Disassociate The Thought From The Action
What? How can I possibly do that? I am a doctor of sorts. I urge to heal the ill. They ask of me many silly things - the masters, not the ill. The ill ask me for nothing, but they wait for my services with those sad and swollen eyes. The masters ask me frequently for things a man cannot achieve. Lick thine elbow. Rhyme with orange. Walk upon the sun. Raise the dead. Disassociate the thought from the action. Bring us wine.
Let me tell you more about the masters. They are dull. They wear black capes and shadowy moustaches. They bicker constantly. They are internal, repeating manifests of my quickening mind, non-existants, lost voices clambering for my audience. They ask me to hoot and whoop when decorum demands silence. They prevent me from stepping close to a windy cliff edge.
The ill are my people. They make the best soup and have the best tunes. They’re always home when I’m wandering in loneliness. Their love is a strange adoration. I am the figure to which they sacrifice the sacrificed. Their last money. Their single daughter. Their stained poetry. Caskets and barrels are torn from the aged insulant and opened upon me as I sit in the father’s chair, while they cough and hoop from behind an embroidered screen in applause.
Sometimes the ill are indifferent. Sometimes they are beyond my levels of help. Sometimes they heal themselves, and scuttle away when they see me approach. Sometimes their poor bodies take the strain, and with time their symptoms sometimes fade. Will I always live by my trade? The ill are always ill, but will the ill always accept my bill? They probably will.
But I can’t be sure. I’m preoccupied by the masters now. It affects my abilities to heal. I like to forget my patients. I leave the wooden chart of my appointments in a pig ditch. I hoist my satchel on my shoulder and walk towards whichever building in this town looks most like an inn.
It’s actually a hotel for horses, but after asking for a drink they take me to an area where a lonely horse “can eat breakfast”. I’m happy with whatever whisky you have. Well I think I might try whichever is cheapest. Thank you. The masters tell him I have no coins for him. I bite my lip, and tell the kindly keeper that I do have a roll of coins in my trouser pocket, but it is the nature of the masters to separate my matter from safety. He leans in.
And the keeper leans in and tells me he’s ill. One look at his eyes - one smell of his pallid musk - how he tells me he is an ill. As sure as one look at my my medical satchel and blooded bib tell him I am a doctor. He mumbles his sorry list of symptoms. I put my hands on his forehead and tell him to avoid warm work. He wavers my slate. Life is easy, the masters remind us.
The sun is low in the nondescript sky as I shuffle out into the street, over the soil strewn cobbles. The masters tell me to urinate, and urinate fast. Against that wall, one says. Into the street fountain! Better! Another exclaims.
A fine thing that would be. These people are confused enough with their death. No time to be caught poisoning their water supply with my liquids.
Dear me, I think as I urinate openly in front of a closed belt buckle shop, I’m going to be sick.
If you’ve just finished reading that, well done. I don’t want to put the following up as a proper article as it starts off going nowhere and ends up getting nowhere fast. It’s a dialogue between two fictional people and was written for a radio play that was never recorded. Hope you’re all well. Love you, bye.
——
If there’s one thing I remember about him, it was his laugh. I remember him laughing this one Christmas… the sound of it shook the walls. Not that it was loud. It wasn’t loud. It was like dragging a rake over pebbles.
What else do you remember about him?
He never was around in the weeks. Friday and Saturday nights I’d see him. He’d appear in the doorway and say
In the front doorway?
The bedroom… my bedroom doorway. I remember being in pyjamas, so just before my brother and I would go to sleep he’d appear. Shake his big fist at us in a jolly way. “Hello boys!” he’d say in his thin strangled voice. And then he’d always say the same few sentences “They killed me on this spot in 1843!”
Any variation each time he said them?
Oh sure, sure. He knew he’d appeared before. He recognised us. “They killed me on this spot in 1843 - cut off my head and nailed my body to the tree”
The tree? The one that’s standing out there in the garden?
I think so. Sometimes, though, he’d get bored of this performance and just come in and sit on the bed. He was quite a depressed ghost.
Did your parents know anything about these visitations?
Yes, although they didn’t condone it. Once my dad saw him in the hallway and chased him out with some holy water in a balloon. But he’d come back and laugh about it later. He thought my dad was a prick.
A prickard.
What?
Err… prickard. That’s the kind of language they would have used in the 1840s.
He had a perfectly good grasp of modern English. He’d float into cinemas and watch films.
Really? Most spirits are bound by their final moment of torment…
Christ that’s morbid. Sorry. I know you’re an expert in the paranormal…
Doctor. I’m a doctor of the paranormal sciences…
Sorry, yes. But sometimes I wonder if academic types - not just yourself - know what it’s like to grow up with a ghost. He used to laugh about his timely and unjustified death.
Case studies going back as far as the 60s have shown…
He’d make his spectral guts roll out from where they’d cut him. “Whoops there,” he’d say and my brother and I - really - we’d just go crazy.
Do you have any more cigarettes?
No, I’ve smoken them all.
Well, I’d like to say that these sessions have been very helpful, David.
You make it sound as if this is the last.
I think I’ve got enough information on…
But there’s so much more of Staldhart Pete’s stories I can tell you! Listen to this: one night he came in with a television set he’s stolen from the local Dixons…
David. Look. You had a lot of fun with your ghost, and that’s great for you. But it doesn’t fit in with the message I’m trying to impart in my new book…
What, that all ghosts are there to scare people? That they’re all “Mmmnnn hmmmnnn I’m going to spook you”? Well it’s NOT like that and there are SOME ghosts out there…
It’s just not interesting. You might as well be talking about your neighbour, or a wacky uncle.
What about the truth?
Forget the truth. People want to be scared. Why do you think there’s all those voodoo TV programs?
Well…
And why do you think people go to Alton Towers? Or watch Rentaghost?
(pause)
I loved Staldhart Pete. He’s a part of history. Local history and my history.
Yes, that’s right. But it’s not interesting or fun. Not like Frankula or Bamboozo the Dead Magician.
Who?
My two latest great finds.
Did you make them up?
Yes. But there based on two junkies I used to live next to. Who died. So they might be ghosts now.
Well what if Staldhart Pete came back and gave you a spooking you’d never forget?
(pause)
Here he IS NOW!
Where?
Over there! Watch out!
Where, David?
Oh, fuck off. Get out of my bedroom.
Both of those are absolutely brilliant. I would love to see the second one acted. Your writing gets better and better. Really weird, and it never tries to mean too much, but ends up bigger than that. Great! Fantastical!
I started reading the first one in the voice of Gollum (in my head). Once that wore off I thought I wasn’t going to like it, but I quite do actually.
I would LOVE to hear the second one as a radio play. Yes, it went absolutely nowhere, but I found it hilarious. I am sitting under a ceiling fan and chuckling to myself. I am really meant to be making a nut loaf.