Read by Patsy Prince (final story in podcast, here)
How to put this?
I was looking for a flat, and then I found a flat and Heaven knows … that didn’t go so well. 2019 hadn’t been a great year anyway. First I lost my job, then my dog died, then my boyfriend left me for a woman who was literally called Jolene. I know it sounds like a country song, but that was the actual order of events. And the worst thing was that our shared flat in Vauxhall actually belonged to my now-ex, Johnny, so I had to move out. Except I couldn’t afford to live in London any more because I’d lost my zero-hours contract at HMV.
I had six months’ worth of savings and no interest in living, so I decided to move back to Manchester to make the misery last. I slept too much, ate too little, took up smoking and made endless cups of tea which went cold while I stared emptily at the grey Moss Side rain. Apart from that, I pretty much wasted my time. The dodgy-looking middle-aged guy I sublet the flat from turned up to take the deposit and give me the keys, then instantly ghosted me. Which was ironic, given what followed.
The first weird thing was the junk mail. There’s always letters for old tenants in these places (I’ve lived in enough to know) but however many I binned they kept coming, and they were all for the same people. Mr Smith, Mrs Smith, Master T Smith, The Smiths, even T Smith Esquire. I assumed it must be generations of the same family, who really needed to sort out their redirection service - but the guy who owned the place was called Travis, and there was never anything for him.
The second problem was the lamp in the bedroom. Not only did the beige shade have an odd-shaped stain, the bloody thing didn’t turn off. The bulb wouldn’t come out, and the socket switch was stuck. I tried pulling out the plug but it seemed wedged into the wall, so I gave up and started sleeping on the sofa, where I spent most of my time anyway.
Then the radio went weird. It was DAB, Sony, mint: one of the first things Johnny bought me, in fact, but one sharp October morning it wouldn’t pick up any of the normal stations. I skipped from preset to preset, my usual dejection giving way to irritation, trying Magic, Radio 2, Virgin, even though the music that they constantly played said nothing to me about my life. Which now consisted mostly of crying in the Job Centre and stalking Jolene on Facebook because Johnny had unfriended me. I lugged it between rooms looking for its happy place, but nothing worked. The only frequency it liked now was some throwback station called Retrograde, and every song seemed to be by one of those 80s miserablist bands: The Fall, Depeche Mode, New Order, and Morrissey. Really a lot of Morrissey.
So I turned the radio back on, and after a few days I started to quite like the songs, especially the Smiths ones. Like me, they were sad and alone and had more angst and anger than they could handle. They were hummable, too: sort of jaunty dirges. I even sang along with a few. The one about being human and needing to be loved. The one about life being very long when you’re lonely. And in an unexpected, roundabout way, like a shy Goth uncle at an awkward family wedding, the music started to speak to me.
And then so did the walls.
It happened when I was brushing my teeth one afternoon (my single achievement of that day so far: tick). The bathroom window looked onto the grimy, blank concrete of the council-block opposite: an apt metaphor for my life, I thought in my darker moments, of which there were many. Except now it wasn’t blank any more: someone had scrawled REDRUM across it in blood-red paint. Shocked? I nearly swallowed my toothbrush, which would have been quite serious as it’s electric.
Craning out of the tiny window, I saw the rest of the message: REDRUM SI TAEM. It sounded like the motto of Hogwarts, but I’d seen The Shining, so slowly, I spelled it out backwards: MEAT IS MURDER. What sort of vigilante vegetarian would bother graffitiing here, instead of the halal butcher’s opposite? Curious, I googled. The first result was a Smiths album, and everything finally clicked. Well, sort of.
I was being haunted, but I’d been too miserable to notice. You know how it is when you’re depressed; every day is like Sunday; every day is silent and grey. Even blatant paranormal activity barely makes you look up. Other things started making sense now. The endless flyers from local vinyl shops and the Vegetarian Society. The clickbait news-alerts on my phone about the Queen being dead and riots at Strangeways Prison. Something, or someone, was reaching out from beyond the veil, and doing it via the medium of Morrissey songs.
But I didn’t know what they wanted, and worse, I didn’t know how to stop it. So I decided to try and summon the restless spirit the only way I could think of. I gathered all the Smiths letters and flyers and took the radio into the bedroom. I still couldn’t turn the bloody lamp off though, so I closed my eyes, tuned the radio to white-noise, opened my mouth and sang.
“The rain falls hard on a humdrum town …” This line had come to mean a lot to me.
I opened one eye, but the cosmos remained unmoved.
“This town has dragged you down …” Nothing.
I sighed and played my ace. “See, the luck I’ve had can make a good girl turn bad …”
Suddenly the junk-mail stirred, and the radio white-noise rustled ominously.
“Who’s there?” I whispered. The lamp dimmed, then brightened like winter sunshine; staring at it, I realised the random stain was in a shape I recognised. It was like one of those Jesuses people find in pieces of toast, except the face I was looking at was Morrissey’s.
Through the roaring mist of static I heard a familiar nasal baritone. “I am the light that never goes out,” it crooned.
“Oh my God!” I gasped. “It’s you! I didn’t even know you were dead!”
A hollow sigh, like the hiss of the ocean in a coastal town they forgot to close down.
“Not quite,” the radio said sadly. “The body’s still out there giving me a bad name. I’m just Morrissey’s soul.”
And then he told me a story only slightly more unbelievable than the one you’ve heard so far.
Once upon a time, forty-odd years ago, an unemployed vegetarian musician called Steven Patrick Morrissey, living at this very address, got extremely dejected (which was normal) and somewhat drunk, which was rare. Heartsore at the failure of both his punk bands, and tortured by a literary ambition which hadn’t gone beyond writing a pamphlet about the New York Dolls, he summoned the Devil, as you do, and offered to sell his soul. (Apparently someone at the job centre had given him Satan’s phone number).
According to Morrissey, Satan looked like a fat, sweary A&R man interrupted in the act of snorting coke off a toilet-seat, and perhaps inevitably, was a Scouser.
“Let’s have a gander at the goods then” said the Devil, sniffing deeply. “All right, it’s in decent nick. What you asking for it?”
“For once in my life, let me get what I want,” begged our hero. “Lord knows, it would be the first time.”
“Well what do ya want?” said the Devil. “Name your top three. Number one album? A book deal?” He sniggered. “World peace?”
Morrissey liked the sound of them all. “Except you’d probably create world peace by wiping out humans so … how about world vegetarianism?”
The Devil grinned toothily. “Why the hell not? I mean, it’ll take a few decades, but I bet I can get a vegan sausage-roll into Gregg’s by 2018.”
Privately wondering how a sausage roll could be vegan, Morrissey decided to nail down some specifics. The book deal had to be with a big publisher, like Penguin. And it would be an instant classic. And he wanted to win an award.
“You’re pushing it now, son,” grumbled Satan, “That all?”
Morrissey couldn’t believe his luck. Suckers never can, he told me sadly. He took the Devil’s razor-quill, scratched a vein and signed at the bottom of the extremely long contract.
“So do you take my soul now?” he asked nervously.
“No la,” said the Devil, “you’re gonna want that to write your songs aren’tcha? Don’t worry, by the time I come for it you won’t be needing it any more.”
The next day, the nineteen-year-old Morrissey met Johnny Marr at a Patti Smith gig, and the rest, of course, is musical history. At least until the ink dried on a second contract: the one for Morrissey’s much-anticipated Autobiography, published as a Penguin Classic in 2013. It was at that moment, his soul told me, there was a blinding flash and his body felt a freezing blast chill it, like goosepimples inside his heart; like Christmas alone in a thousand unheated bedsits - and then nothing at all.
“It was Satan reaping my soul,” he explained. But apparently there was really no room in hell any more; sort of a prison overcrowding situation. “He knows heaven doesn’t seem to be my home, so he had to find somewhere else for me to go. He trapped me here in the end. The genius in the lamp. It’s the sort of shit joke the Devil loves.”
After that, things went rapidly downhill. Morrissey’s soul watched in horror as the music nosedived, then his empty avatar’s terrible novel appeared. It won a prize all right: the Bad Sex Award.
“’Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra’s howling mouth and the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation whacked and smacked its way into every muscle of her body,’” he shuddered. “Satan keeps his promises.”
Then came the “provocative” statements, “controversial” interviews, increasingly right-wing opinions, retweets of Britain First ‒
“I’m shitting all over my own legacy. I have to stop myself,” he whispered through the radio, his lampshade face pulsing in agony, “and you have to help me.”
“Gladly,” I said. “But if you’re stuck here, what can I do?”
“Well,” he said, brightening, “my body’s playing the Arena Saturday. Wanna go?”
He told me to get some scissors, and to trust him. Two minutes later I was cradling lamp-Morrissey in my arms: electrical cord cut, but miraculously still glowing. I felt weirdly like the Virgin Mary in some postmodern indie Nativity, but as he modestly explained, I was more like the donkey that carried Jesus into Jerusalem.
I was to get right up front, he told me, and when the last song was played and all the phones and lighters came out, I’d pull the lamp from under my jacket and hold him aloft, where he couldn’t be missed. When the lamplight hits Morrissey’s eyes, his soul will ride the beam back home.
At least, that’s the theory. Who knows if it’ll work, but anything’s worth a try, he says. If we succeed, I get a job as PA to the newly reunited Morrissey, and if we fail, we’ll write songs together. He reckons we can’t do worse than his body’s managing on its own right now.
And as the Devil once said: “Why the hell not?”
(c) Sophie Bloom, 2019
Sophie Bloom studied English at Leeds University, and creative writing in various evening classes and a writing group. She lives in York and wrote a previous story, Baggage, for Liars' League's Halloween edition, about a woman haunted by her undead exes.
Patsy Prince trained at RADA and KCL. Recent film includes: The Bad Nun, Mummy Reborn and Culture Shock. Theatre includes: Voices from September 11th (Old Vic) and Swallows (OFS Theatre Oxford). She also co-hosted 'Open', a podcast on The Women's Radio Station. Patsy is an ex-lawyer, ex-parliamentary candidate and ex-hotelier, now excelling at being a bad wife, drinking too much gin and expanding her collection of millinery.
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