Page 1 of Unalive On Air

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Video Killed the Radio Star

Present Day

I woke up dead.

Okay, I know that’s impossible. A person can’t wake up when they’re dead.

Corpses are corpses. They can’t do anything other than simply lie there. Sometimes hang, but we won’t get into that at the moment. It’s generally agreed upon that once dead, unequivocally no waking up should be occurring. Like at all.

And yet, here I am.

Dead, dead, dead, dead. So very fucking deceased.

Annnnnd awake. Ta-da!

Lots of impossible things are happening right now. But since I no longer possess a pulse, and at this very moment have nowhere else to go, I’m gonna roll with it.

I’m—well, the cadaver version of me—is lying spreadeagled on the fancy-pants hotel bed, and for want of a better word, bug-squished into the springs by an oversized antique bronze chandelier. The four-poster bed, also most likely antique, has been reduced to luxury kindling, and there’s a fuck-off chandelier spike driving straight through my neck into the feather pillow below me.

Not quite what I had in mind when I said I wanted to be nailed to the mattress.

There’s blood everywhere. Literally everywhere. Congealing on the bedspread, pooled on the rug, drip drip dripping from my blue-grey fingertips into viscous black puddles below me, and in horror movie slashes across the ceiling and walls, after no doubt my carotid artery had been torn a new one. There are even spatters on the TV, the windows, and the desk, including over some of my studio kit.

Mum’d always said I’d die from a heart attack.

“Gary, do yourself a favour and go for a run now and then.”

“Those biscuits will be the death of you.”

“A lardy lad like you will wind up dead on the toilet. Look what happened to Elvis.”

Wrong.

Actually, my lardy little heart put up quite the valiant fight. I feel a flush of pride. The power in that aortic pump was enough to reach the ceiling.

It’s going to take forensic officers hours to clean this up. Hopefully I’ll be able to stick around and watch it, and I won’t be whisked off to some other dimension or afterlife. I’ve got no idea what happens when a person dies, but since I’m lying right there, dead as dead can be, and I’m also standing here beside the bed feeling not quite so dead, does that make me . . . undead? Unalive? Who knows?

Here’s what I’ve learned in my approximately twenty minutes of being a . . . spectre of some sort.

I can move about and sweep parts of my body through solid objects. The TV, the smashed‑up bed frame, the murder chandelier, even my corpse. I haven’t gone all the way through the door or walls yet, mostly because I have this unquashable fear that I’ll “pass on” and never return if I do.

Walking seems relatively easy, but if I let my mind drift for too long, my feet begin sinking through the floor. I glance down and realise it’s happening again, so I pull them out and plant them back onto the carpet. They don’t disturb the rapidly curdling river of blood below me. They just sort of rest on top of it all.

I touch my ghost neck. It’s solid. There’s no gaping hole, no bones protruding, no arteries flapping out like tampon strings. No gore.

I feel no pain, no discomfort, no hunger. All the aches and cricks I had when I was alive have dissipated, vanished, gone. And being nearly forty with a penchant for pork scratchings and an abject aversion to all forms of exercise, let me tell you, I’ve had my fair share of unidentified nagging pains. Even my bladder is comfortably empty, and my gut . . . well, it’s as though I’ve just taken the world’s largest, most satisfying dump.

But the scar on the back of my hand from Grandma’s feral cat, Tuppence, is still there, and so is the small nick above my lip that crookedly parts my moustache.

I’m wearing a ghostlike and unbloodied version of what I died in. A white vest, black ExorSquad coveralls unzipped to my waist, thick grey socks, and my spectacles. I remove my glasses from my face, and disappointingly, even in the afterlife, I have shitty eyesight.

Still short, still chubby, still blind, still in desperate need of a haircut and a shave. I thought dying was supposed to free you from these mortal trivialities.

If this is Death’s idea of fun, it has a shit sense of humour. I just fucking know it’s British.

I’m not sure what to do now other than stare at my pathetic dead self and wonder why I didn’t at least comb my hair or trim my moustache after my last recording aired.