MICHAEL Morrison is an over-thinker, but for the right reasons. He wants answers. It doesn't bring him peace though and wherever he goes he finds he same conundrums occupying his mind. Does he solve them? You can find out by ordering a copy of The Choreography of Ghosts from Amazon. The section below didn't make he final cut of the novel.
ONE night, drinking gin and psycho-analysing himself, he decided to write down the best and worst
things he had done in his life.
At first he had thought it was the alcohol, but days later, sober, looking at his words, he realised the best was not so good and the worst came packed with the hurt, the guilt and the memories and racked him with so much remorse that his heart heaved as if having to pump the blood around a man twice his size.
It was more what he had not done rather than any wrong he had committed, but was he solely to blame? He needed to confront it, question it and nullify it. This would take time, effort and a radical change in his circumstances.
Back in England he would go out running away from this and would see single discarded children’s
shoes, left gloves, right gloves, socks, trousers, knickers, prams, pushchairs, toys, dolls and he would run
as fast as he could along the canal-sides to escape the badness, the madness, the sadness, but the
badness, the madness, the sadness would run faster than him.
It was ahead of him, always ahead, its spies watching from the tower blocks, following his every move. Its spies, those people trapped on the tenth, fifteenth flight, in their little rooms, their abusive relationships, with too many kids in too small spaces trying in vain to love their families, their housemates, their lives. But how could they? How could we? How could he?
He recalled someone once saying years ago that there must be something in the water in relation to
the amount of people, men usually, in fact almost always men, who had taken their own lives in his
home town.
Was it the claustrophobia of the villages and towns in the valleys, the encapsulating
brooding hills looming over lands housing people who would once return home of an evening from
the relentless noise and smell of the factory, but now barely left home to enable themselves to make
a return? Was it the lack of opportunity to escape and when you do escape the growing feeling of guilt
gnaws away until you come back only to be let down by nostalgia? Or is it the end of a relationship
— one more option gone from a small list hardly teeming with possibility?
But it happens everywhere, from villages and towns to sprawling cities, people lost in vast oceans of
houses, from council estates to luxury apartments, helpless and anonymous, alone and lonely.
Did this happen here too? Here in Padria? The rates of suicide, he would later discover from a newspaper
report, were not too different, at least not so significant as to offer any explanation.
Clearly the issues of money, love, isolation, a perceived lack of prospects were the same all over the world. Yet we stand and watch the soil tossed over those not yet deceased rather than take the shovels off those preparing the young men for death. The real gravediggers. It wasn’t just young men though.
Thousands of jobs had been lost over decades of decline, a city’s people now time rich, but cash poor.
Bars round here know their market, and how could anyone refuse offers to knock themselves out twice
as fast at half the price to forget their lives?
Songs of freedom, free spirits and doing what you want wherever you want with whoever you want
whatever the consequences escaped from bouncer-framed doors of bars and clubs, those inside waving
their arms in the air like they just don’t care, more free than they had ever been, but in reality bound
by every arm of constraint that near poverty could wrap around them.