Nobody True Read Free Page A

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