Ghost Life: Part I

A novella, or short story, in a series of installments.

Part I: The feast of Stephen.

  Drafted again.  Another fucking relative.  And no occasion for false consolation.  None of this, “he died in his sleep”, “sure, he didn’t suffer”, or “he had a quare long life, sure” – none of that.  Dominic died slowly, from leukaemia, and he suffered, by fuck did he suffer.  He was only forty seven, the poor fucker, only forty seven, and he’d spent most of that in jail with loyalist psychos because of a string of armed robberies.  His wife, Auntie Margo, had been eighteen years his senior, but her vivacity had prevented this from being a barrier to their fling, and marriage.  That was only two years ago.  Now she looked frazzled, washed out, almost deader than he was.  Most of their marriage had been spent with him being diagnosed, then going through a series of treatments, each of which seemed to logarithmically accelerate his degeneration.  They had clung on to the dwindling odds of remission until the poor bastard expired his last puff of air.  And there were a lot of people who had once called him all the sleekit bastards and scums of the earth under the sun now commending his memory to their pint glasses.

Malice.

Malice: a short story.

"This is how the rumour mill starts: A young man known by the cognomen, "Beaker", is beaten to death less than ten yards from my front door, turning the spot, just by a lamp-post, into a permanent floral shrine. His mother, father, his brothers and one baby sister all gather around this spot and read aloud the messages left with the floral condolences. Messages asking why, how, and when would it all stop. Another victim of the cycle of violence and hatred between the divided communities of you know where. Already, before the blood dries on the tarmac, he's canonised, he has the status of "victim", he is a candidate for beatitude. What was supposed to be a "punishment beating" for some disloyalty to the Loyalist cause turned into the manslaughter of Barry William Smith, twenty-one, the gawky, bare-forked offspring of Colin and Roberta Smith. A cycle of whispered canard and humming gossip is set off that sees half-believed stories bruited by workmates and school children, a rash of heated words which connote more than they denote transmitted through the pubs and playgrounds, the two most famous vectors for such derangement. Somehow, a series of rumours that were otherwise impossible to credit are hi-jacked by some malicious, calculating soul and transmuted into common coinage. I, it is said, am in part responsible for the boy's death.