The dead

Nobody else notices the dead bobbing around in the very air we breathe. The dead - or perhaps I should say their remains, their essence - are like the summer husks and pollen and seeds and silken threads that jostle with shards of light and send the swifts tearing across the sky like rips in the clouds. The dead, our continuing companions, ask nothing of us, but remain with us, fainter than jellyfish, indeterminate as coral, inanimate yet helplessly on the move. They do their jostling without sound. No-one else seems to notice, but I do. I walk carefully through them, cautiously so as not to irk their hidden sensibilities. I duck under clusters trapped in the lee of breezes by azaleas and buddleias and laburnums like detritus on an ebb tide. I ensure that when I throw sticks for the dog I skim the peripheries of their thronging schools.

That's why it was so surprising to find myself the subject of an intense but amused stare from a well-dressed lady in The Botanical Gardens the other day, as I carefully ducked under a shoal of coagulated deceased. I was forced to pass her by, being on a trajectory between the magnolias and a large hawthorn; turning back would have seemed rude. As I approached her, she smiled once again and said, 'I'm sorry for asking, and this probably sounds stupid, but were you avoiding the dead just then?' I took a deep breath, to allow myself thinking time; whether to lie or to admit some form of collusion, a possible shared madness, two partners in a crime.

The world ceased to turn for a brief moment, then I exhaled and replied, ''Yes, I slipped under them, just out of politeness.'

She seemed relieved. Less than five feet tall, I guessed, dressed in a twin set of indeterminate age, grey hair in a bob, the eyes of a good person, smiley, pale, clear of concience and bitterness. She looked me up and down. 'I don't think they mind if you jostle them, you know.' Then she motioned towards a bench.

I felt I had been caught in a criminal act, my mind prised open and its contents exposed to the curious and the suspicious. But I went to the bench dutifully and sat at the far end. She brazenly sat in the middle. I waited.

'Well,' she began, 'this is odd, isn't it?'

'I guess it is. But how did you know?' A pigeon clumsily fluttered to our feet and goosestepped up and down warily.

'It's a long story, or a tall tale, whichever you prefer.' The old lady seemed to smile at every opportunity. 'I've been watching the dead for some years now, and watching the people who watch the dead. Oh yes. I'm sure you, like me, wasn't sure what they were at first. Distortions of the atmosphere, perhaps, floating gossamer cases of some sort, even spots on the eyes. It took me a long time to figure them out. In the end it was their faint, plaintive cries that convinced me that they were indeed the dead.'

'Cries? How?'

'As they move or drift around, they emit a sound, a kind of, um, squeal. You can hear it too, right?'

'I, I don't know. I can't always make them out, and I'm deaf in one ear. I miss a lot of sounds other people hear.'

'There are more of us than you might think, you know.'

'How do you mean?' I flicked out a foot onto the path of freshly fallen blossom to make the increasingly precocious pigeon scurry away, like a lame carrier-bag man.

'I can tell,' and she smiled away, beautifically, 'I can always tell: you think you are alone, but there are quite a few of us. I meet them occasionally, though, like you, they are shy, they don't like to talk about it...'

'I never asked for it, to be able to see...'

'The dead!'

'I don't know why me. Why should it be me, of all people? Why be given such an insight without knowing what to do with it, or what it means?'

'Oh yes, it's an insight alright,' and she positively glowed with joy at this point, 'It's the greatest insight you will ever have. And the more you acknowledge their presence, the more you will understand. What do you think is the greatest unspoken preoccupation of all these people?' and she indicated with a delicate hand the passers-by: the students between their studies, the amateur photographers getting too close to the garish blossom with their lenses, the old men with terriers on extendable leads, the fearful and unhappy strollers, none of them aware of the dead in their midst.

'Death?'

'Yes. And of course they push their fears and unknowingness back and back through their lives until it is too late. But you and I, living with the dead, brushing against them, nudging them like birthday balloons, we are already embracing the greatest of unknowns. Nothing can torment us in the way that death can, no mystery can destroy us with its superstition any more. We are free of that ultimate dread, and therefore, we are trully free.' And she laughed out loud, looking around triumphantly, at the briefly curious park people, as though challenging them to dispute her truth.

'I'd better go,' I sighed, gathering myself, as though I had somehow become disassembled while she evangelised in her rapturous, secular tone.

'Of course. And if we don't meet again, remember, they don't mind being bumped around a little.' And with a final chuckle she got up to go first.

As I stood up, I felt the faintest of sensations on my ears, my hair, and the nape of my neck. They silently moved away to allow egress. Perhaps the dead had been listening in, gathering around for the news, trying to gain their own insight into the living. They made not a single sound for me, just peacefully, serenely hung in the peripheries of my field of vision, in the zone of my brief existence, like a star or a smut.

I moved through their impossible presence, their formless shapes filling my expanding world in their millions, billions even, squeezing, octopus-like, into every gap and space of my life.

The old lady drifted away on her stubby legs and melted into the distant foliage of a strawberry tree. I turned for home, pushing and butting with a new found glee at the swarms of long-forgotten, using windmill arms and a jerking head to cannon them into themselves. A new unselfconciousness took hold of me. It must have looked like a strange dance, the actions of a wakeful epileptic. But I kept on jostling them, moving them around like a juggler of clouds. This is how you will know me, the man in The Botanical Gardens keeping the dead on the move, communing with all that ever lived, unknowing of rain, sunbeams through the sesile oaks, the sharp winds, silent and animate, unafraid forever of the dead. Their capsules of empy time, like dark energy, like the tablets they keep making me take, present yet dissolving like the fresh blossoms in the rain.