Serpentine Gallery 24-hour Experiment Marathon

James was a ghost of a boy. Literally. He recalled with absolute clarity the moment of his death. For it stayed with him, but not the way images stay with the living. All vibrant at first, then receding into fainter tones. In James the colours burned. For the living, the world was just some variants of black and white; like writing on a page, full of humdrum contrasts, one thing against its opposite. Boring. But from ghost world each thing radiated a vibrant hue, like life was a spectacular kaleidoscope or something. Yes, like the sun had got inside it all. Given the generally very colourful state of things it was hard to move around, quite painful on the eyes, but you got used to it and James didn't mind. He had spent his other life moving from one place to the next, one place rubbing against another, so hanging out was pretty welcome. And all this light was a great relief from the BLACK BLACK BLACK, which was what he thought could be the title of his life as an alive person.

This colour thing was the main difference, as far as James could see, between the ghost world and the old world, and it caused a lot of trouble in the border zone or shining as they called it. But more of that later. As far as James could see, and that was very far, the main reason to go there was to try and die back to life. All the ghosts had this longing to some degree, but James barely felt this desire: it was an occasional itch in his hollowed out core. Mostly he wanted to have some fun. He was bothered by other stuff though, since you ask. Yes, questions about memory. As far as he had sussed it, there was a big thing going on with forgetting, like it was the thing joining up the dead, the undead (like him) and the living. The more he thought about it the more it seemed that the world of the undead and the living were not so separate after all. He remembered the time in the hold, the black void swelling beneath him. He remembered asking his sister, Unknown Quantity, what his name was. This, he thought, this was when the forgetting started. And when the forgetting started was the beginning of ghost life.

Just a note here. As it is hard to understand. His sister wasn't really called Unknown Quantity by people. That was James' little joke about his sis, a way to keep her close now that she was lost to him. James liked to call her that because she kept changing her name in every new place she found herself or when she met new people. That was her way to get by. James had lost track of the names she had: Olivia, Gloria, Lisa, Alice, Rivulet, Torrent, Zenith. That was the last he had bothered to learn before he coined her U.Q. Though he missed her, he mostly just admired his sister. He wished he could be like her, changing with the weather, like a cloud or something that people see a lot of different things in. James. What James is, he thought, is just a constant, something to rely on. How can I be a child?

There it was again, brutally clear, like it was inked right through him: the hour of his death. His stupid thought: get back my watch from that barter man Chinese Mick or Mike. His sister U.Q., her stash of cigarettes and her angry look as he left for the job. Then her face all tears as he bled out on the docks, Mick's knife still digging in the hole in his neck. Broken watch face, ghost and smiley stilled, no more tick tock. Infinity.

He thought of his story so far. How to make this ghost life go somewhere, James thought. Like someone was watching over him, wanting him to want some more. He remembered this feeling from the other life, some story someone told him, a telephone or something, about love, yes, the love story it was called. It left him feeling insufficient, like he was always missing something, always incomplete. That would be a reason to go somewhere and look for something. He tried to think about what other people would do in this kind of circumstance, you know to move things on. He felt trapped in tones and heavy ideas about what he was. Like he was some historical creature who everyone had told a story about, so it was impossible to be anything other than what people had said and said. Then he remembered what his sister would have done: she would have made a list. Make a list of questions, or things you'd like to be or places you could go to, like possibilities. These are like spells and they take you from one place to another, they break the world you are in.

Here is what he wrote in his head. There are no numbers, because these make lists grow upwards, and the undead never grow.

Flesh. Flesh is good, until it fails. Cancun, Mexico. How easy it is to break the world. How hard to put it together. Doors opening. Smiling faces. Other children. Chinese Mick. Wheelbarrow. The new. The absolutely new. So new that nothing can be said to come before it. The snow, the brilliant snow, as clean as a white page, or an empty screen. Eyes, eyes. All the colours of the eyes and their shining at you. Like windows into happy. Watching. A watch. Yes, a watch.

This was about the time that the list thing stopped in his head. Numberless and numb.

And there he was at the shining, though he hadn't wanted it to be. Some kind of time slide thing. And now, all the colours playing before him, colours so many he could not name, and in the colours figures and faces dancing, and beside each other, coming into shape. This is it, he thought, this is where the worlds meet. Though he was not sure which worlds were meeting. Was it the undead and the dead or the living and the undead? All this gathering and dancing. All this meaning. Meaningfulness. New light coming through him and into him even though he was only made of light. Yes, yes. He wanted to touch and be touched.

He thought of all the stories he had forgotten, and he knew his story was only one, one of the many. Then he thought about all the forgotten stories in the world. Tried to feel their weight and consequence, to take them into him. How good it would be, he thought, if you could make a thing to keep all the stories alive... like a kind of never ending, never forgetting, never failing voice that would sing the song of the humans dead, undead and alive.

Olivia, is that you, he said. Then silence.