in alphabetical order as he made his way to the bathroom. “Good God!” Mark exclaimed out loud when he saw his reflection in the mirror.  He didn’t look hangover, though considering the amount he had drunk last night he ought to be. His brown hair was its usual tuftee, obstinate self: creating its own peaks and furrows with the irrational willfulness of a crop circle. His blue eyes were clear, his skin pale, and his freckles light. But somehow, he looked odd. He pulled a few faces but they didn’t help. He was reminded of a fairytale he read as a kid. About an ugly, wizened dwarf who had a spell put on him so that every time he looked in the mirror a little bit of his face changed – his nose bent few inches, or his hair developed a curl. Until one year he woke up and found out that he had transformed into a dashing, winning prince. “Wishful thinking”, thought Mark. He nudged the weighing machine out from its place by the bin and stepped on to them. Every morning he never failed to be tackled by the way his goldfish, Newton, would swish to the front of its bowl and watch with amber eyes, as though fabulously excited. Not that his weight ever varied. Mark had a fast metabolism. He could eat anything and never put on an ounce above thirteen stone. Weighing himself was simply part of his morning routine, like shaving and tooth-cleaning and cotton-budding wax from his ears. Mark frowned and squinted at the scales. How ridiculous. He couldn’t possibly weigh that. He gave a little bounce, but the pointer didn’t shift. “I can’t weigh zero stone!” Mark exclaimed. “That’s crazy.” Newton wiggled his fins indignantly. “They must have broken. Great,’ he muttered. “I’ll have a go at fixing them tonight, maybe.” Newton blew sympathetic bubbles. If that wasn’t strange enough, when he lifted the toilet seat, he found that for some reasons he had no urge to urinate. You would have thought that eight pints of beer swishing through his body over the last six hours would have left his bladder bulging and screaming for release. But - nothing. Not even one faint yellow droplet. Mark rubbed his head thoroughly and figured that it was going to be a very odd day. Outside, he half expected the weirdness trend to continue, to discover it was raining fish or the street-lamps had to come alive like aliens and taking over the world. But to his relief, it was just an ordinary day. The sky was watercolor blue, dabbed with lemon, the air crisp and fresh as apples, not yet tainted by daytime fumes and fog. Mark then towards the parking lot but to his surprise his parking was empty. The car was gone. “That’s strange, where’s the car?” Mark thought standing right where his car supposed to be. “I think I left in the pub’s parking last night. Seeing how drank I was.” Mark suggested to himself. “Let’s get the car after work. For now, let’s hurry.” Mark decided and started his journey to the subway station. On his way he stopped at a convenience store to buy Kit Kat and a can of Coke. His usual breakfast. Mr. Evan, the store manager, was busy in the back cutting loose newspapers so Mark left his change on the counter. There weren’t many people at the subway station. Waiting for the sub Mark was thinking about the promise he made to himself, never to think about Olivia, to slam a lid down on the last night and seal it tight. The hum of the cleaning man nearby sounded like the lament of a dying bird in the cold air. The sound filled Mark with sorrow. He remembered the way he and Olivia had walked by the moonlit canal. How he had plucked a Coke can ring from the pavement and tried to force it on to her finger, his voice catching with tears as he explained how she had just smiled sweetly and then shaken her head gently and talked about how she really valued him as a friend but – “Mark! Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it or it will hurt too much.” Mark told himself. On the sub, he opened his black office bag and pulled out a book. It was a self-help book called 10 Ways to Fulfill Your Dreams. Mark found it very embarrassing to read it in public, for everyone would give him looks as if to say, ‘SO you have just spent £10.99 on a book, in the hope to get yourself a girlfriend. Is your life that sad?” So he had removed the cover of Best Selling Novel and put it on top, now everyone gave him respectfully, felloe-intellectual glances. Mark knew deep down that self-help books were a bit silly. But he hated the thought of the therapists. There was something about going to the therapist that was like admitting that you are really off your track, which he wasn’t and he knew it was a cliché but he worried that they would hold up those inky blotted cards that revealed your subconscious.  Books were safe, and after all, what was wrong with trying to find more happiness in life? Because that was the point of life, surely? And happiness wasn’t, was it? It didn’t seem to be one of those things that floated about, looking for people to spill blessings on; you had to go looking for it, chase it like a butterfly, and catch it in your palms. If you got clingy and squeezed it too tight, you crushed it but if you just close your palms gently and let the butterfly breathe, it could stay fluttering there forever. “Life is what you make it, so try to think positive thoughts before going to bed. They will determine how your next day goes.” The book instructed Mark tried to remember his thoughts before sleep last night. By the end of the chapter, however, he still felt confused. He wondered sometimes if happiness really had anything to do with Olivia, or finding a way to win the lottery, or buying that elusive holiday to Hawaii. And could you really change your destiny by lying in the bed every night and for fifteen minutes saying over and over? “You think too much about everything, that’s your problem.” he caught himself. Olivia always used to tease him. “You should just enjoy life, and stop worrying about it.” He was just worrying about whether he worried too much when an old woman got into the sub. She was wearing a filthy patchwork coat, dyed red hair trailing down her hunched back, her talon-fingers curled around a crumpled can of bud. Mark couldn’t help glancing at her. “Well, at least my life could be worse.” He thought Then he felt mean. But he could tell everyone in the sub was thinking the same. Then the old woman did something extremely peculiar. She shuffled up to Mark and tried to sit on his lap. “Hey – Hey” he cried realizing that he was about to become a flat mark and be squashed into the furry blue and green striped seat, he jumped up, only just grabbing his bag in time. The woman plonked herself down. Mark suppressed an urge to slap. “Well, just nick my seat, why don’t you, and hey, if you want, you can have the shirt off my back and my self-help book, since you clearly need it.” Mark felt like yelling but he didn’t. Manners and shyness overcome his anger and kept it firmly locked in his chest, and he merely grabbed a pole, dipped his nose in his book, and fumed until the sub slid into Shepherd’s Bush. Mark works at a restaurant on Uxbridge Road – specifically, the one with smeary windows and tacky red letters that said “LUIGI’S CIBO”. It was sort of a place that was passed by many times and thought: “I’d rather eat my food off the pavement than go in there.” And if they saw the things his boss did with the food, Mark thought, the pavement would indeed seem a better option. He saw the first stream of people across the road swinging umbrellas, briefcases, and newspapers. Funny to think that a year ago he’d been just the same: getting up and working twelve-hour days in a top city law firm before he’d ditched it all in. He didn’t envy them. “OK, so you’re earning ten times more than me, so I have a degree in physics and a law conversion course and now I’m mostly living off my savings, all because one day I got sick of the rat race I decided to ditch it all in on a whim. And I still don’t know what I want to do with my life, but I can assure you that I love my job, every minute of it because I get to work with Olivia Harman. Well, I do at the moment…” Mark called to them silently. As Mark got closer, his heart began to flutter madly. That was the trouble with declaring devotion to your best friend and the girl you worked with every day – there was no hiding the morning after, pretending they didn’t exist. “What would she say? What if- God forbid- She resigned?” Mark thought. Olivia was the sunshine in his days; she made life livable: how would he survive without her nudges and jokes and deliciously wacky vacuum-sounding laugh. He pushed open the door, his eyes looking at once to the coat pegs above the till. Her coat, the gorgeous grey one with a furry hood, wasn’t there. He was safe for now. As Mark took off his anorak, he heard a noise from the kitchen below. That would be Luigi, his delightful boss. Mark went down the steps. Luigi was standing with his back to him. His black hair curled in a greasy mess on the back of his fat neck, a faint rash spreading across his skin. He often suffered from a rash. Underneath his tough persona, he was probably rather sensitive, Mark suddenly realized with a heart-skip of sympathy. “Smash! Smash!” Luigi was violently sharpening a knife. “Uh-oh,” Mark thought. Something was definitely up. Luigi was tended to knife-sharpen at stressful moments- such as when the rents were ‘doubled by those c**k suckers at the council’. As he puts it, or the health inspector visited and found meat in the veggie-burgers. “Hi, Luigi,” Mark said softly. He didn’t turn around. “He must be in a really foul mood.” Mark thought. He pulled an apron from the peg and tied it on. It felt grimy, although apparently they were washed on a weekly basis by Luigi’s wife, a kind-hearted woman who gave Mark a Snickers bar every time she saw him, saying he was a ‘growing lad’.  That always made Mark laugh – he was six feet two. “It was my birthday yesterday,” Mark added “Humph,” Luigi said, something friendly like that. Perhaps he thought Mark was hoping for a bonus. “I had a late-night, I’ve got such a hangover.” Mark went on lying. He was still strangely clear-headed. He just wanted to fill the silence. Luigi didn’t reply. His shoulders were hunched as though he was crying. Mark was amazed. Luigi! Crying! Perhaps his marriage was falling apart. Perhaps his business was about to go bust. In flash, Mark suddenly saw Luigi not as an evil boss who treated his employees like cattle, but as human beings, someone who could be hurt as easily as the next man. “Luigi, are you okay?”  Mark went to him, rubbed his hand gently on his boss’s shoulder. Luigi turned, suddenly. His eyes were red and glazed. Then in an angry flash, he slashed the knife through the air. Mark gasped. The knife had gone right through him. He looked down at his stomach, waiting for blood to belch out. Nothing came. And then the memories, the memories that had been whirling in the back of his head, slotted into place, formed a jigsaw. At that moment the feeling of unease that he’d been suffering all morning suddenly made sense, and he collapsed in shock. He remembered it all. The pub The party Olivia Walking by the canal Slipping in The water in his lungs The gasping in horror He lay on the floor, the newly washed tiles wet against his ears. In the background, Luigi was now dancing around the kitchen, leaping and waving the knife like a Samurai Warrior. Rage swirled through Mark. He wanted to scream. He wanted to close his eyes, shut the world down. This couldn’t be. Reaching out he slammed his fist against the fridge door. It went straight through it. Straight through two inches of steel. He wriggled his fingers in the icy refrigerated air. His hand brushed something. A jar. He pulled at it, yanked it out through the door. A jar of Branston pickle. Only yesterday he’d been spreading that on to the bottom of sandwiches, and now…now… Smash! He threw the jar on the floor. “Hey! Huh! God!” Luigi turned in bewildered shock. “He can see me!” Mark’s heart leaped. “He’s just pretending, playing a game” Luigi turned away, picked up a dustpan and broom, and started sweeping muttering, “Silly Luigi, knocking things over.” “I’m here,” Mark howled Luigi started to whistle under his breath. “I’m here.” Mark croaked tears in his throat. Luigi carried on sweeping. A few minutes later Mark was back on the tube. Drumming his fingers insistently against a rail as annoyingly as possible, hoping for just one evil glance from a person. Nobody looked up. Once off the tube, he ran all the way back to his flat. Back home, he left his flat door swinging open, ran into the bathroom, pulled out his scales. He weighed himself again: zero. He picked up Einstein’s fishbowl with trembling hands and put it on scales. Five pounds. Einstein flipped his fins and smiled up at him smugly as if to say, ‘Well, actually it seems I am bigger than you after all, so ner-ner-ner.’ Zero… Five Pounds… Five Pounds… Zero. “Oh God, it’s really true. I’m a ghost. I’m a ghost. I’m a ghost” Mark thought. For a moment he was blank with shock. And then, for no reason, the thought popped into his mind: “What on earth am I going to tell my mother?”