cross by the moment. As you’ll have gathered Mother didn’t like public scenes.
So that was the very beginning of my out-of-body experiences—OBEs, as they are generally referred to.
Of course, it’s not something that most sensible people can believe in.
3
I didn’t have another OBE for a good few years and by the time I was in my teens—I was seventeen, to be precise—I had all but forgotten about it. I suppose I eventually had come to believe that it had been a dream as Mother had said, so it played no important part in my thinking as I grew up; I didn’t quite forget about the experience, because when it happened again I immediately related the two events. This time the circumstances were far more serious.
As a kid I’d always loved drawing and painting*—drawing in pencil or pen and ink mainly, because tubes of paint were a bit expensive for a single-parent family (and, being dead, my father discontinued the alimony payments, which were never official anyway because my parents hadn’t actually divorced. Apparently, he’d died—I don’t know what killed him—when I was twelve years old, but I didn’t learn about it until a couple of years later). I’d spend most of my free time sketching, even creating my own comic books—graphic novels, as they’re grandly called nowadays—writing my own adventures to go with the action frames. Some of those comics were not so bad, unless my memory is gilding them a little; I’ll never know anyway, because Momma Dearest threw away the big cardboard box I’d kept them in, along with the few paintings I’d done and short stories I’d written, when we downgraded and moved to a poky flat in a less reputable part of town. No room here for all that junk, she’d told me when I complained that my box of valuables hadn’t turned up. I could appreciate the problem, but it would have been nice to be consulted. Maybe then I could have at least saved some of my favourite stuff. Pointless to blame her—she had enough worries coping with life itself and the day-to-day expense of existing.
*Art and English: they were my top subjects at school. In fact, so certain was I that my future career was going to be drawing and painting, making up advertisements—I called it advert-ie-sements in those days—to go in newspapers and on wall posters (this was “commercial art” I soon learned, now “graphic design”), that other lessons didn’t concern me very much. Maths I hated—I think I’m “dyslexic” as far as numbers go—history was okay because it was stories, although I could never remember the dates of all those historic events (unnecessary in these reforming and “new-ideology” times, I gather). Geography was dull, RI—religious instruction—not too bad because, again, it was about stories. Between art and English, I enjoyed art the most. Sure, I loved writing tales and essays, but I got more satisfaction from pen, pencil, and paint. Eventually, I began to appreciate the masterpieces, initially the works of Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, all the great but obvious guys, later moving on to artists as diverse as Turner and Picasso (I loved the latter’s earlier stuff, before he started taking the piss), from Degas to Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema—yep, I know, all the populist stuff, but so what? Only later, when I enrolled in art college, did I learn to value the trickier and more imaginative works.
She used to take in sewing at home and was pretty good at it, until too much working in inadequate lighting ruined her eyes. She received some income support, although it wasn’t much, and the old man had a small life insurance policy, which she claimed as they were still legally married. It wasn’t a lot, but I’m sure it helped a little, and I suppose it was the best thing my father had done for us. As soon as I was old enough I got a job stacking shelves in a local supermarket and collecting wayward wire trolleys from nearby streets and car parks—they might escape the store’s boundary but they couldn’t run forever. Another problem with Mother was that the more she worked alone, often through the night, the more neurotic she became about people. I think she became a bit agoraphobic—she was, and still is, something of a recluse. She began to stay at home all the time, weekdays and weekends. The clothes stitching and repairs she did for chainstore tailors was delivered and collected, and by the age of eleven I was doing most of the shopping. Two summers before that was the last time we took our annual holiday at the same old boarding house (the proprietors of which had never forgotten my fainting spell over dinner and liked to remind me affectionately of it the moment we arrived). Partly it was because Mother could no longer afford it, but mostly because she couldn’t handle people anymore. Everyone, she maintained, was out to cheat her, from the milkman to the employers who used her sewing skills. According to her, all men were like my father, undependable, had questionable habits, and were not very nice. Regarding this last judgement, I guess the bad poison worked on me, for I never had the least curiosity about my dad, and certainly no desire ever to meet him. At least, not until later in life, when curiosity did finally kick in; before that he was just a cold-hearted bastard who had no love for me and Mother, just as I had no interest in him.
Eventually I managed to get a smallish grant that would allow me to go to art college and study graphic design (I never had the luxury of studying fine art like many of the students who had nice rich daddies—my sole aim was to get all the training I could for a career in advertising) as long as I had a proper weekend job and could pick up the occasional evening work. God bless supermarkets, bars and restaurants—there’s always employment out there if you’re able and willing, most of it paying cash-in-hand.
At art college I learned about photography, printing, model-making, typography and design itself—news and magazine ads, posters, brochures, that kind of thing—and I met and mixed with some good people from varied backgrounds (not all had rich daddies). There were also plenty of attractive girls around, many of whom were pioneers of free spirit living—and, importantly (to us boys), free loving. I had one or two girlfriends during my time at the place and there were no hassles when we broke up; the barrel was too full to get heavily involved with just one person, and that applied to both sides. My only problem—my only big problem, that is—was transport.
The art college was on the other side of London and daily journey by tube and bus was eating away at both my grant money and earnings from those weekend and late-night shifts. So, ignoring near-hysterical objections from Mother—those machines are death-traps, you’ll kill yourself within a week—I bought myself an old second-hand Yamaha 200cc motorbike. Not much of a machine really—a mean machine by no means—but good enough to get me from A to B, and cheap to run too. I’d had to save and scrape together every penny I made, working double- shifts most weekends, but because of that labour I cherished the old two-wheeled hornet even more. Trouble is, Mother was almost right.
I’d moved away from home—I admit it: Mother, who had become a little crazy by then, was driving me crazy too—and into a run-down apartment with three fellow students, two guys and a girl. It was closer to the art college and saved me a small fortune on tube and bus fares. I still needed the bike though for buzzing around town.
The accident happened on a wet, drizzly day, a typical winter city day, and the air was chilled, the streets greasy. I’d skipped a model-making class (it was an unnecessary part of the curriculum as far as I was concerned: I had no intention of making a career out of fiddling with glue and little sticks of wood and cardboard) so it was late afternoon, four o’clockish. The kids were coming out of school, mothers collecting them in four-wheel-drives and hatchbacks. Aware there were school gates up ahead, I’d slowed down considerably (and thank God for that), but as I said, the street surface was slippery and visibility in the early winter evening none too good. I was about to pass a parked Range Rover when a kid of about five or six ran out from behind it. I learned later that the boy had seen his mother parked on the other side of the road and, in his eagerness to get to her (her and the little white Scottie yapping in the back of the car), he had raced out without looking.
I remember I had two choices, but nothing at all after that: I could run straight into him, or swerve to my right, across to the other side of the road. The only trouble with the second option was that there was a van coming from the opposite direction.
I liked to think afterwards that I made the decision quickly and rationally, but it could be it was merely a reflex action. I steered to the right, the machine began to slide under me on the slippery tarmac (so I was told later) and headed into the path of the oncoming van. It seemed the van was braking hard already, because the driver had seen the boy about the same time as I had and had guessed he might run out. But of course, the wheels beneath him had trouble with the road surface too and both van and motorcycle slithered towards each other.
It was fortunate that the van had also reduced speed, otherwise the crash would probably have been lethal to me. As it was, the impact was hard enough to break one of my legs and send me skittering across the road using my helmet as a skateboard. As well as the damaged limb, I sustained massive bruising and a hairline fracture of the skull—the crash helmet saved it from cracking like an egg.
The kid’s sunny little face, blue eyes sparkling as he ran towards the yapping dog in the car, blond curls peeking out from beneath his infant school cap, the bright blazer two sizes too big for him, is still imprinted on my mind as if the accident occurred only yesterday, even though the resulting crash was a complete blank to me. I just know that if I’d injured that small boy—or, God forbid, if I’d killed him—then I would never have forgiven myself.
