The Book of the Not-Dead-Enough: Admin Errors from the Other Side

By Richard T. Watson

Satire that anticipates Britain's EU Referendum and potential Brexit as well the political landscape that brought us here.
With a fresh round of spending cuts in the Afterlife and immigration services stretched to breaking point, mistakes are inevitable. Admin errors, but from the Other Side. Anomalies slip through the net and sit down to tea.
It's those at the bottom that suffer, the ones with no say in it. The living world begins to fill up with those who have died but been refused entry to the Hereafter; the dead that haven't died to their full potential. The Book of the Not-Dead-Enough is the story of their continued attempts to keep calm and carry on, in a world that has seen too many George Romero films.
The dead live on in our memories, but the Not-Dead-Enough don't need memories; they need a good beautician and central heating. They've been Beyond and come back. They're not sure they like it.
They're not just pushing up the daisies; they're making daisy chains, tidying up the graveside floral arrangements and downloading Interflora vouchers on their smartphones. If you want something done properly...
Loitering somewhere between Dickens, Pratchett and Douglas Adams, The Book of the Not-Dead-Enough is a debut collection of short shorts and flash fictions that isn't wholly flippant nor wholly serious, but tickles at the join between.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard T. Watson
• Release date: Apr 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310555671

Richard T. Watson

Admin worker by day: reader-of-the-things by night. Occasional theatre director and playwright. Big fan of world breads. Richard T. Watson is Fiction Editor for Sabotagereviews.com, which focuses on small-scale and indie literature and hosts the annual Saboteur Awards. His fiction has been published by Leaf Books and Eclectic Eel zine. In 2009, he won the Sunday Times Harold Hobson Student Drama Critic Award. His play, Pack Mentality won 2010’s International Student Playscript Competition, and he was shortlisted for the Shaw Society’s inaugural T F Evans Award. Since then he's mostly been temping around the public sector. He lives with his wife and her piano in West Yorkshire.

Book preview

The Book Of The Not-Dead-Enough: Admin Errors From The Other Side

Richard T. Watson

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2015 Richard T. Watson

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favourite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

CONTENTS

The Death-Trap Bus

Famous Last Orders

A Good Way To Die

Charlie Archer Passes On (Again)

The Coffin-Chaser

Murphy’s Insurance Law

The Successor I

A Clean Bill Of Death

No Migrants, No Zombies, No Dogs I

Commercial Strategy and the Profit-Loss-Death Formula

How Management Rectifies Crime: A Story of Fraud and Evasion

A Charitable Death

Almost Haunted

Hardboiled

The Successor II

Death Warmed Up

No Migrants, No Zombies, No Dogs II

The War on Halloween

The Pensioners' Crusade

Til Death Do You Part

The Bureaucrats of the Hereafter: The Cogs of Destiny

Acknowledgements

About the Author

The Death-Trap Bus

A man, face-down, on a bus. Sprawled on the roiling top deck of a double-decker, a man splayed across the top of the stairs, his face flat on the floor. It’s the sort of shape you draw a chalk line around. No one can be comfortable with their neck at that angle.

The bus lurches around another corner, rocking through two more potholes strategically located to cause the most sickening movements possible on double-deckers. One of the other passengers had gasped when the man slipped, but now she’s being careful to cover that gasp up with some serious staring-out-of-the-window.

Gradually, the face-down man’s thoughts begin to reassemble into some sort of order. His overwhelming sensation is of the cold – some idiot must have opened a window – and the damp patch pressing against his jaw. His stomach is conspicuously quiet, without the low rumbling noise he’d had since the last energy price hike; his cold-blooded wife had won the Heating-or-Eating Argument for heat. He can’t see anything. There’s a pain across his shoulders, like he’s been stuck in one position too long.

He tries to remember how he got into this position. There had been...he can’t even remember as far back as two minutes ago, he realises with a flash of panic. There had been...a bus. There had definitely been a bus. A big one: double-decker. He’d been standing at the bus stop for half an hour – something about this had been irritating, but he can’t think what. Was it the unending rain pounding his skull, or the bus being outlandishly late? One of those things, he distinctly remembers, had been a particular source of irritation.

His limbs really are at an uncomfortable angle. He’ll have to move soon, once he can get some feeling into his feet. His shins ache, but there’s no sensation of anything lower down.

The bus had arrived, he remembers, ploughing first through the dip in the tarmac that he’d never noticed until it filled with rainwater and became more a ford than a road. When the door opened, water had poured out, carrying with it an old woman who kept her footing at the expense of her shopping. He remembers he’d felt a little bad at getting on without helping her, but he’d needed the feeling of a roof over his head so much. He remembers the stairs – he’d decided to go up as soon as he saw the passengers huddled on the back seats downstairs, their bags clutched up to their chins like meerkats on holiday, as a tidal wave rushed back down the bus towards them.

I’m sorry, folks, it’s uphill all the way! The driver had called back at them, but the man had made his way upstairs with all speed. It was a quagmire down there. The stairs, trodden by countless soaking feet, had been no better. He remembers thinking of the health and safety risk this bus posed: water everywhere, everything slippery and the floor always rocking. If they weren’t careful, someone was going die up here. He winces as another sharp corner throws him against the rail. He has to get up. Lying here won’t help him get to the bank – he remembers now that he was going to the bank.

His suit is soaked through, streaked with dirty water. His shins must be bruising nicely, and it feels as though something has dislocated. He isn’t sure what has dislocated; possibly it’s everything.

Clearly, the man reasons, the driver is at fault. He had taken off too quickly, attacked those potholes, and has no concern for his drowning passengers. The stairs pose a very real threat to life and limb. It is the man’s duty to go back down and make a complaint.

Carefully, the man opens his eyes and pulls himself to his feet. He finds nothing seems to work properly: nothing is quite connected as it should be. He can’t turn his head to face forwards without his shoulders twisting in a different direction. Maybe that’s the dislocated bit. Luckily, if he tilts his shoulders a certain way, stoops, and faces sideways, he can manage to navigate the stairs. He clings to the rail while his feet slip and slide. With some shame, he realises that this is only the second-most humiliating thing to happen today. The first was admitting that he would have to go to the bank manager and grovel if he wanted to keep his house. It isn’t that he wants to keep his house – he supposes he does – but his wife very much wants to keep the house, and to keep it warm. Her contented warmth is the only thing that makes their time together bearable, and since he lost his job – he is loose change somewhere down the back of a corporate merger – they’ve been spending a lot more time together. Redundancy stretches ahead like an eternity.

The stooping, hunchbacked man, shuffling crab-like, ignores the stares he attracts back on the bottom deck. Instead, he focuses his attention on the driver of the watery juggernaut carrying them all to certain death.

The man has heard of a double-take before. He’s never seen one, or at least not one so textbook-perfect as the one the driver gives him. It might be because of the angle the man has to force his body into to be able to look at the driver. The wet patches all over his suit probably don’t help – and they won’t help when he finally gets to the bank manager.

You do realise how dangerous your bus is, don’t you? The man demands, ignoring the clear sign forbidding him from distracting the driver. The driver gives him a concerned look, and turns back to the washed-out road.

Are you alright, mate? He asks.

Do I look alright? He tries to indicate his ruined suit, but can’t quite marshal his arms into the right shape.

Well...not really, mate, no. Another concerned look flashes at him. It’s...well, your neck doesn’t look right, not like when you got on. The man has to admit that his neck does feel strange. He reaches up and gingerly explores the top of his spine with his fingers. Alarmingly, his head rolls backward, entirely of its own volition. The driver swears under his breath. Mate, you’ve broken your neck!

But still, the man thinks with a sigh, it’s only the third-most-humiliating event that day.

In town, walking to the bank, sideways and with his head propped up in his hands, the man wonders what the bank manager will make of a customer with a broken neck. He wonders if it will harm his chances of getting a loan. He wonders if he should have gone to hospital. Or to an undertaker; it has come to his attention that, in addition to breaking his neck, he seems to have lost his pulse and isn’t actually breathing.

The man doesn’t know it yet, but he has joined an arbitrary and remarkable group: the small but growing proportion of people for whom death is not, in fact, the end. This is their book: The Book of the Not-Dead-Enough.

###

Famous Last Orders

(with thanks to Jake Thackray)

It looked like an ordinary, quiet village pub. Until recently, that was just what it had been: ordinary,

quiet, and a pub. It still was a pub, but it had recently featured in the And Finally... news for something far less ordinary.

My wife and I had managed to get a couple of days off work together, and we went for a drive around the Cotswolds. It doesn’t sound much of a holiday, I know, but you take what you can these days. Having heard about the newly famous regular at the Cross-Keys Inn, I thought it might be worth dropping in for a visit on our way through. Also, I’d heard their steak-and-ale pie was to die for.

My wife took a table by the window, the only part of the pub where you could see your food. It was one of those pubs that seemed to harbour a black hole in the middle, into which fell most of the light, whole afternoons, and the occasional small dog. Being a mock-Tudor building, it had dark timbers everywhere, and the bar itself was buried near the back, in shadow. We were there on a weekday lunchtime, when a few obvious regulars milled around the black hole’s edge, and a few others – tourists like ourselves – occupied the outer reaches of the room. The dark pillars – ebony black – made natural screens, so that you could never quite see the whole room at once.

I ordered our drinks, plus a pair of the famous steak-and-ale pies. Then I noticed the gentleman perched near the end of the bar. Every English pub has a man like him; I understand it’s a condition of their licence. White, gruffly working-class, resolutely half-cut at all times. He gets his own barstool, and is known to all the staff and regulars. In his now-distant youth, he could have started a fight with himself in an empty house. The place would feel incomplete without his fuzzy white beard, his stories about the war (any war) and his occasional snores as his head droops over his pint. You’ll sometimes see him scowl at the young people and the flashing machines, or hear him mumble to himself about whatever story is on the muted rolling news channel. Admittedly, this pub had very few electrical devices, and their old-time regular was less vocal than most.

I pointed him out to the barman.

Is that...? I asked quietly, although he was clearly in a stupor – the regular, not the barman.

Oh, you’ve heard about our Mr Brannigan, have you? The barman winked, leaning in on one elbow so as to face the regular in question, and keeping his voice low. That’s him all right. Resting in peace at the moment. So to speak. Bless him.

I hear he’s been with you quite a while? The barman nodded.

Aye, that’s right. He hasn’t really left us since he died, I don’t think. He must have seen my face fall open in surprise, or my efforts to close it up again.

He didn’t...he didn’t die here, did he?

Oh, I should think so, sir. Right there on that barstool of his, I shouldn’t wonder. He’s very attached to it. I supposed that he would be. He don’t like change, our Mr Brannigan, says he can’t be doing with all this modern nonsense...you know: teenagers, foreign taxi drivers, the internet. Says we never had them in the Old Days.

And what about people dying but coming back? Isn’t that quite a modern trend? I kept my voice quiet in case he overheard. One mustn’t let the dead catch you speaking ill of them. And it’s not like everybody does it; he’s helping create a new tradition, isn’t he?

Oh, maybe you’re right, sir. But don’t go telling Mr Brannigan that. I reckon he just went to the Great Saloon Bar In The Sky, as they say; but they’d turned it into a trendy wine bar, so he came back down here.

But...how long has he been nursing that pint, then? I’d first heard about him four or five weeks ago, and found it hard to believe the pint had been festering so long without some deterioration.

That one? Oh, only about twenty minutes, I should say. He does still put them away, does our Mr Brannigan.

Oh, he’s still drinking is he? Well, that’s, er, that’s good, I suppose.

Oh yes, it seems to keep him happy. Or, docile, I suppose. The barman paused to consider his next choice of words. He’s a very well-behaved customer. Not like some of them we get on Friday nights. He’s not always polite, I grant you, but docile, very docile. I did wonder just how violently drunk the dead could be.

To my surprise, Mr Brannigan at that moment seemed to wake, stir himself from his undead slumbers and come to some sort of life. His twitchy limbs settled when he discovered the pint still in front of him, and he took a sip before settling back down to contemplate the far reaches of his beard. Yes, he still puts them back. We give him a new one when he’s finished...it keeps him calm. The barman chuckled. "Got to be careful though, and wait til he’s sure he’s finished. Once, we tried to take his empty too soon - Lord, you’ve never seen a corpse move so fast! The barmaid nearly lost her