Spinetinglers Anthology 2008
Page 18
“What do you mean?” Wilfred demanded, trying to squeeze the rest of himself through the wall, without making it look as if he was struggling. “It’s just this wretched flock wallpaper sticking to my clothes.”
Cyril ran a jaded eye around the room. He had died at the very stroke of midnight between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day of a heart attack, because his foolish young relations had decided to celebrate with some very loud party poppers. Because of the particular time of his death, every day was Christmas Day for Cyril, summoned from the spirit world at midnight on Christmas Eve and being banished hence on the following midnight. Cyril hated Christmas with a vengeance, and he also hated party poppers.
His gaze came to rest on Emily. “You’re looking pale. Not going to die on us, are you?” Another standard ghost joke, and he and Wilfred roared with laughter. He was right, Emily was certainly pale, although exactly how pale it was hard to say, because she was virtually translucent at the best of times. It was one of her first Christmases as a ghost, and the other ghosts still scared her. In fact, she still scared herself sometimes, when she looked in a mirror and saw a ghost looking back.
“I wonder if they’ve got the dinner table laid yet?” Wilfred said, and popped his head through into the dining room to have a look. He was as keen on food in his current ghostly state as he’d been when he was still alive. And although he couldn’t eat it, it didn’t stop him from trying. He liked to bury his face in the various dishes, making furious munching noises, which he’d often wanted to do while he was still alive. Only the one time he’d tried it, his wife had fed him bread and dripping for a month.
There was another waft of cold air, this one rather less blustery and more genteel, and when it began to turn to mist, it swirled round and round ever more densely, until it became a tall, thin lady dressed in a ball dress, a tall, thin lady who had materialised inside the Christmas tree.
“Oh!” she exclaimed. “Whatever have I done? I can’t get out! It’s all spiky.”
“You do this every year, Hettie,” Cyril told her, banging his walking stick on the floor and cackling. He also began to edge toward the back of the tree, as if to help her, as he’d noticed that her skirt had got caught up at the back, and he was hoping for a glimpse of petticoat or stocking top.
Hettie couldn’t pass through tinsel, because that’s how she’d died, accidentally garrotted by a tinsel necklace, when she’d fallen down the stairs after one too many glasses of mulled wine. The only way for her to get out was on her hands and knees, affording Cyril a very generous view of cleavage.
They were distracted by a puff of air that smelled and sounded like something that might be emitted after the ingestion of too many Brussels sprouts, and which turned into a very naughty-looking little boy, then the draughts came thick and fast. In no time at all, the room was full of ghosts of various shapes and sizes, some little more than transparencies that could be seen, if the light reflected in a certain way, and some as solid as the living.
There was even a ghost Father Christmas and eight ghost reindeer drawing a ghostly sleigh. Father Christmas had met a sticky end, or rather, a galvanising one, when the sleigh had been entangled in a tasteless display of Christmas lights, because the elf tasked with watching him reverse had been drunk on cherry brandy. Or, that was the official reason. It was more than coincidence that the drunken elf, the sole survivor of the incident, had now taken over the top role as Santa and had appointed a lot of very attractive female elves as his helpers. He’d also introduced a new corporate dress code, so that all the little elves had to dress in ermine-trimmed, red miniskirts, with thigh-high boots. And, he’d also made the wearing of “wonder-bras” a condition of employment. This didn’t go down very well with Matthew the YTS trainee elf, but then Matthew was already resigned to his life being hell, because he’d spent the whole year making ballet skirts for Barbies, when he was supposed to be learning accountancy for business.
The ghostly elves killed by Christmas decorations now hated them, and instead of making presents as they did when they were alive, they spent the year going from loft to loft, finding the fairy lights and decorations that had been neatly and carefully put away and turning them into a tangled mess.
Wilfred was goading Father Christmas, who was now a lot less merry than he’d been before he’d become a ghost. In fact, Father Christmas had always been as miserable as sin, if truth be told. He’d had the worst job in the world, trying to force elves to make toys, when all they wanted to do was drink, play poker, and shag in the stationery cupboard. Sometimes, there’d been more people in the stationery cupboard than there’d been on the factory floor, and those on the factory floor were usually doing nothing more strenuous than having an elastic-band fight. There had been a blissful few weeks when productivity had soared, and the warehouse had started to fill up with brown cardboard boxes. He’d thought that the elves had finally turned over a new leaf. Then he’d discovered that they’d struck a clandestine deal with Ann Summers, and were making toys of a completely different variety.
Father Christmas’s cheer had been bought from a goblin, who did business from the pub – it’s no accident that whenever Santa is depicted at his happiest, he’s always covered in a white powder that certainly isn’t snow. And, his battle cry of “ho ho ho” isn’t a hearty chuckle – he’s just stating that he’d like a woman of dubious virtue to be available to him when he’s finished delivering presents to the whole world. Seeing all those Christmas stockings gives a man an appetite that can’t be satisfied with any amount of Christmas fare.
“Have you brought us any presents?” Wilfred enquired. The sleigh was parked outside, in the same spot as was occupied by a Land Rover. One of the few perks of being dead was that you could drive as carelessly as you liked, and the ghostly sleigh would simply pass through oncoming traffic. Which was just as well, because Santa had eleven points on his license already, and one more prang would get him a ban.
“I’ll bring you a smack on the nose if you don’t leave me alone,” Father Christmas responded. You didn’t really want a smack on the nose from Father Christmas if you could help it, because he was a veteran of goblin pub brawls, and he tended to have his knuckle dusters close to hand.
“I love your outfit,” Wilfred persisted. “It’s very now. Red is the new black and all that.”
“Well, your outfit could do with some red on it,” growled Santa. “Like some of your blood.” Wilfred laughed because after all, he hadn’t had any blood inside him for a good fifty years, and Santa was just taking a threatening step toward him, when Cyril stuck his head into the dining room next door.
“Dinner time!” he exclaimed joyfully. Cyril loved dinner time, even though he couldn’t eat, because he liked to stir up trouble by whispering inflammatory remarks, which the guests would think had been made by the person sitting next to them. If they hadn’t come to blows before the Christmas pudding was lit, he’d be very disappointed.
“Would you like a mince pie?” Wilfred asked Father Christmas. It was the wrong thing to say, because Santa hated mince pies, even more than he hated Christmas lights. Not surprising, because he’d been faced with roughly a quarter of a billion of them every Christmas for the last couple of thousand years. He hated the smell of mince pies, he hated the taste, and he hated the way they looked. Every time he saw one, he wanted to trample on it.
“I’m going to kick your head in,” he began. Even though his boots were fur trimmed, at the very midpoint between the girly and the fetish, they still had stout soles and metal toe caps, and Wilfred was just backing away, when Herbert intervened.
“You behave or you’ll go in the ball,” he said, brandishing a bicycle pump and pointing to a gym ball, which had been unwrapped and put to one side by its disappointed new owner. It would be the work of a moment, to suck Santa’s ghostly form into the pump and then expel him into the ball. Herbert had been a policeman, until one Christmas twenty years ago, when he’d slipped on a festive pile of vomit
while chasing after a shoplifter, fallen into the road, and been run over by a passing Christmas tree delivery lorry. And, he still felt obliged to deal with any conflict.
Cyril watched this exchange with interest. He couldn’t think of anything he’d like better than to be trapped in a rubber ball, while various sweaty bits of female anatomy were pressed against him. But the human guests were starting their meal, and he needed to go and meddle.
The human beings were pulling crackers, which didn’t crack, and party poppers, which didn’t pop, as Cyril had done the rounds as he did every year, weeing on anything that he thought was likely to make a noise. To his satisfaction, a row had started before the first course had even begun, because the husband was accusing the wife of buying cheap crackers, while she claimed they’d come from Marks and Spencers, only she couldn’t prove it, because the cardboard packaging had already been taken away with the recycling.
The meal took nearly two hours, and by the time it had finished, Cyril had started four furious arguments, Wilfred had plunged his face into every plate of food, Hettie had sat on the lap of every man the right side of a hundred, and Father Christmas had spent a very enjoyable time under the table, looking at things he shouldn’t have been looking at, and teasing the dog, which could see him but not bite him. They’d experienced the traditional Christmas dinner and the traditional Christmas dinner argument, and it was now time for the traditional Christmas, falling asleep in front of the Bond film.
The ghosts loved Bond films – a lot of stunt men were killed in the making of them, and if you were a ghost, you could see the stunt-ghosts waving to the camera, making rude hand signs over the heads of the actors, or running across the set with no clothes on. Cyril and Wilfred cackled so much that they fell through the floor and ended up in the basement, Hettie pretended to be shocked, and Father Christmas remarked that with all this equality going on, he’d have thought that the female stunt ghosts would like to run around with nothing on, instead of draping themselves over James Bond like cheap whores.
After James Bond, it was time for the humans to break out the cards and the brandy. Although ghosts can’t actually drink, they can breathe in alcohol fumes, which has much the same effect, and even Santa’s aversion to Christmas fare did not extend to brandy. The best part of the whole thing was the chaos that could be created just by whispering instructions to the partly drunk guests. Santa persuaded a man who fancied himself as a bit of a card shark, to bet his car on his hand, when he was only holding a pair of twos. Cyril told a man with a rather short temper that the person sitting next to him had looked at his cards. Wilfred brought an end to the game by breathing, “They’re all cheating, you know,” into every ear, until accusations, cards, and fists had flown in all directions.
By now, the ghosts were glowing faintly orange from the brandy fumes, apart from Hettie who was green from crème de menthe. They were meandering in and out of rooms, and Santa was telling everyone that they were his best mates. A few too many buttons had come undone on Hettie’s dress, and Emily had fallen asleep with part of her in the living room, part in the dining room, and part in next door’s kitchen. Cyril and Wilfred were talking about how many shillings things had cost in the war, and how young people today didn’t know that they were born. Finally, as midnight struck, the ghosts all began to dissolve into mist. The ones who were sober enough exchanged kisses and promised to meet up again next year, and then they were gone.
Trauma Court Live
by Michael L. Garrard
The moment he saw Peter Holden’s face grinning back at him through the windscreen of the doomed Toyota, Doug Silver knew that something was wrong, very wrong.
As he struggled to wrench the steering wheel around to bring the Mercedes under control, he tried to understand what had happened. It should have been the Claimant’s face looking out at him from the other car, not that of the solicitor representing him. Someone must have changed the program.
“Pause sequence, please.”
The measured words of Mr. Justice Nash, amplified through Silver’s headset, filled the car, but, of course, it was an illusion, simply another part of the simulation.
The Mercedes and the Toyota both abruptly stopped moving, frozen in space barely a few feet apart and a fraction of a second away from their inevitable, tumultuous collision.
Silver closed his eyes as he waited to exit the program. The familiar, but neverthelessunpleasant, feeling of nausea washed over him, as his brain was disconnected from what passed for reality and was dunked back into the here and now, that being Court 31 of the Royal Courts of Justice in London’s Strand.
As Silver opened his eyes, Nash was already removing his playback headset, with a typically melodramatic flourish for the benefit of everyone present, as well as the viewers. Silver also took off his headset and looked across at his opponent, Peter Holden, who was still wearing that same infuriating grin on his face.
Nash revelled in his status as the country’s first celebrity judge and host of “Trauma Court Live!” – television’s latest hit series. It was Nash who had first persuaded the Department of Constitutional Affairs to grant the 123rd Amendment to the Civil Procedure Rules, in order to allow the show to be transmitted live from Court. The show’s format demanded the use of groundbreaking CGI simulations in all of its featured cases. Spectacular road accidents, with drivers sustaining multiple, often horrific injuries, soon proved themselves to be “ratings gold dust.” The stated purpose of the Amendment had, as ever, been the improvement of the administration of justice.
The thinking was that lawyers instructed in road accident claims would now be able to represent their clients’ interests in a way that was never truly possible before. As a result, Trauma Court Live! had rapidly become the flagship for a revival of what had long been thought to be a defunct concept in entertainment — the television reality show.
Silver was hardly in a position to complain. As the Trauma Court’s resident defendant lawyer, known as “Pain Man” to the show’s many millions of viewers, he earned far more than he had ever dreamed as a stressed-out, high-street solicitor, specialising in personal injury work. Still, whenever he was interviewed for one of the web-sheets or supermarket glossies, Silver never forgot that it played out best in the media to speak of the moral debt he owed his clients, and why it was essential that he went through every bit of the same pain and suffering that each of his unfortunate clients had to endure. The money and celebrity status was, of course, simply an added, and certainly not wholly unwelcome, bonus.
“I'm sorry, Mr Silver,”— Nash said, addressing the nearest camera, rather than looking directly toward Silver, “I’m going to accept Mr. Holden’s point. Contrary to your earlier protestations, it seems to me that Mr. Holden’s submissions on causation are entirely borne out by the report prepared by this Court’s accident expert. I am inclined to accept that the reaction times of Mr. Holden’s client were exemplary, and under the circumstances, there was very little he could reasonably have done to avoid the collision.”
With a strained smile, Silver gripped the bench before him. He knew bad grace did not play out well before the cameras. Still, Nash could be insufferable at times. It was obvious, from the moment he first reviewed the files in the case, that it would be a hard fight against Holden. His own client, a senior loans manager with an American bank, had fallen asleep at the wheel of his car on SuperToll 4, having been out on the town entertaining clients the previous night. The manager’s company, Mercedes, had drifted over from the fast lane and collided with the Toyota, driven by the claimant, a twenty-seven-year-old sales executive. Now, paralysed from the waist down due to severe spinal injuries, Holden’s crippled client sat in his wheelchair at the rear of the Court, his pretty young wife beside him. Nobody paid them much attention, except, of course, the studio camera technicians for the purposes of catching those all-important reaction-shot cut-aways
“Mr. Silver?” Nash asked. “Do you have anything to add?”
“No, My Lord,” he replied. He knew there was no point in arguing, once Nash had made up his mind.
Silver rubbed his neck. The nagging ache wasn’t only because of his exasperation with the judge. Repeated exposure to the hyper-realistic accident reconstructions was beginning to take its toll on his body. The fact that computers simulated the injuries made no difference to Silver’s brain. It seemed just as real.
Peter Holden, on the other hand, was fresh-faced and enthusiastic; his lean, clean-cut looks betraying not even the slightest degree of discomfort or worry. Still, in his early thirties, Holden had the enthusiasm and ambition, as well as the all-important physical resilience and mental stamina for the job. Silver knew that Holden loved the fame, recognition, and wealth that Trauma Court Live! had brought him, almost as much as he did.
“Commercials in five!” The studio director’s voice in his headset interrupted his thoughts.
On cue, wild applause began to erupt from the studio audience seated in what used to be the public gallery at the rear of the Court. The well-worn, leather-upholstered, wooden benches had long since been ripped out. Instead, audience members now sat ranged along rows of plush, lime-green seats, each seat equipped with data-input keypads. Although, as a Civil Court, the Trauma Court relied on a judge rather than a jury to reach a judgment, one of Nash’s changes to the format had been to allow the presiding judge to take into account the views of audience members. Television and web- viewers were also able to render their verdicts via their remote pads, home computers, or by phone.