Page 4 of The Ghost of Exes Past

She looks less scared now. In fact, she’s looking scar-y. She’s angry. With me? After everything? I take a step backwards. Her brow is doing that thing where one of them points up sharply, and now I know I’m in trouble. I used to tease her about that all the time, but this isn’t the time for teasing – she’s up and marching over.

‘What the actual fuck, Jake?’ she growls. ‘You’re not real.’ She’s swiping at me, and I’m dodging her. The button from her blazer is dangling by a thread, and she’ll be fuming once she notices. Even more than she is already. What’s that Shakespeare quote … Though she be little, she is fierce? And fierce she is, so I try to slip off out of her sight, but I can’t – I’m not invisible now.

‘Nice to see you too, Belle.’

‘Fuck you,’ she screams, her hands batting the air, so I dodge to my left, just as the tip of her nail catches my chest, and it hurts. Wait. She can touch me? I look down in disbelief. So not only can she see me, but she can touch me? I’m solid!

She crumbles to the floor, again, her head buried in her hands, sobbing. I squint and make out ‘Why … my bedding (or could be wedding) … ruined.’ My eyes flick to the white gown hanging on the door of the wardrobe behind her. It’s not what I expected for Belle; it’s so structured, formal, and … posh. We spoke about weddings – of course we did. We were young and in love. And when I imagined ours, she was in something more rustic, flowy, a flower crown in her hair or something. I guess styles have changed since then. She quietens down and straightens up, still looking furious.

‘For what it’s worth, I’m just as unhappy about being here as you are,’ I mutter, rubbing the spot where she caught me, but also savouring the feeling of being touched after so long. As she stands, her long auburn hair falls over her face, her mascara smudged under her eyes. It reminds me of that scene from The Ring, but I decide not to mention it – I might be the ghost, but she’s far more petrifying than I am. I stifle a laugh as she walks towards me, glaring.

‘You’re supposed to be dead,’ she growls. She says it again, louder this time. I scratch my head, about to reply, but a guttural scream erupts from deep in her chest as she picks up a vase from the fireplace opposite me. ‘YOU ARE DEAD! WHY ARE YOU HERE?’ The vase flies from her hand, almost in slow motion, but just as I predicted, it misses me and instead hits the wall to my side. She always was bad at sports, I think, tutting, as the last of the glass shatters.

‘Belles, calm down—’

‘Don’t “Belles” me and don’t tell me to calm down,’ she snarls back. ‘You’re enjoying this, aren’t you? Enjoying ruining the best weekend of my life.’

‘Well, if you just let me explain …’ I say, shrugging, as she paces back and forth, her steps getting quicker. She’s shaking her hands as if hyperventilating … Oh, please, don’t let her have a panic attack now, I’d be useless and I’m not sure that googling ‘what to do if someone is having a panic attack after seeing a ghost’ would help me much.

‘This can’t be happening. This can’t be real! I’m getting married tomorrow!’ she pants, this time leaning forward and pausing to take deep breaths.

‘Yeah, and you’re turning into a right bridezilla by the looks of it.’ At this she turns and marches towards me … Uh-oh.

‘Why. Are. You. Here?’ she spits in my face, furiously.

I open my mouth to tell her, but the truth is, I don’t really know.

I was twenty-five when I died, too busy actually living to have really given much thought to what came after. I just assumed you died and then your soul evaporated and that was it. I liked the idea of heaven or life after death – who wouldn’t? But I never expected there would be this much red tape. The in-between limbo thing isn’t a specific place – I can move around the real world – it’s more … the effect it has on you. I’ve been utterly numb. To emotions, to touch, to art, to sound – nothing penetrates.

I’ve mostly spent the last decade in the back row of the Curzon, watching films I can never properly feel. I can’t smell the stale carpets, and I have to imagine the sweet waft of popcorn or the gooey nacho cheese. December is the worst time. The lobby must reek of mulled wine and cinnamon, and everyone’s in cosy jumpers and stamping their feet and rubbing their hands and breathing it all in, while I just sit there, watching, when outside, some guy is down on one knee in the snow and I feel … nada. Nothing feels good, but nothing feels bad. Life has lost its colour and I’m not allowed to move on from it.

Gabe said (we got on nickname terms after about four years) that I’d get used to it if I didn’t want to do the other thing – this thing I’m doing now – and it’s been a toss-up for a decade about which I’d hate more. Loneliness has won, though. Honestly, it’s been shit living in a world where everyone is thriving but I’m just there, looking in. Watching people live a life that I have lost. What I’d give to taste the stolen cola bottles from Belle’s pick’n’mix cup one more time … I wish I’d nicked more while I had the chance.

I’ve had no one to talk to, joke with, touch. Well, no one apart from Gabe.

Gabe isn’t what I imagined for a kind of grim reaper. He looks more like a bouncer for one of those really rough nightclubs in Soho. He’s a big guy, roughly six foot six, and burly, with arms as thick as my legs. His beard is well maintained, with patches of grey, and he has a shaved head. He looks like he’d pick you up by your elbows and throw you out of heaven if you hit on a foxy archangel. I didn’t tell him this until years later, when I was confident he’d find it funny … which he never did.

It wasn’t until after we became properly acquainted that I began to notice he has incredibly kind eyes. They’re framed by deep-set wrinkles, so I’d age him at fifty, and that hasn’t changed (I too haven’t aged a day since I died). He’s also a moody bastard to be around. He drags his feet when annoyed, and his low and gravelly voice booms when frustrated, which he often is around me. His humour is catty and sarcastic, so on paper we should get on better.

I’d been dead for three days when Gabe finally bothered to show up. I’d spent most of that time walking – couldn’t tell you why, exactly. Couldn’t tell you much about those three days at all. It wasn’t because I had anywhere to go but, I guess, I didn’t know what else to do. Apparently, when you die and you’re so shocked and can’t process it, and don’t want to believe it, your legs just keep going … and since I was in Kent, London was the direction they’d picked. I was slumped on a bench in front of some old docks, in a place called Wapping, when he casually waltzed over and plopped himself down next to me, interrupting a perfectly good stare at some ducks I couldn’t feed.

‘Who the fuck are you and why are you sat so close, mate?’ I muttered to myself, thinking he couldn’t hear, but then he turned, a smirk on his face.

‘Cheery fella, aren’t you, Jake? Thought you’d be happy for the company and the explanation, but I can leave …’ So then, obviously, I begged him to tell me what kind of hell I was living in. I followed him back to his ‘house’ and nearly lost it when I saw where he was taking me. I asked him if he could be any more of a cliché, haunting an old woman’s attic. He looked at me, annoyed and hurt in equal measure, and mumbled something about having had plans to convert it. But when I got to the top floor, the place was actually impressive – well beyond my limited IKEA tastes. A wooden writing desk was nestled under the eaves; embroidered tapestries hung perfectly aligned and spaced on the walls; and, as if to show off, Le Creuset bowls were dotted around for decoration. Light poured in from a skylight above the desk, making the whole place look like something from an oil painting. Even I found it a beautiful space.

‘Really bucking the horror-film aesthetic,’ I quipped.

‘Thanks, love,’ he replied with a covert wink.

Once I’d made myself at home on his sofa, it didn’t take him long to start hinting about my ‘mission’. How I needed to work out why I was being held in the ‘in-between’ and what my punishment would be if I wanted to get out of it.

I honestly thought one of the best things about being dead would be not having to have a job anymore. I told him I just wanted to swan my way around London, riding the Underground and getting into nightclubs for free, but turns out, thanks to Gabriel, I can’t rest easy – as if real life and dying weren’t tough enough. He’s like the annoying parrot that my grandad once had – except, instead of repeating the Eastenders outro drums, it’s always ‘mission’ this and ‘righting your wrongs’ that, and ‘you should be spending more time working that out’ instead of ‘dicking around’. And only then would he let me pass on to the next life.

Years passed and I simply couldn’t be bothered to work it out. It’s been like the worst escape room ever: confusing, lonely, and unending. He promised that – depending on how successful my punishment is – passing on to the next life will be better than the limbo we’ve been living in, but how in sweet hell does he know that, since he’s only ever been to the gates and never inside?

And what’s limbo life without a little bit of rebellion? So instead of getting on with the deeply tedious business of righting my wrongs, I’ve spent the last ten years winding Gabe up as much as possible, which, unsurprisingly, has been way more fun.

‘What if my life’s mission is to watch every film ever made?’ I teased him one afternoon, and that turned out not to be such a bad idea. I blitzed through IMDB’s top 250 films in just two months … but that started to become boring, so I changed tactics.