The Pervert Ghost

I got out from under him, walking right through him and the bench. No reaction at all from the fat fuck, but so absorbed was he in eating his fried chicken that even if this had all happened yesterday he might have sat on me without registering my presence anyway.

Ambling over to a shopfront window to a boutique, I could not see my reflection in the glass, and some teenagers who were riding their skateboards through the mall way too fast skated right through me as though I wasn't there.

And I wasn't there. My mind forced me to confront a truth that I already knew. I was dead and now walking around in some sort of bizarre afterlife. I was a ghost.

Yet still, I hoped that somehow people would notice me, that I wasn't all alone and dead in the world of the living. Nearby were one of Adelaide's most iconic tourist attractions, the pig statues, four of them in all. As was often the case there were young children playing on the pig statues, and I thought about how I had seen documentaries about the supernatural and how children were often the first to pick up that there was something wrong in a haunted house.

Kids were scared of ghosts, I thought to myself. They will be able to sense me at the very least. I went over to the pig statues and the kids happily carried on playing. No reaction at all. Somewhat mean-spiritedly and immaturely, I tried to scare them.

"Hey look at me, I'm a ghost, a very scary ghost and I'm coming to get you! Boo, roar, oooooh!" No reaction from the children. "Boogedy, boogedy, boogedy!" I called. I waved my arms, continuing to make ghost noises, but to no avail. The kids did not see, hear or sense me and nor did anyone else and I gave up after about two futile minutes.

Walking further up Rundle Mall, I came across a second iconic statue, the 'Malls Balls', two large silver spheres one on top of each other. It was another popular tourist spot, and some Asian tourists were keen to have a photo taken, an old lady obliging them.

My brother had owned a book on paranormal mysteries, and one page featured eerie images of 'ghosts' that had appeared in people's photographs, whether holiday happy snaps or at times wedding photos. The camera owned by the tourists was a modern one, a digital camera, and the photo would be apparent straight away. If I intruded into their photo, would a slim, blonde haired young man appear in the image? Perhaps a spectral, shadowy ill-defined image?

I stood behind the Asian tourists to see what would happen. "Say cheese," said the old lady as she took their photo, the tourists thanking her and checking the image on the camera's screen. I could not see myself, and nor could anyone else. So much for that theory.

I walked further up through King William Street, and reached Gouger Street where many restaurants and the famed Adelaide Central Markets could be found. Of course, nobody could see me or hear me as I walked through the fresh produce area and other food stalls, nor any of the other market stalls in the large undercover building. I then picked up the scent of incense and followed it to a stall filled with new age paraphernalia and candles, and it advertised tarot readings. My hope swelled. Perhaps the people running the stall were psychic and could communicate with me? But I was to be disappointed. They showed no reaction to my presence and nor did any of the customers and those who visited for readings. Perhaps they could only sense certain spirits and not others and maybe I wasn't a ghost they could sense? Maybe I had to be dead longer? Or maybe all this sixth sense and supernatural was nonsense? But then how to explain my current situation?

For the rest of the day I walked through Adelaide, pondering my predicament. I could see living people, but they could not see me. But obviously I was not the only person to die in the history of the world. What of other ghosts? Where were they? Why couldn't I see them? Or maybe one ghost could not see another ghost? I hadn't even been dead 24 hours, I had no idea.

I also found myself learning -- or trying to learn -- how physics worked in my new state. It was all very strange. I could sit on something such as a chair if I put my mind to it, otherwise I would go through it, and it was the same with vehicles. Standing in front of a car in slow moving traffic, the car drove straight through me with neither the driver or passengers feeling anything, however when I wanted to board the Glenelg tram I stepped aboard with no issues.

Down at Glenelg, the afternoon dark and damp, I made my way through the humid atmosphere and the many people who were at the beach to enjoy the warm and humid, the palms that grew in the area adding to the tropical feeling of the day. I waded out into the waters of the Southern Ocean, getting immersed but unable to get wet. Getting out of the water, I walked through Colley Park filled with large Norfolk Island pine trees and saw a middle-aged couple working their dogs, two black Labradors.

Recalling that animals were more sensitive to the supernatural than humans, I went over to the dogs hoping to get a reaction. Nothing, the dogs looked straight through me and walked straight through me, with no response to my presence at all.

Going back to the tram stop, passing the Glenelg Town Hall, museum and the War Memorial, I went into an ice cream parlor where a group of teenage girls were getting ice cream cones. One girl had a Blue Heaven ice cream, my favorite flavor of ice cream. I couldn't resist trying to take a lick of the bright blue ice cream, but when I did I could not feel the ice cream as cold, nor could I taste it and the girl carried on her way with her friends licking her ice cream, clueless that a ghost had tried to take a lick.

So ghosts could see, hear and smell things, but they had no sense of taste or touch? It was weird. I tried to pick up a fork from a table at a nearby café from where the diners had gotten up to leave, but my hands went through it rather than being able to pick it up. A waiter clearing the table picked up and removed the fork along with the other cutlery, plates and glasses as oblivious to me as everyone else in the world of the living.

I was going to catch the tram back to Adelaide, but changed my mind and decided to test out this ghostly endurance thing further, so ran back to Adelaide all the way along the Anzac Highway. It was a journey I had run before during a fun run, a distance of some 15 kilometers and was puffing, hot and sweaty by the end but today like when I ran to the city this morning I felt nothing, and just the same as when I jogged through the parklands to the western side of Adelaide city as when I left Glenelg.

This was quite extraordinary. I had been fit when alive, but now I was dead my endurance seemed limitless. Did this work for people who were unfit in life? Like the fat guy in Rundle Mall earlier that morning, who sat through me eating fried chicken, chips and doughnuts? If he died -- which might be sooner rather than later given his terrible diet and consequent obesity problem -- would he also be able to run long distances at a fast pace? Who knew?

Back in the city, I continued to wander around aimlessly through the city streets. What else could I do? Although people could not see me, for some reason I felt the need to be around living people as dusk and then night fell over Adelaide. I went to a musical theater show at the Adelaide Convention Center, then to a black tie cocktail party at the large hotel next to the train station and finally into the pubs and nightclubs found along Hindley Street in Adelaide's West End. But ghosts could only find limited pleasure from musical theater, from cocktail parties and from pubs and clubs, and I felt pretty forlorn as things wound down in the early hours of the morning, drunk patrons spilling out onto the street.

Using my new ability to walk through walls and glass, I went to Rundle Mall stepping effortlessly through the glass doors of a department store and lying down on a display sofa, pondering what was next.

*

I awoke the next morning hoping against hope I was alive again, but was still well and truly dead, not that I was really expecting things to be different. Still pondering how ghosts could sleep but otherwise did not seem to feel tired, I walked straight through the glass doors and into the mall. The bad weather over Adelaide had cleared and it was a bright and sunny dawn, the sunrise earlier today as Adelaide had switched its clocks back from daylight savings time overnight to Central Standard Time overnight.

Going down to the River Torrens, I joined in other people enjoying the fine dawn by running around the parklands, just to be around people. I thought about my family? Did they know I was dead? Of course they did, the police would have told them yesterday. How about my friends? I wanted to see if they were okay, to go home to the Fleurieu Peninsula to check on my parents and siblings but at the same time I didn't want to see them upset.

Again unsure of what to do, I went over to trendy Norwood and then to another trendy area just to the South of the city called Unley, just to be among the living even though I was dead. During this time, I wondered about what came next? Would I 'cross over'? If so, when? Perhaps all dead people had this transition period after they died, then moved on when they realized they were dead?

I had also heard theories that people who died had relatives and friends who had passed on who came back to help them cross over. My logical side of my brain told me this was just fiction, but here I was a ghost walking around dead so maybe this was the case after all? Being dead at 18-years-old I didn't know a lot of deceased people who would come back for me to cross me over, but I could name three at least.

First was my Grandpa Joe, my paternal grandfather, the only one of my four grandparents to have passed away. He was a really nice guy, lots of fun, but sadly he had succumbed to mesothelioma a few years ago, a legacy of working with asbestos in his younger years. Grandpa Joe would come back for me for sure.

Second was my Uncle Robert. He was actually Dad's cousin rather than his brother, but he and Dad were closer than Dad and his actual brother. Uncle Robert had died of a freak heart attack in his 40s in early 1997, it was hard to believe he had been gone 4 years and his wife and own kids were devastated when he died. Maybe Robert, a guy who always loved jokes would come back all smiling and laughing to take me back to the afterlife?

Third was the most tragic, my cousin Natalie. She was the eldest daughter of Mum's sister, and born in 1976, six years older than me. She had often babysat me and my siblings and she was such a nice girl, really pretty with a smile that could light up the room and always willing to help anyone.

And it was this virtue that cost Natalie her life. While waiting for a train at a railway station in suburban Adelaide early in 1995, there was a mother struggling with three young children and a screaming baby in a pram, with one of the boys -- a toddler -- running off and falling onto the tracks with a train fast approaching.

From what witnesses had described, Natalie had leaped off the platform and onto the rail tracks, grabbing the screaming toddler and getting him to safety. Unfortunately, the train approaching was an express train not stopping at this station, and the train driver had no time to stop, nor did Natalie have enough time to get herself off the line and back onto the platform, with inevitable and tragic results.

Although Natalie had died heroically and in fact was given a posthumous award for her bravery it didn't make losing her at the age of just 18 any easier. She had two younger brothers and while the older brother was heartbroken, the youngest one ran off the rails completely after his sister's death, unable to accept that she was gone.

Even six years on, I still found it hard to accept that my favorite cousin was gone and that I was never going to see Natalie again. Or would I? Perhaps Natalie would be the one to come back and cross me over too?

I felt rather melancholy as I walked through the parkland on the southern CBD thinking about how Natalie had died at 18 years of age, and now I had too. The only difference was that Natalie had died heroically saving the life of a child, while I was a classic case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. How else could you classify dying from a lightning strike?

All through the fine and sunny Sunday I aimlessly walked through Adelaide, going to the zoo and museum to relieve the monotony, hoping that Grandpa Joe, Uncle Robert or my cousin Natalie would appear to cross me over and take me to the afterlife, if indeed there was such a place. But they did not, and as night fell over South Australia I could only think about what lay ahead for me.

*

My unusual death was freaky enough to make it onto the news in Adelaide, not the lead story, nowhere the lead story but buried among the human interest segments. It was also in the newspaper, again nowhere near the front page but it was in there.

I spent the week walking and running around in a world where I could see, hear or smell things, but nobody had any idea I was there. Because I needed a post mortem and with Easter falling the next week, my funeral was delayed until the Tuesday after Easter.

I really didn't want to go to my own funeral where people would be upset, but felt people would be upset if I didn't for some strange reason, I was the one who was dead, it didn't make a lot of sense. But then nothing made a lot of sense in the strange new reality in which I lived, or to be more accurate, did not live.

None of the other passengers on the train and then the bus out to Victor Harbor knew about the ghostly, non-fare paying passenger sharing the ride with them, and soon I was back in the area where I had grown up on the Fleurieu Peninsula. I thought maybe being at my own funeral would be some comfort to my family, or that maybe this strange state I was currently in would last only until the funeral and when I was laid to rest and everyone said their final goodbyes, then I would cross over and be at peace. But then what of people who died and had no funerals, people who were lost at sea or who died in plane crashes for instance?

At the front of the chapel there was a large photograph of me taken earlier this year, with 'Colin James Murphy, 1st June 1982 -- 6th April 2001' inscribed underneath, the same on the funeral programs that were being handed out by the funeral company. When we had Natalie's funeral years earlier her two brothers sat one each side of a vacant chair in the front row, to show that one sibling was missing. Now my older brother and my younger sisters -- twins -- sat so that a space was missing between them, our parents sitting on the other side. I took my place in the vacant chair wondering if Natalie had done the same thing when she was laid to rest.

Quite a few people came to my funeral -- my family, friends, family friends, my housemates in Adelaide Ben, Holly, Mitch and Mitch's girlfriend Amanda, work colleagues like Kimiko the girl I worked my last shift with, people from the university and my old high school friends and football teammates. It was nice that I was so well liked and would be missed so much, but it was so sad to see everyone so upset. Emma, my crush from university was there with some other students and she was crying, wiping tears from her eyes with tissues. I wanted to comfort her, but I could not.

As for my immediate family Mum was pretty much inconsolable and her older sister was trying to comfort her. My aunt and uncle knew the pain of losing a child at the age 18 when Natalie had died, and now sadly so did Mum and Dad.

The funeral service took its usual course and came to an end following a video slideshow about my life, and then it was off to the local cemetery, the real me in the hearse, the ghost me in the car with my family for me to be buried. Natalie was buried not far away, as were Grandpa Joe and Uncle Robert and older relatives from the family who were long dead. I attended my wake then caught the bus to the station and the train back to Adelaide. Alighting in the city, I thought that now I would finally be able to rest in peace and cross over.

*

My funeral had no effect on the ghost version of me, and I had no miracle crossover. I remained a ghost that nobody could see, hear or sense. Over the following weeks some days I would attend lectures and tutorials at my university campus not that it was any good for me now. I went to my team's football game, the first after I died where they all wore black armbands and had a minute's silence before the commencement of play.

Emma came to watch the game, and so did somebody else -- her boyfriend Justin who I had never met, seen or heard of before. They sat holding hands and I thought how even if I was still alive then my crush on Emma would have remained unrequited as she already had a boyfriend. I had also never seen quite such a dissimilar couple. Emma stood six feet tall when barefoot, was big boned, overweight and with massive boobs. Justin was a skinny runt of a guy, barely five feet five and as skinny as one of the unfortunate Allied POW's in the World War Two who had been sent to work on the Burma Railway.

I felt a bit jealous watching them walking around holding hands and kissing, Justin putting his hand on Emma's plus-sized bum at one stage, feeling the outline of her knickers through her long flowery skirt. But it was pointless being envious, I was a fucking ghost, there was nothing I could do. Emma and Justin could do couple things because they were still alive, and I was as dead as a dodo. What were ghosts supposed to do to pass the time?

Being a fit and active person in life, I walked and ran the streets of Adelaide incessantly, sometimes through the city, other times in nearby suburbs like North Adelaide, West Torrens and Woodville, or I would go to Glenelg. I would ride the trains, buses and trams up and down the routes to suburbs further out like Elizabeth in the north and Noarlunga and Christie's Beach in the south, nobody knowing I was there. I went to the zoo, botanic gardens, museum, on river cruises in Port Adelaide or the Torrens and any number of other tourist destinations. Other days I joined day tour groups to tourist spots out of Adelaide, such as the Murray River, the Adelaide Hills, the Barossa Valley wine region, my old home the Fleurieu Peninsula and Kangaroo Island, just for something to do.

Other days I would go to the airport browsing around the shops and watching people coming and going overseas; interstate to Perth, Darwin, Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra, Hobart, Brisbane and the Gold Coast, and other destinations in Regional South Australia like Port Lincoln, Mount Gambier and Coober Pedy. I thought about hopping on a plane several times and going somewhere interesting but each time lost my nerve and never did so, though what I was afraid of was something I couldn't explain. Maybe I feared that I would somehow fall out of the plane, although I could travel okay in vehicles and on boats so why would aircraft be any different? Or perhaps ghosts preferred to stay in the place where they died? In any case, how much enjoyment could a ghost get from going to the Gold Coast and attending the theme parks? Probably not much.

At times I felt quite gloomy, and probably didn't help myself by doing morbid sums. I calculated that I had been alive just 6884 days, and the day when I would have been dead longer than I was alive would be Monday, 10th February 2020. What would the world be like 19 years from now? I had no idea.

It sure could be boring at times being a ghost, and I took to sneaking into a nursing home in Adelaide's eastern suburbs where all the elderly men and women spent their afternoons glued to the television watching American soap operas to which they were clearly addicted. It was like a religion for them. An earthquake would not have distracted from the television for a second. I watched the soap operas with them, becoming addicted to these shows too. Other times I would go into people's houses and watch the news and other TV programs in the evenings, or I would go to the cinema and watch movies.