Page 55 of Unalive On Air

She smiles. “Mine is a cold glass of Pinot Grigio.”

“Pizza,” Pixie adds, pointing to herself.

“Steak tartare,” Peter says.

“A cup of tea.” Stove fake bawls. “Two sugars, splash of milk.”

“Cake. Chocolate cake in particular, but any cake will do. Ooh, carrot cake, though.” Camille.

“Watermelon,” Josh says, surprising me with his choice.

“Crisp sandwiches,” Trystan adds, causing every other ghost to whine . . .

“Ohh, crisp sandwiches.”

Jeanie throws her entire nine years of drama school into pretend sobbing.

While Pixie says, “I died never having tasted a crisp sandwich.”

For a moment, or ten, I drift off remembering the emotions each of these foods conjured, though I don’t think I’ve ever tried steak tartare, because ew, but I’d do anything right now to wrap my lips around some raw egg and raw mashed cow and actually taste it, feel it, swallow it.

Also, crisp sandwiches are fucking banging.

I shake the thought. “We’re getting a little sidetracked here. Okay, say we can connect Josh’s phone to Stove’s mic and my equipment, and we can connect it all to the Wi-Fi, and let’s just say that we can record our voices and people can actually hear us, how are we going to get this equipment out of the bag if we can’t touch it? And where are we going to set up this studio? It can’t be here. Most of us are only half in the room and half in the walls.”

“We could use the trophy room,” Trystan suggests. “The acoustics are great, it’s big enough to fit us all in, and nobody ever goes there, so we could probably leave the equipment set up for the following week. Assuming there will be a following week?”

“And what about getting the stuff—” I start.

But Jeanie cuts me off. “Peter can take it. He’ll possess Franny just the once, long enough to carry everything over and set it all up. Then he’ll walk Franny back to her office and have her wake up on her sofa as though she’d been napping. You’ll do that for us, won’t you, Petey?”

Peter sucks in a breath and holds it. “Of course.”

“It’s exhausting possessing someone. For both the possessor and the possessee. Really not a pleasant task, but when needs must,” Jeanie says.

Subjecting a nearly seventy-year-old woman to lugging my heavy recording bag halfway across the hotel without the ability to express consent feels like something I should say no to. Yet she won’t remember a stitch, she probably won’t be under that much physical strain, and the other thing is . . . I really, really want to do this.

“Okay,” I say. “Another small spanner in the works is that I no longer have a radio show, so even if I weren’t dead, I have nowhere to broadcast my investigation findings. The execs from Swindon Sounds sacked me.”

“It’s easy,” Camille says, holding their hands up like they’ve got this all figured out. “You start a podcast.”

Everyone besides Josh and Stove ask, “What’s a podcast?”

Possessions aren’t nearly as traumatic as I’d first imagined they might be. I guess I was picturing some kind of reverse exorcism. A bit of screaming, a little writhing, perhaps some foaming at the mouth, or a spot of projectile vomiting, but Peter simply walked right up to Franny, then walked into her, and that was that. There was half a second tops when the light disappeared from behind the head housekeeper’s eyes before her entire mannerisms changed.

“Was that it?” I say, as Franny-Peter rises from the chair.

“Huh?” Peter says. It’s Franny’s voice, but his accent. Oh, that’s weird. “Somebody say something?” he sweeps Franny’s arms out in front of him as though he’s wearing a blindfold, swiping his hand directly through my sternum.

“What are you doing?” I ask him.

But Jeanie answers. “He can’t really see us right now. Usually, only ghosts can see ghosts. If he concentrates, we’ll appear to him more like vapour clouds than solid, definable people. And he can’t hear us very well either. Stove’s the only one who can be heard.”

Stove winks at me. “’Cause I’m the sound guy.” He points towards himself with a single thumb. Then he cups his mouth and raises his voice, “Alright, fuckface?”

“Stove, hi!” Peter replies, smiling. “I’m just gonna take this bag here into the trophy room? Do I need anything else?”

I shake my head and Stove yells, “No.”