Nobody True

NOBODY TRUE

James Herbert

…So that this I, that is to say the soul by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from the body, is even easier to know than the body, and furthermore would not stop being what it is, even if the body did not exist.

René Descartes

Cogito, ergo sum – I think, therefore I am.

René Descartes

I think therefore am I?

James True

“It’s not that I’m afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

Woody Allen

1

I wasn’t there when I died.

Really. I wasn’t. And finding my body dead came as a shock. Hell, I was horrified, lost, couldn’t understand what the fuck had happened.

Because I’d been away, you see, away from my physical body. My mind—spirit, soul, psyche, consciousness, call it what you will—had been off on one of its occasional excursions, to find on its return that my body had become a corpse. A very bloody and mutilated corpse.

It took me a long time to absorb what lay spread before me on the hotel’s blood-drenched bed—much longer, as you’ll come to appreciate—to get used to the idea. I was adrift, floating in the ether like some poor desolate ghost. Only I wasn’t a ghost. Was I? If that were the case, shouldn’t I have been on my way down some long black tunnel towards the light at the end? Shouldn’t my life have flashed before me, sins and all? Where was my personal Judgement Day?

If I were dead why didn’t I feel dead?

I could only stand—hover—over the empty shell that once was me and moan aloud.

How did this come about? I’ll give no answers just yet, but instead will take you through a story of love, murder, betrayal and revelation, not quite all of it bad.

It began with a hot potato…

2

I was six or seven years old at the time (I died aged thirty-three) and on holiday with my mother, having dinner in a Bournemouth boarding house. It was just the two of us because my dad had run out on us before I made my third birthday; I was told he’d gone off with another lady—my mother made no bones about it, despite my tender years I was always the sounding board for her vexations and rages, especially when they concerned my errant father. The nights were many when my bedtime story was a denunciation of marriage and cheap “tarts”. The topic of breakfast conversation often had a lot to do with the failings of men in general and the iniquities of wayward husbands in particular. I must have been at least ten before I realized that the equation “men = bad, women (specifically wives) = good but put-upon”, was a mother-generated myth, and that was only because I had several friends whose fathers were terrific to their sons and their sons’ friends, as well as loving towards their own wives. I got to know about marriages built on firm foundations and I have to admit to an envy of the other boys and girls who had normal home lives. Why did my dad betray me, why did he abandon us for this “tart”? It bugged me then, but now I understand. The icon of worship that was Mother eventually lost some of its shine. Yes, in later years I still loved her, but no, I didn’t turn into Norman Bates and murder Mother, stow her bones away in the fruit cellar. Let’s say my view of men in general, and my father in particular, became more balanced. Lord, in my teens I even began to understand how some wives—the nagging, abusive kind—could drive their husbands off. No disrespect, Mother, but you certainly had a mouth on you.

Back to the potato.

We’d had, my mother and I, a wet morning on the beach and a damp afternoon in the seaside town’s cinema. I rustled sweet papers and my mother wept her way through what must have been a matinee re-run of Love Story. Having only just got dry, we got wet again walking through the drizzle back toe the boarding house. I remember how starved I was that evening when we sat down for dinner in the bright, yet inexplicably dreary dining room, the sweets during the film not enough to fill a growing boy’s belly (the burger was by now a mouth-watering memory), and I tucked into my meat, veg and potatoes without any of the normal blandishments or threats from my mother. The boiled potatoes were smallish but steamy hot and in my enthusiasm I forked a whole one into my mouth. I’d never realized until then that potatoes could get so scorching—that certainly wasn’t the way Mother served them up—and I burnt the roof of my mouth as well as my tongue on the blistering gob-stopper. Aware that spitting it out onto the plate in front of a room full of strangers would get me into a whole heap of trouble with Mother, who liked to maintain a “refined” (one of her favourite words) demeanour in public, I swallowed.

She looked up in surprise, then horror, as I sucked air to cool the potato, the horror having nothing to do with concern for her distressed son but because of the spectacle I was making of myself. Heads turned in our direction, forks froze mid-air, and the low buzz of conversation ceased as my breath squeezed through whatever vents it could find around the blockage in my throat. I’m pretty certain that my watery eyes were bulging and my face a torrid red. The noise I made was like a discordant flute played by some tone-deaf jackass, and when the offending vegetable was drawn further into my throat by air pressure the pitch became even higher, developing into a peculiar wheezing. I was panicking, the option of hawking out the obstruction already missed because it was now lodged just behind my tonsils. My only choice was to swallow and hope for the best.

I could feel the lump searing its way down my gullet and I’m not sure which was worse, the agony or air deprivation. Anyway, I fainted. Just keeled off my chair, Mother liked to tell me for years afterwards in long-standing disapproving tones. One moment I was sitting opposite her and making funny sounds and even funnier faces—eyes popping, cheeks as red as red peppers, mouth thin-lipped oval as I tried to quaff air—then I was gone, vanished from view. There was little reaction from the other diners—they merely cranked their heads to look at my still body on the floor, because I’d passed out in a dead faint. Mother probably apologized to everyone present before running round the table to tend me. Fortunately, I was no longer choking; I’d swallowed the hot potato during my fall, or when I’d landed with a hard thump.

Now this is what I remember about lying on the cheap lino flooring: I had found myself observing from above as my mother sank to her knees beside me and lifted my head onto her lap. She lightly slapped my cheek with four fingers, but I didn’t feel a thing, although I knew it was me stretched out there on the dining room floor, with six or seven pairs of strangers’ eyes paying attention as Mother frantically—and, it has to be said, with some embarrassment—tried to revive me. It was as if I were watching another unconscious person who just happened to look exactly like me.

I recall that I enjoyed the sensation before I became frightened of it. Young as I was, I was aware that this self-observation and the floating above my own body was not the natural order of things; I soon began to wonder if I would be able to get back into myself. And as anxiety occurred, I was inside my body once more, eyes flickering open, the burning deep down in my gullet now mellowed. Mother gave one small gasp of relief, then immediately began apologizing to the other diners, whose raised forks resumed the journey from plates to open mouths as if someone had switched their power back on. Dazed as I was I understood that all interest in me had been lost: the clatter of cutlery and mumble of conversation had resumed. Only Mother remained concerned, but even that was tempered by her flushed self-consciousness.

She had helped me to my feet, and then rushed me to the communal bathroom upstairs to flannel my face with cold water. I was okay though: the potato had already cooled inside my belly. I was mystified and not a little excited about what had happened to me—not the fainting, but the floating near the ceiling above my own body. I tried to tell my mother of the experience, but she shushed me, saying it was all imagined, only a dream while I was insensible from eating too fast. I soon gave up trying to convince her, because she was getting more and more cross by the moment. As you’ll have gathered Mother didn’t like public scenes.

So that was the very beginning of my out-of-body experiences—OBEs, as they are generally referred to.

Of course, it’s not something that most sensible people can believe in.

3

I didn’t have another OBE for a good few years and by the time I was in my teens—I was seventeen, to be precise—I had all but forgotten about it. I suppose I eventually had come to believe that it had been a dream as Mother had said, so it played no important part in my thinking as I grew up; I didn’t quite forget about the experience, because when it happened again I immediately related the two events. This time the circumstances were far more serious.

As a kid I’d always loved drawing and painting*—drawing in pencil or pen and ink mainly, because tubes of paint were a bit expensive for a single-parent family (and, being dead, my father discontinued the alimony payments, which were never official anyway because my parents hadn’t actually divorced. Apparently, he’d died—I don’t know what killed him—when I was twelve years old, but I didn’t learn about it until a couple of years later). I’d spend most of my free time sketching, even creating my own comic books—graphic novels, as they’re grandly called nowadays—writing my own adventures to go with the action frames. Some of those comics were not so bad, unless my memory is gilding them a little; I’ll never know anyway, because Momma Dearest threw away the big cardboard box I’d kept them in, along with the few paintings I’d done and short stories I’d written, when we downgraded and moved to a poky flat in a less reputable part of town. No room here for all that junk, she’d told me when I complained that my box of valuables hadn’t turned up. I could appreciate the problem, but it would have been nice to be consulted. Maybe then I could have at least saved some of my favourite stuff. Pointless to blame her—she had enough worries coping with life itself and the day-to-day expense of existing.

*Art and English: they were my top subjects at school. In fact, so certain was I that my future career was going to be drawing and painting, making up advertisements—I called it advert-ie-sements in those days—to go in newspapers and on wall posters (this was “commercial art” I soon learned, now “graphic design”), that other lessons didn’t concern me very much. Maths I hated—I think I’m “dyslexic” as far as numbers go—history was okay because it was stories, although I could never remember the dates of all those historic events (unnecessary in these reforming and “new-ideology” times, I gather). Geography was dull, RI—religious instruction—not too bad because, again, it was about stories. Between art and English, I enjoyed art the most. Sure, I loved writing tales and essays, but I got more satisfaction from pen, pencil, and paint. Eventually, I began to appreciate the masterpieces, initially the works of Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, all the great but obvious guys, later moving on to artists as diverse as Turner and Picasso (I loved the latter’s earlier stuff, before he started taking the piss), from Degas to Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema—yep, I know, all the populist stuff, but so what? Only later, when I enrolled in art college, did I learn to value the trickier and more imaginative works.

She used to take in sewing at home and was pretty good at it, until too much working in inadequate lighting ruined her eyes. She received some income support, although it wasn’t much, and the old man had a small life insurance policy, which she claimed as they were still legally married. It wasn’t a lot, but I’m sure it helped a little, and I suppose it was the best thing my father had done for us. As soon as I was old enough I got a job stacking shelves in a local supermarket and collecting wayward wire trolleys from nearby streets and car parks—they might escape the store’s boundary but they couldn’t run forever. Another problem with Mother was that the more she worked alone, often through the night, the more neurotic she became about people. I think she became a bit agoraphobic—she was, and still is, something of a recluse. She began to stay at home all the time, weekdays and weekends. The clothes stitching and repairs she did for chainstore tailors was delivered and collected, and by the age of eleven I was doing most of the shopping. Two summers before that was the last time we took our annual holiday at the same old boarding house (the proprietors of which had never forgotten my fainting spell over dinner and liked to remind me affectionately of it the moment we arrived). Partly it was because Mother could no longer afford it, but mostly because she couldn’t handle people anymore. Everyone, she maintained, was out to cheat her, from the milkman to the employers who used her sewing skills. According to her, all men were like my father, undependable, had questionable habits, and were not very nice. Regarding this last judgement, I guess the bad poison worked on me, for I never had the least curiosity about my dad, and certainly no desire ever to meet him. At least, not until later in life, when curiosity did finally kick in; before that he was just a cold-hearted bastard who had no love for me and Mother, just as I had no interest in him.

Eventually I managed to get a smallish grant that would allow me to go to art college and study graphic design (I never had the luxury of studying fine art like many of the students who had nice rich daddies—my sole aim was to get all the training I could for a career in advertising) as long as I had a proper weekend job and could pick up the occasional evening work. God bless supermarkets, bars and restaurants—there’s always employment out there if you’re able and willing, most of it paying cash-in-hand.

At art college I learned about photography, printing, model-making, typography and design itself—news and magazine ads, posters, brochures, that kind of thing—and I met and mixed with some good people from varied backgrounds (not all had rich daddies). There were also plenty of attractive girls around, many of whom were pioneers of free spirit living—and, importantly (to us boys), free loving. I had one or two girlfriends during my time at the place and there were no hassles when we broke up; the barrel was too full to get heavily involved with just one person, and that applied to both sides. My only problem—my only big problem, that is—was transport.

The art college was on the other side of London and daily journey by tube and bus was eating away at both my grant money and earnings from those weekend and late-night shifts. So, ignoring near-hysterical objections from Mother—those machines are death-traps, you’ll kill yourself within a week—I bought myself an old second-hand Yamaha 200cc motorbike. Not much of a machine really—a mean machine by no means—but good enough to get me from A to B, and cheap to run too. I’d had to save and scrape together every penny I made, working double-shifts most weekends, but because of that labour I cherished the old two-wheeled hornet even more. Trouble is, Mother was almost right.

I’d moved away from home—I admit it: Mother, who had become a little crazy by then, was driving me crazy too—and into a run-down apartment with three fellow students, two guys and a girl. It was closer to the art college and saved me a small fortune on 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 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 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 bloodstains. And her clothes are a mess, stockings or tights laddered, dirt on her knees and hands. She is wearing no shoes.

The woman’s voice is somewhat forced and gargled, as if internal blood has risen and is congealing inside her throat, and the policeman struggles to make out the words she says. But he understands enough to catch the meaning.

The deathly pale woman is telling him that she wishes to report a murder. Her own. A name is almost spat out, but it is coherent. Then the woman drops dead. Or so the policeman thinks.

A police doctor is called, who quickly examines the body and asserts that the woman is, indeed, dead. But the doctor is puzzled and adds another diagnosis.

The corpse is taken away and because there is some confusion, if not mystery, about her condition, a post-mortem is swiftly carried out.

The pathologist confirms the doctor’s first conclusion: at the time the woman had walked into the police station, her body was already in the first stages of rigor mortis, indicating she had been dead for at least forty-five minutes.

How so? Later.

5

I continued to have those OBEs. Sometimes they were vague, like a partially remembered dream, while at other times they were perfectly clear yet somewhat unreal in their flow, like movies that have been badly producer-edited. There were gaps in the order, you see, as if I’d reverted to my sleeping body for a while where even my subconscious seemed to be in repose.

The thing is, they no longer needed to be sparked off by any sort of trauma, they started to happen of their own volition when I was near to sleep, body and mind completely relaxed. They occurred only perhaps once or twice a year at first, but then I began to control them—at least, I tried to control them. I’d lie in bed alone and concentrate on leaving my body at will, but nothing transpired at those first clumsy attempts, either because I wasn’t relaxed enough, or was trying too hard. I learned that OBEs are not something that can be controlled entirely at will.

I also realized that between the hot potato incident when I was seven and the motorbike accident when I was seventeen, there had, in fact, been a few other OBEs, when I’d wandered through empty darkened school classrooms, visiting my own desk, or flights when I seemed to be high over the city, with thousands of lights below, many of them moving traffic headlights. I’d put these down to dreams, very, very clear dreams. What did I know? I was just a kid. But dreams always fade with time, if not on awakening, and these excursions or “flights” never did. I nearly always remembered them.

As I got older I began trying consciously to put myself into the OBE state, lying in bed at night and imagining I was looking down at myself from a corner of the ceiling. At first, I’d choose a point above me, think of a small bright light glowing there, then I’d will myself to join it. Nothing really happened though, at least not for a long while. I even used doped—marijuana only, nothing hard—to see if it would help, you know, put me into a relaxed state, free my mind, transcend the norm, but it never worked. I almost gave up until one day in my last year at art college I was bored and listless—a hand-lettering class, I seem to remember, always a drag for me—when suddenly and without warning I was gone.

This was weird phenomenon (I agree, it must always sound weird to anyone—which means most people—who has never been through it themselves) because it was daytime, the sun shining gloriously through a window—maybe its warmth enhanced my drowsiness—and nothing physical had jolted me; no trauma and certainly no accident. One moment I was trying to get the curve on a Century Old Style cap “S” right with my 3A sable paintbrush, next I felt a kind of shifting within me, as if I were being gently hovered out of my skin, and then I was floating above my own head.

Now on this occasion and after the initial surprise—oddly, there was no apprehensive shock involved—I decided I was going to examine the experience rather than just live it. It was as calculating as that. No alarm, no concern that I might not be able to re-enter my body again, no panicky thoughts about death. I could see myself with exquisite clarity, my figure and everything around it finely defined. I noticed the tip of my paintbrush was poised about a millimetre above the letter “S” and my arm—my whole body, in fact—was perfectly still, as if I’d been frozen there. Other people in the artroom were moving: the girl student next to me was wiping her T-square with a clean rag, while on another table, a friend of mine was carefully dipping his brush into an inkpot as our tutor, a thin dandified Swiss with a wispy blond moustache and slicked-back hair, was turning the page of a typeface book opened out before him on the desk top, unconsciously tucking an overspilling cream handkerchief back into his breast pocket with his free hand as he did so. A round clock with a dark-wood frame ticked on the wall. Someone sneezed. Someone else said, “Bless you.” A putty rubber fell off a table and a student bent to retrieve it. All was normal. No one was taking any notice of me.

I wasn’t scared. I guess I was too curious for that. I just felt cool about the whole situation. And because of that lack of anxiety I was able to examine my situation calmly.

I decided to see if I could move about and instantly I could. Just by willing myself I floated to the other side of the artroom, observing the heads and hunched shoulders of the students at work as I did so. I half-expected some of them to look up as I passed over, perhaps disturbed by the breeze I must be creating, skimming along like that. I thought my tutor might bark, “You there, True, come down from zat ceiling and get back to your pless!” in that prissy accent of his, but he continued to study his book, one finger of his hand dipped deeply into his breast pocket as he settled the silk hanky. I could see myself—I’d stretched both hands out in front of me like some ethereal Superman and they were plainly visible—so why couldn’t the teacher and students see me? (At that time, of course, I hadn’t yet come to understand that it was my mind filling in what it expected to see.)

Hovering over a bright window, I turned back to the class. The notion of passing through the window glass had occurred to me, but while remaining perfectly level-headed, I was a little anxious about wandering too far from my natural body. I really did not want to lose sight of it, and I think that was quite reasonable. What if I got lost outside? What if there was a point where the spirit (or whatever I was up there, hovering inches away from the ceiling) became too separated from the physical body and something, some invisible connection, snapped, making re-entry impossible?

Anyway, during that time in the artroom I was, as mentioned, pretty cool about the situation, even if I was reluctant to let my material self out of sight. I looked around, took notice of things, considered how I felt about my condition, then, and only after several minutes, I became eager to get back into my body. (It was like resisting one last chocolate from the box because you’ve already had too many.) And the moment I felt that way I was back.

I don’t recall any journey across the room, nor dipping myself into my natural form; I was just there, looking at the world through my physical eyes once more. Only then did I begin to feel some panic, but it was mild. I think I was too stunned to experience overwhelming anxiety. Soon I was plain curious as well as elated. I’d gone through something rare—at least I thought it was rare, because I’d never heard of this sort of thing happening to anyone on a regular basis, although I’d read of one-off dream-flying and of survivors who claimed they had left their bodies while close to death.

I sat there bemused, worrying that my cracked skull had its aftermath, that the impact had messed with my brain and was creating hallucinations, fantasy trips. But I’d been too passive during the experience and observed too much too clearly for this to have been and illusion. Besides, everything else in the room had been quite ordinary and the other students’ behaviour perfectly normal.

Laying my paintbrush down, I sank back into my chair. What the hell was going on? I remembered the hot potato incident, then the immediate consequences of the motorcycle accident. I’d told the doctors of my out-of-body experience and they’d just smiled benevolently and explained that when the head—the brain, more specifically—took such a hard knock, it often went into some kind of seizure, perhaps losing control for a short time, so that visions in the unconscious state might seem like reality. Nothing to worry about, but a few tests would be in order.

Scans showed nothing amiss as far as my head was concerned; fortunately, the fracture had been minimal, the bone barely penetrated, and the brain itself revealed no evidence of swelling or injury. Rest up, give yourself time for the leg to heal and the skull’s light fracture to knit together. Any trauma to the head could be dangerous and cause concern, no matter how light the blow, but in this case, there appeared to be no such problem. A little surgery on the leg was all that was required.

It was some months after the artroom OBE that I began to think back and re-examine some of the “dreams” I’d had from the age of even onwards, dreams that had not gradually faded from memory as they were supposed to, those that had lingered in my thoughts because of their extreme clarity and almost rational content. In them, I’d visited places I’d only heard or read about, art galleries (paintings and sculptures had fascinated me from an early age), playgrounds, and homes of schoolfriends. I’d spied on my mother as she sewed the lapels of handmade suits while pausing every so often to watch her precious soaps and game shows on the small television we owned and which lit up an otherwise dreary corner of the room. There was no sense of adventure with these dream excursions, nothing exciting about them at all really, and this was what eventually made me realize they were something other than natural dreams.

That’s when I started reading up on the phenomenon and discovered it was more common that I had first thought. I learned that certain curious and dedicated people had achieved by research and perseverance what came naturally to me. Even so, nothing I read compared exactly to my own experiences. Others, apparently, had not attained such clearness of vision or logical continuity; their OBEs were more dreamlike and lacked control, and generally were broken up by blank periods of unconsciousness so that their flow was interrupted, to be remembered later only in vague episodes. However, I did pick up some useful techniques for putting myself into a receptive state, not quite a trance-like mode, but a kind of open responsiveness that encouraged the phenomenon to occur. Things like alert relaxation, where the body is in repose, but the mind is acutely aware if itself rather than the physical body; or the method of loosening the body completely, resting it limb by limb, piece by piece from head to toe; or the perception of outside from within, as if my eyes were merely portals through which I could observe the outer world; or shrinking inside myself, so that my skin and flesh were like an ill-fitting suit, loose enough to escape from. Then there was the mirror image method, whereby a person thinks of themselves floating about their own body, just a foot or two away; the image is clear, and exact replica of himself or herself wearing the same clothes, sporting the same five-o’clock shadow or make-up; the person then imagines he or she is now looking down at their own body from above, that now it’s the physical self that is being viewed. It’s supposed to make the transition easier, but it never worked for me.

In fact, all I had to do was make myself as relaxed as possible, relieve my mind of extraneous thoughts, and will myself to leave my body, sometimes looking at some particular spot on the ceiling or far corner of the room so that my “spirit” had a destination. Then I’d wait for it to happen.

Which it didn’t, more often than not. But sometimes I was successful and the more I was, the more I started to control my “flight”. Initially, I never left the room I occupied, but gradually I began to venture further to other rooms in the flat, cautiously graduating to outside locations, so that ultimately I was able to fly above rooftops, explore places I’d never physically visited—Buckingham Palace was dull, while the homes of some complete strangers could be interesting, even scary. It seemed I was limited only by my own boldness (I have to admit that in those early days I was somewhat timid; the fear of being unable to find my way back to my body was too strong. I was also afraid that the further afield I travelled, the easier it would be to break the psychic link to my physical self).

I slowly learned though that I only had to think of myself back inside my flesh and blood from for it to be so. It would happen in a rush, a dizzying race through space that took no longer than a second or so, and always I’d arrived back safely, with no hitches whatsoever.

I can’t say that I explored this thrilling new state to the full. For one, it didn’t work every time, and for two, after the original excitement, I began to lose interest. I don’t know why, it was just the way it was. Maybe deep down I was really afraid of the capability, some part of my subconscious feeling it was an unnatural state to be in, and that sooner or later something would go wrong, and I’d be punished.

In a way, I was right.

6

Did I ever tell anyone of these OBEs? And if I didn’t, then why not?

Simple answer is, no, I didn’t tell a soul. The reason why is not quite that simple, but you’ve a right to know.

I’ve always been a private person, never one for sharing all my deep-seated angst or emotions. Something I learned from Mother, I guess.

She brought me up to hide my feelings, to put on a face in front of others, particularly strangers. It was all to do with her pride and her shame at being deserted by her husband. Our reduced circumstances embarrassed her and when we moved into our little flat on the rougher side of London, she cut off all contact with friends and acquaintances. You know, I never knew if I had any other living relatives when I was growing up and eventually it didn’t matter to me anyway; Mother and me, we kept to ourselves. I was content enough. I spent most of my time drawing, sometimes painting (when I had the paints, which were usually Christmas or birthday gifts), writing little stories, and reading—God, I’d read anything that came my way, from comics to books to the back of cornflake packets. I loved movies too, and Mother and I went at least twice a week, sometimes twice in one day. For me it was all escapism, I suppose, all these things taking me out of both my environment and my circumstances; it must have been the same for Mother as far as the movies and TV soaps were concerned.

I think that in her mind she lived in some kind of dream world, a place the ugly realities of life could not touch. She was fooling herself, of course, life itself isn’t that easy to shut out.

Now you might imagine that all this would have turned me into a mother’s boy, but nothing could have been further from the truth. I was always independent as a kid, self-contained you might say; I loved my mother, but I could never understand her, couldn’t be the doting son she so much wanted. Just as she disappeared into her film world where everything had a tendency to turn out okay in the end (there were romantic magazines and novels also to keep her dreams occupied), so I retreated into my own small planet, which was a whole deal more exciting that the real one. Although I could never bring them home because of Mother’s strict rule that outsiders were never welcome, never allowed to be “insiders”, I had many good friends at school and later at art college, and as soon as I realized I was capable of taking care of myself I was rarely at home, despite Mother’s accusatory pleas to stay with her. I was no rebel, but I was aware that there was something more, and something better, going on out there and I wanted some of it for myself. Guilt always dogged me though—I did truly love my mother—but I soon learned to accommodate it. Besides, I’d discovered football, which I became pretty good at, and not too long after that, I discovered girls.

But still, the growing-up years are always influenced by your parents and home background, so Mother’s insistence on privacy where all things personal were concerned stuck with me. By the time I was twelve, I couldn’t even tell her things; I’d learned from her to keep my thoughts and emotions to myself and I think, ultimately, she was kind of pleased about that herself—other people’s emotions (yes, even her son’s) could be a “rotten nuisance”. She was complex: she wanted me to love her and be her “best friend in all the wide world”, but she’d been too badly hurt by my father’s desertion to trust any other man, perhaps even any other person; she didn’t really want to hear my troubles or concerns, because that always brought her back to the real world, and the real world had let her down badly. I can admit it now, and I half-knew it then: Mother was a little screwy. If I did upset her by, say, coming home late, or deliberately disobeying her wishes (I can’t say orders, because she was never strong enough to give orders as such—they were always suggestions and sometimes pleadings, rather than dictates), she would regale me with the sins of my father, how he’d left us, been untrue to both of us, run off with some floozy, didn’t care if we starved to death, or were put out on the streets. Eventually, I closed my mind to all this, but even so, the guilt somehow transferred itself to me.

There I go getting off the point. The thing of it is, I’d learned from an early age to keep personal matters to myself, initially because that was the way Mother wanted it, and ultimately, perhaps inevitably, I became embarrassed about life with Mother. In some ways it worked well for me when I reached my older teens, because the girls seem to like that slight air of mystery that hung on me like a dark cloak, made me seem deeper that probably I was. It was something I used to my advantage anyway.

So, enough of all that. I’ve still uncomfortable about our mother-son relationship, but it just might help explain why I kept quiet about the OBEs. I’d learned to keep such things to myself.

Another reason was that I was scared of being laughed at. Or misunderstood, thought to be out of my skull. The pragmatic side of my nature also figured: easier for me to put the experiences down to lurid dreaming, no matter how real they seemed to be. By talking about them, I was admitting their fundamental reality to myself and, frankly, they were a distraction I didn’t need in my life. Besides, the OBEs were infrequent enough not to be a problem.

One more reason, and I think this was as important as the others in its way. Say you were a friend of mine—or, maybe even more significantly, a girlfriend of mine—and I told you I could travel invisibly sometimes, mostly at night when my body was totally relaxed, that my mind could leave my body to go on excursions. Say I told you that and you didn’t think I was totally crazy, you half-believed me. How would you feel about me being able to spy on you at any time, that I could be watching you in your most private moments? You wouldn’t like the idea. In fact, I don’t think you’d ever trust me again. Everyone needs their privacy, their own space. It’s what makes us civilized.

Now and again, I felt the overwhelming need to confide in a close friend or special girl, but common sense always prevailed, something—call it instinct, if you like—always shut me up before I said too much. Later, even marriage could not persuade me to disclose my little secret; maybe I’d kept it to myself so long it had become unimportant.

In truth though, it was never an issue.

7

Something else for you to consider:

You’re physically near to someone, a person you love more than any other in the world, more than life itself. That person is about to be murdered.

That person you love so much is helpless.

And so are you, even though you’re present at the scene and you’re free to move around. You cannot protect your loved one no matter how hard you try.

You have to watch as death slowly, and oh so painfully, begins to claim its victim.

8

My name is—was—James True. Anyone who knew me called me Jim: James was just for passports and tax returns. I was pretty average, five-eleven tall, slimmish, good mid-brown hair, blue eyes, not bad-looking. Like I said, average, quite ordinary. I did have a lively imagination though, which was just as well given the career choice I’d made at an early age.

I dreamt a lot. I don’t mean daydreams, reveries; I mean sleep dreams. Always lucid, full colour, Dolby sound. Reality dreams, but not too logical. Busy, wear-you-down dreams. The medical profession deny the possibility, but often I wake mornings more exhausted than when I’ve gone to sleep. Hard day’s night, and all that. I always figured I was putting in another seven or eight hours’ labour when I slumbered.

Content was anything from fantasy to mundane everyday stuff. Usually a fair bit of angst in most of them. I’d lose something, couldn’t quite reach something, would be placed in an embarrassing situation—you know the kind: in a crowded room or at a bus stop wearing only my vest. Nothing abnormal though, nothing any different from the dreams of other dreamers; it was their lucidity, I suppose, that made them special plus the fact that I could always remember them. I’ve no idea if any had particular significance, because I rarely tried to analyse them. Except for one that was recurring.

In this dream, which came maybe once or twice a year, I could kind of fly. I say kind of, because it was more like long floating hops: I could rise from the ground, sometimes high over buildings, or zoom along several feet above the surface, pushing myself off with my hands every fifty yards or so, gaining altitude whenever it was necessary to rise above people or obstructions. I always thought that these particular dreams were informing me that I was a dreamer, that I had high expectations, perhaps wanted to break away from reality, aspired to things that could only be fantasy, that my own pragmatism, which was tempered by the realities of life itself, unfailingly brought me back down to earth—literally, in the dreams. The way I saw it this was no bad thing. It meant I was grounded. And that was a plus in my eventual profession, where the ideal was advanced—the best soap powder, the finest lager, the greatest value—all of which claims had to stay within the realms of possibility and true to the advertising standards code (I admit that often—no, most times—we pushed those selling virtues to the limit, but we never quite lied).

I soon got over my motorbike accident at seventeen—the hairline skull fracture had been caused by my crash helmet having been dented by the edge of the kerb, but it was one of those lucky fractures (if such a break could ever be deemed lucky) that cause no pressure on the brain and it healed itself within weeks. No surgery was required. Headaches for a few weeks afterwards were the only penalty, and mercifully even these were not severe. My broken leg took longer to mend and I hobbled into college on crutches for a couple of months, but there were no long-lasting effects, no permanent limp, just those periodic twinges.

Because my bike was wrecked I had to stick to London Transport after that, despite high fares and shit services. At least Mother was relieved. It was a drain on my cash, but it only made me take on more evening and weekend work. In fact, day college became a bit of a rest period until my principal hauled me into his office and threatened expulsion if I didn’t get my act together again. Fortunately, one of my flatmates was given the money by his father to buy a second-hand car, which turned out to be an old American army Jeep that we all loved—it might have been cold in winter, because it had no canvas top, but boy, the Jeep gave us great kudos at the college when we rode in together. Despite its lack of comfort, it was babe bait, and we took full advantage.

After completing the three-year course and gaining my national diploma in design, I started looking for a job in advertising. It took me a year of living on social security, hawking my work round one agency after another (same excuse always: come back when you’ve had more experience. So how the hell do you gain experience if nobody’s willing to take you on?). Anyway, I finally struck lucky—if you could call it that—by getting a job with a finished art studio and minor agency. I started as a paint-pot washer, coffee maker, errand runner, art filer—all this after three years art school training—but I was glad to be employed and I made the most of it. It took a while to work my way up to the drawing board, but once there, my training finally kicked in. It was a cheapskate company though and once I felt I’d gained the initially elusive and hard-earned experience, I moved on to a big advertising agency.

Employed at first as a typographer because I’d exaggerated my qualifications a little, I quickly worked my way up to art director on some pretty big accounts. I was used to the work ethic, you see; all those years working through art college as well as evenings and weekends had instilled in me a discipline that could only be for the good. I enjoyed hard work and now, when it was bringing with it substantial financial reward, I found my enthusiasm for the job was even greater. You’re under great pressure in advertising because of its high turnover of fresh ideas, campaigns and ads always wanted yesterday, constant meetings both internal and with clients, briefings from clients, your own briefings to photographers, artists and commercials directors and producers. Long working weekends again, late nights too. Then there’s the social side of the business. Smart, attractive girls, intelligent colleagues, long, boozy lunches balanced out with long and sober bouts of overtime. Add the humour. There’s a lot of humour in advertising, a lot of wit, much of it against the client, although they could never be aware of that. And to top it all, there are the politics. Outside politics itself, the advertising game must be the most political business of all. Unless you can avoid it, it’s dog-eat-dog, all inspired by vanity and insecurity in equal doses, envy, ambition, suspicion, and the quest for money and power.

I always tried to steer clear of it, mainly because it was all too time-consuming and petty; but that didn’t mean I didn’t have to watch my back. Some knives were pretty lethal. The two good things I had going for me were ability (to get on with the work) and talent.

Lucky happenstance brought me in contact with a dream copywriter. Oliver Guinane was brilliant with words and ideas, totally secure in himself, and he loved to work as a team. We were around the same age, had the same enthusiasm for the job, agreed on what was “in”, what was “out”, and what was plain garbage. Best of all, we admired and appreciated each other’s flair for the job.

I’m not sure that in the correct order of things I would have chosen Oliver as a best buddy—he was a little bit brash for me and didn’t always treat everyone as an equal; but he had many other qualities that more than made up for the, well, the deficiencies. Oliver was generous to a fault, had great charm and wit, frequently produced wonderful copy and ideas, and was unselfish with the latter; he also had great energy. With his handsome face, light-brown eyes and full reddish-brown hair that curled around his ears and over his brow, he was also a female magnet, much like that old Jeep, which often meant that I could leave him to the chat-lines while I played the quiet interesting one. Occasionally we’d switch and I’d take on the gregarious role, but Oliver could never stay quiet and interesting for long; his natural boisterousness—and vanity—would eventually take over. He was no good playing stooge. Didn’t matter though, we were a great team both professionally and socially.

We had good times together and through our teamwork we produced some memorable campaigns for accounts as diverse as banking and hair products, alcohol and automobiles. Our reputation grew, as did our salaries, and soon we were being headhunted by other reputable agencies.

We only moved twice though, once to J. Walter Thompson, then to Saatchi & Saatchi, as it was then called. After that, with quite a bit of soul-searching, some sleepless nights and earnest debates (with Oliver as the prime mover in this new and risky plan), we took the plunge and started up our own outfit.

We were lucky. The economy was healthy, house prices were booming, and a lot of money was coming in from abroad. Bank managers (as they still were at the time) were not quite throwing money at businessmen who wanted to expand or start up new companies but, encouraged by their own banking grandees, were generous towards new ventures that had legs. Oliver and I gave a polished presentation to our friendly city bank manager, as if we were pitching for a new account, with my copywriter doing most of the talking while I showed some of our better award-winning work (yep, we were that good) and the manager bought it all.

We approached an excellent account director we knew from another agency and poached a good fresh junior copywriter and art director from Saatchi’s. Oliver had a girlfriend at that time (foolishly, I’d introduced her to him at the old agency) who was a rep for a high-blown and high-priced photographer whose food and product stills were as good as his people work. She was a clever, beautiful brunette, fashionable, and keen with big brown eyes and a slim, leggy body most women would die for and most men would kill for. Her name was Andrea Dodds and eventually I married her. But now’s not the time to go into that. We hired Andrea to be our office manager and second to Sydney Presswell, our financial manager and third partner, who looked alter the business side of things (he was the account director we picked up from another agency). She was presentable, good at handling clients (I used to be one of her clients), and stood no bullshit. Did I say she was beautiful? Well, she was—and still is.

We took on just one secretary, Lynda, to begin with, who also acted as receptionist and telephone operator; a run-around junior, a young kid named Raymond who aspired to be an art director, but who’d had no art school training; a typographer called Peter and the young creative team I mentioned, Paul and Mark. Finding the right premises wasn’t that easy, but after a lot of searching and a lot of rejections, we stumbled upon premises with two vacant floors slap in the middle of Covent Garden. It had just come on the market and it was pricey—actually, too pricey for us—but we knew instantly it was exactly what we were looking for.

We set about the hardest part of the whole venture: acquiring clients. Legally we had contracts with our ex-employers which forbade Oliver and I approaching our existing clients for the next three years. Of course, that did not prevent those clients approaching us once the news got out that we were quitting and branching out on our own. So one or two who trusted our abilities solicited us instead. We gained two quite big accounts that way, but we needed a third large one to make us viable.

We went after new business with a passion, toiling day and night to come up with outstanding presentations and better marketing strategies than the companies already had. Media buying was handled by Sydney for a while, until we were established enough to bring someone in on a full-time basis. We ruthlessly targeted any business that we felt was right for us and whom we considered was receiving less than perfect service—mediocre advertising, poor media choices, etc.—from their existing agency, and we failed to win them over more times than we succeeded. Nevertheless, through sheer nerve, perseverance and, I like to think, talent, we gained three new clients, one medium-sized and two smaller, but easily making up for the third biggie we thought we needed. Heady days, and you know what? I miss them. Yeah, I miss a lot of things… We called it gtp in the fashion of the day, the acronym for Guinane, True, Presswell, of course, set in Baskerville lower case, letters touching. It looked pretty cool.

The agency did take off. Around town we became known as a creative hot shop and we began pitching for and acquiring more and more accounts, some blue chip but mainly clients who wanted that little bit of extra creativity in selling their products, clients who were not afraid to take fresh marketing leaps that would not go unnoticed by the public or the trade. You’d be surprised how many big budget spenders could only live with the known, concepts without risk, strategies that dared not stray from formula or jeopardize the marketing manager’s position. Internal politics are always rife in both small corporations and big ones (the bigger the worse, in fact) and they’re third only to advertising, which, as I’ve said, is second only to politics itself.

The companies that came to us were already aware of our reputation for risk taking and they were usually primed for something different. Maybe nothing truly off the wall, but at least something individual. We didn’t win everything we pitched for by any means—easy to say you’re looking for something “different”, but not always easy to go with it once it’s presented—but we acquired enough business to expand our offices and staff. We even managed to win a few advertising awards along the way, all voted for by our peers in the industry itself.*

*Interestingly, now that Oliver and I were joint bosses, we actually felt more responsibility towards our clients. A long-standing joke in advertising circles is how an art director is constantly devising ways of including a palm tree in the left-hand corner of his layout no matter what the product might be because it meant a photo-shoot somewhere in the Bahamas, a beautiful excursion for himself (and possibly, but not necessarily, for the copywriter) accompanied by glamorous models, plus photographer and his assistants (you couldn’t sell dog food this way, you might insist, but don’t think it hasn’t been tried). Another and even more heavily disguised objective is the D&AD award for best advertising, when fabulous—and very expensive—film or TV commercials (or brilliantly smart ones, but a little oblique as far as selling the product is concerned) are proposed by the agency. These litter the whole media range, great concepts that fail to do their job because the brand name either goes unnoticed, or is never remembered (I’m sure you could mention one or two wonderful TV commercials without recalling the brand they were selling).

It’s a vanity that reveals a lack of respect for the client, but then, more fool the client who allows it to happen. The answer is simple, although often not easy: the truly great advertising always combines a clever (and often amusing) idea with distinct branding (and I don’t mean a large company logo); GREAT COPY, GREAT VISUAL, CLEAR PRODUCT IDENTIFICATION, is the legend that should be pinned to every marketing manager or company advertising director’s office wall, and creative teams should constantly be reminded of it. So, this was our company philosophy and no headlined layout or storyboard ever left our office for client presentation without it being fulfilled. Okay, I won’t pretend we did it every time. Rush or panic jobs, copy deadlines, overnight work, client procrastination, together with their insecurity and occasional inability to recognize a superb concept, all are inherent and expected in the advertising business, so we could not always deliver of our best, but hell, we tried, oh how we tried.

Oliver and I were in our element, working like dogs, our enthusiasm never diminishing. Often we’d book a hotel suite for a weekend and work day and night to produce a fresh and sometimes even original advertising campaign. We used hotel rooms because now and again we needed new surroundings, different venues somehow helping with an objective approach to the brief. Frankly, it’s not unknown in the business for some agencies to lock their creative team away in a five-star hotel for a couple of nights and feed them cocaine for inspiration and to keep them going. It isn’t standard practice, but it does happen sometimes when agencies are desperate, out of time, and the great ideas aren’t coming. We didn’t do that though, because I for one just couldn’t get into drugs of any sort. Sure, I did some hash at art college, and later, when finances started to allow, I tried coke, but it never seemed to work for me, only made me hyper-tense. Same with alcohol to some extent; it took a lot to get me smashed. I don’t know why—something in my metabolism, I suppose—but I was glad. Drugs are bad news, as I later found out. Besides, I didn’t need any chemical substances to stimulate my imagination; that could take care of itself, and anyway, there’s nothing quite like the high you get through creative brainstorms.

Maybe we worked too hard in those early years, took too much on, but Oliver and I, and to some extent Sydney, were overly ambitious and we ran on adrenaline. We seemed to have unlimited energy—although when we crashed we really crashed—which great to begin with, but too much of it could easily have led to early burn-out. As well as producing the creative work, we had the responsibility—the burden—of running our own company even though Sydney took much of the administration side of things onto his own shoulders. We still had to attend too many meetings, many with clients—oh God, those bloody long lunches—but we always made important decisions as a threesome.

So, we worked hard and we played hard, and possibly it was the pressure of both that instigated the first cracks in the partnership. The fact that I stole Oliver’s live-in lover didn’t help either.

9

I’d known Andrea Dodds for several months before I introduced her to Oliver, because I’d worked with two of her lensmen on a couple of jobs. She was tallish, slim and, as I told you earlier, had fantastic legs. At that time she wore her dark-brown hair long and straight so that it fell over her narrow shoulders (these days she has it cut short, urchin-style, the sides flicked away from her face). I’d learned that she was single, had no current man in her life, lived in a tiny flat near Dolphin Square, Pimlico, and I was just priming myself to make a move on her. It wouldn’t usually have taken me so long to ask her out—it certainly didn’t with other girls—but Andrea was an exception. Why? Because I’d already half-fallen in love with her and I was terrified of rejection. Funny how easily you can lose your confidence when something matters too much. Of course, Oliver’s charm antenna was at full alert the moment he spotted her talking to our art buyer in the corridor of our old agency. He asked me who she was and, stupidly, I hauled her in to our office to make introductions.

I groaned inwardly as soon as I saw his eyes light up and he held onto her hand for much too long. I knew I was whipped before I’d even started, but I bore no grudges. It served me right for being so boneless.

Soon she had moved in with him. So soon, in fact, that I was stunned. I hadn’t quite given up hope for myself as far as she was concerned, because there still seemed to be something going on whenever she and I made eye contact. Andrea was no flirt, but she made me feel special when we spoke together or arranged times and dates for photography. She could have rely been doing her job, massaging the ego of an important client, but I didn’t think so; there was something incredibly sincere about her, and something very, very sweet.

Still, I had to accept the situation and I couldn’t be mad at Oliver for having the boldness to jump in first whereas, like some lame fool, I’d hung back, too cautious to make my move.

Ollie and Andrea. They made a hot couple. I couldn’t begrudge him, even though secretly I continued to pine for her. Get over it, I eventually told myself. Oliver was more her league. Besides, there were plenty of other fish, so go fish. And I did for a while, but I never quite got over my original crush. It was when Oliver and I were in the first exciting but anxious throes of setting up our own agency that he suggested bringing Andrea on board as an account manager and assistant to Sydney.

It took me all of two seconds to agree: from experience I knew she was more than just competent and I had no doubt she’d be an asset to our fledgling company; she might have been soft in the looks and attitude department, but believe me, she was shrewd as far as business was concerned and had always driven a hard bargain for the photographers she represented (and I was no pushover—I always treated my clients’ money as if it were my own).

So, initially on a lowish salary but with the promise it would grow as quickly as the agency itself—we were all working on spec those days—she joined gtp. And took to it like a duck might take to Evian, charming both prospective and existing clients, selling our talents as passionately as she’d previously sold the skills of her photographers.

Our team expanded as the client list grew and all seemed well but, like I said, maybe we worked and played a little too hard, because eventually the cracks began to appear. And most of the problems were to do with Oliver.

We’d both stretched ourselves to the limit, Ollie and I, but the relentless grind took a greater toll on my friend and colleague than me. After a while he seemed to be running on empty, becoming irritable with staff members (especially Sydney, who did his best to keen us all sane), going to the edge with clients (most of whom were good and intelligent people—although even those who were not had to be treated with a modicum of respect). Sydney Presswell came into his own on such occasions, smoothing things over, turning any add observations Oliver might have made into nothing more than humorous banter.

Nevertheless, the work was always good; Oliver never let the agency down on that score. He usually managed to pull some little creative gem out of the bag at the last possible moment, when timing was crucial and we had to present an ad or campaign that the client could run with. And if he didn’t, then I did. We were still a great team, but I was beginning to grow anxious about my buddy. Couple of times I took Oliver aside and told him of my concerns—you’re cracking, pal, you’ve got to ease up on the playtime, grab a break, somewhere warm and sunny, pay Andrea a bit more attention maybe… He just shrugged it off, gave me the Ollie-grin that said everything was cool. He wasn’t sleeping too well lately, he would indeed cut out extracurricular activities, and anyway, mood swings were part of his nature. Often on these occasions, he would also remind me that it was his creative input that had won us many clients, a fact I couldn’t deny. Sure, I told him, but we’re more worried about your health nowadays, not your input. You don’t look good, sport, and those mood swings are affecting Andrea in a bad way.

Shouldn’t have said it. Oliver exploded, told me to keep my nose out of his personal business, then stormed out of the office we shared. We didn’t see him for the rest of the day and I regretted having spoken out. Still, it seemed to do the trick—for a while, at least. Ollie arrived back at the agency early the next day, bright and shiny and with a box of expensive cigars as a gift for me. Andrea, who had looked a little flaky for some time now, was with him and she seemed almost as chirpy as he was. I assumed they’d had a heart-to-heart and a new leaf had been turned by Oliver. Both looked refreshed, as if they’d had a good night’s sleep, hopefully in each other’s arms.

It couldn’t last though; Oliver’s jittery moods soon swung back and forth like a personality pendulum and I began to suspect it was more than just overwork and booze that was the problem. But it was Sydney who finally put me wise by pointing out the symptoms.

Insiders call it either the curse or the crutch of the trade, but I subscribe to neither view; sure, coke and cannabis are popular in the business—speed, too—but they’re more of an occupational hazard than a prevalence, recreational rather than obligatory. Creativity can often extend itself to taking mind-expanding substances, and advertising must be one of the most pressurizing careers one could choose. There’s always the exhaustion factor too, when both your brain and body become so fatigued they require a little charge now and again. I’m not advocating drugs as a prop—far from it—I’m merely explaining how the trap is set. I’ve known good people who have succumbed to its lure, and now I was concerned that my best friend and business partner had become yet another victim.

To cut it short, Ollie’s condition grew steadily worse, the pendulum becoming caught on the downswing. One evening I was pigged out on a sofa in my apartment—only a slim triangle of pizza left in its shallow box, bare feet resting over one arm of the sofa, my head propped up by a couple of cushions at the other end half-empty can of Stella resting on my stomach, cigarette butt smoking in a crowded ashtray on the floor—when the annoying chime of the doorbell roused me from my mindless vigil over a docu-soap on the TV. With a groan, I dropped the lager can beside the ashtray and swung my feet to the carpet. Hitching up my jeans beneath the loose sweatshirt I wore, I grumbled my way to the door.

Andrea was outside, her face wet with tears, mascara staining her fair skin. She threw herself into my arms, blurting out her woes as she did so: she’d had enough, Oliver was out of control, he’d lashed out at her, hurt her, sworn at her; she had fled and this time it was for good. I hadn’t even known there’d been other occasions and I felt a rising anger as she told me her sad tale.

Apparently, Oliver’s coke habit had reached critical mass, one of the results being his physical abuse of Andrea, and she had left him and had no intention of ever going back. I hadn’t realized that their relationship was anywhere near this sorry state, so good was their cover-up at the agency. I was stunned.

To cut the story even shorter, she stayed with me.

I’m not proud of it, but I was incredibly angry with Oliver at the time, because not only had he stolen my girl (okay, she hadn’t actually been my girl at the time) out he was now physically—and mentally, I soon learned—abusing her. Just having her there in my own home, distressed and desperate, revived all those feelings towards her that I’d suppressed since I’d lost out to my sidekick. I admit, I’m a sucker as far as women or girls are concerned. I offered to ring him, or to go and see him personally, tell him face-to-face what a jerk he was being, but Andrea wouldn’t allow it. We collapsed onto the sofa together and she begged me to let her stay, if only for the night.

She never went back to Oliver. Again, I’m not proud of it, but we made love that very first evening. All those emotions, those frustrated desires, burst out of me like floodwater from a breached dam.

Oliver didn’t show up at the office for two days, but when he did, he was perfectly calm and reasonable. In truth, he was almost arrogant as far as Andrea’s departure was concerned and I think that hurt her more than anything else. His indifference was a shock for us both, but it helped us overcome the guilt Andrea and I were feeling. He’d had space to think, he told us, and realized he was screwing up Andrea’s life, not to mention his own. He might also be screwing up the business we had all worked so hard for. And he was definitely screwing up his long friendship with me. All that had to change and he knew this might be his last chance.

From now on the drugs and the booze were out, hard work and sobriety were in. He wasn’t going to ask Andrea to come back to him until she felt she wanted to (to be honest, he didn’t seem to care too much on this point; it was as if the ball was entirely in her court) and I felt it wasn’t the appropriate time to explain how she had already moved in with me. That could come later.

Things were awkward between us for a few weeks, but Oliver made the effort. I don’t know how he fought—and conquered—his demons, but he managed to. He came off the drugs and the difference in him was quickly apparent. He became my old, true friend once more and although it took a while to get his creative juices flowing again, eventually the magic returned. We became like the team of old, a regular Lennon and McCartney of the advertising game. I don’t know how it came out that Andrea had moved in with me, but it seemed to happen naturally and there was certainly no overt resentment on Ollie’s part. Maybe he had already begun to tire of their relationship before the big upset—never in the past had Oliver been one for long-term relationships—and so he accepted the new situation without apparent rancour. Perverse though it might sound, I thought he was genuinely pleased for me, because I’d never been able to disguise my attraction to Andrea in the past; now, at last, I’d found someone with whom I could settle down. Oh, now and again, I caught him giving me an odd, reflective stare, but I thought it was remorse.

Everything soon got back to normal and we became frantically busy, pitching for new accounts as well as maintaining those we already had. We employed more staff, creating two new art director/copywriter teams, hiring a couple more secretaries and another account executive, and eventually took over the whole building to allow for our expansion. We were a terrific, young creative hot shop and more than a few advertising awards came our way, either for press and poster campaigns or television commercials.

Within a year Andrea was pregnant with our child (so left the agency in her seventh month) and we were married—in that order. Time went by and, bar a few downsides not worth mentioning at this point, life was pretty good. Or so I thought.

Seven years later I was still enjoying my career, was happily married, and had a wonderful daughter called Primrose. (Yeah, I know. Advertising people, eh? In fact, it took only three months to call her Prim—Primrose seemed such a heavy handle for such a squirt, pretty as she was.) I still had OBEs, which I was learning to control more as well as initiate. They remained my secret and continued to fascinate me.

Little did I know it was those OBEs that would lead to my premature demise.

Hopefully, you’ve stayed with me so far. It’s just that I thought it important that you knew some of my history—it’s pertinent to all I’m about to tell you. Believe me, I’ve left out heaps of personal stuff because I didn’t want you to lose interest along the way.

But now I’m ready and—hopefully again—you’re primed to hear my tale. Everything I’ve told you leads to the horrendous event that was to change my life—or I should say, my existence—forever…

10

“It’s too big for us,” I said, keeping my voice steady, avoiding Oliver’s glare. The debate—all right, the argument—between Sydney, Ollie and myself had been going on for over an hour at least. “We’re just not ready.” I leaned back in my chair, arms folded across my chest, staring at my outstretched feet, ankles also crossed.

“Not if we expand.” Oliver was leaning forward in his seat, wagging a finger at me.

“The time isn’t right for us to take on more staff. We just don’t have the capacity here.”

Oliver slapped his thigh hard and I winced; the slap must have made his leg smart.

“Then we move!” was his reply.

“Are you kidding? It was difficult enough taking over these premises. We’re too busy for the disruption anyway.”

“There is another way.” Sydney Presswell was sitting behind his broad but minimalist desk, and his voice, as usual, was quietly soothing. Sydney had always been a good advocate between myself and Ollie, whose interaction these days was becoming more and more volatile; we barely agreed on anything lately, particularly when creative work was involved.

We both turned our heads towards our finance director/manager.

Sydney had piled on the weight over the years—too many drawn-out client lunches—but still managed to look dapper with his grey receding hair and grey suits the latter always worn with deep blue or red ties. The flesh of his neck puffed out over his shirt collar a little, but his aquiline nose and soft grey eyes beneath finely arched eyebrows gave him the appearance of a benevolent patriarch. He wore those understated glasses, no frames, just plain lenses supported by hinges and plastic nose pads. Although now going through his third divorce, no lines furrowed his smooth brow and only slight bags hung beneath those pale-grey eyes.

We waited for him to speak again, perhaps both of us relieved that our increasingly angry confrontation had been interrupted.

“We could merge,” he said simply, leaning forward and interlacing his fingers on the desktop before him.

Neither Oliver nor I reacted. I just stared.

Sydney’s pale face was impassive. “Blake & Turnbrow have been chasing us for some time, as you know. They’re much larger than us and have offices worldwide. Together we could easily manage our respective clients and any more we might care to pitch for. Blake & Turnbrow are keen to amalgamate with us.”

“To take us over, you mean, don’t you?” I said, my annoyance now focused on him. That in itself was unusual, because Sydney was the easiest person in the world to get along with.

“No, I don’t mean that,” he said, his retort mild, not at all offended. “If getting into bed with a prestigious global agency will help us expand and find bigger clients, why should we balk at the idea?”

“Because, Sydney,” I said with disguised impatience, “it means giving up control of our own business.”

“Wait a minute, Jim,” Ollie put in. “It doesn’t have to mean that at all. Lets take the helicopter view.”

It irritated me further when my copywriter used ad-speak: “overview” wasn’t good, but “helicopter view”? And a “takeover” was a “takeover”, not the sharing of a bed. A suspicion struck me: was Oliver really surprised at the suggestion, or had he and Sydney already discussed the prospect in my absence (I was often away from the office on photographic shoots or making TV commercials, allowing plenty of opportunities for cosy get-togethers for my partners)? Or was I just being paranoid?

“Obviously Blake & Turnbrow like our client list, as well as the creative talent in this agency,” Oliver went on. “But then don’t we envy their client list and some of their creative teams?”

“If we get taken over—” I began to say.

“Merge,” Sydney insisted.

I didn’t drop a beat. “—there’s no guarantee that some of our accounts won’t leave us. They signed up with Guinane, True, Presswell, not with Blake, Turnbrow, Guinane, True, Presswell…”

“BTGTP has a nice ring to it.” Oliver smiled and I wasn’t sure if he was deliberately winding me up.

Before I could respond, Sydney cut in once more. “Companies rarely switch agencies unless they’ve been let down by bad marketing strategies, mediocre creative work, or poor servicing: we’re guilty of none of those. However, we might fall down on the first and last points if we pitch for and win this new account.”

“I’m still not sure why such a large corporate bank should approach us,” I muttered, a little sourly I think. “The agency they have now is one of the biggest and best.”

“Yes, and it’s become complacent. The bank has been with them for twenty years or more and I think they’ve both become tired of each other. It happens to every account eventually, no matter how solid the relationship has been.”

Sydney unlocked his fingers and rested back in his chair. “Fortunately, the bank’s marketing director is a very old acquaintance of mine and for the past year I’ve been rekindling our friendship. We belong to the same club and more than once I’ve let him thrash me at golf.”

“This is the first time you’ve mentioned it to us,” I said grudgingly.

“Because I’ve had nothing to report until now. Geoff tipped me the wink only a few months ago and I’ve been working on him since. He’s well aware of my interest, of course, and I think he’s enjoyed the little game between us. I want the carrot and he loves to dangle it before me. Naturally, I’ve allowed him to enjoy himself at our expense—and I mean that literally.” He looked meaningfully at me, and then at Oliver.

“British Allied Bank is beginning to lose out in the market place,” Sydney went on. “It’s competitors, the other big banks, are regarded as more friendly towards small businesses and more trendy as far as the younger market is concerned. Certainly British Allied is banker to many vast corporations, but never underestimate how important the smaller businesses are. What they lack fiscally as individuals, they more than make up in quantity. Not quite as important, but certainly worth considering are the young non-account holders, the upwardly mobile C2s, who have to be encouraged—or enticed—to open a bank account. Like the small businesses their numbers are incredibly high and well worth bringing in. Catch ‘em while they’re young is the motto of all the banks, because they rarely change banks during their lifetimes.”

“So we’re seen as more cutting edge than British Allied’s present agency? Is that why they want us to pitch?” Oliver was jigging a foot on the carpet, a habit of his when his energy was running high.

“Precisely,” Sydney replied. “But naturally, there will be other agencies pitching, including their present one, which has to be given a chance. I’ve learned from Geoff, though, that we’re the only hot shop; all the others are good and well established, but don’t have our reputation for high-concept campaigns. I think, provided we come up with the right pitch, if we hinted that we could possibly be associated with another much larger agency in the near future, it might be to our advantage. Of course, if we did win it, it would be the biggest single account we’d held financially. The advertising budget would be phenomenal.”

“Are you saying both deals go hand-in-hand?” I asked, frowning.

“Not at all. But a merger would help in regard to back-up. It’s all very well having wonderfully innovative ideas, but if we can’t service the account fully, then what’s the point? The bank will be all too aware of our limitations as much as I know they’ll like our ideas.”

I turned to Oliver. “What do you think?”

He grinned, and his foot was still tapping. “I say let’s take it to the max. Let’s burn the blacktop, go for both.”

He spoke in precise, clipped tones, an “elitist” accent he’d never even tried to modify for street-cred purposes; estuary-speak had become the norm in our game, but he was having none of it. I liked him for that, even though he had an irritating penchant for jargoneze. He never tried to hide his wealthy, upper-class background and, with his shortish brown-almost-auburn hair, loose strands of which hung over his forehead, and military-straight back, intelligent brown eyes, home-counties accent, he would never have succeeded in doing so anyway. Even though his clothes were casual, they had a sharp neatness to them, a kind of preciseness that matched his clipped voice.

“I think we’ve a good chance of winning the account,” he went on, “particularly if they’re tired of the old staid bank advertising they’ve become used to and are looking for something fresher and more original.”

“And the takeover?”

“Merger,” Sydney persisted.

Oliver shrugged. “Whatever. It might be an extremely beneficial move.”

“You’d give up everything we’ve worked for?” I was beginning to simmer.

“It wouldn’t necessarily mean that, chum. Try seeing it from the north.”

I hated it when he called me chum, especially when it was coupled with the jargon.

“Sydney and I already more or less agreed it would be a smart way for us to expand.”

Ah, so Sydney and Oliver had already discussed the matter without me.

“Beside which,” Oliver put in, resting his elbows on the cushioned arms of his leather swivel chair and making a steeple under his chin with his fingers, “we three would each receive quite a large sum for the company.”

“That sounds like a buyout to me,” I said.

“Not at all. Financial remuneration for the partners would be merely part of the deal…”

There was a light tap on the door and it opened a little. Lynda, our receptionist/switchboard girl, poked her head through the gap. She looked directly at me.

“Phone call for you, Jim. Your wife.”

“Did you tell her I was in a meeting?”

“She said you’re always in a meeting.”

I couldn’t argue with that: over the last couple of years, my whole life seemed to revolve around meetings, which was frustrating for someone who wanted to work only on the drawing board. I knew Oliver felt the same as far as copywriting was concerned, but somehow he was better than me on such occasions, especially where clients were concerned. Ollie was also terrific at presentations and his social skills were excellent, whereas I tended to be too stiff and was hopeless at cosying up to the clients, particularly those I didn’t like.

“Ah, tell her I’ll ring back in a couple of minutes, will you?”

Lynda smiled and retreated, quietly drawing the door closed after her.

Ollie was looking at his wristwatch. “Look, Jim, I’ve got something on tonight so I have to get away,” he said, his foot stopping its tattoo on the carpet.

I breathed a loud sigh. “Okay with me,” I said. “But I still think we should take things one step at a time.”

“You think we should pitch though?” Sydney leaned forward over his desk again.

“You two would outvote me anyway, wouldn’t you?”

“Oh no, Jim,” said Oliver, standing up and brushing an imaginary crease from the knee of his trousers. “Also, I want to think on bedding down with Blake & Turnbrow myself. Let’s touch base again tomorrow morning when we’re fresher. I have to admit, though, right now I’m inclined to push the envelope. We could all benefit from a paradigm shift.”

I assumed Sydney understood the lingo; I did, just about.

“If we’re going for the new account we have to start work right away.” Despite the warning, there was no impatience in Sydney’s manner, nor in his grey eyes. There was only his usual impassiveness.

“We wouldn’t start on it tonight anyway,” said Oliver to Sydney. “Let’s sleep on it, okay?”

Sydney nodded and I got to my feet, still wondering if I’d been left out of the loop somewhere along the way. Ollie hadn’t seemed very surprised by either of the two propositions, nor by the possible linking between them. I followed my copywriter out of Sydney’s office back to the one we shared as the agency’s creative directors, Oliver switching on the light as we entered.

Moving behind my desk and picking up a long steel cutting rule that rested there, slapping the flat side against my open palm, a habit of mine when I was tense, I began to say, “We oughta talk…”

“Ring Andrea first, Jim,” he interrupted. “It might be something urgent.”

Reluctantly, I placed the heavy rule back on the desk and picked up my phone, pressing 9 for an outside line. We needed to discuss things, Ollie and I. I dialled my home number.

“Hello, please?”

It was Prim’s breathy little voice.

“Hey, squirt, it’s Daddy.”

“Daddy! Are you coming home now?”

I smiled as I thought of her standing in the sitting room, phone clutched in both hands, her curly hair kept away from her face with an Alice-band. Lush brown hair like her mother’s, a few shades lighter though, with a reddish hue when the sun lightened it; tawny brown eyes full of innocence and fun.

“Soon, Prim,” I told her.

“You got to, Daddy. You’re looking after me tonight. Don’t you ‘member?”

Uh-oh. Sure I remembered. Andrea was meeting two of her girlfriends this evening for a quietish girlie night out and I was the appointed childminder.

“Did you think I’d forgotten? Anything special you want to do?”

“Lots and lots. And cards.”

Seven years old and I’d already taught her how to gamble. Taught her to cheat a little too.

“No DVDs you want to watch?” I needed some thinking time tonight.

“Just games, please.”

I laughed. “Okay.” Plenty of time to think once I’d put her to bed. “Now run and get Mummy for me, will you?”

“Love you!”

She was gone and I pictured her running to the kitchen—she was of an age when kids are always in a hurry, rushing from one interest to the next. A snapshot view of her came to mind, a holiday photo, the sun directly behind her so that the curls around her face were orangey red, a halo of fire, her features softened even more because they were in light shadow, her brown eyes deepened so that they were like Andrea’s. I wanted to eat her.

“Jim?”

Andrea’s voice, low-pitched, even now seductive to me.

“Hi. You rang me,” I told her.

“You haven’t forgotten I’m out tonight.”

“No, I’ll be home in plenty of time.”

“No last-minute meetings. You know what you’re like.”

In truth, I did want to discuss Sydney’s proposal some more with him and Oliver, but maybe a breather would be useful at this point: I was getting just a bit rankled with this talk of a merger—it still sounded like a sell-out to me—and needed time to think on it to calm myself.

“I’ll be home within the hour,” I assured Andrea. “Where are you meeting the girls?” The dinner with two girlfriends of old was a bi-monthly get-together to yak and catch up on the latest gossip.

“San Lorenzo’s.”

I was impressed. “Hope you’re not paying.”

“We always go Dutch. You don’t mind, do you?”

Of course I didn’t; we both needed own-time every so often. “No, you have a good dinner, order the best on the menu.” She deserved it; I was always ringing home at the last moment to tell her I was going to be stuck in yet another meeting, or that I’d be working till late. “Tell you what, I’ll cover the whole bill. You can treat your friends.”

“No, Jim, that’s not necessary. I don’t want to start a precedent.”

“Up to you, but really, I don’t mind.”

“Thanks anyway. Prim’s already eaten, but can you fix something for yourself. There’s plenty of easy stuff in the fridge.”

“No prob. I’ll see you soon. Oh, and Andrea…?”

“Yes.”

“I need to talk to you later.”

I caught the faint rush of anxiety in her voice. “Is something wrong?” she asked.

“No, no. Just things going on here that I’d like your opinion on. Nothing that can’t wait till later.”

“Okay, Jim. I’ll see you soon, then?”

“Almost on my way. Bye for now.”

I replaced the receiver and sat at my desk for a while. Oliver had left the office during my telephone conversation and I was alone. People leaving for home were passing by the open door, some of them calling in a brief “G’night” on their way. Preoccupied, I waved a casual hand.

Something was making me uneasy and at the time I thought it was due to both the suggested merger and the pitch for the new account (which I didn’t think the agency was quite ready for).

Only much, much later did I realize I was intuitively troubled over something that had nothing to do with business.

But then, I’d understand a lot of things once I was dead.

11

The hotel was one we’d used before for brainstorming sessions. Rooms and service were top-grade and we’d hired a suite with two bedrooms, one for me, the second one, across the large lounge, for Oliver.

This was a week or so after my meeting with Oliver and Sydney in which we’d discussed the possibility of “merging” with a bigger advertising agency and whether or not to pitch for the British Allied Bank account. I’d reluctantly agreed to the latter, but the idea of amalgamating with Blake & Turnbrow—a sell-out as far as I was concerned—was still in abeyance. My partners knew my view, which was in the negative, but I guess they thought I’d come round eventually. They were wrong: I wouldn’t. I’d worked too bloody hard—we all had—building our own creative shop to let it be gobbled up by a rival agency, no matter how global and how many blue chip accounts it carried. I suppose ego came into it somewhere—I didn’t want to lose control of our company, which inevitably would happen despite Sydney’s assurances that it wouldn’t be the case.

The point of booking into the hotel for the weekend was to keep us away from telephones—unless we wanted to ring out—and all the other nuisance stuff of running a company. Also, and I’m not quite sure why this is true, getting away from our normal surroundings somehow led to fresher ideas; strange how a different environment can promote new concepts. As well as that, everything was on tap for us, room service ruled. We only had this one weekend to come up with a brand new press poster, and television campaign for the British Allied Bank, an advertising campaign with a budget of several million pounds.

The team was just Oliver and me, and I must admit that, despite my reservation about the account possibly being too big for us to handle, I had become more and more excited as the preceding week had worn on. It’s called the Buzz, and there’s nothing quite like it.

On this Saturday night, the second night of the weekend—we’d be working all day Sunday as well—the hotel room’s thick-carpeted floor was covered with sheets of thin layout paper, rough-scamp ideas on every leaf. And there were some good thoughts on those sheets, pithy copy lines with strong visuals, and I was pretty pleased with most of them.

But there was a problem. I wanted to go with the idea of humanizing the bank by simply informing the public that human beings were running the individual accounts, not computerized automatons, and all had names, families and other interests, but were experts in their particular fields of finance, always with the customer’s interest at heart. Oliver, however, wanted to try a much more grandiose approach, showing how grand and mighty the corporation was, how its network spread throughout the world, and how it employed superior specialists in all matters of finance. I saw the latter as far too anonymous for the ordinary people who would use the bank’s services; and Oliver saw my concept as too limited, even though I explained that the advertising would be good for bank staff as well as prospective customers, putting staff on a plateau, letting them know they were appreciated by their employers while still trying to hook new customers. We even argued over the media, because I wanted newspaper ads along with television whereas Ollie wanted to use glossy colour supplements, forty-eight-sheet posters and enormously expensive sixty-second commercials.

The answer, of course, was to split the budget on different campaigns, using the bank’s size and grandeur as an umbrella under which all aspects were covered, but neither of us saw that at the time. I think by that second night we were both too wired for compromise—literally, in Oliver’s case, as I was soon to find out.

What was missing was a mediator, a cool voice of reason that would argue both cases, then come up with a compromise solution suitable to both parties. That was the role Sydney usually played, but although he’d looked in on us earlier that day he’d long gone by now. If he could, he had told us, he would call in later when we’d both had the chance to cool off a bit.

But now it was almost 11 p.m. and I didn’t think he would return at this time of night. Probably wanted to catch us when we were refreshed the following day, Sunday.

I stared at the layouts scattered around me on wall-to-wall carpet and, whether it was sheer weariness or I’d been half-convinced by Oliver’s persuasive reasoning, I was about to give in. Too much time and energy was being wasted on useless yatter and not enough on getting the job done. I’d work up Ollie’s idea with visuals, then together we’d see how it would run as a TV commercial. Maybe we could show how huge the bank’s network was by showcasing real individuals… Anyway, that’s the way my thoughts were heading and I could just see the glimmer of a satisfactory solution up ahead and not too far away.

I heard the toilet flush and soon after the bathroom door opened, Oliver sweeping through. His shirtsleeves were rolled to his elbows, his silk tie at half-mast, shirt collar unbuttoned.

“Right, let’s just harmonize on this fucking thing,” he said without looking at me. His voice was angry and, when he took the chair at the suite’s desk bureau, the toe of his shoe began its familiar drumbeat on the carpet.

“Chill out, Ollie,” I said, not rising to the bait. “I think—”

“Chill…?”

It was snapped out and I stiffened, taken aback.

“We’ve got until Monday morning to come up with the goods,” he went on. “Presentation’s at the end of the week, and you’re telling me to chill out! What is it with you? Doesn’t anything ever puncture your cool?”

“Hey. C’mon,” I began to protest.

“Finished layouts, full-colour posters, storyboards—Jim, we’ve got to get our shit together on this, we’ve got to ink the paper! But no, as usual, you’ve got to have your own way. Your idea has to be the one we go with.” The your came as a sneer.

I was, well, I was astonished. Oliver and I had had our spats over the years, always about work, but on balance it was generally his ideas that went through. The split was about sixty-forty in his favour.

“This is stupid…” I said, beginning to lose some of that cool just a little bit.

“Don’t call me stupid!” he came back. “You’re the one who’s stupid.” His eyes were wide; he was staring at me in a way that was somehow familiar. His knee jerked as the heel of his toe-cap continued to punish the carpet.

“Ollie, I’m not calling you anything. Look, let’s just ease up, give ourselves a break. Maybe carry on early tomorrow morning after a good night’s sleep.”

“Fuck you,” he said, reaching behind him for his cigarettes on the bureau top.

As he looked away I suddenly remembered why that wildness in his eyes had seemed familiar. Without another word, I rose and strode towards the shared bathroom.

Cigarette halfway to his lips, he noticed I’d left my chair. “Where the fuck are you going?” I heard him say.

Ignoring him I went into the bathroom and did not bother to close the door behind me. A black-marble shelf containing two basins ran beneath the full length of the long wall mirror and I squatted so that its surface was at eye level. I moved over to the second basin, studying the smooth, flecked marble beside it and saw exactly what I feared might be present: a small amount of scattered granules of fine powder and smears where Oliver had gathered up some of the residue with a damp finger to wipe into his gums.

Just to make perfectly sure, I licked the tip of my own finger and dabbed it on the hard marble surface, then tasted it. Although rarely one for any kind of drugs, I had tasted cocaine before, and this was the real McCoy. Oliver was doing blow again.*

*Sydney had taught me how to spot this years ago when we first suspected Oliver was a user. Unlike the cokeheads and their habits you might see in Hollywood movies, addicts who bend over glass tables or flat mirrors to snort cocaine, one finger closing a nostril while the other provides passage to the nose’s inner membranes, leaving a slight residue of fine powder like dandruff on a dark suit, coke is never wasted this way. It’s too expensive to leave even the smallest spillage. No, true addicts will always tongue-damp a finger so that it picks up whatever’s left. They will either lick their finger again as though it was some kind of narcotic lollipop, or will rub the substance into the gums. Where drugs are concerned there is no wastage. Doesn’t happen.

I stormed from the bathroom to confront my friend.

“You silly bastard!” I told him.

His turn to freeze for a moment. The flame from his lighter hovered a couple of inches away from the cigarette, then was extinguished without completing the job. He glared back at me, but said nothing.

“You told us you were finished with drugs. Didn’t you learn your lesson last time?”

“All right, all right, okay, okay. So what if I am back off the wagon? Where’s the harm?”

“It nearly broke the partnership before!”

“You remember what Sinatra said: A nip every now and again pulls you through the day.”

“I saw the movie; he was talking about booze, for fuck’s sake.”

“Same thing, chum.”

“The hell it is.”

“Same thing and no hangover.”

“It’ll ruin you.” I shook my head in dismay.

“So will constant work overload. Besides it sharpens me up.”

“Sometimes,” I told him, “it makes you think the crappiest idea is awesome.”

“Hey, I give you good copy.”

“No, Oliver, you don’t. Trouble is, you don’t know it when you’re high. Don’t you remember how strung out you were before?”

“You’re exaggerating, chum. I can handle it.”

“Don’t fucking call me chum.” Maybe it was the “chum” usage that made me a little bit cruel. “You lost Andrea, remember that?”

I didn’t like the dark grin he gave me. Nevertheless, I softened my tone.

“You promised you’d quit, Oliver. You’re letting us all down, but mostly yourself.”

“Ah, fuck it!” An ugly snarl accompanied the curse. “It’s my problem, not yours.”

“No, it’s our problem. We’re the ones who have to deal with it.”

Anger spoiling his good looks, he jumped to his feet, shoving the lighter back into his pocket and tossing the unlit cigarette onto the carpet.

“You know what you can do with the agency.”

“Hey, c’mon.” Even though I was more than a little annoyed I raised both hands placatingly. “You don’t mean that. See, this is what happens when you’re doing coke. It makes you bloody schizophrenic.”

“At least I’m not the one that’s holding the agency back. You were frightened to pitch for this account until Sydney and I persuaded you. Even worse, you’re scared of tying in with a bigger agency so that we can expand.”

I felt the skin of my face tighten. “Let’s leave it there, okay? I don’t want to get into this right now.”

“No, Jim, ‘course you don’t. Let’s face it, chum, you don’t like change, you never have.”

I could have pointed out that we’d built the agency together, account by account, and I was equally a prime mover in everything we had achieved; but it wasn’t worth it—it was no good talking common sense to him when he was in one of these stupid moods. He had been hitting the bottle all evening, first emptying the miniature whiskies from the mini-bar, then ordering a bottle of Black Label from room service, while slipping into the bathroom every so often for cocaine hits. And I’d thought he had a bladder problem.

“We’re both tired,” I said evenly, grimly aware that there was no point in trying to reason with him. Alcohol and coke were a bad combination. “Let’s call it a day, carry on tomorrow morning when I’m fresher and you’re straight.”

“Why? You think that’s going to change anything? You’ll still be holding me back, as ever.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying, Oliver.” I refused to rise to the bait, suspecting the bitterness of his words had more to do with whisky than powder. “Enough for tonight, okay? We’ll start again in the morning.”

“You won’t change your mind though, will you? You still won’t agree to a merger.”

“This isn’t the time to discuss it!” I shouted back at him. I wanted to give him a smack, wipe the supercilious smirk from his face. Instead, I said through suppressed anger, “I’m turning in and I think you should do the same.”

“What?” he raised his arm and peered at his wristwatch. “Going to bed at half-past eleven. Well I’ve got better things to do.”

He grabbed his jacket hanging over the back of a chair and tramped across the sheets of layout paper towards the door, crumpling them, leaving scuff marks over my Pentel visuals.

“Oliver, don’t,” I called after him. “This is bloody silly.”

“Fuck you,” he said as he pulled open the door to the long hallway beyond and turned to give me a contemptuous look. Never before had he regarded me with that kind of expression and I was shocked. He looked as if he could kill me.

Then he was gone, slamming the door behind him, and that was the last time I saw Oliver while I was alive.

12

Maybe it was the vodka, then the brandy, then the gin I’d consumed from the mini-bar that made my OBE so confusing; I’d downed them all in rapid succession after Oliver had left the suite.

Now on my own, surrounded by trampled layouts, I’d grown more and more angry. Trust Ollie to walk out on me when there was so much work to be done by Monday. And trust the fool to go back on his word that he’d keep off drugs for good. Now our partnership was in jeopardy all over again. I needed a copywriter who could judge what was good and what was awful. I needed a business partner who could think clearly when important decisions had to be made. I thought Ollie had learned his lesson from last time around.

It was past midnight when I went through to the room next door and threw myself onto the bed, an almost empty miniature of gin clutched in one hand. I supported myself on an elbow and drank the last dregs (shit, I hated gin) and let the tiny bottle drop to the floor as I flopped onto my back. Oliver, Oliver, why did you have to do it? Why now at this crucial time? The bank was probably one of the most significant accounts we’d ever take on and, once we became committed, we couldn’t be seen to blow it. Okay, it might not seriously knock us back in the industry, but it could damage our reputation as a winning hot shop a little. As for the so-called “merger” with Blake & Turnbrow, we needed to talk about it coolly and rationally without internecine disputes even before negotiations had begun.

Man, I was tired. Sick and tired, I guess. I’d never liked arguments and this one was a dinger. Ollie and I used to be tight, but now the relationship appeared to be over. For good? Who could say?

Closing my eyes I felt the room shift around me; by no means a seismic shift, but a smooth displacement that had more to do with exhaustion than the alcohol I’d consumed. I opened my eyes again and stared at the ceiling. Orange light came through the windows from the street below, this occasionally brightened by a whiter light, traffic approaching from a side street opposite, so that shadows moved around the darkened room like playful ghosts, growing then waning as headlights outside moved on.

I wasn’t drunk—I’m sure I wasn’t drunk—but anxiety, mental weariness and booze were never a good mix. For a moment I was disorientated, but the room soon settled itself again. The hum of late-night traffic that filtered through the windows’ double glazing was almost soothing. We would get through this, I told myself, and things eventually would go back to the way they were. Compromise was all that was needed here, and Sydney was good at smoothing over difficulties and offering solutions to disputes. I’d give him a call in the morning, get him over here, let him sort things out. Sydney had always been the perfect middleman, the soother of awkward situations. Hopefully, he would back down once he saw how anti-“merger” I really was and, in turn, he would help dissuade Oliver from such a drastic course.

My eyes closed again and this time they remained closed. Within seconds I was gone.

It was as easy and as quick as that. One moment I was drowsy, sinking into sleep, the next I was out of body, hovering near the ceiling, gazing down at myself.

Sometimes—in fact, most times—I had to work at it, consciously putting myself into a state of relaxation, imagining myself outside of my own physical form, seeing myself lying below in my imagination only, until the image became sharper, clearer, and suddenly I would actually be there, some other place, watching myself, no longer confined to the shell of my physical body. Usually, a great sense of freedom accompanied egression, a feeling of limitless space around my spirit form, a knowledge that I could fly to any destination I chose without constraint; but tonight I was confused, my mind not as liberated as my spirit. It was as if a thick yet invisible harness held me to my body, the bondage of reality perhaps. It could have been that my body, the part of me that was permanently chained to the physical world, sensed more than my spiritual self did and so was reluctant to release me, somehow afraid of the parting.

This state did not last long though, because a moment or two later my body dwindled below me as I zoomed away, through the ceiling, then the ceiling of the room above, swifter and swifter until I was out into the night sky.

It’s difficult to describe the feeling accurately, because it involves so much that is unknowable to most people. To begin with there is an incredible sense of wellbeing, for there are no physical torments such as pain, weariness, hunger or hangover anymore and, although there is some initial apprehension, this quickly vanishes with familiarity and you begin to enjoy the sensation. Most of the time you’re not in control of your destination but sometimes, if your mind is clear and compliant enough, you can direct yourself, you can choose a place and suddenly you will zoom off to it. Same thing if you envisage a particular person. It’s a bit like those rare times when you realize you are dreaming and so for a while can direct your own actions in the dream. Usually this interesting state doesn’t last long, because a little consciousness soon encourages full consciousness, and you find yourself awake again, annoyed you hadn’t made more of the experience.

On this night though, I was unable to govern my journey and found myself inside a kind of kaleidoscope of images, none of which appeared relevant to me. I seemed to travel back in time, because I saw myself as a little boy, skateboarding down a hill, picking up speed, shouting with both glee and fear as I increased speed, and then I watched myself sailing through the air, because the skateboard had hit some obstruction in its path (I wasn’t sure, but I thought it was my mother’s handbag lying in the roadway, and that was ridiculous, because why should her handbag be lying there?) and the board I had been standing on clattered over and over on the hard concrete while I glided smoothly through the air, screaming because I knew I was going to hit solid ground before too long. But instead of smashing into concrete, I found myself lying on cheap lino flooring, gazing up at a ring of faces that stared down at me, one of which was my mother’s, embarrassment as well as anxiety written across her plump features, and I remembered I’d just swallowed a steaming hot potato, a potato whose fire singed the inside walls of my chest, and then I was in another place, in a room filled with oldish-looking furniture, and I was watching a little boy, an even younger me, playing with a plastic Skywalker and Darth Vader on a rug in front of an electric fire, only two of its bars working, and I was desperately trying to ignore a row that was going on between a man and a woman who shared the room with me, and I could see that the woman was my mother, only she was much younger than she was today and she was almost pretty, despite the roundness of her face, and she was shouting at the man who, for some reason, had no face, his image masked beneath one of those pixel cover-ups, you know, little squares of different hues technically superimposed on screens so that the person being filmed cannot be identified, and he was silent as my mother screeched into his face, only occasionally uttering some kind of weak protest, and the more I stared at him the more the pixels disintegrated, square by square, while he was turning to me and saying ‘Jimmy’, until—

—until I was off again, flying over rooftops, winging through darkness, skimming through shadowed canyons, until, until…

… until I found myself descending worn stone steps that led down from the street, then passing through a battered, paint-chipped door. I was inside a dingy, dank room, its only light source an angle-poise lamp on a table covered with newspaper clippings, the dusty naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling switched off.

A figure was seated there, back to me, long-bladed scissors in one hand, snipping away at a newspaper. The cuttings already taken from other newspapers were set out neatly, without one piece overlapping another, the lines in between precise in their parallels. (I could tell it was a man by the size of his hands and the heavy set of his hunched shoulders.) I was puzzled by the sounds he made, a kind of wet snuffling. Every so often he would reach for a soiled, wrinkled rag lying on the desk and bring it to his face as if to wipe away mucus. Perhaps he had a heavy cold.

I was suddenly very afraid.

Why I had been drawn to this place I couldn’t tell, yet somehow I knew there had to be a reason. Certainly, I didn’t want to be here in this sombre room. Through an open doorway I could just make out a narrow cot bed against a wall, its sheets rumpled, unmade. In there the window’s grubby curtains were closed tight, as if to discourage snoopers, even though the flat itself was below street level. Well-thumbed magazines lay untidily on an old sofa, barely leaving a place to sit. There was no cheer here, no welcome; the place seemed filled with threat.

Snip-snip-snip.

The metallic cutting sound was eerily loud in the room’s stillness and, if I’d had a heartbeat, I’m sure I would have heard that too.

I drew nearer, but not willingly. It was a compulsion, an undeniable curiosity, that drove me.

Even though I was of no physical substance, I was afraid as I peered over the man’s shoulder to read the large print of newspaper headlines.

POLICE ADMIT SERIAL KILLER AT LARGE.

MURDER VICTIM MUTILATED.

WHY THESE VICTIMS? POLICE BAFFLED.

HUNT FOR MUTILATOR CONTINUES.

I straightened in shock. These murders had been happening for the past six weeks and the newspapers were full of lurid stories; even the broadsheets seemed to have lost their sense of decorum in their gory descriptions of the crimes. According to these stories all the victims were chosen at random, there was no connection between them. Also, the killings appeared to be motiveless, the unfortunate victims had no known enemies and apparently were not involved in any kind of criminal activity. In fact, the only similarity between the victims was that all three were professional people: the first had been a lawyer, the second an insurance broker, and the third, a woman this time, was a radiologist in the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel.

I was no more than a few inches away from the man’s head as he snipped away at a copy of the Daily Telegraph and I became even more disturbed by his odd breathing. It was somehow coarse, guttural, as if his throat were clogged, and I was repulsed by the sound.

I backed away a step and stared at the back of his bowed head. His scrappy hair was badly cut, bald patches visible even in the poor light from the low lamp that threw his back into dark shadow; what hair there was looked lank and dirty and I was sure that if I had a sense of smell in my altered state, the man himself would be rank, unwashed.

I realized what else made me feel so uneasy about this person: the perception had never before been this clear as far as others were concerned, but now I could just make out this man’s aura, the glow that emanates from every living thing. Some claim it’s a person’s soul shining from within, while others, more pragmatic, say it’s merely the normal radiation emitted from any material form. Nowadays, I tend to go for the former.

It was nasty, this aura around him, thick with muddy greys and blacks, their range short, shallow, extending only here and there beyond half-an-inch, and it seemed to me that the phenomenon exuded something foul, something rotten. I backed further away and that was when the man stiffened, the scissors stopping mid-snip. His head lifted and I became still, almost afraid to breathe (not that I needed to breathe at all).

It was as if he had sensed my presence.

Yet I’d made no noise—I couldn’t, not in this form.

He seemed to have felt my gaze on the back of his neck.

But, of course, I wasn’t there in person, there could be no presence to feel.

He lifted the scissors and clicked the blade shut. He changed his grip and held them like a knife.

Then he slowly began to turn my way.

I retreated even further, hoping to become lost in the shadows. Ridiculous, I know, because I was invisible. In all my out-of-body excursions nobody had ever been able to observe me in this immaterial state.

Yet he was turning towards me with purpose and I felt terribly exposed.

And then his black bulbous eyes were looking into mine.

I screamed. I fled.

13

It was horrible, ugly, and suddenly the world was spinning around me.

I don’t know if it was the shock, or my natural abhorrence that took over and whisked me away from harm, but I left the room fast. I didn’t run away, of course, I merely zoomed off as if yanked by a hook, images and sounds whirling around me. I was out of the darkened room, heading skywards, and then I knew nothing more for a while. It was as if my spiritual form had passed out.

I “awoke”, if that could be the word, in the living room of my own house. There were no lights on, but I could see my location by the street light flooding through the window. I’ve since reasoned that it was instinct that brought me there, that I’d fled to where I felt safest—doesn’t everyone feel safest in the sanctity of their own home? What I didn’t realize though, not until I inadvertently glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece, was that a few hours had passed since I’d entered the OBE.

I remembered the horribly dingy basement room and the man inside snipping away at the newspapers, and I remembered him slowly turning round as if he’d become aware of me. I remembered… I remembered… no, I couldn’t remember the face that had looked directly at me. Somehow the image had been frightened from my mind. I tried to recall what had scared me so, but I couldn’t, I just could not bring it into focus. But I knew I’d witnessed something awful, something that my brain had no wish to recollect. Perhaps later…

It was good to be home, oh, it was so good. Familiar furniture, framed pictures, comfortable sofa and armchair, thick wall-to-wall carpet—home, sweet home. A natural response had brought me here, of that I had no doubt: I guess self-preservation has a homing instinct all its own. But where had I been dining the intervening hours? It took me some time to work this out, but eventually I realized that my mind—and hence my “spirit”—had just closed down. Panic had set it to flight, and when I was safely away from that… that… thing in the dark room, my mind had sought sanctuary in oblivion. Why I had not simply returned to my body, I had no idea, but now the impulse to do so was immense.

As a rule, just the thought was enough to send me gliding back, a journey never more than a second or two no matter how far I had journeyed. But this time I resisted the impulse. Maybe it was the recent threat of danger that had me seeking the assurance of everything familiar and ordinary—what could be more commonplace than your own house? Or maybe I just had to touch base with reality for a while—again, what’s more real than your own place? Before I went back to my body, I had to reassure myself that my loved ones were safe and secure for the night.

Just that thought sent me gliding into the hall and up the stairs to the bedrooms. Now you have a choice when out of body, in that you can move exactly as you would in real life—one step at a time, that sort of thing—or you can kind of sail or glide everywhere. I usually chose to do both, sometimes taking steps, other times pushing myself along as in those dreams I spoke of earlier. On this fretful occasion I glided up the stairs, using my hands to propel myself upwards as though I were beneath the ocean, almost weightless, exploring some undersea wreck. Normally, it was a wonderful feeling, but this night I was too agitated to enjoy the experience.

Up I went, for some reason terribly afraid for my family. It made no sense at all—the man had only felt my presence, hadn’t actually seen me. And so what? What could the man do? He didn’t know me, could have no idea of where I lived. But still the anxiety sent me gliding purposely up the stairs. I had understood that the man I’d witnessed collecting clippings from various newspapers was wicked, because it was evil that seemed to ooze from his very pores, manifesting itself in the ugly monochromed aura. Yes, he seemed to sweat badness and I’d sensed that even if I could not physically smell it.

Why should he have been cutting out those particular news stories of a serial killer? My absent heart turned cold, a peculiar experience, I must admit. Foolish too, because there was no way I could be traced back here to my home. Even if the man had actually seen me, even if he had some psychic sense that made it possible, he would not know me from Adam, and therefore could not know my home address. Yet his threat seemed very real.

I paused at the top of the stairs, unsettled, now definitely afraid for my wife and daughter. What if this person had the ability to follow me? What if he was capable of OBEs? No, not possible. Certainly I, myself, had caught glimpses of spirit people, a kind of faded print of moving images, but nothing I could connect with. If I approached, they merely melted away. They were sometimes picked up only in the periphery of my vision, to evaporate when looked at directly.

I got a grip of myself and went on.

Primrose’s bedroom door, as always, was open wide so that we could hear her if she had a bad dream and called out during the night, and I sped through. I hovered over her and regarded her lovely little face, her lips slightly parted, the soft drone of baby-snores assuring me she was safe and well. Her arms were thrown back, small clenched fists resting on the pillow, and her brown curls framed her sweet face. Leaning down I planted a gentle kiss on her cheek and she wrinkled her nose and turned her head aside as though something had tickled her. Without thought I tried to tuck the bedcovers up around her neck, but of course, my hands merely went through the soft material. I lingered for a few moments and imagined I could actually hear the small thud-ups of her heartbeat; imagined or not, it was reassuring.

Backing away cautiously as if I might make a sound and wake her, I tiptoed out (silly, I know) onto the landing. Again I paused, this time to listen for any extraneous sounds, anything foreign to the domestic peace, and only when satisfied there was nothing to be anxious about did I move along the landing to the bedroom I normally shared with Andrea.

The lamplight outside the window allowed me to see her lying on one side of our large double bed—she once told me that, out of habit, she never invaded my side when I was away—and she, too, looked peaceful. Her skin was pale in the cold glow from the street, and her features were beautiful and unlined. We’d had our problems during the marriage, particularly over the past year—I was the guilty party, work had eaten up so much of my time that Andrea was entitled to feel neglected—but I’d never stopped loving her and I hoped it was the same for her. I still found her exquisite and inwardly, and constantly, blessed her for giving me such a wonderful daughter. Her naked arm was above the bedclothes and I ran invisible fingers along the smooth white skin. I had watched her before like this, my own body lying empty beside her with my spirit form hovering over us both, wondering at the unique experience. You might think that it was spying, but truthfully, it doesn’t feel like that. Maybe it’s because you’re existing in your purest form and bodily desires are not present. It doesn’t mean you can’t appreciate the beauty before you, but there is no lust involved, no sexual pruriency whatsoever (otherwise I guess most out-of-body practitioners would turn into voyeurs and sex surfers). I had once caressed Andrea’s naked sleeping body on a hot summer’s night when the bedsheets had been tossed aside, but because there was no physical contact involved, there was no arousal (and certainly not for my sleeping beauty). You can’t have it all ways, I suppose.

I sat next to her on the bed (no, there’s no strain in standing—weariness only comes with the length of time you’re in OBE—but you tend to follow the normal life patterns), just watching her sleep, making up my mind to pay her and Prim more attention once this new client presentation was out of the way, resolving to take more time off in future, delegate more of the creative work to my up-and-coming art directors and copywriters, when suddenly I was jolted by some awful, sickening dread.

It seemed to hit me like a sledge-hammer, a sudden powerful shock that had me collapsed over the bed, where I stayed, stunned and gasping for unnecessary air. A memory—a scene—flashed through my mind: I seemed to be very small, for I was looking up, looking up at two figures. I recognized one. Mother, smiling down at me. She was different though and for a moment—no, it must have been a nanosecond, because it was all happening so fast, so fast yet so ridiculously drawn out, as if I had conquered time itself—I wondered why.

Then I realized it was because she was so much younger than the woman I now knew, than the image that I had held within my head, the present-day woman. As in the vision earlier that night, she was younger, her smile was sweeter, and she was pretty in a plumpish, round-faced way. Now she was making noises at me, but I heard no sound; somehow—perhaps it was because of the O shape of her lips—I knew she was making cooing sounds at me, baby sounds.

I turned to the figure standing next to her, a man who was also gazing down at me although I could not see his face, only his clothes, his long thin legs, a woollen jumper. I tried, I really tried, to see his face, because I knew he was important to me; all I saw was a blur this time, a soft pink-greyness as if the head had lost focus, but I knew it was the pixel-disguised person I’d seen with Mother before.

The couple dissolved and I was still low to the ground, for once again I was looking upwards and figures were bending over me, a circle of curious heads, and I was choking, something was burning my throat something was stopping my breath. It was hot-potato time all over again. And there was Mother, older than a moment ago, her expression inexplicably overridden with embarrassment rather than concern.

Dissolve, very quick, fade-in scenes coming thick and fast. I was surrounded by other kids, in a schoolyard I could tell, for the buildings rose around us like brick canyon walls and a bell was ringing somewhere, calling us all to assembly, but I was otherwise engaged, me and another boy, a bit bigger than me but with a bloody nose and tears in his eyes as he rained punches at me. I knew I had given him the bloody nose and I was feeling good because of it, even though I also knew I was now going to take a hammering. I felt pain, nasty, powerful pain, but it didn’t last long, for I was in another scene, the story of my life revealed in incidents rather than episodes, and I was watching a girl, a beautiful, dark-haired girl of about fifteen, and my whole body seemed wracked with emotion that I think was first-time love, and this did not last either, but the scenes—the incidents—were changing even more rapidly, becoming a kind of vortex of images, speedy but perfectly clear and, in their encapsulated way, perfectly presented with beginnings and ends. It was thrilling, but at the same time so bloody scary.

And I had to wonder why it was happening.

On it went, more scenes—sorry, incidents, episodes—from the past came and went, and I saw them all as an observer, not a participant. Weird, unsettling, some events leaving me steeped in guilt, while others were totally joyous.

It occurred to me with some dismay that this must be like the death experience some people spoke of, the retelling of their life in all-embracing flashback. But there appeared to be no judgement, only a subliminal and non-specific weighing-up of good and bad deeds committed by me. And anyway, I wasn’t dead, only out-of-body, so whatever was happening was merely some freakish phenomenon I’d never experienced before.

Through the years of practising the out-of-body state, I had read up on the subject and tried to learn as much as I could about the theory, the control, and other people’s personal experiences, and had been surprised to learn that the spirit essence never quite leaves the body, that there is a kind of silver thread (some preach that it’s golden) always connecting you to your physical form, that no matter how far you leave your body behind, this thread or cord stretches but never breaks the link. This, according to the theories, is why you can never lose your physical self, that nothing can destroy the connection. Well I’d never observed this so-called silver or gold thread or cord, although I’d always felt some kind of invisible bond. But now I felt it break.*

*There is no visible link, although without doubt there is a psychic link. While separated from the host body, the bond between soul and body is too strong and yet too delicate to be broken (think of some of those deep-sea creatures whose flesh is so fine it’s transparent, yet they withstand constant unbelievably intense physical pressure without being crushed; or think of finely spun spiders’ webs that can bear comparatively heavy loads without tearing. I’d say the psychic link between body and itinerant spirit—let’s call this other self that for the moment—is even stronger). This, of course, is not a fact, but something I’ve rationalized as time has gone by and certainly—and this is the important part—I’ve kind of sensed from the beginning; so much in that incorporeal state is sensing, which is considerably heightened in the out-of-body state. Maybe bodiless you’re closer to life’s mysteries. Or maybe it’s some kind of compensation for the absence of one of your other senses: I mean touch, because there is no physical contact anymore, you just cannot feel anything at all material. And believe me, that’s hard to get used to. Your fingers just merge into anything you touch, your body can move through anything solid like liquid through a fine sieve.

I could not see it, I could not feel the link, but somehow I sensed that it had snapped like a long, finely drawn rubber band and the result was that I had been propelled forward, my invisible head almost smacking my invisible knees. It was a terrible, fear-inducing jolt and I was suddenly cast free of myself, the metaphorical umbilical cord that held both parts of me together, body and soul, had been sundered.

I had an equally sudden vision of that man in the darkened room cutting the cord with his long-bladed scissors. Impossible, of course, but somehow I couldn’t shake the image from my mind. I began to panic.

Could you lose the connection with your own body? Could you be cast adrift? I had no idea—I was a lone pioneer as far as OBEs were concerned; I certainly had no knowledge of others who practised it, although I’d read the few books written by people who claimed they had mastered the technique of leaving their own bodies to become entirely spirit; but nothing they’d said covered this eventuality. I was scared, terribly scared, and I wanted to get back to my body without delay.

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.

Although I had no sense of time, I knew it was still late night or early morning because it was dark outside save for the street lights. Besides, when I looked, the digital radio/alarm clock on the bedside cabinet told me it was 1.55 a.m. So who could be ringing me at that hour? Oliver, phoning to apologize for his behaviour earlier? I doubted it. My copywriter’s strops could last for days, sometimes weeks when he was really in a sulk. So who then?

Andrea. Her and Prim’s images leapt into my mind. Andrea would certainly ring if something was up at home. Or maybe she had expected me to ring her last night, as I always did when I was away. I invariably checked if things were okay with Prim and Andrea before dinner or around bedtime (my daughter’s bedtime), but tonight—last night, to be accurate—I’d been too engaged in hassles with Ollie to remember. There might not be a problem at home, I thought, calming myself to a degree, because my wife was aware that I’d probably still be working late into the night, so she wouldn’t be disturbing my sleep. I hoped that was the case as I studied the still-ringing phone.

It stopped abruptly, but I continued to stare. She’d given up, but would be worried that I hadn’t answered. What the hell could I do? I certainly couldn’t phone her back. One more try at the body. You never know, it could just work this time.

I rose and knelt on the bed, gazing down at my mashed face and the sight made me feel sick to my non-existent stomach. I didn’t avert my gaze though. Even if I could get back inside and take control, tap out my number on the phone despite blood-drenched and now misaligned real eyes, how could I speak to Andrea without a discernible mouth? I’d only spit gore and loose teeth into the mouthpiece.

Shit in a bubble bath, what the fuck was I supposed to do? I roared my anguish, a sound no living person could ever hear, and I sobbed into my hands. What had happened to me? Why had it happened to me?

Understand that the thing which makes you a person is not the flesh and blood, but the mind—not the brain—that lives within the shell. It forms the personality, the philosophy, the instinct and perception, the very nature of the man or woman or child themselves and I’ve learned over the years that this is what you take with you when you leave the body. It is you, and when you’re in spirit or OBE you perform just as though you’re in the physical. You close your eyes, you weep, you feel fear, you feel joy, you feel all emotions as usual; and you dress yourself as you would in life, your mind creates the phantom material; as mentioned before, you can experience desire, but because your mind is aware there can be no physical expression, it necessarily becomes unimportant. Your mind also reconciles other senses, so that you can hear, touch (but not actually feel—it’s all to do with perception), obviously see and you can speak, although no one else will hear you (in feet, all those senses are inexplicably heightened, because no longer are there physical defects or dulling limitations). I guess it’s all to do with the mind convincing itself—no, wait, it has to be stronger than that. Possibly it’s because the mind is the reality, all other material things non-existent or irrelevant, unless accepted by the mind itself. I’m no philosopher, never was, but it makes some kind of sense to me. Let’s just say I existed in the sixth sense, which does not preclude all of the other five. Taste is missing and so is smell. Just like in dreams, in fact.

But the main point I’m making is that even in my spirit form I acted exactly as if I were occupying my body as normal. I could sit, lie down, walk, run, jump. And on top of this, I knew I could fly, float, pass through walls, and think myself to other locations.

So now I kneeled on the bed and wailed. I was frightened and lost and had no idea where I was supposed to go from here. I was homeless; I had no body and no tangibility.

I cried for Primrose and Andrea, and I cried for myself. God, I even cried for Oliver and Sydney, my friends and business partners: what were they going to do without me, who would get the work done? I cried for my mother. We didn’t get along anymore, but what was she to do with me gone? She’d lost one man already, her husband, and now me, her son. Self-pity mingled with commiseration for my friends and family as I hugged my self there on the big, blood-ruined bed, rocking backwards and forwards on my knees, and all the while the demolished face of my old self watched me with crooked glazed eyes.

It took some time, but eventually I began to calm down. I wasn’t all-cried-out just yet—I knew more tears would be shed later—but I gradually became aware that staying here with the wrecked meat and bone that once was my human form was pointless. Besides, I felt an urgent need to see my wife and daughter once more, because maybe there would be no other chance; if I was dead (and let’s face it, all the signs indicated that I was) I might have only this last chance before I went on to the place where all souls go (I began truly hoping there was a heaven after all).

Before my life expired, merely the imagined picture of a location was enough to get me there almost immediately; I was always aware of my flight, but it usually went by so swiftly it hardly felt like a journey. This time, however, I consciously had to make the effort of leaving the hotel room by passing through the thick outside wall into the night. Once outside I had to follow a route to my home that I knew, transportation now a considered thing rather than just a wish-fulfillment. I was strangely chilled as I travelled, as if a breeze was flowing through me, even though I had no physical outline to capture its draught, and my journey was by short body-hopping movements, casting off with either hands or feet to float some distance before sinking to the ground again. It was like the recurring dreams I used to have where I never could quite fly above the earth completely, my own pragmatism allied with gravity drawing me back to solid ground each time. Those astronauts who had walked the moon must have shared the same experience.

The London streets were quiet, the occasional lonely lorry or all-night bus passing me by; only a few cars were about, their headlights dipped. There were people here and there, sometimes in small groups as if they had left late-night parties or clubs together (this was the weekend, I reminded myself) and I avoided them without knowing why. But on turning a corner and briefly grounded at the time, I ran straight through a person who had been about to make the turn from me other direction.

It was the weirdest feeling, because for an instant I was almost part of the stranger. Alien thoughts poured through me, not quite visions and certainty not manifestations, but thoughts, representations of people the person must have known. There was a fraction of a situation too, an altercation between two women, neither of whom was particularly attractive, over the person—a man, I assumed, the guy whose body I’d trespassed on—himself. There were other things too, as if this pedestrian was carrying the baggage of his whole life around with him, but these were confusing and easily relegated by the two-women scenario. Then it was gone and I was in open space again.

I felt suddenly drained, slightly nauseated, as if my invasion was punishable—or perhaps too much to handle—and I came to a halt. Turning my head to watch the man’s retreating back, I saw that he also had stopped and was looking behind him towards me, a bewildered expression on his lamp-lit face. I thought he might even see me and I unconsciously raised a hand in salutation, but of course he stared right through me (literally).

He shuddered, a jerky spasm, a feeling of someone walking over his grave, I guessed. And I felt the same way too, although I didn’t give a shudder. The man turned and went on his way, disappearing round the next corner, leaving me perplexed and no less afraid for myself. It was an unpleasantness I intended to avoid in the future. If there was some kind of future for me.

Resuming my journey, I discovered I could no longer float quite so easily. I realized much later that I was becoming used to my situation, my state-of-being, and the familiarity appeared to set its own limitations. You see, this was not entirely the OBE of before, when I had a proper life. No, I was now in some kind of limbo, unattached but still linked with the former life. Somehow, this condition imposed certain restrictions and I was yet to learn what they were. I guessed that the more I accepted and adapted, the less freedoms I would have, reasoned thought perhaps setting its own boundaries, if only to a certain extent.

The journey home was one of the worst I’d ever undertaken; I was in grief and I was frightened and confused. Only the image of my loved ones, Prim and Andrea, kept me from sinking into an invisible whimpering heap on the pavement. This can’t be death, I repeatedly told myself, this can’t be the consequence of dying, the next stage, the step through the door; this couldn’t be the after-death existence most of us hoped for. If it was, where were all the other souls? If I was a ghost, where were all those who had preceded me? Anyway, I didn’t feel like a ghost. Disembodied maybe, but I certainly had not left this place on earth. Where was the Big Judgement those nuns in junior school had promised me (or, more truthfully, threatened me with)? Where was the eternal peace and joy we were supposed to expect, and where was God’s all-embracing love? Or was He having a laugh? (Yep, by now a little anger was creeping in and that was no bad thing—somehow it gave me a bit more focus.)

I went on, at one moment boiling with rage, the next tearful with despair. Never had I felt so alone. I longed to be with my wife and daughter again and I kept willing myself to be home, hoping that the willing would work as it always had before, so that just the thought of Prim and Andrea inside our house would take me there instantly as though the mere desire would act like some futuristic transporter vehicle, a Star Trek machine without the electronics and dazzling light particles. It wasn’t to be though and I wandered the streets like (literally again) some lost soul.

Nevertheless, I arrived home more swiftly than if I’d been plodding along with real legs and feet, and no tiredness accompanied the effort. I stood by the stone post at the bottom of our short driveway and looked at the house, waiting, not to catch my breath, which was totally unnecessary, but to relish the moment. I felt relieved and at the same time flushed with anticipation.

Oddly, there was a light on in an upstairs window despite the hour. It came from Prim’s bedroom.

15

It must have been the non-thinking, the sheer reaction, that got me into my daughter’s bedroom so swiftly. One moment I was standing by the wall post, the next I was gliding up the driveway to the entrance (my feet skimming inches above the ground) and had passed through the sturdy wooden barrier that was the front door and in a flash was on my way upstairs.* I didn’t so much climb the stairs as sail right up them, finding myself outside Prim’s open bedroom door without further thought.

*Let me just tell you about going through a closed door or wall:

You don’t just flow through in an easy, fluid movement like a ghost does it in a movie. What happens is that for an instant you are part of that substance, be it wood, stone or cloth. With the last you become part of the fabric itself, a piece of the weave; with wood you’re the very grain; with stone you’re part of the dust that makes it. You mix with the atoms, integrate with them, become unified until you move beyond. It’s more or less the same when you pass through a living body, only then you also become part of its memories and metaphysical nature; but more of that later.

I have no idea why I paused there—perhaps I was preparing myself for another shock—but pause I did. No, now I think about it, it was more of an involuntary hesitation than a deliberate halt, for I could hear a familiar soothing voice. It could be that I expected both Prim and my wife to glimpse me in this new and surprising state, for I hadn’t yet learned enough about my condition to know how it might affect others. In OBE I’d always been invisible to people, but now the rules might have changed dramatically. Some people do see ghosts, don’t they? Especially when they’ve had some physical connection. I truly did not want to scare my wife and daughter. But then, was I a ghost? True enough, I appeared to be dead, my body wasn’t breathing anymore (despite its incredibly ruined state I had checked for any signs of breathing or heartbeat back in the hotel room), but I really did… not… feel… dead! It was becoming a mantra for me.

Andrea’s soft-spoken words encouraged me to enter. The room was lit by a colourful Winnie the Pooh lamp, a gentle glow that only tempered the shadows, rather than banishing them completely. Beneath the lamp on the pretty bedside cabinet stood Prim’s little blue puffer, placed on the very edge so that it was within easy reach. Our daughter had suffered her first asthma attack more than a year ago and it almost broke my heart to know she was always so afraid of having another (she’d had four more since the first one) that the Ventolin spray was always close at hand, especially during the night. Some kids had their own personal security blanket; my little girl had her inhaler. I stood in the doorway watching for a long difficult moment. Andrea was sitting on the bed, with Primrose cradled in one arm, pillows propped up behind them. Her other hand stroked our daughter comfortingly as Andrea continued to speak in that low, calming voice.

“It was just a nasty old dream, darling,” she was saying. “Nothing’s happened to Daddy, I promise you.”

In her arms, Prim clutched Snowy, her favourite teddy bear whose fur used to be pure white but was now faded to a light yellowish grey. I’d given her Snowy on her third birthday.

“But he didn’t answer the phone, Mummy.” Light glistened off cheeks that were still not dry from earlier tears.

“I know, but it was very late and Daddy has been working very hard. He was probably sound asleep.”

“You tried his mobile too.”

“Yes, but it was switched off.”

“He always keeps it by the bed.”

“The hotel would already have a phone right next to the bed. He wouldn’t need his mobile.”

“Then why didn’t he hear the hotel phone?”

“Because he must be exhausted. You know how hard Daddy is to wake up when he’s been working too hard.”

“But I’m afraid, Mummy.”

“I know, Prim, but there’s no need. I’ll ring again first thing in the morning. You’ll see, he’ll answer it then and wonder what the fuss is about.”

“In the dream he was very lost.”

“You always get anxious when Daddy’s away. Remember when you cried because you thought he’d fallen down some stairs? That was a long time ago, wasn’t it? And when he got home, nothing at all had happened to him, had it?”

I remembered the incident. While it was true that nothing had happened to me physically, it was an afternoon when I’d spontaneously gone out-of-body while sitting at my desk and half-falling asleep. I’d been surprised to find myself in this other realm without any warning and had had no control whatsoever. In the OBE I was at the top of a tall building, standing on the very edge of the roof (it was a familiar building some miles away from my office and I had no idea how I’d got there) and about to take a step forward. Well, whereas if in control I would have glided to a safer place, this time I fell. Really it was no more than what sometimes occurs in a normal dream, where you seem to take a wrong step off a pavement and the sudden jolt wakes you, but in this instance the location was a little more serious. And, as if in a normal dream, I was instantly awake, my whole body no doubt jerking with surprise, and I almost did fall off my chair, but I managed to save myself in time. Fortunately, I was alone in the office I shared with Oliver, or I would have had to endure his laughter and teasing for the rest of the afternoon. My heart was beating a little faster than usual, but otherwise I was okay; it was only later I learned that around the same time—about four in the afternoon—Primrose, who was belted up in the back of Andrea’s little Peugeot on their way home from school, had given a small scream and burst into tears, proclaiming that her daddy had fallen down some stairs and hurt himself.

I hadn’t revealed what had actually happened to me when I got home that evening, because I really didn’t grasp the connection when Prim ran down the hallway to tell me of her outburst and to make sure I wasn’t hurt. I laughed and reassured her that I was fine, there had been no accident earlier, and it was only when I was in bed that night that I related the two incidents. Even so, I dismissed it as coincidence, but now, in the doorway, I began to wonder.

“Can’t you phone again now, Mummy?” Prim was persistent.

“No, darling. Daddy would be cross if we woke him. It’s not long till morning, so we’ll call him together then. Perhaps if his work has gone well he’ll be coming home.” She leaned down to kiss Prim’s freckled nose, then said, “Time for you to go to sleep too. You’ll be in a grumpy state all day if you don’t.”

“Andrea,” I said, stepping further into the room. “I’m here. I’m fine. There’s nothing wrong.”

I don’t know why I made that last remark: maybe I wanted to believe it myself. In fact, I don’t know why I even spoke: previous experience in out-of-body had taught me I couldn’t be heard. Nevertheless, the practice of a lifetime was hard to break. Besides, if my daughter had the insight or intuition to sense something bad had happened to me, then perhaps she might see and hear me now.

“Something’s happened to my body,” I told them both, “but I’m all right. I’m not dead, you must believe me.”

“Come on now.” Andrea eased her arm from Prim’s back and laid the pillows flat. “Lie down and go to sleep.” She bent to kiss the top of Prim’s head then pulled the flower-patterned duvet up to our daughter’s chin. Primrose wasn’t pacified, but she was tired, her eyelids drooping even though she fought to keep them open.

“I won’t sleep, Mummy,” she said.

“Ssssh. You will. Think nice things.”

Prim pulled a disgruntled face, but it was half-hearted, I knew she’d be asleep within moments.

Andrea switched off the bedside lamp before standing, then walked soft-toed to the door. She stepped through to the landing, turned to look back at our child once more, and then half-closed the door behind her. I lingered a while by Prim’s bed and sure enough, she had already fallen asleep. I tried to brush a stray curl from her closed eyes and my fingers made no contact. With a last, regretful stare at her innocent shadowy face, I turned away and followed my wife.

I found her sitting on the edge of our own bed, her eyes fixed on the phone on the small bedside cabinet, one hand resting beside it. Her bedside lamp was switched on. I could tell she wanted to ring the hotel again, her anxiety plain to see but, sensibly enough—although I clenched my fists tightly in anticipation—she let her hand fall away, obviously deciding it was too late to disturb me. She slipped beneath the covers and switched the lamp off.

“No,” I cried, almost in tears. “No, Andrea. Ring the hotel, get someone to check my room. It’s not too late, it can’t be too late!”

I wondered if somehow she could hear my distant voice, because for a moment she rested on one elbow as if still pondering, wondering what she should do. But then, she lay down, one arm above the covers, and closed her eyes. In the pale-orange light from outside I could see the frown that disturbed her features. Soon though, the worry-lines eased and her face was smooth again. Andrea, too, was asleep.

In abject misery, I sank down beside her. I closed my own invisible eyes.

16

It was a strange gagging sound that roused me. I don’t say “woke me up”, because I didn’t know if I’d been sleeping; I didn’t know if it was possible to sleep in my condition (what a joy it would have been if I’d been woken from a nightmare).

I just opened my eyes at the noise and there I was, back in the hotel suite, lying on the bed beside my own butchered carcass. I didn’t have time to consider whether or not some kind of instinct had drawn me back to the site of my own annihilation, an unconscious determination to rejoin my soul’s host while my mind was blanked, because the uniformed waitress with the breakfast trolley was now standing in the doorway staring, gawping at the bloody, chopped thing on the bed with horrified eyes. Her jaw flapped and closed as she tried to summon up a scream.

It finally erupted in a piercingly high-pitched, blood-curdling shriek, which was immediately followed by a series of wheezing staccatos of half-stifled, breath-catching screeches that scared the hell out of me. For a moment I thought she might suffer a seizure and I raised my hands, palms forward, as if to calm her.

She was the same sallow-skinned, dark-haired girl who had brought my breakfast the previous morning. Her instructions were to let herself directly into my bedroom if her knock failed to wake me (my bedroom had two doors, one of which led to the suite’s sitting room, the other out into the hotel corridor. Oliver had a large bedroom on the opposite side of the sitting room). I’d tipped her generously the day before and although she seemed to understand little English, I think she was eager to please me with her efficiency; unfortunately, this morning she got something more than just a tip.

The poor girl, smart in her white shirt, green waistcoat and tight black skirt, fell back against the doorframe and for a second I thought she might pass out. Her pupils rolled back inside her head for a fleeting moment and her whole body swooned, but the doorframe itself kept her upright and she recovered enough to stagger out of sight. I heard her lumbering down the hallway (she was a heavyish girl) on unsteady legs, the semi-screams still struggling to reach full-voice again, and then it was quiet.

I turned my head and looked at my blood-coated remains. Oh dear God…

Early daylight coming through the open curtains did nothing to improve the scene. In the cold light of day, as it were, the sight was even more appalling. Last night the immediate shock must have numbed me from the full horror, because not everything had sunk in. I was now noticing more details without hysteria blanking me.

The blood was already coagulating, its colour turning coppery, and my disorganized eyes were still gazing flatly outwards, matt crescents between their lids. My nose was nothing more than shattered pulp resting within the bloody valley of flesh and bone that was my indented face. Just inside the lopsided rictus grin of a mouth I could see broken stumps of teeth resembling vandalized gravestones against their inky backdrop and, if I had been capable of vomiting, then I think I would have; I certainly felt nauseous. My chin was a crooked peak, but otherwise okay, the worst of the facial damage just above it.

It occurred to me that somebody would have to identify my body and a fresh revulsion swept through me. My God, it might have to be Andrea. I groaned silently at the thought.

The rest of me had been battered too, both my arms broken, one at the wrist, the other at the elbow—maybe I had tried to fight off the attacker (but how could I if I wasn’t there?)—and one of my legs was twisted awkwardly at the knee, the kneecap itself pulped, my ripped trouser leg messy with glutinous, hardening blood. There were deep cuts all over my body and my head was almost severed as if the neck had been sliced by some sort of small chopper or axe. Whoever had attacked me really wanted me dead.

The wounds were crude and a great flow of viscous-looking blood ruined the pale-green bedspread, overspilling its sides and running down onto the carpet below. Its edges had hardened, the colour very dark.

“Oh God…” I whispered, still contemplating my lifeless form with tear-blurred eyes. I shuddered at the damage done to my chest and stomach, where blood had poured copiously, even now small bubbles forming every few seconds or so, as though pockets of air were escaping the wound. I noticed something protruding from below my left ribcage, blood almost covering it. It was small and round, but before I could inspect it, something else distracted me. The zip of my trousers was open. Because of the thickness of blood that had welled there, I could not tell—nor did I honestly want to know—exactly what damage had been done. In fact, I didn’t even have to guess, because something lay between my outstretched legs, a mound of bloody meat that had been removed from my groin and slapped down on the soft bedcover, an abstract genital pile, the sight of which now had me retching again.

As I bent over my knees I heard heavy footsteps hurrying along the hall outside my room. Still retching, pointlessly because I had nothing to bring up, I retreated into the corner of the room.

Oh, it was a long day. A terribly long day. And I stuck around for most of it.

Where else would I go? What else could I do?

I hunkered down in the corner in abject misery and watched the comings and goings, the shock and utter dismay of the hotel’s under-manager and concierge, who had rushed to the room after the room-service waitress’s hysterical alert, then the horror of the manager himself and the small posse of staff he’d brought with him, later the calm reaction of the first uniformed police officer to arrive. By the time two plain-clothed detectives bustled in I was just a traumatized wreck.

“Help me,” I croaked pitifully, not even bothering to rise to my feet because I knew there was no chance of being seen, let alone heard.

Eventually the room was cleared of everybody save the detectives, who reprimanded the first cop for not having cleared the crime scene immediately. The professionals soon arrived and took over. Some wore all-in-one white shell suits and I assumed they were the forensic scientists. The police surgeon, careful not to get blood on his civilian clothes and shoes, examined my body. With an ironic grin he pronounced me dead. One of the guys in white took photographs before another one took measurements of blood splatters and drifts. Yet another used a camcorder, and all the while the two detectives conferred in hushed tones, as if they didn’t want the corpse to overhear.

An extremely tall grey-haired man with a jet-black moustache and matching eyebrows entered and the two detectives acknowledged him with respectful nods. The uniformed policeman at the door saluted him.

His stature was impressive, his back ramrod straight, his charcoal-grey suit immaculately pressed. He went immediately over to the police surgeon, who was making notes on a pad.

“Detective Superintendent Sadler,” the newcomer announced without extending a hand to shake.

The medic just gave him a curt nod. “Dr Breen,” he said, looking back at his notes. “Too early to give you anything.”

“Hazard a guess at time of death?” Sadler asked, his tone implying little hope.

“You’ll need a proper autopsy for that.”

“Do your best.”

“Well, the body—what’s left of it—is still warmish, but then the room temperature is quite high. I could take a quick rectal reading, but I imagine you don’t want anything disturbed at this stage.”

The policeman grunted something that must have been agreement and the police surgeon went on.

“Lividity is underway as far as I can tell—and the state of the body itself doesn’t help—but the pathologist will have a clearer time of death after the post-mortem.”

“But rigor mortis…?”

“Oh yes, that’s certainly begun, but you’re aware of how unreliable that can be when determining these things.”

The detective superintendent’s impatience was made apparent. “Good God, man, I only asked for a rough estimation,” he said gruffly.

“Eyelids frozen, muscles of what’s left of the jaw stiff. Same with neck and upper chest, but the corpse’s disarray and loss of blood make it difficult to assess.”

Dr Breen caught the grimness and steely-eyed severity of the tall policeman’s gaze and hurriedly proffered his informal judgement.

“Death definitely occurred more than three hours ago and I’d guess it was closer to six, maybe a bit more than that.”

DS Sadler wasn’t quite finished with him yet.

“And…?” he demanded brusquely.

“And? And what?” The police surgeon obviously wasn’t used to blunt interrogation and it showed in his irritated frown.

“Is it another one?” asked Sadler.

“We think it is, Sir,” Simmons, one of the detectives, put in, stepping forward and carefully avoiding a glob of thick blood on the carpet as he did so.

“Through the heart?” queried the detective superintendent.

“Yep. You can just see it under the ribs if you look closely.”

The senior policeman took his detective’s word for it.

“So we have yet another victim.”

“Could be a copycat,” suggested the second detective.

“Don’t be bloody daft, Coates,” Sadler said crossly. “Actual cause of death is not public knowledge.”

Coates’s face reddened. “Yes, Sir.”

I looked up and stared at them all, almost but not quite shaken out of my torpor. What did he mean, “Actual cause of death is not public knowledge”? I was confused for a moment, but then it began to come together. The tall man had asked if it—it being me, my stone-dead corpse—was another one, obviously meaning another victim. And one of the detectives, the one called Coates, had suggested it could be a copycat murder implying I was one of a series. I might be dead, but I was still alert.

What was it that the public didn’t know, though? I began to pay even more attention.

“It’s there all right.” It was the police surgeon, Breen, who spoke up.

All eyes, including mine, turned towards him.

“Hole through the heart?” said Sadler.

A grave nod of the doctor’s head. “Yes. Underneath the left side of the ribcage and straight up. As in all the other cases. Hard to find at first, with all the blood. But the flat end of the needle is there all right.”

I remembered the blood-covered bump I’d noticed earlier.

“And that’s what killed him?”

“Well, I hope the mutilation came afterwards, for the victim’s sake, but I don’t think so. The pathologist will let you know for sure. If already dead, the blood flow would have been heavy, but not as fierce as it would have been if the victim were still alive.

“Look.” He pointed with his pen. “The thigh’s femoral artery has been cut through. If the victim had still been alive at the time, the blood would have escaped in a spurt that might even have reached the ceiling.” The three men looked up: the high ceiling was pure white. “But, as you can see, it gushed in a great arc that reached well beyond the bed, almost as far as the wall, which suggests to me the victim’s face was cleaved first, killing him instantly, the other weapon used afterwards. The main flows have soaked the carpet, and there are splatters everywhere, some quite a distance from the general spillage, although they were probably caused by the action of the first weapon itself, sinking into the body and jerked out again with considerable force. Looks to me as if the instrument used, by the way, was a butcher’s chopper, or something similar. I’ve seen their kind of deep wounds before. Forensics will let you know for sure.”

“Whoever did this must also be covered in blood. Surely someone on the staff had to see the killer leave.”

Simmons shook his head resignedly. “Night porter and the lobby reception guy, who were still on duty, spent most of the time in the office behind the counter, saw no one suspicious and certainly no one with blood on their clothes. In fact, not one guest arrived or left.”

Coates spoke up. “There is a back entrance to the place. For staff and workmen, small deliveries, that kind of thing.”

“Unattended?” snapped Sadler.

“ ‘Fraid so,” Coates told him. “At least, some of the time. There is night security, an open cubicle near the door, but the guard on duty frequently leaves it to do his rounds.”

“Wasn’t the door locked?”

“No, Sir,” Simmons replied. “Night staff and early morning cleaners are using it all the time.”

“There has to be a bigger delivery area.”

“It’s in the basement. Heavy vehicles get to it by a ramp leading from the road outside.”

“Locked though, Sir,” added Coates. “It’s a big roll-up door and it was closed for the night. No deliveries were expected.”

Sadler considered all he had been told for a few moments, then: “Right, I want you to interview every person who was on duty during the night and early hours. No doubt the manager or the under-manager will supply a list of personnel. Question the night porter and the receptionist again. They may remember something they’ve forgotten. Oh, and the security man also. Prompt him—he might just come up with something useful.”

There were raised voices in the next-door room, the lounge area, and I thought I recognized one of them. Hurried footsteps, the rustle of my layouts from yesterday being trampled on, a sharp, “You can’t go in there,” followed by scuffling noises, and then Oliver was in the bedroom doorway.

“Oh…” is all he said, but it was an agonized sound, a soul-wrenching sound. Horror, shock, disbelief whitened his face and highlighted the few faint scattered freckles on either side of his nose. He stared at my blood-drenched remains on the bed.

“Jim…?” I heard him say in a breathless whisper.

I realized he could only assume it was me lying there.

“Who are you?” Sadler barked at him.

Another uniformed policeman was behind Oliver, holding his arm to drag him away. “I couldn’t stop him, Sir,” the annoyed policeman grumbled. “He pushed past me.”

“Leave it for a moment,” his superior ordered. The PC released his grip.

“What… what’s happened?” Oliver’s voice was hoarse now, strained, as if he could barely force the question.

One of the detectives moved towards him to block his view.

“It’s all right, Simmons,” said the chief. “Let’s hear what he’s got to say.” He addressed Oliver directly. “I’m Detective Superintendent Sadler from New Scotland Yard, and this is Detective Sergeant Simmons and Detective Constable Coates. Now will you please tell me your name?”

Oliver raised both hands to his face to block out the sight on the bed. Somehow he couldn’t quite cover his eyes, though, and he continued to stare over Simmons’s shoulder through slightly spread fingers at my blood-covered carcass.

“Okay, get him back into the other room,” Sadler ordered, striding towards my distraught friend.

The uniformed policeman took him by the arm again and Simmons gently guided Oliver backwards. Sadler disappeared next door with them and I followed.

My campaign layouts, scuffed and in disarray, lay on the thick-carpeted floor and Oliver was led through them towards an armchair; he was carefully helped to sit.

“Will you tell me your name, Sir?” repeated Sadler, his voice less harsh this time, but still authoritative.

“What?” was all Oliver could utter. He was staring back at the doorway to the bedroom, but his eyes were unfocused.

“Your name,” Sadler said again.

I settled in a corner by one of the long windows as if to be unobtrusive.

“Oliver Guinane,” my copywriter managed to say.

“And do you know who the dead person in the other room is?” he was asked.

No doubt the detective superintendent knew my name already. They would have been told who occupied the suite by the management and, as Oliver was sitting in front of him, it was a fairly safe bet to assume the corpse was James True. Nevertheless he watched Oliver closely.

“It’s Jim… James True. He… he was my partner.”

“Life partner or business partner?”

Ollie’s attention was finally distracted from the open doorway and he peered up at Sadler, incomprehension masking the shock for a moment.

“Did you work together or did you live together?” the senior policeman asked patiently.

“We worked together.” Ollie was too dazed to be offended. “He was my art director. We have our own advertising agency, gtp—Guinane, True, Presswell.” He looked at the faces around him as if expecting them to know of our company. Nobody said a word, but I did notice one of the detectives, the one called Coates, give Ollie an odd look.

“We hired the suite so we could spend the weekend working on a pitch for a new client without being interrupted. We do that now and again, you know, when it’s important.”

Now he was gabbling too much. Still in shock, I assumed.

Sadler cut through it. “How do you know it’s James True lying there. The face is unrecognizable.”

Oliver cringed; the image of the chopped heap next door had almost overwhelmed him once more.

“I…” He paused, gathering himself. “It has to be Jim. It’s his room. And the clothes…”

“They’re shredded and bloodstained.”

“The shoes. Jim always wears…” He shook his head. “I mean, always wore old Nikes when we brainstormed; they were comfortable, familiar. Jim said he’d had his best ideas wearing them and it was true. They’re old and worn, but they were a good-luck kind of thing to him.”

“Despite the mess the body’s in, you managed to notice the shoes?” It was Simmons who asked the question.

“Yes. Yes. They were the only part of him that wasn’t covered in blood.”

“When did you last see Mr True?” It seemed Sadler was satisfied with the identification.

“Uh…” Oliver blinked at the senior officer. “Uh, late last night. We…” He stopped mid-sentence as if suddenly aware of the implication.

“One of the hotel staff heard loud shouts coming from this room last night,” said the detective called Coates.

“Uh, yeah. Yes, that was us.” Ollie returned his attention to the superintendent. “We had a bit of an argument. Nothing serious,” he quickly added. “Just a normal disagreement about work. Happens all the time.”

“Does it really?” Sadler remarked drily.

“Yes, yes it does. It’s never serious.”

“Is that why you left the hotel? I’m informed that you were both guests here.”

“That’s right. If we hadn’t had a row I’d have just gone off to my own bedroom. Things would have been resolved more easily after a good night’s sleep. We were both incredibly tired, we’d been working non-stop since Friday.”

“You said your argument wasn’t serious, yet you stormed out of the hotel. You didn’t just go to bed.”

They all watched him silently.

“Look, if you’re implying…” Some of the old Oliver was finally breaking through. He was getting angry.

“I’m not implying anything, Mr Guinane. I’m merely trying to establish the facts. You left the hotel, so where did you go?”

There was just a beat before Oliver replied. “I went home, of course. I’d had enough, I was exhausted, stressed—I had to have a break.”

“Did your…” Sadler considered for a moment, “words with Mr True lead to violence?”

“Good God, no! Jim and I are friends. We’re friends. There was nothing serious in what we said to each other.”

“The porter collecting breakfast cards outside another door claims the argument he heard sounded violent.”

“He’s exaggerating. Jim and I would never come to blows. God, we’ve known one another for years.” He looked up appealingly at the tall policeman. “I would never hurt Jim.”

Sadler gave a slight nod of his head as if absorbing all he’d heard. He turned away from Oliver and went to the window where he nudged back one side of the lace curtains to study the street below. He was only a couple of feet away from me and I could tell there was a lot more deliberation going on beyond those cold blue eyes.

“Tell me precisely what the argument was about,” he said, still looking through the glass.

Ollie shook his head in frustration. “It’s complicated. Primarily it was about the creative work for a prospective client, but it went on from there.”

“Oh?” Sadler turned back to Oliver and I caught the other detectives glancing at each other.

“Another company, a big agency, wanted to merge with us.”

“Swallow us up, Ollie!” I wanted to shout.

“Jim was against it, I was for. But look, it wasn’t serious enough to kill him over. It would have been resolved, just as all our little spats are.”

“So you often argued, then,” said Simmons.

“God, no.” Oliver shook his head vehemently. “That is, yes, but it was never serious, it was always over small things.”

“Merging with another company?” said Simmons wife scorn in his voice. “Sounds serious enough to me.”

“That’ll do, Simmons,” Sadler said curtly. He looked as if he had other things on his mind now. “Mr Guinane, we could take your home address and phone number from the hotel register, but I’d appreciate it if you gave it to one of my officers before you leave.”

Oliver nodded anxiously, as though he were eager to please. You’d have thought he had something to feel guilty about.

“Also, before you go,” Sadler added, “can you tell me a little more about James True?”

“You’re certain it is him, then?” Oliver almost looked hopeful that there might be some mistake. “I mean, his face…”

“You assured us it was a few moments ago. Why would you think otherwise now?”

“I don’t.” Oliver lowered his head into his hands and his voice was muffled. “It was just… just…”

“I know it’s hard to accept, but we have no reason to believe the body belongs to anyone else but James True. His name was in the hotel register, along with yours. Despite the facial damage, his dental records will confirm his ID because the lower jaw is almost intact. I’d imagine some reconstruction work could be done on the upper jaw without too much trouble. What I’d like you to tell me is, what kind of man was he? You must have known him very well.”

Oliver lifted his head again and his hands flapped limply over his knees. “He was a good friend. He was just, you know, a regular guy. A bit self-contained, I suppose, he never really gave much of himself away. But he had a good sense of humour and, of course, he was very talented.”

“A very successful man, I would expect,” surmised Sadler while one of his officers made notes.

“Yes, very. Together we were a great team. Although I’m the copywriter and Jim is… Jim was the art director, we interchanged a lot. Generally we both came up with ideas, but sometimes he thought up good copy lines while I had layout ideas. Our track record speaks for itself.”

Oliver paused, as if it were difficult to continue. He stared blankly at the carpet.

“Was he married?” Sadler persisted.

My friend nodded.

“Did he have any children?”

At that, Oliver finally broke down and wept.

The chief superintendent stepped towards him and placed a hand on Ollie’s shoulder. “Please try and answer my questions, Mr Guinane. Then you’re free to go.”

“Jim had a daughter. Primrose. She’s only seven years old.” Now he really broke down. The two younger detectives seemed embarrassed by his sobs.

“Just one more thing, Mr Guinane. One more question for now, and then it’s over. Try to answer me.”

“Yeah… okay.” Ollie found a handkerchief in his trouser pocket and dabbed at his eyes with it “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice shaking. “What did you want to know?”

“Just one thing.” Sadler’s sombre tone had all the quality of an undertaker’s. “Was James True a handsome man?”

17

It was a lousy day for me, as you’d expect.

I spent the best part of it chained to the hotel room, not because I wasn’t free to go, but because I didn’t want to leave. I couldn’t face going away from my body, bloody and cleaved though it might be.

I slunk into different corners whenever someone came near, generally just keeping out of the way. Silly, I know, but it was hard to come to terms with the phantom I’d become: I still imagined people would bump into me. Besides, I didn’t like that feeling I had when someone brushed through me, which they did twice when I went from the lounge into the bedroom, and vice versa. I got a weird sensation of assorted thoughts and feelings when it happened, a jumble of emotions that were entirely alien to me. A certain amount of chemical electricity was involved, much milder but similar to touching the wire of an exposed light switch. No more than a brief but uncomfortable buzz.

At one point in the proceedings, the bedroom telephone together with the one in the lounge rang and it was DC Coates who picked it up. He listened, then turned to his superior, who was watching.

“Hotel switchboard, Sir,” Coates said quietly, as if in deference to my corpse. “Mrs True is on the line, wants to speak to her husband.”

“Tell them to say he can’t take the call right now,” advised Sadler. “I’ll be leaving here soon to go to True’s home address. I want to break the bad news to his wife myself.”

I jumped to my feet and kind of glided across the room to reach the phone, but Coates had already given instructions and was replacing the receiver when I reached it. I had no idea what I’d have done if I’d got there in time. Andrea would have been unable to hear me and what would I have told her anyway? “Hey, honey, I’m a ghost.” Non-existent heart twice as heavy, I slunk back into my corner.

More white-clad figures appeared, then left. More photos were taken, more video-filming done, including the lounge and Ollie’s bedroom. Blood splatters and even minute spots were measured in relation to my corpse. A Home Office pathologist arrived and, together with the superintendent, examined me more closely, their conversation kept to a low murmuring.

Finally, the pathologist, who was a woman, straightened and I heard her say, “The autopsy will tell us a whole lot more.”

Sadler said, “Make it priority,” and the pathologist organized my body’s removal. A polythene body bag was brought in and I was carefully loaded into it. I admit, I turned away at that point, and I groaned with self-pity when the bag’s zipper was pulled up over my head so that my defiled carcass was completely hidden from view. The ratchet sound seemed so final. I only heard myself being carried from the bedroom because I refused to watch.

The police chief (I’d heard him referred to as SIO, which presumably means Senior Investigating Officer) conferred with his two detectives, then gave further instructions to the forensic team. Fibres from the bedroom’s carpet and the blood-soaked quilt were to be taken and a close inch-by-inch search of not just this room, but the lounge area and second bedroom, was to be undertaken. Of course blood samples would be used to ensure they all matched (the sick bastard who had even chopped off my genitals might have bled too if there had been a struggle, although the best guess was that my heart was pierced while I lay zonked out on the bed), and naturally everything was to be dusted for fingerprints (of which there would be many—mine, the maid’s, workmen’s, previous guests’… the list would be extensive). Apparently satisfied, Sadler departed from the crime scene and I wondered if he would go straight to my home with the awful news.