Sin (9 page)

I looked up at her again. She
winked and I realised what I should have known anyway - she was
teasing.

"So," I said. "Death hasn't
dulled your edge then?"

"Not a bit," she replied. She
stepped to my side and sank down to the ground beside me. Her
movements were as fluid as if she'd poured herself. I imagined the
whole cast of the Royal Ballet performing Swan Lake, or some other
famous ballet dancing show thing (I wasn't up on my classical
dance) pirouetting through her body. Grace would have been an
appropriate name for her, but then so would Sarcky Cow.

"Death," she continued, "isn't
really as bad as it's made out to be. Granted I can't enjoy a Big
Mac anymore, but at least I don't have to buy tampons either."

"What a lovely thought," I said.
I would have assumed that being deceased would have more going for
it, or against it, than the simple pleasures of fast food and
periods. Not that I'd have thought a woman’s monthlies was exactly
a pleasure, but you get the point. Not that Big Macs and large
fries are necessarily a pleasure either, for that matter.

"Indeed," said Joy. "Now do you
want to get that lazy arse moving or are you going to stay moping
here for the rest of your miserable life?" She poked me in the
shoulder, quite sharply actually.

"Ouch," I complained.

"Sin, when did you become such a
wuss? Has having that nice Dr. Connors looking after you all this
time turned you into a big baby?"

I wouldn't have called Dr.
Connors care 'looking after me', nor would I have called it 'care',
but I didn't think I had to point that out to my sister. I'm sure I
wasn't still the handsome hunk that had checked himself into the
institute. Granted, I'm sure I wasn't a handsome hunk at all, but
if I looked rough back then, I'd certainly be on the dark side of
shabby now. Joy, on the other hand, was glowing. I don't mean in
that aural angel kind of way, but rather in that healthy holiday in
the sun three times a year, gym three times a week and cleanse
three times a day kind of way. More radiant than... I don't know...
a radiator. A white one. With a light shining on it. Or
something.

"Death's been good for you," I
commented, changing the subject. A weird thing to say, perhaps, but
I was talking to my dead sister, so I figured it was ok.

"I wouldn't say that," she said.
"I've a devil of a time trying to get my roots done."

So there I was. Unsuccessful at
suicide, hiding in a forest, talking to the ghost of my
suicide-successful sister. It had been a busy day. I'd escaped a
mental home, killed a bird and a boy and I still had time to watch
Eastenders and maybe grab a bite to eat. Chit-chat with Joy was
pleasant and totally irrelevant. I was confused.

"This is a strange dream."

Joy smiled. The dimples in her
cheeks made her look, as ever, like a mix of cute and sultry,
carrying her smile up to her eyes.

"Who says you're dreaming?" she
asked.

How did I know she was going to
say that? I felt like I was in the middle of a horror movie, where
I knew I shouldn't go down into the cellar - especially with the
light not working - but I was going to go anyway.

"So, I'm awake and you are
really my dead sister's ghost, come to haunt me?"

"What makes you think I'm a
ghost? What makes you think I'm haunting you at all? Just because
I'm dead doesn't make me a cliché, you know."

Fair point, I thought.

"Well, if you're a zombie," I
pointed out, "you're not baying for blood and you haven't got half
of your head missing. I know you don't like horror films, but
remember when we watched Dawn of the Dead together?"

"That was Shaun of the Dead, and
if you'd prefer I look the part just to convince you, then I
suppose I could play along."

As she spoke, I noticed movement
in the corner of her eye. At first I thought it was a tear forming
and was going to ask her why she was crying, but when I saw it
wriggle and plop out onto her lap, my mouth dried up. There on her
tan coloured trousers, creamy and bulbous, was a maggot. I stared
at it for a moment, my usually smart mouth staying dumb. When it
was joined by a second, equally bulbous cousin, I looked back at my
sister's face.

Or what was left of it.

OK, so her roots needed touching
up before, but now they were a mass of movement as maggots swarmed
across her skull making her look like an adolescent Medusa.
Sections of hair, along with the skin it they were attached to,
slid down across her face leaving streaks of red and brown. Carried
by the added weight of the larvae, they dragged over her still
sparkling eyes until they reached her jaw and fell onto her lap.
She smiled again and a cockroach worked its way out of her mouth,
all spindly legs and antenna at first, then seemingly all body,
hard, black and glistening. The cockroach joined the scraps of head
and crawled over the writhing maggots until it fell onto the ground
and scurried away, thankfully in the opposite direction to me.

One shining eye bulged outwards
at me until I thought it would explode, spraying me with gloop and
cornea. Instead it popped out and hung by its optic nerve, swinging
lazily on her cheek. It still sparkled, even though it was now
bloodshot and yellowing.

She raised one hand. The hand
was missing its flesh. Skeletal, with withered tendons struggling
to stay attached, it pointed at the remains of her face.

"Is this better?" she asked. Her
voice oozed from between decayed lips, no longer velvet but slime,
still smooth but bubbling slightly and on the edge of coagulating
in her throat.

I regarded her for a long time
as the maggots feasted on her flesh and wriggled into her ears and
nostrils.

"Nothing a bit of foundation
wouldn't fix," I said.

She laughed, spraying blood and
teeth on the ground between us. A molar landed on my foot and I
picked it up and handed it back to her.

"You dropped this," I said.
Whether Joy was a ghost or not, this was a dream, so there was no
point in being disgusted or frightened. None of it was real.

"That's the Sin I know and love.
Thank you Doctor for injecting some humour back into the old
misery!"

This was how I remembered our
relationship. We always seemed to bounce of each other, sometimes
like Sumo wrestlers but more often than not like two balls in a
Newton's Cradle - tick-tack-tick-tacking, trading funny little
comments with smiles on our faces - what was left of them in some
cases. I relaxed and Joy's face returned to its normal pretty self.
She picked up the sections of scalp off the grass and laid them
back on her skull, pushing her eye back into its open socket. I'm
sure this was more for theatrics than necessity as, when she opened
her mouth all her teeth were back in their original places, lined
up on parade for inspection, Sergeant. The maggots were gone,
though I didn't notice them disappear and the bloody streaks across
her face faded to nothing.

"Ugh," I said, pulling a face.
"You can take off the Halloween mask, it's not for a couple of
months!"

"Oh, funny boy," she smirked.
"You should be on stage."

"Thanks."

"Sweeping it."

I laughed anyway, even though it
was an old joke and not particularly funny. Sometimes, without
being able to help myself, I'd be on the precipice of laughing at a
funeral, looking down the pit of complete embarrassment. You know
when it's so wrong you can't help it? Like Death By Chocolate cake
smothered in double cream? You know you shouldn't but you grab the
biggest spoon in the drawer anyway? It was like that, almost. I
knew I was in a bit of a state. I was an escaped mental patient,
had no money, no real clothes, no idea where in the world I was and
I was chewing the banana with my dear old sister, R.I.P.. You've
got to laugh.

No, really. You have to.

"Come on. Buck up bucko!" She
jabbed me in the arm with her perfectly re-fleshed finger. It hurt.
Well, at least it meant she wasn't a ghost and this had to be a
dream. And at least I wasn't naked or running around school in my
pyjamas.

"I'm ok." I almost meant it.
"Just been a bad day, you know?"

"Oh, I know. You've the world on
your shoulders, and you're no Charles Atlas!" Her voice had
returned to its previous silkiness and no longer sounded like she
was going to choke on her words and her own blood. "Been there,
done that, bought the t-shirt, taped over the video, bit the Big
One. Trust me, when I bit the Big One, I think my eyes were too big
for my belly. It's a pity you can't take a bite, and then if you
don't like it, spit it out."

"You mean like Marmite?" I
asked.

"Marmite?"

"Yes. I tasted it once. Bloody
disgusting. I spat it out and it took about an hour to get rid of
the taste."

"Yes, then," she said, a little
sadly, "like Marmite. I took a great chomp at a Marmite sandwich
and now I'm not living to regret it."

"So," I said, wanting to bring
the conversation back to something resembling normality, even
though the subject matter was far from normal. For someone who
could kill people thousands of miles away and who could teleport
his body in the blink of a wink with no strings or mirrors
required, what really counted as normal any more, anyway? "What can
I do for you?"

Joy frowned playfully. "Can't a
sister visit her brother nowadays?"

I nodded. "Of course she can," I
said. "But since you're dead and I'm supposed to be, I figured you
were here for something else. Are you in my head, conjured up just
to keep me company? Or am I actually dead and this is hell?"

"So you think I'd have ended up
down there, do you? Thanks a bunch bro'!"

"Well, I don't know. Did
you?"

"Do I have horns and a sexy
little tail? Not as far as I can tell. So no, I didn't end up 'down
there', but thanks for thinking I might."

I shrugged. How was I to know
what went on after death? I'd tried to take a peek but the door had
been slammed firmly in my face. There might be Heaven, there might
be Hell, there might be a great white light or there might be
endless repeats of Crossroads with nothing to eat but cheesy
Wotsits or prawn cocktail Monster Munch. I didn't want to piss Joy
off whether she was real, ghost, dream or cannibalistic zombie
eyeing up my liver for lunch, but I hadn't had the best day. Give a
guy a break, eh?

Still. She was my sister. I
hadn't seen her since before she'd killed herself, naturally, so
perhaps I should be nicer. Depending on your religion, by
committing suicide you could either be a blessed martyr or damned
for all eternity, doomed to walk the earth in new shoes with no
plasters. Did your religion dictate your afterlife - if there was
one? Just because I was having a wee tete-a-tete with her didn't
mean life after death was a reality. Maybe it was a surreality? I
was dreaming and she was a conjuration of my mind, a sleight of
hand illusion performed by the snoozing synapses of my brain. But
it made me think. Did your own personal beliefs create your
Heavens, Hells and Asguards? Was reincarnation real for those that
believed in it, but if you didn't you had no chance of coming back,
whether as a dolphin, a butterfly or a fresh pile of steaming
doggy-doo-doo? And what if you believed in nothing? Was death the
snuffing of your not so eternal flame?

Who knew? Ask me another.

Either way, I was pleased to be
reunited with Joy, even if it was all in my not completely stable
head. I'm not saying I was as crazy as Dr. Connors liked to insist
I was, but there had to be something a little whoo, a little whee
up there, didn't there? I hadn't lost the plot entirely, but I'd
possibly skimmed a few pages. Otherwise I'd still be sitting in my
cell waiting for the needles to come and pay a visit. Saying that,
if all was jolly double-dandy, I wouldn't be at the hospital at
all. I'd be in a comfortable job, earning a comfortable wage, maybe
even with a comfortable girlfriend. I'd have a dog called Frank and
be trying to stop next door's cat from leaving little presents
between my lobelias.

Hmmm. I'm not sure which is the
better deal now.

Hey ho, away we go.

"I don't think that," I said.
"Of course I don't. I don't even know if there is a 'down there'
for you to end up in." And besides, this was Joy. She'd made so
many people happy it had sent her over the edge and she'd felt
forced to take her own life. It was better than taking other lives
like I had a penchant for doing. How could someone like that end up
'down there'?

Not that I'm implying Australia
is all that bad.

"Well, alrighty then," said Joy
in her best Ace Ventura voice. It was, basically, crap. My sister
was always one to get up and sing at a Karaoke or dance on a table
or see if she could down a pint of lager in three seconds without
it coming out of her nose. She knew magic tricks which, though
recent events and discoveries dulled their shine, Siegfried &
Roy might not exactly be impressed by, but they'd certainly
appreciate the effort. When it came to voices and such, though, Joy
was pants. Her Welsh accent sounded Pakistani and her Sean Connery
was akin to Father Ted after he'd had a few. As for Ace Ventura, I
didn't think Jim Carrey had anything to worry about. She sounded
like Joy doing an impression of Joy, but badly.

I smiled anyway, deciding to
leave the deep and meaningful behind. Thoughts of life and death
and cheesy Wotsits could wait for another day. Enjoy the dream
because when I awoke I'd be back in the nightmare.

I belched loudly. It was one to
be proud of and Joy slapped my arm in mock disgust. She could lay a
good one out when she wanted to, so she was probably only
jealous.

"You horrible, stinking, filthy
pig!" she said as she smacked me again. "You really disgust me, you
know that?"