But here’s the thing of it: although hitting the van and its immediate aftermath have no place in my memory bank, the moments that followed are still very vivid to me, because I left my body for the second time, and on this occasion it was for a lot longer. It was as if my other side, my mind, my consciousness, my spirit—I had no idea what it was at the time—had been jolted from my physical from by the van’s impact. As if the psyche, or whatever, had taken a leap from its host.
No doubt you’ve heard or read about the debates concerning whether the human body is merely the shell that contains the soul, but hell, I was just a teenager at that time, a callow youth who was fairly lucky with the girls, was reasonably good-looking, was healthy, and loved what I was studying and looking forward to a successful career because of it; what did I care for spiritual and religious concepts and theories? I’d hardly given the conundrum a second thought. I have now though. I’ve given it a lot of thought now.
I suddenly found myself standing by the roadside, on the pavement. And I was looking down at my own body, which had ended up in the gutter by my feet. For a few moments, nobody moved; everything was eerily silent. Then the little boy I’d just avoided knocking down began to bawl. His distraught mother left her car and ran across the road to him, gathering him up in her arms and squeezing him tight. When she whirled around to look at my motionless body in the gutter, her son’s head buried into her shoulder, I saw her face was white with shock. I could only imagine the emotions she was going through, the relief mixed with the fear and concern for the unmoving body lying a few metres away, one leg sticking out from the knee at a ludicrous angle, a trickle of dark blood seeping out from beneath the bashed crash helmet. Other kids, tiny boys and girls in scarlet and green blazers, who had witnessed the accident, began to wail and clutch their mummies, a daddy or two also comforting their offspring. The van driver was still sitting in his van, a dull look of incomprehension on his moon-shaped face.
As for me, well, I was no longer me, but something aloof from my own self. I felt no pain whatsoever and, for the moment, no confusion either. I was just there, looking down at myself, completely emotionless right then. Soon though, very soon, reason began to kick in.
Although there was not yet fear, I became curious, then anxious. Was I dead? Was I now in the state that followed death? What was I supposed to do? Hang around , wait for someone—something—to come and fetch me? If so, where was I going? And how would I explain this to Mother? Shit, she’d be cross.
I bent down to get a better look at myself. My body was lying face up and I appeared quite peaceful, almost serene, as if I were taking a nap. The only thing that spoiled the picture was the awkward-angled leg and that thin trail of blood seeping from beneath the yellow crash helmet and forming a puddle on the hard grey surface of the road. I felt no alarm, unlike the majority of the onlookers, the kids and their mums, maybe a teacher or two, but I was surprised. And did I say curious? Yeah, I was very curious.
How could this be? Why was I suddenly two persons? I had divided into two, hadn’t I? Something caught my eye. The fingers of one of my hands were twitching, so there was some kind of reaction, if not life itself, still going on. I don’t know why but the movement caused me to examine the hand attached to whatever I had become.
And I could see it, just as if it was properly made of flesh and blood.
I wriggled my fingers, a more vigorous effort than those other twitching fingers in the road, and was satisfied that I could both see myself and move myself. My head snapped up as onlookers hesitantly approached the unconscious other me—the real me—as if I were a bomb that might explode at any moment and I was disappointed when no one seemed to notice the other self, the upright one who could wriggle his fingers at will, not by reflex.
I said something, I don’t know what—maybe I was telling them that I really was all right—but none of them so much as glanced my way. Their attention was directed entirely towards the damaged figure lying in the gutter.
They gathered round so that my body was blocked from view and I spoke again, but was ignored as before. Then a weird thing happened—well, something peculiar on peculiar: I began to float in the air.
It was an easy, fluid rise and, or so I thought at the time, completely unintentional. I found myself hovering over the gathering crowd, my own crumpled figure coming into view once more. (Later, I came to realize—once I’d begun to get used to this strange state that is—that the floating had, in fact, been quite deliberate: subconsciously I was afraid of losing sight of my own body even for a moment, probably because I sensed it was my only anchor to reality and normal earthbound life). I could hear the people murmuring, someone shouting for an ambulance, a man kneeling beside my body, the van driver lurching unsteadily towards the crowd to see the damage, all the while saying over and over again like a mantra to anyone who would listen, “It wasn’t my fault, it wasn’t my fault, he came straight at me…”
And curiouser and curiouser, there were filmy shapes on the edge of the crowd, human figures that were not quite focused (not to me anyway), forms that you could see right through and which shimmered occasionally like unsettled holograms. They were just standing by watching the action, no different from the other onlookers except they were transparent. One looked up at me—I was pretty sure it was a man, although the shape was difficult to define—and he opened his mouth as if speaking to me. I heard nothing though, apart from the anxious mumbles of the real crowd. But there was something familiar about the spectral man and I didn’t know why. Something… No, I had no idea. There was something benevolent about him though.
Often in my dreams one situation can swiftly and easily meld into another, the shift seamless but illogical in the cold light of dawn. Well, that’s how it seemed to me.
From floating above the scene, I was suddenly and fluidly inside an ambulance where my physical body was strapped to a cot and covered by a red blanket, an ambulance man (who would be called a paramedic these days) easing off my battered helmet to examine the wound in my skull. This, quickly and fluidly again, changed into a hospital emergency theatre where people in white gowns and masks calmly tended my body. I assumed my head and other parts had been X-rayed before the surgeon got to work on me, but I must have missed that bit because I have no recollection of it at all. I hung around the ceiling of the operating room for a time, watching over the medics with concern: if I wasn’t dead already, then I certainly didn’t want to be. Too young to die, I assured myself.
Next thing I knew I was in an intensive care unit, standing by a bed in which I lay unconscious with a swathe of bandages around the top part of my head. There were three other beds around the room, these filled with patients fitted with IVs and tubes and wires hooked up to little machines. Fade into Mother weeping at my bedside. A nurse lifting an eyelid to check my pupil. A doctor giving me the once-over. My mother again, weeping as before. Then complete fade-out until I woke up.
I think what had actually happened during this, my second out-of-body experience, is that the other me, the one with no flesh and blood form, had returned to my body from time to time. To my unconscious body, that is. And because I was in a coma for a couple of days, with no conscious thought, I had no natural memories of that period.
When I finally came round, much to the relief of my mother and my friends, I kept quiet about the odd experiences, a) because I didn’t understand them myself and b) because I didn’t want everybody to think the head trauma had short-circuited the wires in my brain.
I recovered quickly, you do when you’re young. My leg took a little while to mend (still had the occasional twinge up until my death), but the hairline fracture in my skull soon healed with due care and attention of the medics and nurses (I dated one of the nurses for a while when I got out, a pretty redhead of Irish descent but no accent). Despite heavy bruising there was no internal damage. In short, I’d been bloody lucky; and so had that little boy, thank God.
Physically, I was soon back to normal. Mentally? That was something else.
Oh, and the motorbike was wrecked, by the way, and I never bought another one. Death or injury comes too easily on those things.
4
Figure this…
A woman walks into a London police station, her step awkward, slow, kind of stiff. Much of her face is covered with dark drying blood. Blood also ruins her blouse and jacket just below her left breast.
In faltering words, she speaks to the duty sergeant, who is more than a little surprised, maybe nervous too —the visitor’s face (the part that could be seen) is chalky white in stark contrast to the burnt umber bloodstains. And her clothes are a mess, stockings or tights laddered, dirt on her knees and hands. She is wearing no shoes.
The woman’s voice is somewhat forced and gargled, as if internal blood has risen and is congealing inside her
