Lo!
Alright team. Last month I asked if you wanted to see some actual writing, not just my usual dribbling topical trivia - and about five of you reached out to say YES! Yes, Ben, we would! Dollop it on us! Lay it out! Load the cannon! Fire everything! The other 392 of you were, admittedly, silent. But, like in every election in every country ever, that counts as a thunderous earthquake of a majority baby!!! So incoming is a short story I’ve been whittling at in my spare moments. Don’t be afraid to send me your feedback. Don’t be afraid in general. It’s a ghost story (spoiler alert), but not that kind.
For those of you who despise the written word (and specifically, mine) - don’t worry. I haven’t given up on verbal communication just yet. In fact, I’m doing a couple of stand-up shows this March and you ought to be at them, honestly.
March 19th - Work in Progress w/Rajiv Karia @ The Betsey Trotwood, Farringdon
March 26th - Work in Progress @ Glasgow International Comedy Festival
Also, next week, all being well, I’ll be making a BIIIIGGG announcement about stand-up plans for later in the year. So keep your eyes peeled for that!
In the meantime, have a read of this, and thoughts on a postcard…
GRAVEYARD
Ryan saw the cemetery was open and quickened his step. Thank God. They were always doing work on the front porch bit, as if that mattered at all in a cemetery. Everyone here was, famously, dead. They would not be overly worried about decor. In fact, the more ramshackle it was, the better. Graves crumbling like quarried chalk, paths surrendering to the chaos of the banks, the bouquets placed on the memorial stones melting, withering. The colder it was, the crueller, the more Ryan needed it.
Coffee sloshed around his cup. The graveyard was his favourite place to walk little oval circuits when he needed to clear his head. Here, the emotions you were meant to feel were carefully prescribed at the entrance. A quiet, wistful melancholy, punctured only by the occasional panic as you clocked statues staring at you through their wedding veils of cobwebs. It was actually cathartic. The modern graves jolted you into remembering death was real. The older ones reminded you this was always so. He could try to put the grinding outer world away, and specifically his phone which, though set to silent, glowed hot with notifications in his pocket. And if he cried a bit, well, y’know, it was a graveyard.
Ryan paced through the gates and lowered himself onto a bench, balancing his coffee on the slats next to him. He blew hot air through his clasped hands. This was what they said helped - regulate your breathing. If you pass a cool breeze over your molten core, it will solidify again and stop sluicing around inside you, like the contents of a juicy festival bin bag. But when he’d breathed out and all the air in the lungs had dried up, Ryan’s heart was still clouting the inside of his chest. His eyes looked aridly about himself for answers. His blood coursed through him like sriracha. Maybe he shouldn’t have had the coffee.
He looked down at the empty cup. ‘Be present,’ he whispered, insanely, he thought. He curled his fingers around the cup, one by one feeling the waxy texture of the cup against each pad of his fingerprints. Be. Present. His mind played the words again, stress-testing them for cracks. Beep. Resent. The circumference of the paper cup buckled in his grip, and he very gently throttled it out of shape. A dribble of cold coffee trickled amongst the valleys of his fist. Beep.
From hot to cold, reality washed over him, realising what he might look like to a passersby: a man alone, whispering to himself as he strangled a latte in a graveyard. He pulled himself up, he would search for a bin. Did they have bins in graveyards? They must. I mean, in a way, the whole place was a bin! A giant human bin. Here are the ones that don’t work any more! Toss them on the pile! He frowned grimly at what lay below him, the ground reconfigured as a massed heap of slumped bodies, and him pacing atop it, a waxy figurine on a miserable, miserable cake. He looked about for something with a recycling symbol on it, placing one foot frantically down in front of the other, on what was now, to him, a pathway fat with souls.
***
There wasn’t a footpath, but there was something. Slightly more than a fox's trail, it looked like something was sour in the air and the grass was growing up around it, leaning away from a bad smell. A lack, snaking into the grass. Ryan hadn’t found a bin but he was becoming frustrated with the rhythmic crunching of his feet, and then more frustrated that he was frustrated. And so, desperate to wipe his brain clean, or maybe just drawn by something amongst the wildgrass, he paused, then stepped off the gravel.
The undergrowth was thick and difficult to navigate, the brambles covering everything. But it was quieter amongst the vegetation and for a second, Ryan closed his eyes and just let the sounds of the crickets and the shuffle of the wildgrass wrap around him. One far-off car horn blared on the main road, but for some reason it didn’t bother him. It rolled over him like weather, safely refracted and smudged in the distance.
He took several wobbly, muffled steps before his ankle turned on a lump of granite and he discovered that the brambles were, in fact, covering something. What he’d thought were steps along the trail were in fact the marble outline skirting of much older, forgotten plots. The hairs on his neck rippled. He had strayed off the road, and was now truly amongst the dead. In a way, it was actually kind of beautiful. This blanket of growth was somehow more respectful. It was warmer, like a duvet. Finally, some privacy for the guys. To sleep, perchance to dream. Forgotten by the visitors, but also by family and friends, and dead long enough that the caretakers had ceased to care, these souls could sink into the soil of oblivion. Still here in the world, but secret. That sounded nice. Ideal, actually.
Maybe the effects of the coffee were wearing off. Ryan could feel his breath sitting down quietly within him. His stomach had stopped revolving like a rotisserie chicken and his bladder was happily full. Very full in fact. Long walk home, too. And so quiet here.
He checked over both shoulders, then unzipped his fly and let out a steady, twenty-four-carat golden stream of piss.
***
The air cracked in front of him. It stiffened and rolled inward, shifting like soil. There was a rumbling seemingly coming from the ground and a vast bruise opened up and boiled over in mid air, and through it: a hand, a chest, knees, ankles, a chin, and then, there, a face.
In front of his eyes, or perhaps below or within them - Ryan seemed no longer to be able to measure space with his eyes - was a figure. A man, perhaps. A silhouette, a shadow and a skeleton all at once. It was a corpse, but it hovered off the ground, and the meat of the man was blossoming and snapping continually, his joints rearranging, one second fungal, the next quite pixellated. As the rotting flesh moved, the skeleton moved too but they moved out of time with each other, glitching, fading, sliding.
Ryan fainted. Or he didn't. He felt like he was falling from a great height and surfacing from a great depth, both together, but when this feeling abated, he found himself standing exactly where he had been, immobile. He tried to blink away the high-pitched whine which was whistling through him, humming in his jaw, and peered ahead at the nightmare materialising in the air.
It had clearly been a man at some point but the expressions being pulled by its face, now its skull, now its face again, communicated emotions that there were no human words for, because, Ryan feared, they were not living human emotions. Every so often, a young, crisp version of the man would snap into focus, gasping with shock, as if realising repeatedly that he was dead, waking from a horrific nightmare to discover it was true, over and over and over again. And the man's eyes. Oh God, the eyes. Different shades of the same hell, sinkhole-deep but reeling forward, bursting and plummeting simultaneously. You could get lost in those eyes. And not in a good way.
As the shape writhed and stretched, Ryan realised he probably knew what this was: a ghost. It looked like no ghost he had ever heard about, read about in books or seen in films. There was no white sheet or ghoulish whisper. But this was, Ryan supposed, what death actually, physically looked like. The past disgustingly, feverishly superimposed onto the present. Ryan’s live human eyes were seeing, trying to see, the dead end of the light spectrum. Time, in the form of a man, was leaking out of the sky.
He’d summoned a demon. He'd summoned a fucking demon with his piss. He knew how this stuff worked: you defiled a tomb or wronged a last wish and you were haunted for life. He'd just wanted a bit of relief, just one bloody moment to himself, and now his payment: the undead. Of course. This was his just desserts.This was very much not typical, but it was, Ryan thought, typical.
The ghost’s mouth was moving, trying to move. The flickering jaw locked back and forth and something approaching a voice was creaking out, crackling like static. Ryan winced. What would this be? A curse? A hex? The name of his future killer? The exact hour of his death? A dreadful mantra that would follow him, in his quiet moments, when he looked in the mirror, in the corner of his eye, a shame that would steal in on the wind and ruin him? All of these things he deserved, Ryan thought. After everything he’d done. This was his fate.
The skull's movements coalesced. The voicebox, crusted with barnacles and shot through with a lattice of worms, shook into action. Sound arrived.
'Yahh! Yaaaaah! Yahaaaa!'
Ryan frowned. He leant in.
'Get! Get away! Shoo yah!!! Fucking hell! Christ! Christ’s sake! Yah!'
The ghost's arms thrust forward, brushing the air peskily.
'Piss off now!'
***
Ryan stepped carefully over a patch of nettles. Steadying himself against the arm of a beech tree, he turned back to look at it one more time. The apparition fizzed and crackled in the distance, the ghost repeatedly flapping his shimmering bone-arms over and over again. From this distance it looked fucking stupid. A broken logo in the air. A museum hologram running its time in an empty room. The purple cloud behind the ghoul mingled its neon with the wildflowers. Some ectoplasm hung and waved from a tree branch, an errant line of spiderweb. Dock leaves bobbed along to the side of the portal.
As he sauntered out the front gates of the cemetery, Ryan dunked his coffee cup in the bin by the entrance and blew out in relief. Dimensionally speaking, he was a mongrel, an animal. Pissing on a stranger's lawn. A happy, oblivious little pest. He was, in the grand scheme of things, nothing at all.
Rounding onto the street, he clicked his phone open. Miranda's name flicked up on the screen. Fourteen missed calls and one broken little text.
‘Are you alive?’
Ryan started typing.
Feeling generous?
If you’ve got spare honk, why not consider giving to one of these amazing charities?
Child Poverty Action Group - 8 children in a classroom of 30 are in poverty! The Child Poverty Action Group works with schools to make changes like recycled uniform schemes and free breakfasts. Donate now so children in poverty can make the most of school life!
Parkinson’s UK - Parkies provides care and support across the UK for people with Parkinson’s, and fund research into a cure. They do incredible work! Please consider donating!
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