As I die, I watch myself pacing around the house, trying to decide what to do. I need to go after Mum and stop her. But I’m too frightened to go outside.
I have to go. Even if I have a seizure, even if I have a panic attack.
I have to make her see sense.
I jam my phone into my back pocket and stare out of the window at the terrifying whiteness of the monochrome sky.
I don’t believe I’m going to leave until the door has closed behind me.
I’m terrified. The world yawns open around me and I’m sure I’m going to pass out right then and there on my doorstep.
I watch this memory of myself, the me who doesn’t know how badly wrong everything is going to go, and I feel proud. Because that version of me was doing something he really didn’t want to do. He was terrified, but he did it anyway. It surprises me because I thought I’d only found those parts of me in the Stillness, but it turns out I’d already found them in the ordinary world as well.
Good to know.
Except here I am: dead.
About to meet my Maker.
I feel It all around me now. I taste burnt pennies in my mouth and it occurs to me, in a kind of dream-like whirl, that my auras were nothing but the feeling of God’s breath bearing down on the back of my neck.
I’m not too keen on the idea of meeting God, if I’m honest. The timing sucks, because if I’m going to be judged, I have to admit I’ve killed more than my average number of people this week.
Maybe judged is the wrong word. I feel It now … not judging me, studying me.
For now I see through a glass, darkly.
Now I know in part; then shall I know even as I am known.
I understand, now, what this place is. The ordinary world is on the wrong side of the glass and what we think we know is only a tiny part of the story. Now I’m on the right side of the glass and I know a hell of a lot more, but It gets to see me more clearly in return.
A question plays in my mind:
What are you?
But I’m not sure if I’m asking It or if It is asking me. Maybe I’m asking myself.
What are you?
Come to think of it, I actually don’t care, I think.
The thing about being closer to the truth is that you get to see a lot of things more clearly than you did before.
Farah was right. I’m brave. I always was. Even if I have to go back to the version of me who wouldn’t leave his bedroom, even if I forget every memory I ever had of this world, even if I forget Farah. I know now that I have the capacity to become this person again. A person who defends his friends. A person who faced Jonah, who fought back.
This is me; this is who I am.
Most people come to the Stillness to die. But not people with epilepsy. We come here the way some people go on a day trip to the seaside. We die like everybody else, but not in the Stillness. Not like this.
Jonah knew that.
FORTY-ONE
You know it’s going to be a bad day when you wake and feel pavement against your face.
My first thought: Oh, no, not again.
Then, context: Hi, I’m Kyle. I’m seventeen. I have epilepsy. This happens to me a lot.
I’m lying face down, twisted like a fifty-storey splat, the pavement wet and cold and gritty beneath me—
Wait… Not pavement.
Carpet.
There’s something vaguely medical about the long Formica worktops, the equipment in moulded white plastic boxes. I think, for a second, I’ve passed out in the clinic again.
Then I become aware of voices. Angry, impatient, mocking.
Context rushes back. I sit up and it feels like my body is returning from a million miles and a thousand lifetimes away. My shirt is torn and drenched in blood, I remember now that it’s from where Jonah stabbed me in the chest.
Farah is on the sofa. She lies at a lopsided angle, her hand still clamped to her stomach. Jonah is standing over her, his legs astride hers. He’s trying to pull her hand away from her side and she’s struggling and moaning and trying to twist away from him. Chiu is crouched on the sofa nursing a bloodied nose. He must have gone for Jonah and Jonah knocked him away.
I stand.
I bend forward and pick up the golf club. Everything happens very slowly.
