I had no idea why Kelly had decided to smoke outside the car; the inside reeked of cigarette smoke, cheap astringent alcohol and fast food. Classical music whimpered apologetically in the background knowing it didn’t belong and air fresheners of various shapes, sizes and scents adorned every available surface. The back of the car was littered with rubbish and cigarette butts with a decaying blanket to cover the rips and stains along the back seat. I shuddered to think about what had gone on in that car; why agitated finger prints blemished the windows, why padding was torn from the headrests, why a deep opaque stain had seeped through upholstery, hiding amid the tassels of the thread-bare blanket. It was actually sickening in there.
The man in the driver’s seat was short and portly; wearing a pin striped suit with slicked back hair like tar and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. He was the sort of man that looked well presented, until you got close enough to see the dandruff on his shoulder, filthy finger nails and persistent, dubious stains embellishing his suit. In fact judging by the tailoring it wasn’t his suit at all, but one he had shadily acquired and squeezed into; pulling the creased fabric taut against his sizeable belly in an effort to look respectable. I didn’t like the look of this man at all; he made me feel queasy and that his grubby, unkemptness might be contagious. Nick and I weren’t familiar with this car (thank goodness) so we could glide through the rear door and crouch, as if seated.
I climbed into back first and as soon as Nick’s was crouched beside me, he took a few whiffs of the putrid atmosphere and his face soured “OH GOD! Jasmine, it’s like a crack den on wheels!”
“You can go if you want, but I need to see what she’s up to.”
Nick was surveying the state of the car in repulsion, “Why are you so surprised she cares that I’m dead?”
Kelly climbed into the car and was met with a gravelly demand from the suited ape of a man, “SO? What did they say?”
She seemed less than pleased with this greeting, “Hi Kelly, great to see you. Hi Gav, it’s great to see you too.’”
This was Gav? I was expecting a suave man that could seduce innocent women to the dark side, or perhaps an elderly Jewish man in a top hat and fingerless gloves, singing about picking pockets; not this bulbous, oily, scum bag. Kelly looked distinctly anxious around him and as the light caught the shining bruise that flourished around her eye, I could understand why; the shaky layer of foundation she’d tried to hide it with failed on under closer examination.
Gav exhaled a plume of smoke into the confined interior of the car, “All this wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t of screwed the first job up.”
Nick tried to fan the smoke away from his face to no avail. “What job? What the hell are they on about?”
I shushed him so not to miss any of the parallel conversation in the front seats, “Kelly was going to rob you after . . . you know . . . you did your thing.”
Kelly just glared straight ahead, her voice devoid of expression, “This wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t screwed the second job up and killed him.”
Nick’s voice began a considerate whisper but lost composure near the end, “What do you mean she was going to rob me? Wait . . . did she say he killed me?”
Gav pointed an irate, podgy finger towards Kelly, “We’ve spoken about this. There was a complication and I dealt with it.”
Shuffling forward, Nick strained to get a better look at the slimy thug in the front seat “Shit… this guy killed me?”
“What if they find him?” Kelly enquired getting her makeup out to touch up the dense lid of foundation, covering that colossal bruise
“He’s in the lake on the hotel’s golf course, I’m not risking it. We’re leaving tonight.” Gav seemed to relish the secret of where Nick’s body was hidden. The words rolled off of his tongue on a crest of tobacco fumes with a malicious, tranquil ease.
Nick’s voice wasn’t quite so undisturbed “I’m in a fucking lake?!”
I was gob smacked, unable to respond. Kelly put her makeup away with a sulking huff “I’m not the one who killed him, why do I have to leave?” her voice was so shrill it made my eyes squint, like a bitter taste was left in my mouth.
Gav’s face was darkening in anger; blood rushing to the surface, veins fracturing the white of his eyeballs like lace “If you don’t want to end up in jail, or with a knife your back like that guy, you’re coming with me!” He ground the cigarette end into the dashboard, extinguishing the remaining embers and threw the stained filter behind him.
The butt flew through the air, through my head and became the latest addition to garnish the back seat. The taste of pungent, burnt tobacco filled my mouth as it soared through my face and provoked a gag to climb in my throat “EURGH. Oh God! EURGH”
Nick had followed the path of the cigarette end but the burgundy discoloration on the seats upholstery had caught his attention; making his voice crack in alarm, “Jasmine . . . this is my blood. . . . I was still alive when they packed me into the boot. . . .”
Gav continued scalding Kelly; rogue beads of spittle traversing the space between them in his aggravation “And besides if you hadn’t run out that house crying about how you ‘saw a ghost’ none of this would have happened in the first place!”
Upon hearing a ghost being mentioned, I stopped dead; deer in the headlights. My stomach dropped, breath caught and even though my usual bodily numbness prevailed, I swear I could feel a sweltering blush of guilt rising up my body. Nick’s head gradually turned from the blood stain to me with strained, disbelieving eyes which made my heart stop.
Kelly continued in that same vile whining, edging back in her seat, away from Gav who was practically frothing at the mouth “Something was in there! It chased me out of the house!”
The pair continued to argue amongst themselves but it was muted under the intense silence between Nick and me. I was waiting for his reaction, but for an age he said nothing, eyes still fixed to me. “A ghost chased her out of the house? Any idea which ghost Jasmine?”
This doesn’t look good. My little stunt with the mirror writing had done a great deal more damage than intended “I may have scared her a little . . . but I didn’t chase her out the house! I was looking out for you, she could have hurt you!”
At my last defence of protecting him, Nick’s brows flung upwards in astonishment, voice raising an octave “Hurt me? Like she could have killed me? And ‘looking out’ for me? That’s funny, cause I’m in a suitcase at the bottom of a lake right now! This is all your fault!”
The dials and lights in the car began to glow as the quarrel between us escalated; Gav and Kelly stopped their bickering to stare in apprehension at the anonymous luminosity that was infecting the car.
I was getting wound up, I could feel the coils tightening in my chest; he couldn’t pin this all on me “How is this all my fault?! The amount of girls you brought home, it was going to happen at some point!”
“So what if I did bring girls back?! Fucking hell Jasmine, I was happy!”
“If you were happy it would have been one girl Nick, not half the city.”
“Oh great, I died because you were jealous; Jealous of LIVING people, doing LIVING things when you are DEAD.”
Nick has been dead all of five minutes; he can’t even begin to know how it feels. He’s always had company; he’s always had me “Of course I was jealous! Watching trashy girls come home night, after night, after night with the guy I L. . .” I held myself back just before the last word broke free and made everything twice as complicated but Nick caught on regardless.
“What?” he replied, still hot with rage “What were you going to say?” He knew the answer; why torture me and force repeat confession?
The lights in the car were gleaming like neon now and the front seat passengers were examining the dash board in terror, trying to discover its origin.
“‘L. . .’ what Jasmine? Loathed? Liked?”
“LOVED! Okay?!” I roared, knocking him back with surprise and all the bulbs in the car absorbed the energy of my emotional coil snapping. Lighting up to maximum intensity the filaments hummed in cautioning harmony before bursting with malicious pops of glass that palpitated throughout the car.
“Do you believe me now?!” Kelly squealed, protecting her eyes. Gav slammed his foot down onto the pedals and the car rumbled into life. As the beaten up auto screeched away, I drifted through the back seats to be left standing in the road but Nick was carried away unable to pass through the boot of the car. The familiarity of where his last few minutes were spent dragging him down the street. As Gav and Kelly screeched off into the distance, Nick leapt through the side door and into someone’s front garden.
His face was livid as he marched back to where I was stood, hair dishevelled and cheeks reddened. “Are you saying this started for you before I was dead?”
I needed to get out of this conflict; my palms were sweating and my head was spinning. Other ghosts from up the street were coming to their windows and watching our dispute; peaking round curtains and wondering why these two ghosts were quarreling. Ghosts don’t quarrel; ghosts don’t form any sort of attachment with each other worthy of such a heated disagreement. The spectators even came out of their houses in awe to behold the dead lovers tiff, whispering amongst themselves like rustling leaves; voices jarring my concentration with rogue words like “unheard of,” “impossible,” and “keepers.”
I hastily scanned the crowd for the twins, caught between the throws of fury and the sickening expectation of seeing their innocent, expressionless faces, but Nick was still chasing an answer “Did it Jasmine?”
I couldn’t deal with this. It was too public, too revealing; we needed to continue this in the cottage or cease fire. I raised my hands in defeat and turned to walk back to the house but Nick followed behind me. “Don’t run away from me Jasmine,” he caught up and grabbed my arm to slow me down, “Don’t run away from me!”
His demanding grasp blocked the audience out of my mind and provoked me. I span round and bellowed at him, “What do you want from me Nick? YES, it started before you died; a long time before you died.”
“Well, the whole thing has worked out in your favour hasn’t it?”
I was overflowing with that nauseous feeling that this was the point of no return, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Did you do it on purpose?” his voice was dense with the severity of his accusation, “Did you mean to get me killed?”
I felt my heart cracking, leaking desperation into my rage, “How can you even ask me that? Of course I didn’t!”
“I don’t know what to think anymore Jasmine. You can see how this looks”
This could not be happening. I have waited for my shot with Nick for five years and now it was all crumbling to ashes in front of me. It felt like my heart had been poisoned and was staggering through its last fated beats before collapsing to create an acidic void in my chest. “What do you want me to do Nick? Say I’m sorry? Wish it never happened? What can I do to make this right?”
Nick’s face untwisted from its rage; his ferocity was doused with grief “You can’t make this right; I can’t see my family or get married or do anything because I’m dead” tears gathered in his eyes, but he refused to release them this far into the fray; instead they fueled the poison in his final close “I wish I’d never died . . . No, in fact, I wish you’d never died then you wouldn’t have interfered and fucked everything up!”
My fight was gone. I had lost him. Despair infested my insides, expelling any glimmer of hope on one final dizzying breath. The reality of our words hitting me like a bullet in my chest, “If that’s how you feel, fine”
“. . . FINE”
