Nobody True Read Free

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.
    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