Normally, that very thought would have effortlessly sent me home to my body within moments; but this time I had to will myself deliberately to return. I flew from the house and along streets rapidly enough, but I had to negotiate the route, will myself along, whereas before there was no conscious effort, I just arrived back in my body without thought or direction. A couple of times now I even got lost, became confused, had to force myself to slow down and think of where I was and where I had to get to. Luckily, I knew the city well, so it was no great problem to return to the Knightsbridge hotel; the difficulty was having to think my way there.
And then I arrived, gliding upwards to the tenth floor, through the thick wall, into a lengthy corridor, sinking through the closed door to the suite I shared with Oliver, coming to a jerky halt in the lounge where all my layouts and Ollie’s copy ideas littered the floor. I felt more fear as I glanced towards the open doorway to my bedroom, wary of going in, deeply anxious about what I might find.
I suppose some kind of homing instinct had brought me here, but now I felt nothing. No, I did feel something—I felt adrift… dispossessed. I moved towards the open doorway.
I’d left the two wall lights on above the bed when I’d half-drunkenly collapsed onto the large double bed and I could see what remained of my body lying there on top of the covers. The blood was horrendous. I mean the amount of it. The human body holds, what? Eight and a half pints or thereabouts, and it looked like most of it had spilt out of me. You know how it is when you drop a bottle of milk? It seems to spread everywhere. In the bottle it doesn’t look that much, but on the floor? It’s like a dam just broke.
My blood soaked the quilt on which I lay and what wasn’t absorbed ran over the edge of the bed to puddle the floor. There was even blood on the wall behind the headboard, great arcs of it, drooling streams, as well as dramatic splatters. It resembled art from a Jackson Pollock red period.
My eyes were slightly open in the scarlet mess that once had been my face and the pupils were like unpolished marble, frozen and lacklustre. I was dead, well and truly dead.
14
Whoever had murdered me had left me unrecognizable; if not for the hair and blood-soiled clothes I wouldn’t have known myself. Wait, I got that wrong: it wasn’t the hair or clothes—I just knew the body was mine; although the link had been broken, I wanted to get back inside myself, pure instinct overriding logical thought. I wanted to put life back into my body no matter how mutilated it had become.
Usually, intention did not come into it; I just arrived back, kind of slipping inside like a hand into a glove, a foot into a shoe. But now I had to force my spiritual self to step into the mess and gore that was my former self, into the clumps of sliced flesh.
Squatting over my remains, I lowered my spiritual butt into my physical pelvis; then, after a moment’s hesitation, lay back like a vampire into a coffin.
Unfortunately, whereas at other times I’d merely melded with myself, returning to flesh and bone an easy and smooth accommodation, I now seemed alien to my own substance. I fitted okay, but I did not adhere, did not become myself again.
I found myself lying loose inside an empty desecrated vessel. And every time I tried to move, I failed to stir my flesh; my spiritual self just parted company with its host. Frustrated and in deep despair, I began to moan.
I had no idea how long I stayed there, endlessly sitting, then lying down, trying to “think” my way back into my body, because in the OBE time has no proper meaning, no value at all, unless you related to a living event played out before you, but I think my endeavours went on through the night and into the morning.
One of the strange things among all these other strange things was that there was still a residue of thought left inside my battered brain; or maybe it came from my body as a whole, as if all that was experienced through life etched itself into the very meat and bone of our being, perhaps even ingraining memories into our tissue and sinews, the very texture of our bodies. Maybe the brain isn’t the all of our thinking.
I caught glimpses of other moments in my life, never fast, yet not clear images as before, almost reflections of events and people, some from long ago, most more recent. The strongest were of Primrose and Andrea, but Oliver was also there amongst them, and so was Mother. But they were all too insubstantial and I was too distressed to pay them much attention.
I was panicking by now, desperate to fill myself and having no success at all. No matter how mutilated, I wanted my body back. I wanted to be me again. I began to pray and pray in earnest, even though I’d never been religious during my lifetime—my God, my lifetime: I’d already given it time span—but that didn’t prevent the hypocrisy now; I prayed as if I’d been a devout religionist all my days. Help me, Lord, I begged, beseeched—whined—and I made outrageous promises about my future actions should my existence so kindly be extended. Church would be my second home, good deeds my second nature. Just another chance, dear Lord, I’m really not ready for this. And remember, dear God, I’m a Catholic.
Yet I kept asking myself through the blathering, was I truly dead?
I didn’t feel dead. But what would I know? It was a first-time experience. Why couldn’t I see the talked-about bright light at the end of the dark tunnel? Where were the deceased relatives and friends who were supposed to welcome me over to the other side? Where were the angels?
All I saw was the walls and furniture of a luxurious but impersonal bedroom in a hotel suite, a TV inside an open cupboard in one corner, a built-in wardrobe in another, long windows with fancy heavy drapes to the left. Neither heaven nor hell. Purgatory then? Could be, I supposed. I’d learned about purgatory in my junior school, which had been run mainly by nuns (I’d attended a Catholic school, even though my mother aspired to no particular religion, and learned that purgatory—if the place existed, which I always very much doubted—was an intermediate place where the soul sweated for purification of sin. But nobody had told me it might be a hotel room).
No, that couldn’t be it, because I wasn’t really dead. If I were, I’d know it, right? Anybody would know it. I mean, there’d be no doubt, would there? Unless, of course, I was a ghost. A lost, confused ghost. Wasn’t that what ghosts were meant to be, the lonely spirits of those who couldn’t accept that their bodies had ceased to function and they were now adrift from it? Troubled souls who didn’t realize they were outstaying their welcome in this world? Nah, not me. That was stupid. Death had never bothered me either as a concept or a reality: when your time came, that was it, no sense in complaining. Move on. Don’t look back. Time was up. Yeah, easy to be pragmatic when it was just a notion for the future. We all know we’re not immortal, so how come death rarely figures in our plans?
This was the kind of pointless argument I was having with myself as I tried desperately over and over again to win back the flesh and I guess it could have gone on endlessly had hot the telephone next to the bed rung.
I made a lunge for it, forgetting I had no substance, and my hand went straight through the plastic and interior workings so that I unbalanced (yep, you can still do that even without a body) and ended up on the blood-soaked carpet. I swore—under my breath if I’d had a breath—and held up my arms in despair.