Page 95 of Unalive On Air

I hope he hears my thoughts, because I’m too cowardly to say them aloud.

“Ready to try again?” he asks.

“Sure,” I say, instead of “I would do absolutely anything you asked me to, so long as I get to spend another minute in your presence.”

While Trystan’s gentle snores echo from the hut, I decide to test my boundary lines. Really, I want to speak to Jeanie alone, and I figure the quickest way to get to her would be to walk out into the ocean as far as I can and evanesce into her room. I’m also curious about triggering a lacklustre orgasm when I vanish.

It’s a solid fifteen minutes of walking straight out into the sea before I feel anything. I can’t see fuck all in this light, and for all I know, I’m spinning in circles, but whatever . . . might as well explore the possibilities of my undeath.

Never have I ever walked on the bottom of the ocean before in the middle of the night, so I suppose I can cross that off my bucket list.

My fingers start tingling, then my toes, and I think it’s the cold until I remember I’m three hundred metres below surface level and I’m not breathing or using my eyeballs and the tingling is probably because I’ve hit the point where my boundary lies. And now my whole body is tingling, and it feels like . . . it feels like I need to be rubbed a little harder. Oh my god, that’s frustrating. I want more, faster, give it to me . . .

Like a fairground goldfish in a clear plastic bag, I’m dumped onto Jeanie’s rug. There’s no longer a bed in the room, nor a chandelier, and there are no lights on.

In that moment, it dawns on me that Jeanie may still be with Angel as she was the night of my death, but as I get to my feet . . .

“Gary Runcorn! What time do you call this?!” Jeanie jumps out of the chair beside the window.

“I don’t know, there aren’t any clocks in the sea,” I reply.

“What I mean is, why are you testing your boundaries in the middle of the fucking night?” She’s yelling now. Whoopsie.

I can’t be arsed with the preamble. I’ve got questions I need answered. “Tell me how you’re involved in Peter’s death?”

Jeanie flinches, but she waits too long to deny it with any believability. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Lol!” I say, crossing over to one of the cabriolet sofas and trying very, very hard to sit with at least a fraction of class. “In my time, people write that in text messages to mean ‘laugh out loud,’ except nobody’s ever laughing when they type it.” I fear she will miss the nuance in that sentence.

“Are you alright, Gary?” she says, sitting at the other end of the settee and putting me to shame with her ass‑balancing skills.

“Yes, I’m quite fine.” I don’t bother to mention how my heart is aching for someone destined to pass into a different life. What’s the point? “But I need you to tell me how you were involved in Peter’s death.”

Again, she pauses, but now it’s a resigned pause. She looks at her hands, her fingernails, and sighs. “If there’s one thing I regret not doing before I died, it’s getting my nails done. They look bloody awful.”

I could agree with her, explain how I wish I’d fucking shaved and trimmed my moustache the night before I got squished, but I leave the silence floating between us, like a bunch of question marks she can’t ignore.

Eventually, I win.

“Fine,” she whines. “I guess Angel gave the game away, didn’t he?”

“Even if he didn’t, I’d have figured it out sooner or later. You want me to investigate everyone’s death but Peter’s.”

“That’s not true,” she says, but the curvature of her eyebrows and the deer‑in‑headlights stare tell on her. “It’s simply that we already know what happened with Peter. It was an accident. The sword went in the wrong hole. An accident. Even Petey’s forgiven Helga.”

“Not a single sentence in that word salad you just spewed is accurate,” I say.

Jeanie folds over on herself. Her face finds the gap between her knees, her arms come up over her head, knocking her eye mask askew. “Fine. Fine. But please, none of this can go on Unalive on Air. It would ruin Helga, ruin the hotel, and the entire village.”

I don’t want to make that guarantee, but I also desperately need to know what happened. “Okay. Cross my heart, hope to die.”

“Oh, ha ha,” she says, but accepts my promise. “It was eighty-four. I’d just finished filming The Last Bus to Hornblotten Green and came back to Helzephron for the summer as I always did. Well, not always. The year before, I was actually in Morocco making this film about desert zombies. Anyway . . .” She repositions herself after I raise an eyebrow.

“I was staying at The Paragon. It wasn’t as nice in those days, but you know, it was the eighties. It all felt incredible at the time. I was young and making movies, living the dream. I remember one day I’d left a script in the dressing room behind the auditorium, and when I went back to collect it, I bumped into Helga. Oh, she had such long, beautiful hair back then. It was all the way down to her bot—”

“Is the hair relevant to the story?” I say, raising my hand.

“Well, not really.”