Nobody True Read Free Page B

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