Exit, Ghost

Okala Elesia

When the Tory minister texts me out of the blue requesting that I bring poppers to his flat, my first thought is, why is this Tory minister texting me? He’s not even one of the good-looking ones. Later on though, much later, I wonder, no, wait – how is this Tory minister texting me? and I reply, arranging to meet him.

The Tory Minister answers his door in cotton slacks, wearing sandals with socks. The TV is on, playing highlights from an old England game. We make awkward small talk on the landing, then he invites me in and we make awkward small talk in his living room. The place is desolate, desperate. It’s probably not even his 6th best flat.  After a couple of drinks, The Minister loosens up. He says he is eager to get the party started, stating on several occasions, “I want to get this party started,” and, “this party, let’s start it.” Later, he asks if I brought the poppers. I reply that I didn’t know where to get any but, having consulted the internet, have taken it upon myself to concoct a herbal ass-relaxer from things sourced from my neighbour’s shed. The Minister does not look happy.

“I’m not drinking that,” he says, shaking his head at the half-filled vinegar jar in my hand. “You’re a damn fool, Minister,” I shout at the Minister, who is now standing over me.

“Minister?” he says, his head ballooning in size like a cartoon.

“Tory Minister,” I say, swigging from the jar.

The swill is mostly fine. It tastes like a salad dressing an old boyfriend used to make.

Except–

When I come to, the Tory Minister, who only moments ago, had been clutching his tanned dome in utter despair, is now seated at his living room table calmly punching out sums on a calculator.

“Hmm,” he says glancing over at me and then back to the calculator, “I can pay you up to when you died, is that OK?”

I look down at my still body. From this angle it looks washed out, like parts of me are going missing.

“Am I dead?” I ask.

“What you drank I wouldn’t even use on my weeds,” he says.

The Tory Minister tells me the soul takes fourteen hours to untether itself from the body. I don’t ask him how he knows this. So until then I’ll just have to hang around. Not with him, of course; at midday he has to go and open a school in Harrow. No hard feelings, he says indicating my stiff body with a smile, and we both laugh.

“There are some painters and decorators coming later,” he says apropos of nothing on his way out, “they’ll know what to do.”

#

You can’t do much in this state; can’t stray far from the body, can’t open doors, can’t call relatives, can’t shut the bulging, petrified eyes poking from the face of your awful corpse in a terrible photograph of the end. Instead you spend hours in the flat of the Tory Minister thinking about the fourteen hours and why you responded to the text of the Tory Minister in the first place. When the answer doesn’t present itself – and it won’t – you just kind of sit on all fours staring at your body. Not a bad bod. Would have responded well to the gym. Could have been better in the shoulders, probably.

This gloom is interrupted later on by two women. They are wearing overalls. The decorators, I presume. They force the door and make a beeline for where I’m lying. One, the plumper of the two, shakes her head. They get to work straight away; pulling and stretching and massaging parts of me that are gone. And then they start breaking things.

“Hey! You guys aren’t decorators!” I squeal limply.

They fold my torso in on itself and pack the whole thing into a box. This is taken to a van outside. I have to marvel at the lengths they’ve gone with their costumes. Even the van, a little long in the tooth, bears a name on the sides: Margate Painters. The van they drive to a warehouse somewhere in South East London, at least that’s what the signs say. It’s here I’m carved up. The shorter of the two, a plump lady with dyed red hair, is at least somewhat sympathetic to my situation.

“People used to drink weed-killer all the time before all this political correctness,” she says, before adding quietly, “just so you know: your parts are entering an industrial freezer that will aid the snack-ification.”

It is some time before shorty and beanpole return, but when they do, it’s to move my pieces again; this time to a kitchen in the same facility to be with a sour-faced man they call Gary. They disappear once more. Gary spreads the parts out on a tray and seasons them with Chinese Five-Spice.

“The Garys are dying out,” I yell over the sound of a flame-torch, “you might be the last one.” He ignores the bait. And why not? He probably isn’t being paid enough for any of this. The birds of a feather come back, where my body, now commodified into meat squares, is wedged tightly into several hundred sandwich bags. I smell faintly of burned bacon.

“You’re going away now. You’re going to live with The Speaker.”

“The what?”

“The Speaker of the House. Only thing he eats.”

We head back to the court foyer and the van. I ask beanpole her name. She tells me it is Sinita but that that ultimately doesn’t matter because these questions are only the ghost-thirst talking. “You don’t know me or my ghost-thirst!” I yell, punching through the van’s interior with my phantom hands. Sinita says to rest because The Speaker always has an appetite.

The box is hauled to the front door of some country residence. Could be Kent. Could be anywhere. Just then, a pale lumbering figure appears behind the front door of the house.

#

The Speaker pops meat squares like they are going out of fashion. After several handfuls, he begins to feel his muscles weaken; enough to extricate his skeleton from his ass: first the feet, the legs, and then the rest. Like someone struggling out of a wetsuit. The squelching is terrible. When he’s fully removed from the flesh, he stands before me, a pile of walking bones, unsteady on his legs. And then he jumps into the pool.

In a roundabout way, I guess they worked. The poppers, I mean. Goddamn.

Except The Speaker can hear everything.

“Quiet, ass-snacks!” he shouts between laps.

I watch him transition from backstroke to front-crawl. His form is staggering, cutting through water like a shark. What talent! What unbelievable talent! I look once more at the heap of skin and organs he crawled from; the heart still beating, unseen parts that still twitch. Meanwhile, I’m waiting. Waiting for the profound thing that comes after. The fourteenth hour.

Exit Ghost was originally published in Issue #29

Okala Elesia is feeling okay. He lives in London and has work published in Extra Teeth and elsewhere. Find him on Instagram at @yellahands.