I knelt, my hands touching but not feeling their shoulders (I was already learning ways to make my condition just a little more tolerable: I’d reach out and touch, and although I made no physical contact, by leaving my hands where they would normally have rested on the other person, I imagined I could feel. It was better than nothing).
‘Don’t worry for me,’ I said as if they could hear. ‘I’m fine, really. I didn’t feel any pain, I didn’t even know I was going to die.’ Maybe it wasn’t helping them, but in a strange way it was helping me. What better way to go than when you’re not there? No suffering, no fear – just, well, just oblivion. Only it wasn’t quite oblivion, was it? No, it was discovery, then fear, this followed by all kinds of angst.
I was about to blubber, so I forced myself to snap out of it. Withdrawing my hands, I got to my feet and made a resolution. There was a reason for my condition and I was going to find out what it was. I was an enigma, a mystery to myself, and I determined to find the answer. And while I was at it, I’d discover a way to contact my precious wife and daughter. Hell, spirits spoke to the living through mediums all the time, didn’t they?
Unfortunately, it was precisely at that point that Andrea gently nudged Primrose away from her and said: ‘I have to phone Nanny True, darling. I have to let her know about Daddy.’
And my new resolve crashed.
While I hadn’t felt close to Mother for many years now (if ever, in fact), the grief I knew my sudden death would cause her almost overwhelmed me with sadness. What’s the old Chinese saying? The torment of the gods is for your children to die before you. It goes something like that. Anyway, that day I understood the adage perfectly. Despite her detachedness, she would be devastated at losing a second man in her life, my father being the first (despite her apparent disdain of him, there had to have been some love at the beginning). She had no close friends – she’d never courted friend-ship, for that matter – and although there was still Andrea and her granddaughter Primrose, she hardly ever saw them before my death, so I was pretty certain she wouldn’t after.
I sat with Prim and tried not to listen to the onesided conversation coming from the phone. Fortunately, Andrea kept her voice low, only the gravity of its tone reaching Prim and I on the sofa. My daughter had slumped with one cheek pressed against the back of the sofa, her brown eyes glittering with tears. Small catches of breath jerked her chest and shoulders every few seconds and her solitary sobs had become dry with repetition. I’d have given anything to hold and reassure her Daddy was okay, he was right there beside her and feeling no pain – no physical pain, at least. But I had nothing to give. What could a bodiless person possibly possess to give? Even a future was in serious doubt. So I used the new trick I’d learned: I put my arms around her and imagined they were making contact. I whispered loving things into her ear and hoped they would, in some mysterious way, get through to her. Oh God, I could feel her hurt and it was terrible to bear.
Andrea returned and her face was ashen. I saw that she was going to sit in the place I already occupied and I moved away, reluctantly relinquishing my imagined hold on Prim, but just as unwilling to undergo the added trauma of being ‘invaded’ by my wife.
Prim snuggled into her mother’s arms once again and looked up into Andrea’s face. ‘What . . . did . . . Nanny . . . say?’ Each word had had to be forced.
A child’s question and perhaps the only way she could express concern for her grandmother.
Andrea’s reply was as grim as her face was pallid. ‘Not much,’ she said.
Kneeling on the floor in front of them, I let go a deep sigh. No, it was more of a silent groan. I should have known Mother would deal with my death in her own remote way. Any wayward emotion would be kept in check in another’s presence. Maybe she’d burst into tears once she put the phone down. Maybe. I wondered if she had even enquired how I’d died. Well, could be I was judging my mother too harshly, but it had taken a lifetime for that judgement to be formed. Let it go, I told myself without bitterness. Mother was Mother. Her self-preservation took its own line. I returned to my wife and daughter, who had no such hang-ups.
I don’t know how long we remained there in that gloom-laden room, all of us weeping and scarcely moving – it could’ve been an hour or half an hour – but finally it was the sound of a car door slamming on the drive, then the doorbell ringing, that roused us.
Andrea gave Prim one last hug before rising and walking right through me as she went to answer the door. Briefly I felt that now-familiar disorientation as her psyche mixed with mine and misery piled on misery. But I’d also caught a curious hint of anticipation, a kind of reflex lightening of her mood which, while hardly shifting the grief, at least interrupted it for a moment.
I heard the front door open, then a loud sob that came from Andrea. The silence that followed was broken only by a few more muffled sobs. Rising smoothly – at least I had acquired a certain grace of movement in my new state – I went through to the hallway.
Andrea was in Oliver’s arms, one of his hands in her hair, holding her head against his shoulder. His eyes were closed and there was nothing in his expression.
19
I hung around the house for three days – I think (time continued to baffle me) – full of self-pity and anguish for my family. Outside, the weather had turned grey and drizzly, suitable for the general mood, I suppose.
I think I must have been afraid to leave everything that was familiar to me; somehow the contact helped maintain my own reality. Nothing could be mundane for me anymore, but at least the familiar offered a kind of sanctuary.
It was terrible to witness the suffering of my family and I searched for ways of letting my presence be known to them (I wasn’t yet ready to leave the house and find a spiritualist). I tried to move objects, anything from ornaments on the mantelpiece to lace curtains; I spoke directly and loudly into Andrea’s ear; I tried writing my name on a steamed-up bathroom mirror; I willed cups to rattle in saucers; I tried rapping on table-tops, kitchen counters, any hard surface that came to hand. Nothing, though. I made no sound, I caused no disturbance. I could only watch as a stream of visitors offering condolences came to the house – friends, neighbours, and of course my business partners, Oliver (again) and Sydney. Surprisingly, it had been Sydney who had formally identified my body, I learned – eaves-dropping was a cinch when you couldn’t be seen. Or maybe it wasn’t surprising after all. It would have killed Andrea to view my mutilated corpse and my mother was out of the question. Oliver? To be honest, I’m not sure how he would have handled it. Badly, I’d guess, given his reaction when he arrived back at the hotel suite to see what was left of me on the bed. Underneath his bravura persona, he was quite a sensitive soul. Despite police suspicion he’d have been an awful choice of murderer. In fact, I think he would have been a disaster as a murderer.
The police came twice, asking the same old questions about dodgy acquaintances and outright enemies, but Andrea had nothing to give. The worst were the Press and television journalists who rang the doorbell night and day – how does it feel to know that your husband was the fourth victim of a serial killer, are you satisfied that the police are doing their job efficiently, do you fear for your own life knowing that the murderer is still at large, do you have photographs of your husband we could take copies of? It was intrusive and it was cruel. I would have done anything in my power to keep them away, but of course, I was helpless. The frustration and the sense of inadequacy were hard to bear.
Eventually, I became restless within myself. I don’t feel I’ve ever been one for self-pity (never much cause before anyway), but I’d indulged too much in the aftermath of my death. Okay, maybe I had good reason, but basically I’ve always been an optimist and it seems to me that death should not necessarily erase the character you’ve developed during your lifetime. It wasn’t exactly optimism that got me moving, though, more like curiosity, a compelling urge to discover more about myself and this dimension in which I existed. Also, I felt
the need to find my murderer, and certain ideas were pushing their way through this great fog of misery and woe that had engulfed me.
First things first, though. I had a duty to call in on Mother. All right, it was more than duty – I wanted to see her, she was my only parent, after all. Yes, and I did love her. How can a son not love his mother? I made up my mind to leave my house and visit her. Besides, arrangements for my funeral and kind eulogies from well-meaning visitors (my canonization was due any day, I began to feel) were unsettling. I needed to get into the world again before I turned into a morose, reclusive ghost.
So I bade silent farewells to Andrea and Prim, whom I’d followed around during the day just to be near her (understandably she was being kept away from school for a while), sitting on the floor beside her bed at night when she slept; later I’d drift off to my own bedroom and lie down next to Andrea, throwing an arm over her, imagining I was real and could feel her. Purposefully, I set out into my strange new world.
It was late afternoon as far as I could tell and the traffic flow from the city was already beginning to swell as I made my way to the wide main road. Prepared for a long haul – my mother lived close to the river on the east side of London – something happened that both surprised and pleased me.
My mother’s image and the low-rent flat she lived in were strong in my mind, because I was thinking of her sitting in her old lumpy armchair, the curtains behind her possibly drawn closed so she would be in shadow (that was her usual mode of mourning, and by mourning I don’t necessarily mean grieving for someone just passed away; any slight or upset that involved altercation with other people – might be the milkman delivering late, or a neighbour making too much noise – would send her off into one of her sulky moods). Just my staying out late when I was a teen – which I did a lot, I admit – was enough to send her into a grumpy retreat for a few days. Sunshine was never allowed into the room during that time, but the gap between the curtains would open an inch or so usually about the third day, widening from then little by little as the mood drained from her. It was irritating, but eventually I learned to take no notice. I’d carry on talking to her as normal and sometimes, if there was no response, I’d reply for her. I had many such self-conversations and I’m afraid it never improved the situation. In the end I’d begin to annoy myself, so I’d make an apology and finally – after the third or fourth one that is – it would be accepted. Full daylight returned to our front sitting room.
So that was what I was thinking of, except I saw Mother in a more distraught state, because this time my death would be the culprit. I usually endeavoured to visit my mother at least once a week and the reception was always frosty if I was late, or had missed the previous week. Drawn curtains in summer, single lamplight only in winter. I pictured her there now, shrivelled in her armchair, tear-stains blotching her plumpy face. Maybe she’d be holding a photograph of me in her trembling hands, possibly me as a boy and more manageable. Just you and me, Jimmy, she used to say then, grasping my small hand in hers and squeezing. We don’t need anybody else – and especially not him (she meant my father, the absconded husband). Just the two of us against the whole world. Well that was fine when I was little, but when I grew up I got wiser and realized the whole world and its residents had a lot to offer. Eventually – around twelve, I guess – I rebelled and started to become my own person. Sure, I still loved her, but I wasn’t certain that I liked her that much anymore.
Yet again, I digress. There I was, three (?) days after my body’s death, breezing along – not quite gliding, but not quite walking either – with Mother’s image and environment sharp in my mind, when suddenly, everything became rushed. That is, I was rushing, leaving my own surroundings far behind.
This was how I mostly arrived at places in my previous, living OBEs. I’d think of a location that was known to me, or a familiar person, then with a blurred kind of flight I’d be there. It was a bewildering but exhilarating experience, a ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ affair without the dazzling column of starlights. For an instant, when I appeared before the person I’d had in mind, I was always sure that I could be seen, or that my sudden arrival had at least been sensed. I felt so real myself, you see. It took a beat for me to realize that my body had not come along for the ride.
And that’s how it was again soon after my death. One moment I was moving along a main road, then everything kind of blurred and rushed, and I found myself in an unfamiliar part of the city. However, I was aware that I’d been brought closer to my mother’s address. Concentrating hard this time, rather than just thinking of her, I experienced another blurred rush. Whatever had been accomplished instinctively in my previous dream-states, I realized, now had to be considered.
I found myself even closer to my mother’s address, in a side street where the houses were run-down and the gutters littered. This time I knew exactly where I was and it took only a mental picture of Mother and her surrounds for the rush to start again and the journey to be completed.
Only a few inches of daylight shone through the narrow gap in the curtains, but at least she had the small table lamp on, which cast as many shadows as it defeated. And, yes, sure enough she was in her lumpy old armchair, sitting forward, leaning towards the low coffee table I’d bought her years ago. There were three photographs on its small surface, one of them black-and-white and torn into four pieces, the other two in colour, both of me. The first, a shot when I was no more than ten or eleven years old, the other as a young man, when I’d graduated from art college with an NDD – National Diploma of Design. I looked good – smiling, happy, kind of confident in myself.
The torn monochrome was of an older man, but although the four pieces had been roughly assembled, they had not been tightly joined, the gaps between distorting the subject’s features. It was a small photograph too, which didn’t help; I couldn’t recognize the man. Yet he – I could see that his hair was grey at the temples and that he was smiling – was somehow familiar to me.
I turned my attention to Mother and whispered to her that I was there but, naturally, there was no reaction. Her poor face was puffy, and the redness around her eyes indicated that a multitude of tears had been shed. Unusually for her, she looked untidy: the collarless blouse beneath her thin beige cardigan was wrinkled, unfresh, and her skirt was rumpled too; she wore old carpet slippers and her tights or stockings were crimped around the ankles. Even her grey-brown hair was slightly messy; normally it was tightly set and not a single hair moved when she shook her head. Now it fell over her forehead in untidy locks while the rest was a confused tangle of curled snake-like clumps all over her head. Rarely had I seen her in a state like this. In fact, the last time she had been almost as distraught was on the day I told her I wanted to find my father (I was seventeen, if I recollect correctly, and it was shortly before my motorbike accident). He might – according to her – have been a bad man, an awful husband and father, a person who drank too much and was obsessive about things that decent people did not mention aloud (I took it that she meant sex), but I’d insisted, told her, it was my right to know my own father no matter what kind of scumbag he might be. That was it: curtains closed, sitting in a sulk for the next five days, with a blotchy, tear-stained face, accusations that I was becoming just like him, didn’t care for her anymore, that I was obstinate, bullheaded and disrespectful – all this thrown at me, wearing me down bit by bit until I figured that finding my long-lost dad was more trouble than it was worth. I admit it – as far as women were concerned, whether they be mother, girlfriends, or wife, I took the easy way. Can’t stand moods, never could. Maybe because Mother always seemed to be in one. Anyway, like that time, when I was seventeen, this was just as heavy. Heavy, but at least understandable. She’d lost her only son, hadn’t she? And in the most awful way any mother could imagine.
I noticed her pinkish, transparent-framed spectacles were lying on the coffee table behind the photographs. I also noticed a bundle of letters on the carpet by her feet. Curiosity taking
over from the pity I felt for her, I went down on my knees beside the low table so that I could get a closer look at those letters. At first I thought they were letters of condolences for her recent bereavement, but now I saw that some of the envelopes were battered and old-looking. Peering even closer, I saw that the one on the top said: Master James True, with our old address beneath the name.
It was a jolt. Why would someone have written to me at our previous address? Leaning forward so that my head almost touched Mother’s knees, I tried to discern the postmark, but it was smudged. The envelope itself was light blue and the stamp was one I hadn’t seen for many years. The other envelopes were of various sizes and mostly white; frustratingly, I could not riffle through them.
A tearful sigh, not quite a sob, came from Mother. I toppled over as she stretched forward, a reflex because I thought she might touch me and I didn’t want to scare her. Silly, but I still hadn’t become accustomed to my present state; there were all kinds of things yet to learn and, until I did, involuntary actions or reactions would continue.
She reinstated her glasses on her nose, then picked up the most recent photograph of me.