top hat

Out of place is one way to describe it.

He is stood there, on the deck looking out over the edge of the boat. Straight out. No messing. No looking down or around. No matter how much the boat sways his eyes are fixed on something.

His top hat looked out of place here, now. Maybe a hundred years ago it was all the rage. Now it was just… precarious. Yet it sat, solidly as if it had been stitched onto his head at birth and was damned if it was going anywhere now.

Perhaps it was? Although I doubt it; it would have been too big for even the fattest headed baby.

Why is he standing there? Does he not feel the rain?

I am sat, huddled, under the stairs on deck. I’m smoking but he doesn’t notice me. He doesn’t notice anyone (not that anyone else is out in this weather).

It isn’t the first time I’ve seen him, the poor bastard. I haven’t spoken about him to anyone else, so I have no idea if he’s a common site on-ship.

It’s not like he is always there, anyway… just mostly. Just holding onto the rail and staring out to see.

‘He has lost someone’, that is normally the schtick with ghosts and the sea, right? But I don’t think that is the case. He doesn’t look sad. And why should he be haunting a ferry built probably 80 years after he died?

Although it does seem like he has lost the plot a bit. Standing on a ferry en-route to the Isle of White, gripping the rail tight and staring out into the dark…

Perhaps he was mad before he died? Or maybe he is mad because he died… It could do that to you, I imagine. ‘Death’. Not the easiest concept to swallow no matter which side of it you fall upon.

He certainly doesn’t fit with the times this thing was built in; he might be out by a hundred years or so going by his hat. Maybe he could pull it off if he was wearing shoulder pads. But he isn’t: it is a top hat for him and nothing else.

He vexes me, this naked ghost man.

Is nudism common with ghosts? He is the only one I have ever seen.

Maybe they all get lost a lot. Maybe they never haunt the right thing; there could be thousands of them out there, haunting something by mistake: An ice cream van, a dog’s kennel, a video store, a compost heap… who knows?

Maybe he died on a boat on a stag night? Did they have stag nights then?

Maybe… Probably… I have been smoking for too long. Nothing about this makes sense any more.