Every Touch

by Parke, Nerika

  Denny was horrified. “What happened to her?”

  Oliver shrugged. “Don’t know. No-one I’ve spoken to does. Maybe they’re still here, but just as, you know, pure energy floating around or something. Maybe they move on to wherever they’re supposed to go next. I just know it happens to all of us, eventually. Otherwise the place would be wall to wall spooks.”

  Denny thought about it. On the one hand, he wasn’t going to be stuck here forever. On the other, he had no idea what was coming next. Kind of like life really. At least he didn’t have to worry about that for a while. Maybe after five years of hanging around this one building, he’d be dying to move on, so to speak.

  “Okay,” he said, “thanks for being honest with me. No sense in worrying about it now.”

  “Now that,” Oliver said with a grin, “is a very healthy attitude to have. Just ignore the inevitable. It’s what we did in life, right?”

  He was right. It’s what Denny had done.

  “The buzzer,” he said, changing the subject, “how did you press it? I can’t touch anything.”

  “Really? ‘Cause you look very much like you’re touching the floor.”

  Denny looked down. He put his hands flat onto the floor, feeling the cold tiles beneath his palms. It hadn’t actually occurred to him before.

  “Oh yeah.”

  Oliver snorted at his surprise. “And you went upstairs, so you were touching the steps. And where did you sleep?”

  Denny’s eyes widened. “On my bed.” He frowned. “But yesterday, I fell through the sofa. At least, I sat on it then fell through it.”

  “What happened just before you fell through it?”

  He thought, trying to remember. “I was watching my sister and brother-in-law pack up my kitchen, then I looked at the sofa and wondered how I could be sitting on it when I had just walked through a door, then I was on my ass on the floor.”

  Oliver laughed. “I would have liked to have seen the look on your face.”

  “Hmpf.” Denny smiled.

  “Thing is, just like with the breathing and everything, touching stuff is now a choice for us, even if we’re not thinking about it. You walked up the stairs without falling through them and slept on your bed because you didn’t expect to not be able to. Other stuff can be more tricky, don’t ask me why, it just is. I’m still having trouble wrapping my own head around the ins and outs of it.”

  “So, I can touch things if I want to, but I can also choose not to?” Denny looked around for something on which to try out this new knowledge.

  “Yep. Pretty cool right? We can be substantial...” He reached out and grabbed hold of the rail which ran up the steps to the door. “...or incorporeal.” He passed his hand straight through the rail. “But I prefer ‘metaphysical’. It sounds cooler, like a superpower.” He grinned.

  There was a large, fake potted yucca near the door and Denny shuffled himself over to sit in front of it.

  “So, how do I do this then?”

  “You have to believe you are solid. Then you will be.”

  “Okay. Believe I’m solid.” He stared at the plant, focusing all his attention on it. “I am solid. I can touch this plant. I am...”

  The front door opened and a middle-aged man walked through. Denny looked up at him in irritation, and momentary self-consciousness over being on the floor until he remembered he was invisible.

  “That’s the trouble with the living,” Oliver said solemnly, “they are always getting in the way.” Then he laughed.

  Denny shook his head and turned his attention back to the plastic plant.

  “I am solid,” he said, willing himself dense.

  He reached out his hand and touched his fingertips to the pot. They passed straight through. Frowning, he withdrew them and tried again, again failing to connect with the pot. After several more goes and a final frantic flurry of waving his hands uselessly through the plant, he looked at Oliver.

  “It’s never going to happen,” he said.

  “It’ll happen,” Oliver replied, “you just need practice. Believing is a strange thing. You often think you believe things when you really don’t. But you will. Every ghost can do that.”

  A thought came to Denny. “Poltergeists?”

  “Some people can’t take the differently manifesting and eventually lose it,” Oliver said. “Start throwing things around for no reason. Others just like scaring the crap out of the living.”

  They talked for a long time. Denny had no desire to go back to his empty flat and Oliver didn’t seem to mind.

  He liked Oliver. He was sure if they had met when they were alive, they would have become friends. He told Denny about his year of differently manifesting, what he’d learned, the other ghosts he’d met, what was going on in his zone. Denny was impressed at how he seemed to be making the most of his time. Apart from protecting the local school kids from any drug dealers who made the mistake of trying to sell to them (“I actually made one lose control of his bladder once. One of my proudest moments.”), he often patrolled the area at night, making sure anyone out on the streets after dark was safe. Denny got the feeling he was trying to make up for what he’d done.

  It gave Denny hope. If Oliver could make being dead work, maybe he could too.

  Eventually, Denny felt sleep beginning to overtake him again and he started to yawn. Another automatic reaction, he thought, as he wasn’t using the oxygen anyway.

  “You look like you need some more Z’s,” Oliver said.

  Denny smiled. “Yeah. This being dead stuff is really taking it out of me.”

  “I’m going to head back to the park anyway,” Oliver said, “watch the sunset. Maybe I’ll be lucky and get to see the hot girls on their evening jog. There’s this group of women who sometimes come through. Watching them in their shorts and tight tops, everything bouncing,” he closed his eyes and sighed, “almost makes being dead worth it.”

  Denny laughed. “Is it pervy if they don’t see us watching?”

  Oliver shrugged and grinned. “Not like I didn’t do it when I was alive. It’s just much easier to get away with it now. I guess once a pervert, always a pervert.”

  “Ghost perverts unite,” Denny said, grinning and holding his hand up flat against the barrier.

  Oliver high-fived the other side with an exuberant “Hell, yeah!”

  Five

  Denny slept soundly all night, from the moment he lay down on the bed, not stirring again until it was morning.

  The first few seconds after he woke, with his eyes still closed, were blissful. When his brain was still clouded with sleep and he could almost think that nothing was wrong.

  Then his death hit him again. The loss of his life, his family, his friends, everything he knew, came flooding back. That was the worst moment, the first few seconds when the pain was raw and devastating and despair threatened to overwhelm him. He squeezed his eyes tight shut against the tears and took a deep breath in, letting it out again slowly, practising the relaxation technique Ingrid, his yoga instructor ex-girlfriend, had taught him. After a couple of minutes he opened his eyes.

  He supposed that waking up would get easier one day, when he got more used to his situation. Hopefully that would be soon.

  He wished he knew what time it was. His watch was still on his wrist, but it wasn’t working, at least not properly. From what he could tell, it said the time he thought it was, not the time it actually was. He had asked Oliver about it the day before and he had said the watch was merely an extension of his own self image, not a functioning timepiece any more. It therefore just went with his own perception of the passage of time. He wondered if there was any way he could get hold of a clock. That was, when he could get hold of anything.

  He decided that was going to be his mission for the day, changing from the incorporeal state he was now in, to the physical. Having a focus, that was the key to getting through the pain and shock he was still feeling acutely. He was trying not to think about Trish and his family. Al
l thinking about them did was make him want to cry. He’d been the same when his parents had died. People had kept telling him he should talk about it. He didn’t see how talking about a life-shattering event made it better. For him, it just made him even sadder. Focusing on something else until the raw pain lessened, it had worked before, so he was going to make it work again.

  He sat up and looked around, picking a good candidate. The chair by the window, that would work. He remembered holding onto it when he’d first woken as a ghost, so he knew he could. He stood and walked over to it, swiping a hand at it. It went straight through. Two more tries produced the same result. Closing his eyes, he tried to expel all doubt from his mind, which seemed to have the opposite effect and only made him feel more doubtful. He opened his eyes and tried again, just in case. His hand passed through without any resistance whatsoever. He subjected the chair to his fiercest glare, as if it somehow was to blame.

  When the chair refused to be cowed, he decided to try a different approach. He walked away, examining the few other pieces of furniture in the room, drifting into the bathroom and back out again, keeping his mind on anything other than the offending seat.

  Suddenly, he ran back at the chair and grabbed at it. It gave no resistance at all and he hurtled through it, stumbling towards, and then through, the glass doors to the balcony. He yelped as he hit the railing and fell backwards, landing with the upper half of his body in the bedroom and his legs outside on the balcony.

  “Ouch.”

  He rubbed at his hip where he’d landed, musing on how unfair it was that as a ghost he should be able to feel pain. Then he looked down at his legs on the balcony.

  “Now that’s interesting.”

  Drawing his legs in and standing back up, he carefully walked through the doors.

  The idea that he could actually get out onto the small balcony hadn’t even occurred to Denny. He took a deep breath of the fresh air, closing his eyes and tilting his face up towards the sun. The warmth felt wonderful and his spirits lifted a little. Opening his eyes again, he stepped to the railing and leaned forward to look down. His face immediately hit the invisible enclosure and he pulled his head back, rubbing his forehead where he and the resolutely immovable barrier had collided. He extended both hands and felt his way around the enclosure. The unseen wall ran around the balcony just beyond the railing. He reached up and encountered it again roughly two feet above his head. He guessed the balcony must count as part of the building. At least he could get outside, even if it was only into a seven feet by three feet area.

  A few of the other flats in the building had balconies too and he’d seen seating on a couple of them. That would be nice, he thought, being able to sit outside. He’d never done it when he was alive, but he’d have a lot more time to fill now. He could spend all day sitting in the sun if he wanted to, not having to worry about getting skin cancer and premature wrinkling or having something more useful he should be doing.

  It didn’t make death feel any better, but it was something.

  He stood outside for a while, looking at the tops of the trees in the park beyond the buildings on the opposite side of the road, then down to the ground three storeys below where the traffic was building towards the morning rush hour and people were on their way to work. He would have been one of them, if he’d been alive, going to his job at the station. He wondered who had replaced him, if they missed him there.

  The striking of the clock on the church tower down the road drew his attention and he counted. Eight o’clock. He rolled his eyes. In life he always hated getting up, always lying in on his days off. Now he could lie in as long as he wanted and he had woken well before eight. He leaned forward against the barrier and tried to see along the road to the church, pleased to find that if he pressed his face as far out as possible, he could just see the clock on the tower. That would be useful.

  He looked at his watch and smiled as the display changed to match the church clock. Not for the first time, he wondered what would happen if he took it off, what would happen to any of his clothes if he took them off. He hadn’t even tried removing his shoes yet, nervous that if anything left contact with his ethereal body it might vanish and be lost to him forever. He didn’t want to spend the next five years with bare feet. He decided to ask Oliver the next time he saw him, before risking anything, even his largely useless watch.

  Wandering back into the bedroom, he glared at the chair on his way past and walked through the door, which Trish had left open when she left, to the living room. He then looked back at it and smiled. He could have walked through the wall if he wanted to, but instead he had detoured across the room to use the door. He made a decision to keep using doors on principle. Just because he wasn’t alive any more, didn’t mean he couldn’t behave like he was.

  He spent some time working on controlling his ability to touch things, sitting on the sofa, which he steadfastly refused to think about, and wafting his hand through the coffee table in front of him. But after a couple of hours he still hadn’t got anywhere and was ready to start throwing things, if he had been able to pick them up. After a bout of frenzied lunging at the table from every conceivable angle, he leapt up and screamed in frustration, kicking at its chunky leg.

  “Damn it!” he yelled in pain as his foot collided with the solid wood. “Oh, of course, so now I can touch you!”

  He nudged at it with his foot, thinking. He could feel the pressure of the table leg against his shoe and he knew his shoe was merely an extension of his ghostly self. Therefore, he reasoned, he was touching the table. Reaching out his arm, he bent over slowly and placed a fingertip onto the wooden surface. The varnished surface felt cold against his skin. He pressed. His finger stayed resolutely on top of the table. He added his other fingertips then flattened his hand onto the surface. He added his other hand.

  Closing his eyes, he sank to his knees on the floor, leaned his forehead onto the table and sighed.

  “Thank you.”

  Kneeling up again, he took his hands from the table then put them back down, smiling when he felt them connect. After repeating the action a few more times to satisfy himself he wasn’t going to lose his newfound solidness, he stood and went back into the bedroom, striding to the chair and grasping it forcefully.

  “Ha!” he exclaimed in triumph, laughing as he picked up the chair and twirled around with it before replacing it on the floor by the window. He stood back and looked at it for a few moments then he reached out his hand, concentrating. It passed through the solid wooden back of the chair. Repeating the action, he grabbed it, grinning when he was holding it again.

  He spent the next hour perfecting his new ability, alternating being physical and metaphysical until he could do it with barely a thought. His practice was interrupted by the sound of the intercom buzzer and he smiled and ran to the door leading to the corridor, eager to show Oliver his new skills.

  It was only when he collided with the door and staggered back, clutching his nose, that he realised his error. The pain brought tears to his eyes and he lowered his hand to see blood on his hand which shimmered and vanished after a few seconds.

  Despite his throbbing nose, he began to laugh.

  “Well, that was embarrassing.”

  After gingerly feeling his nose for injuries and wishing he could check it in a mirror, he carefully became metaphysical and walked slowly through the door, extending his hands in front of him, just in case.

  He reached the door to the stairs and suddenly stopped, looking back at the lift. Smiling, he pressed the button, stepping in when it arrived and riding it down to the lobby.

  Oliver was standing by the door looking in when Denny strode proudly from the lift doors, but he didn’t notice as he stared at one of Denny’s neighbours, an attractive, leggy blonde woman walking across the lobby.

  “Dude, who is that?” Oliver said, craning his neck to watch her walking through the still open lift doors.

  “I think she lives on the second floor,�
�� Denny said, “but I don’t know her.”

  “Why the heck not?” he said in disbelief.

  Denny shrugged. “When she moved in I was dating someone else. I thought about it after that ended, but you know, dating someone who lives that close? Having to avoid seeing them after it ends badly? Way too much hassle.”

  “Well, that’s a defeatist attitude, assuming it’ll end badly.”

  Denny laughed. “With me it’s a safe assumption. Not necessarily badly, but it always ends.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “No idea.”

  Oliver stood back and folded his arms across his chest, regarding Denny intently. “Do you know any of your neighbours?”

  “Yes,” he said defensively, desperately trying to think of names.

  Oliver raised his eyebrows.

  “I see Mr Duncan in flat six often. He and his wife have always been kind to me, ever since I moved in.”

  “And?”

  “And... okay, so I don’t know the rest. Stop judging me. I have friends, just not here.”

  Oliver grinned, unfolding his arms. “Well, you’re stuck there now, so you’re going to have to get to know them if you don’t want to lose your mind.”

  He thought about that. “How would I get to know them if I can’t even speak to them?”

  “Hang out with them. Take an interest in what’s going on with their lives. At the very least, learn their names.”

  “You mean, hang around in their flats with them? Isn’t that kind of creepy?”

  “We’re ghosts, being creepy comes with the territory,” Oliver smiled. “Even I have the folk who are in my zone regularly, the kids at the school, their parents, the people who work in the shops, walk in the park, live around here. Take it from me, you’re going to need the company if you don’t want to develop a hole in your marble bag.”