Cosmo Mag: Len the Ghost talks films, sex, and letting his guard down

Len the Ghost Is loosely inspired by a person we knew from our big Welsh holiday. He often hung out in the bar having a pint and long chats with my mum. I've changed his name for the purposes of this Story. We called him "…. The Ghost” because of his long grey beard and mysterious past. He was incredibly kind. This story, while inspired by him and is ironic and silly as hell, is intended with the highest compliments; part of me really does wonder if in his personal life he had been a total bachelor. RIP dude xxx

Cosmo Mag: Len the Ghost talks films, sex, and letting his guard down

It is dark when I first meet Len the Ghost. A blessing, so as not to see my shiny face fraught with sweat and anxiety. I sit waiting in a candle lit, what would be cellar if it weren’t for the sparce tables and chairs, and slightly withered fresco painted on the wall. My fingernail picking at a splinter in the table wood, I ponder his request to meet here, and whether it foreshadows the aura of the man I am yet to meet. Dark. Musky. Anachronistic. There is an air of rustic romance. I can imagine this is where he meets his ladies of the night, perhaps I am sat where many a femme-passeé have before. 45 minutes pass, alone, I am sucking up the last drop of Chateau Capbern that, as I am told, is the only wine he will have pass his lips.

I nervously consult my notes. ‘Draw him out. Find the story. …. And don’t get sucked in!!!’ I have plastered in bold as a mental doctrine on the page. Self-control and resistance. That is what I practise now. I can’t let it happen again. I can’t let HIM happen… to me. I am merely a membrane to absorb him. I am the medium through which to pass on a tale untold. I am strong. But NO! For all of a sudden I am weak! What is this, deity in midnight black? Dressed in a cloak whose ends flirt and tickle the steps beneath it? It is him. I shift in my seat. ‘No, stop. You are calm, Lorna’. You are cool, you are a professional. But his descent, his attention-commanding aura, standing with the poise of someone aware of the amount of eyes on him, the amount of spectators drinking in his appearance, means I just can’t help it. I drink him. I SLURP him. Like a muller corner. Or a tango ice blast.

He meanders over to the table, if slightly vampirically. Verbally engage with me he does not. Instead he stands before me, looking me so intensely in the eye it feels as though it is physically burning my cornea. This goes on for what feels like an age before he sharply snaps his head to the right, abruptly ending the frenzy and sending my pupils into a manic, indignant bounce, like that of the culprit in a game of Crack The Egg. Once they reach composure, I look around and notice my vision is clearer. Suddenly, my glasses seem inefficient. Surely not… He has performed laser eye surgery on me with a stare! I marvel at the new-found crisp edge of everything. He’s so much more than the rumours. But I slightly resent him for this. It means I can see more vividly where I end and he begins; that we are separate.

I can hardly speak, but he just smiles. As if this is only the first gift of the night. Holding my gaze, his index finger and thumb reach for the bowstring around his neck that holds his cloak together, and tug, letting it cascade gently to the floor. A debonair black suit is revealed, with a little black bowtie shyly peeking through the scraggly white beard that tumbles over. I want to hide too. I know how that bowtie feels, I think. Suddenly, I don’t know why, or what I’m doing until I’m doing it, I’m curtsying.

Still in silence, we sit, and all of a sudden I am over come with a self-consciousness that I’ve never known before. My breath catches as I attempt to ask him my first question.. ‘Why’…. I steady myself. Seconds pass. ‘Why have you for so long refused to be interviewed?’ I say with more disjointedness than the release of each Sherlock series. But he is not paying attention, he is instead transfixed by the twist of the grissini breadsticks on the table. How he can find the art in anything! Marvelling at them, his fingers run over the ridges like a potter surveying his finished work. Before I can stop myself, I hear myself ask, ‘Do you.. do you like… breadsticks?’ WHAT AM I SAYING. A MOCKERY of a question. He has made me forget all my training. But my puerility didn’t seem to bother him. He takes a while to respond, considering it, as if this is the first question, the only question, that matters. ‘No’, he says, after a short while. ‘I prefer Dairylea Dunkers’. Then, keeping his head still, his eyes dart up at me. He looks younger from this angle. His voice like grit, ‘the jumbo tubes’.

I gasp. The breath runs through me and turns to a thick, burning gas. I am Chernobyl, waiting to explode. My voice wavering as the words find release, I attempt my second question. ‘So…Len...’ –STOP SAYING HIS NAME! I think to myself. But how can I not when it feels so good? Like an ‘I do,’ decades awaited, or peeling off the screen-guard on a brand-new smartphone. Steady now Lorna… ‘What do you think it is about… your… your life that has inspired so many TV shows about you?’ I just about make it to the end of the sentence before lurching for my glass of water. My mouth is void of moisture. His radiance has dried me up. I’m a raisin, a rusty nail, a horny Weetabix.

‘…May I counter your question with another question?’ He asks. OH LEN PLEASE! But I only nod. Just at that moment, he turns away and reaches behind him into a canvas tote bag that reads ‘Professional Diva’ in curly writing. A man full of surprises. He pulls out what resembles a leather driving glove, slips it on and picks up the spoon to his left to tuck into his pea and pine nut soup.

I am left in agonising suspense. One mouthful. Two mouthfuls. Three must surely be it. Relieve me, Len, for I am about to overflow. Finally, he presses his pocket hanky to his lips and gently speaks...

‘What are you most afraid of, Lorna?’

‘Oblivion,’ I hear myself say, automatically.

What? Really? Ok. I’ve said it now. And in this moment, I mean it. This is the person he’s made me into. A poet. A philosopher. Someone of profundity. The void is real, and it’s me. Without him. Finally, I had something to lose. Perhaps, oblivion had enveloped me until this point, and my fear oriented around the thought of going back.

He considers my answer for a moment, before nodding subtly. As if he recognises it. As if this is the correct answer to a test I had unknowingly taken. He pushes his pea soup inches away from him and reaches back into his tote bag. He pulls out an oblong shaped black box. I feel like Sophie Neveu from the Da Vinci Code. Is this a Cryptex? Had I just provided the answer he’d been seeking? I hold my breath as he fingers the clasps. Finger me.

They flick up. He looks at me. I throb.

He reaches into it and pulls out a thin, long, metal implement. An explosive? An arrow? A blow-dart? He grips it between his thumb and index finger and reaches for his mouth, scraping out the remains of a pine nut from between his teeth.

‘Sorry. I have my mother’s canines- a nightmare when it comes to shelled foods.’

He’s so sexy.

‘I understand,’ I reply. Quivering. He puts the toothpick back in its ostentatious box. I don’t have much time to recover as before I know it he has turned back around and clasped my hand in his.

‘Ranae sagum veho aulaeum,’ he says to me. ‘It means, he who seeks truth, seeks freedom.’

It doesn’t. Roughly translated, it means, ‘the frog ride the curtains.’ Latin was always my best subject in school. BUT STILL! The words were beautiful. The frog ride the curtains! OH, THE FROG RIDE THE CURTAINS! I want to shout it from the rooftops. I want to etch out all the writing on the Rosetta Stone and re-carve into it this beautiful, melodious phrase!!! I’d be that frog, I thought. I’d ride him all the way to curtain-city.

‘Do you seek anything?’ I asked him. I have lost my inhibitions.

‘Yes…’ He replied.

I urged him with my eyes to carry on. But he stopped and looked away. His eyes couldn’t hold my gaze anymore and he seemed… nervous?

In that moment, I saw him as a boy. I saw him after his first heartbreak. I saw him sitting timidly on a bench alone on his first day of university. I noticed my loins had cooled. In that moment, instead, I wanted to hold him, stroke his beard and rock him back and forth to a gentle Daniel Caesar record. Perhaps, ‘Who Hurt You’ Who did hurt you, Len?

He turns back to me, and I notice he has put a pair of Will.i.am Optics sunglasses on. I wondered if this was to hide the beginnings of a bleary eye. He still hasn’t spoken. I remember the note I wrote to myself. ‘Draw him out.’ So I do. I sketch him with my biro. I draw him with a pirate hat. I draw him in a bikini, shaking hands with John Cena. Happy. For this is how I want to remember him. I raise the napkin to his gaze to urge him to talk to me. To show him the other side of whatever mountain of pain his heart can’t quite trapeze. We can tackle the storm together, then revel in the sedation of the clear blue skies, hand in hand, my head nestled deeply into his scraggly white beard. My Mr Scraggles, my sweet Caroline, my hot hunk of skirt-steak.

I can sense the words coming, as if I hear their echo first. Now, my ears pick up every last murmur, every decibel of subtext. A long sigh, then…

‘I have… fears. My worries they… they run deep. Just as the land runs vast, and the clouds mount thick onto one another. my pain is loud, but sometimes tauntingly quiet, my apprehension is real but at the same time, I can never quite grasp it... ‘

‘I understand’

(I really don’t.)

‘Have you ever felt like a floating leaf, riding the wind alone, lost in the skies, miles from home?’

This feels like a rip-off of something. Perhaps a song I once knew in my past life, the one that existed before this night. I recognise the metaphor. Uncurious, I brush the thought away.

‘Often’ I say. This calms him. I can tell he craves home. Nomad of the night, reacquainted with a proper bed only when spending the dusky hours with a maiden he met on tinder. I imagined his profile. Interests: intense staring, pondering the unexplored catacombs of the human psyche, nail art. I go crazy for: Zac Efron in 17 again!!! (Or warm human blood.) Looking for: nothin’ serious.

I wondered how many one night stands he has had only to sleep under a duvet. I feel something cold spatter on my cheek. I concentrate my gaze back on him and see that he is blowing bubbles at me with a small handheld bubble device. ‘UH OH, BLIZZARD!’ He precipitously bellows, darting from the table and meshugally huffing bubbles around the room. Oh, my Mr Scraggles, what has happened to you?

It’s a doggy-dog world, and I quickly realise that he is a meercat. Scared as the rest of us. Watching him, I think how he encapsulates all our attempted endeavours to etch dents into reality, deigning to create something to be remembered by, but ultimately resounding with the impact of a mere bubble on a leather briefcase, popping, then vanishing into nothing.

I realise I must intervene. Downing the rest of my Chateau Capburn like I’m Kristen Wiig in a self-depracating comedy about her life going wrong, I lunge to my feet and hurl myself at him to tame the wildling. Len the Ghost mistakes my compassionate intervention as some kind of aggressive attack. He snaps his head my way in isolation, the rest of his body following suit like an owl, and pulls his fists up. We are sparring. Bad Blood by Taylor swift bellows from the speakers. Air punches weave past each other. His eyes have turned black. He barks, like a dog.

He sparks me, right on the cheekbone. I jab him in the neck. He is weakened. I punch again, this time into his shoulder. He retreats, cowering. The calm before the storm… I suspected. I knew it was a trap. Two can play at that game. I feign kindness and approach him with a surrendering lifting of the hands, but he calls my bluff, and kicks me in the stomach with the heel of his black cowboy boots. I tumble to the floor and lay there, winded. I look at his facial expression: half horrified by his animalistic outburst; but I see that he feels angry and disrespected. And what does an angry and disrespected builder with an incredibly good work ethic and huge electricity bill to pay do? Finish the job.

He prepares to end me. Vocal exercises, lunges, and a tiny barber who runs out from behind the pillar and trims the split ends of his beard. I was toast. Now fully ready, his stature lingers above me in stasis, taunting my breathless body. However, if there was one thing I knew about Len the Ghost, it’s that he’s all about building tension, so I knew I had some seconds to work with. I thought hard of a way out of my peril. Then it hit me: I saw a young waiter, potentially new to the job, hoisting a delivery of pine nuts to be used in the pea and pine nut soup through the back doors of the bar; my first thought was that there is a much shorter route from the car park to the kitchen, my second thought, was of Len’s canines.

‘A nightmare when it comes to shelled foods.’

I had found my escape. But my execution had to be slick. Despite my breath returning, I faked some short, desperate inhales so as not to let on, and waited for the waiter to get nearer. Precipitously, as he brushed shoulders with Len, I burst upwards. I grabbed a handful of pine nuts and threw them into Len the Ghost’s open, smirking mouth. ‘NOOOOOOOOOO’ he cried, as his jaw fumbled, and the pine nuts embedded themselves deeper and deeper between his canines and incisors.

He desperately lunged for the ostentatious black box that bore his toothpick, but I was faster. I snatched the box off the table, ripped off the lid and held the dart-like spire up in front of him. Waiting until our eyes met, I crisply snapped it in half.

It was as if the skin on his face effervesced with a grey-green powder. As if something was oozing out of his skin and leaving his body. He dropped to his knees. Was it grief? Was it fear? I saw that he was viscerally weakened. He held his chest like someone suffering their second heart attack; it was a knowing fear- experienced before. The type that is quiet. Trembling, he glared at me.

‘This isn’t over Lorna.’

Seconds later, I watched his body spiral into a fume-like wisp and evaporate into the air. What remained was the debonair suit, black cowboy boots, and long scraggly chinstrap strewn on the floor.

The beard was fake. I had my suspicions.

Who was he?

I tried to piece together what I had just witnessed. There was only one explanation for such an instantaneous, corporal enervation, right when I snapped that toothpick.

The toothpick was a horcrux. And someone who can’t grow facial hair is impersonating Len the Ghost.

I grabbed a handful of pine nuts for the road.

Who knows when I might need these next.

One thing I did know, was that whoever they are, they’re volatile, angry, magic, and at large. But most importantly, pine nuts were no longer just for eating.