Page 5 of The Ghost of Exes Past

Maybe my mission was to haunt and prank ghost hunters. I’d start small, just trying to appear in their peripheral vision when they had stopped recording. I spent a whole month haunting this particularly posh podcast duo (they had matching fleeces embroidered with their logo, Ghoul Talk, and everything – took themselves way too seriously). I’d wait until the woman was alone and then try to appear right in her eyeline … Ta-dah. She never saw a thing. But once, I knocked a lamp by accident and she screamed so hard, she dropped her camera down the stairs. Three years of haunting yet a lamp did more damage than I ever could.

Gabe would always have me meet him at his favourite pub, The Bell & Hound. The kind of place that puts tinsel up in November and you can still spot remnants of Sellotape stuck to the ceiling come July. I’d fill him in on my antics, but he was never impressed and, with a potty mouth just as bad as mine, he’d grumble, “Stop fucking around!” He didn’t even look up from his needlepoint.

‘Well, just tell me what the hell to do, then,’ I’d reply.

‘Is it really so hard,’ he’d say, pulling his thread through, ‘to think about what you did wrong in life, Jake? And don’t use hell’s name in vain.’

I’d retort with something clever. He’d ignore it. And repeat.

So, I changed tactics again. What if my mission was to tap the shoulder of the world’s top ten most beautiful women? Number one on my list was, obviously, Zendaya, who walked right through me in Harrods. Not past me, but literally … through me. Like I was a draught from a shitty air-con unit. She got goosebumps and everything. Small win for this sexy ghost. Saying that, I’ve never felt as invisible as I was then, standing next to one of the most beautiful women in the world and barely registering as a breeze.

I went back to Gabe’s attic after that and didn’t leave for a month, until I decided it was time to try Margot Robbie, at which point Gabe flipped out at me. ‘How about you focus on the one woman you actually fucked up?’

I spent a while trying to figure it out, I did. Did I bully someone at school? I didn’t think so. I once overcharged a bloke for his MOT because he called me a muppet in front of the garage, but my spidey senses told me that wouldn’t warrant eternal damnation. There was also the time I stole a tenner from Mum’s purse when I was fifteen and also that time I copied someone’s homework instead of actually reading Of Mice and Men, but none of it seemed soul-destroyingly bad. And I was always the perfect boyfriend so … I went back to watching movies.

After nine years back and forth like this, Gabriel sat me down and stopped being cryptic.

‘It’s eternal damnation,’ he said.

I told him that it would be way creepier if we were sitting in a dark attic filled with candles and cobwebs rather than bold woven carpets and faux-fur throws.

He told me that there are multiple afterlives. Not one. Several. He takes souls, like mine, to their gates by boat. Literally rows them up to the doors and lets them make their case for which afterlife they best deserve. Most people, he said, are decent enough that it’s not much of a contest. But for people who’ve done something genuinely bad, he had another option. He could destroy their soul instead.

No doors, no boat, no case. Just nothing, for eternity.

Finally, an explanation. Delivered with the energy of someone reading a bus timetable.

I asked him how the fuck a guy his size managed to row a boat without sinking it. He didn’t laugh.

Then he told me what my punishment was. The one I’d been supposed to be working on this whole time. He said that I’d taken something from someone in my life – something that I had no right to take – and before I could pass through any river or door, I had to put it right. A trip down memory lane, he called it. Something about revisiting what came after me.

Just as woo-woo as the sage incense my mum occasionally burned or the tarot cards Belle and her aunt used to love, right?

He said I’d know the right person when I found them, because they’d be the only one who could see me. That I’d be able to touch them – like actually touch, not just float through – and that when I took their hands and got them to think of a relevant time and place, we’d go to that memory together. If it was irrelevant, nothing would happen.

I asked how I was supposed to know what was relevant. He looked at me like I was a drunk who’d walked into a glass door, twice.

He said there was a deadline: midnight on 12 December 2026.

‘Well, you could have said all this nine years ago, mate,’ I retorted, rolling my eyes.

‘I left you clues everywhere, you daft sod. What was the only film on at every cinema in London the first time you wanted to sack it off and watch films?’

‘Oh. I did think it was odd that there was a Beauty and the Beast marathon on everywhere …’

‘And those pub quizzes—’

‘Always a Disney princess round, and the answer was always Belle!’ I started to think I’d been an idiot.

‘And everything else you saw and missed,’ Gabe said, while peeling off Post-its emblazoned with ‘VISIT HER’ from his walls. I thought he was putting off seeing his mum or something.

So, it was Belle. Of course it was Belle.

Gabe went back to his needlepoint and gave me a year. I spent eleven of those months watching 300 more movies and then decided I should probably give it at least a try before being damned for eternity.

So, I’ve spent the past month standing outside Belle’s house in Hackney. Not stalking, I’m not a creep – just researching. Gabe said I need to put right what I did wrong and the first step is obviously research to … you know, make sure she’s still alive … and hasn’t become a serial killer or something.

I saw she looked good, happy even. One afternoon I followed her and some swanky bloke to an overpriced French bistro down Bermondsey Street. The woman I watched walk into that bistro wasn’t Belle. Not the same Belle I fell in love with. The Belle I knew wore Crocs with socks without a care of what others thought, and nicked cigs from her dad’s secret stash in his glovebox. The woman in front of me had a handbag she was so precious about that she carefully placed it on its own chair rather than on the floor.