Oh, dear God, I thought. How will she take it? And how will she tell Primrose? They’d both be devastated. No, worse than that, much worse. This time I didn’t bawl: I wept. I wept quietly for my wife and daughter.
The tears fell until I finally ran out of them. I drifted through to the lounge and found a different corner to mourn in. Dropping to the floor I raised my knees, wrapped my arms around my shins, and rested my forehead on my kneecaps. I’ve no idea how much time went by,6 but eventually I found myself alone. It wasn’t dark outside, but shadows were long and the streets below were filled with even more traffic and pedestrians. Obviously it was rush hour, which lasted a couple of hours, sometimes more as this was London.
I cursed myself. I should have left with the senior cop, followed him to my home, maybe even hitched a lift in his car so that I could be there when he broke the news. It was time to go home: I was desperate to be with my family.
I suppose I could have passed through the building’s thick outer wall and floated down to the busy street below, but for some reason that I couldn’t quite fathom, I opted to take the normal route. I kind of walked/drifted through the suite’s closed door and the blue-and-white exclusion tape strung across it, past the uniformed cop on guard duty, then along the high-ceiling hallway to the stairs. I could have taken the lift, but how would I have pressed the buttons? I passed one or two people along the way and did my best to avoid contact with them, just as if my body was solid.
There were a lot of journalists and photographers in the reception area, those by the lifts being held at bay by the frustrated under-manager and a surly porter. I slunk by them all like a celeb trying to avoid paparazzi – irrational, I know, because I was perfectly aware that I could not be seen, but I was not as yet used to the condition.
Outside, the street was full of bustle: traffic, commuters hurrying by, pretty girls in short skirts, long skirts, or sexy trousers. Every one of them had a place to go and lived inside their own bodies. Me, I’d become a bodiless nomad. Rudely disinterred from my own host body. A mystery even to myself. Especially to myself.
On this fine autumn evening, imbibers from the pub across the road spilled out onto the pavement and tables were set outside a nearby café, with several occupied by customers who, no doubt, were familiar with the Continental practice, a custom that never worked well when one of our winters came along. Despite the chill in the air they all seemed happy enough, which seemed particularly cruel to me. Illogically, I wanted them to share my misery, needed them to empathize with my acute loneliness. I think really I just yearned for them to be aware of my plight. Or maybe I wanted to be among them in human form.
Uhhh! Someone had walked straight through me. It was most definitely imaginary, but I thought I felt myself sucked along with the person for a brief moment, a sensation so slight, so subtle, that I wondered if it had really happened. I gave a little shiver and pushed away the memory of his sour visions; yet I experienced an unexpected regret at having left him. The man walked on, unaffected it seemed, save for the sudden familiar ‘someone-walking-over-my-grave’ shudder he gave.
Pulling myself together, I moved away from the hotel steps and drifted along the pavement, catching a shoulder or arm now and again, passing through any body when it could not be avoided. But then I became aware of something new that was weird and a little worrying: I seemed to be tuning in to the collective consciousness. By that I mean I was beginning to experience the unspoken words of these rush-hour people, their intellections: their imaginings, notions, perceptions, cogitations, deliberations and reflections, together with their shared apprehensions, all their cerebral musing suddenly breaking through and coming at me like a great tidal wave of mass thought, so that I had to squat against a wall and cover my ears as if it was their noise tormenting me, piercing my mind, not their conjoined brain yammerings. Almost overwhelmed, I crouched against the brickwork, pressing my hands against my ears even harder and yelling at the top of my own soundless voice to mute their cacophony.
Dear God, my mind screamed, this is going to drive me crazy.
Then, within seconds, something in me started to take control. It was as if I had some inbuilt protection unit that could nullify the ‘sound’. This was my first lesson in asserting some governance over my new status – I think the mere wish to rebuff the assault, coupled with the ‘physical’ act of blocking my ears and ‘yelling loudly’ was the catalyst that exerted my own will and saved me from going loco. Ultimately, it was instinctive, just as many actions in real life are.
Eventually, I got to my feet and moved cautiously onwards. I realized it would probably take the best part of an hour to reach home at this rate (had it taken that long to get back to the hotel last night? I couldn’t remember) and I became impatient. Experimentally, I tried leaping into the air, arms and legs straight in superhero mode, and kicking off with my toes. I could have been a normal human being for all the good it did. I rose about ten inches before settling down on concrete again. Cursing, I tried once more and the result was the same. I thought of those floating dreams again, and as I did, I was back in the air, just a couple of feet for sure, but learning another lesson about myself.
On the pavement once more, I willed myself to float – no, I imagined myself floating – and that was when I rose anew. The earth still had some gravitational pull, because I sunk yet again, although I now had some idea of how it was done. Just as in the old dreams, I thought of myself in the air, launched myself, and there I was riding high.
Whooping with glee, despite the dull heaviness in my heart, I pushed – imagined – myself a little further this time, and further I went. In spite of my troubled mind, I gloried in this small achievement. In truth, it was exhilarating, a tiny oasis of delight in a wretched day. I was airborne, had risen above mere mortals – that sudden conceit caused me to think on. Was I truly lost to this world, then?
Traffic and people passed beneath me and I gazed down at both with wonderment and trepidation. I asked myself the same question, but in different ways: Was I really dead? I mean, do ghosts get excited?
‘Couldn’t be dead,’ I said to myself as I sank back to earth. I just didn’t feel dead, I kept reminding myself. But I’d stood over my own vandalized corpse, so I had to be dead. Then why was I here, gliding through the air, invisible to my fellow-men in human form, but aware of everything around me? I think, therefore I am, said Descartes, and he was a clever guy. Well, I thought, but did I exist?
I touched concrete without feeling a bump and immediately two young girls passed right through me. Just a frisson of alien incursion – a fleeting vision of a good-looking young guy, obviously the topic of the girls’ giggly conversation. Something more though, a covert, brooding envy underlying the pleasure. Within the blink of an eye, I understood that one of the hurrying girls had a date with a new boyfriend, while the other girl, who pretended to share her companion’s anticipation, secretly harboured a nasty streak of jealousy deep within her heart. The insight was quickly gone, but a sour memory lingered with me. I shivered, because the residue of bad will was slow to fade and tainted my own temporary lightness. I resolved to pay even more attention to oncoming strangers – these partial absorptions were way too unsettling. (Interestingly, the one with the new boyfriend was the plainer of the two girls – I had caught a glimpse of their faces just before they walked straight through me – and it was the attractive one who was burdened with the envy.)
I stepped into the gutter and continued my journey, sweeping along the streets, making better progress when all I had to avoid was jaywalkers and cyclists. Once, at a road junction, I came down in the path of a single-decker bus and I couldn’t help but scream as I cowered and covered my head with my arms. It was bad, but not as bad as I expected it to be.
For a start, there was no impact (obviously, not in my state) and the sense of metal, engine parts, oil, and people’s lower bodies washing through me like fluid through a sieve (well, something like that) was no big deal.
It happened so fast and there were so many passengers on board that their every perception dimmed the next, or mixed with it so none was clear. As a round colour chart filled with different colour samples will become completely white when spun, so the individual concerns and considerations melded into one, and were reduced to a senseless but subdued intrusion. It could be handled and that new lesson came as a relief: a mass assault would have quickly sent me crazy.
It became impossible to take any more pleasure in my flight, because primary concerns soon overwhelmed anything else. Anxiety became my driving force. I had to get to Andrea and Primrose, I wanted to be with them when they heard the news of my demise. Somehow – God only knew how – I had to offer them some comfort. If there was a way of letting them know I wasn’t gone, that I was still around . . .
Minor incidents along the route are not worth mentioning here; suffice to say, that by the time I reached journey’s end I’d learned more rules of my condition and was beginning to adapt. People passing through me, something that couldn’t always be evaded every time, was something akin to a cold shiver, or sometimes, when it happened very swiftly, like a cerebral sneeze, a mild shock that shook me for only an instant.
Even so, by the time I reached home I was an emotional wreck, because pernicious travelling companions – fear, doubt, curiosity, bewilderment, apprehension – had accompanied me all the way. But finally I was there and I paused – hesitated? – at the entrance to the short drive as I had last time I’d journeyed home, but now for a different reason.
I suddenly felt completely inadequate.
As previously noted, time appeared to have little relevance in the new dimension I occupied, but the autumn sun was sinking behind buildings on the false horizon, leaving night and lengthening shadows to settle in. I was dimly aware that the trip from the heart of London into the near-suburbs shouldn’t have taken that long, but at the moment other concerns took precedence.
My home stood in a broad, tree-lined avenue and was one of the rewards of my success, although I wasn’t wealthy by any means, just comfortably off. Detached from its neighbours, with two cars inside the double garage – my BMW and Andrea’s small new runaround, a green VW – the house comprised four bedrooms (one of them converted into a study/studio for me, another used as an exercise room for Andrea, and the other two as normal bedrooms), two bathrooms, downstairs cloakroom, a well-spaced hall, long lounge area with patio doors to the rear garden at the far end, dining room and fair-sized kitchen. At the front was the short drive I now lingered in, a small, neat lawn with a couple of flower-beds to one side, and at the rear of the house another, larger garden.
I noticed there was no police car, liveried or unmarked, parked at the kerbside.
I stood watching my home, emotionally but obviously not physically weary, until the sun was just an orange glow behind the distant buildings. I don’t know why I stayed there – I think I was just afraid. Something within nagged at me, told me that when I confronted my wife and daughter and they neither heard nor saw me, then it would be final confirmation of my death. And that really scared me.
I’m not sure how long it was before I stirred myself – as I said, time had little meaning to me now and could be judged only by the actions of mortals – but eventually I resolved to face the truth.
I approached the heavy front door to my home.
18
A second’s obliteration of sight, the briefest sense of being inside, even being part of the wood grain itself, that’s what I experienced when I passed through the front door. I became kin to its texture, its essence, and somehow I understood its growth as well as its roots (yes, literally; I had knowledge of the tree itself, when the oak was planted in the ground and drawing life from the earth and sky). But it was only an instant (by now you’ll have caught the drift that time isn’t quite what it seems to be).
Even as I emerged from the door into the hallway, stairs dead ahead leading to the bedrooms, a feeling of dread pushed oaks and grainy textures from my mind.
The place seemed empty. Certainly there was a coldness of atmosphere to it that I’d never experienced here before. One of my greatest pleasures in life had been stepping over the threshold of my own home after a good and fruitful day’s work at the office and knowing someone was waiting for my return. Especially when it was Primrose waiting for me. But it was only at this precise moment that I appreciated just how much it meant to me, for now there was nothing. No sound of voices, no music, no small running footsteps. Nothing. But no, that wasn’t quite right. It was the feeling of something missing that held me there.
I was suddenly afraid to move.
Surely the police, the detective superintendent called Sadler, should be here breaking the tragic news to Andrea, commiserating with her, asking questions about me? Had I got here ahead of him? But the place was quiet.
Maybe it had taken only minutes for me to reach here, I told myself. Maybe the journey was quicker than I thought and my timing was all askew. My family was not at home and the policeman hadn’t yet arrived. Yes, that was it. There was no strange car parked by the roadside or in the drive, and perhaps Prim was being collected from school at this very moment. But then, outside, the blood-orange sun was already settling behind the spread of buildings to the west and I’d left the hotel when it was high and brighter in the sky. I checked my wristwatch.
Yes, it was there all right, although I had to pull my shirtcuff back to see its face.7 It was a reflex action because I did not feel dead. The digits told me it was 1.32 a.m. But that was impossible. It was not yet dark enough outside. And anyway I couldn’t have lost that amount of time getting here from the hotel. It wasn’t possible! Then it struck me: 1.32 a.m. was the time of my death. That was the precise moment natural things stopped for me. The shirt and trousers I was wearing (I had no jacket) and the watch on my wrist accompanied me into this other existence because they were an intrinsic part of me. Somehow I knew that the digits on the watch would always be set at the same time unless I concentrated hard to make them change, and the clothes I wore would never need cleaning or ironing as long as I didn’t ‘see’ them as dishevelled. This awareness seemed to come as naturally to me as other realizations surely would.
The digression was quickly over with and my thoughts returned to the house’s emptiness. And that was when at last I heard the small sniffling sounds, then the murmur of a soft, soothing voice. Andrea’s voice, Prim’s sniffles. I hadn’t heard them until now because I was too out of my mind with anxiety to take in much else.
I moved fast. I walked or glided, I don’t know which, through the open door to my left, following the sounds. They were sitting cuddled together on the long sofa in the lounge, arms entwined round each other, Prim’s small head buried into her mother’s chest. It was such a heart-rending sight that my own eyes stung with tears.
I rushed to them and tried to smother them in my embrace, but of course, there was no contact, only an unintended sinking into their flesh. I pulled away, startled, even though by now I should have known what could happen. But I’d been caught off guard and I guess, under the circumstances, it was understandable. I backed off: the utter misery I’d partially absorbed from them was even worse than my own. I could only gaze at them.
While journeying through the streets, and even as early as back there in the hotel suite, I’d been aware of a kind of fuzziness around individuals, shallow halos that had not quite impressed themselves upon me enough to give them any thought – let’s face it, I’d had plenty to think about at the time. When I inadvertently got too close to people (and remember I was doing my best to avoid them) I could see those halos more clearly, softish, but often bright vignettes surrounding each figure. I had accepted that these were each person’s aura8 and I had neither the time nor inclination to give it further consideration. Now I was witnessing it around my wife and daughter, a miserable dull grey that was dense in places. At this time I was not strongly attuned to the phenomenon, but it was definitely pr
esent and somehow it revealed their depths of misery even more clearly than Prim’s sniffles and Andrea’s tears. Obviously they’d been told the dreadful news and by the state they were in it must have been some time ago, because there was no hysteria in their grief, and no denial either, only resigned, sorrowful acceptance. It seemed they had come to terms with the reality of my death already, although I suspected that the full, unexpected horror of it would crush them again and again over the next few weeks, perhaps the next few months. If I’d had a heart, it would have bled for them, but as things were, I could only join in their pain.
Andrea was repeating the same soft mantra to Prim: ‘It’s all right, baby, Daddy just passed away, he didn’t feel a thing.’
It seemed that, wisely, the whole story was being kept from Primrose, and I was grateful for that. I mean, how do you tell a little seven-year-old girl that her father was murdered and mutilated in the worst possible way by some sick maniac? Which words do you use? I prayed right there and then that she would never be told the full truth, not even when she was a grown woman.
I dropped to my knees on the plush carpet and whispered that I loved them both and that I had not left, I was still around, that I’d find some way to let them know.
What? Haunt my own family? Had disembodiment driven me crazy so soon? I’d seen the mangled state of my corpse. There was no coming back. But there had to be a way of making myself known. It happened in movies didn’t it? What was that big hit several years ago, the one with Whoopi Goldberg and the two actors whose stars never rose as high again? The one where the husband or boyfriend is murdered but comes back and contacts his girlfriend through a medium. Ghost, that was it. Yeah, big hit at the time, but hardly rated at all in retrospect. Okay, that was pure Hollywood, but grieving widows and widowers visited mediums all the time, searching for some word from their lost loved ones. I’d always thought that that kind of thing was hokum, sheer nonsense, the greedy feeding off the needy, but hey, today I was clutching at straws. I’d try anything to make my family aware that I was okay, not the same, but generally okay. I know it was desperation, but I just could not bear their suffering. I had to do something.