5.7


"Dude. That's fucked up." Paul shook his head. "Did that really happen?"

"How would I know? I haven't even been along the Cannock Road in over a year. I can't even remember what it looks like, apart from all those flats."

"Someone being killed there isn't unusual. The Chronicle would probably print a story if there wasn't someone ending their life in the loneliest place in Wolverhampton."

"It felt real. It felt..." Roisin pursed her lips as she tried to grasp the fleeting memory. "You know that feeling you get when you become aware that you're just a ego controlling a huge flesh puppet? Like, you're looking at something and suddenly you become aware of the edges of your glasses, and then you see the hair framing your face, and you look down and you see your hands and marvel at how they're doing whatever they're doing without you directing each tiny movement?"

"Not really, no. Have you talked to anyone about this?"

"No. It doesn't happen very often, but I become aware of my whole body occasionally. I thought everyone did, then blocked it out again because finding out your mind is dislocated from your body generally freaks people out."

"I can honestly say that has never occurred to me. You might be the only one."

"No there's a name for it." She pressed the thumb and middle fingers of her right hand to her temples. "I read it somewhere. It’s..." she screwed her face up, trying to recall the memory. "Something to do with Buddhism, becoming aware of a higher state of mind. I can't play first-person video games because of it. I become detached from my own body and become the character I'm playing."

Paul turned his nose up. "What? Like in Tron? That was a terrible film, and that's not even mentioning the two that followed it." He pronounced 'film' as 'fillum," and it reminded her of her mum's accent, although she wasn't Irish but northern.

"No. I've seen that. There the characters know they're in a video game. With me, the video game becomes the reality and if I'm not careful I can forget anything outside of it exists. If the car hadn't hit me I might have stayed in her head for hours."

His frown was threatening to become his only expression, the sort where her dad would have warned against the wind changing. Before it blew him over the rainbow, anyway, or at least over the county line. "No offence intended, but that sounds like a serious mental problem. Has anyone ever commented on it before?"

She shook her head, returning to gaze at the ever-moving block of stone, which was still cycling through the past-present-future her, except now it also held the very disturbing skeletal her. "I've never really discussed it before. I mentioned it to a friend once and she told her mam, who told my mam, and then I wasn't allowed to play with her anymore because I wasn't normal." She gave a rueful smile. "That's what she said, anyway. I couldn't understand why everyone didn't experience the same disassociation."

"I don't think it's just Buddhism. I think it's a religious thing altogether. I've heard priests describe something like that; except they call it 'conversing with God.' It's why people can do amazing things in the name of religion."

"What sort of amazing things? Miracle healing?"

"I was thinking more of strapping on a bomb vest and blowing up a church full of protestants."

She laughed, although she knew it wasn't meant to be funny. "Sorry. It is a kind of out-of-the-body experience although I never really thought of it as your soul leaving the body. It kind of makes sense, though. It would explain why people think they've seen something beyond when they've survived being dead for a minute or two."

"You mean I have to stop believing in Heaven now?"
"God, no. I'm just trying to describe what I'm feeling. Any resemblance to other people, whether living or otherwise, is entirely coincidental and not intended at all. Your Milage May Vary. Errors and Omissions Excepted."

Paul yawned. "Are we done here? I still have to get up early and it's after two already."

"I suppose." She would have stood fluidly, except her leg had gone to sleep and now she had pins and needles in it. She hobbled and hopped, trying to get the feeling back, but stopped at his doorway. "Have you really done no work since I arrived?"

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