Chapter 6 Damon
Damon
The train journey from Brighton back home to Northampton was a blur of images, past and present.
Melissa kept trying to engage me in conversation, but my replies were perfunctory.
I was still too overwhelmed from watching my life flash before me.
Such a cliché, but I’d never imagined what it might be like in practice.
At least for me, it meant thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands, of images escaping from my subconscious, encompassing all eras of my twenty-eight years.
And in the fortnight that’s followed, I’ve been dipping in and out of those memories, dwelling on some and reliving others.
But always trying to make sense of one in particular.
The boy I think I might’ve killed.
A red-headed lad, his crumpled body on a pathway separated from a road by trees and bushes.
I am standing over him as he lies there, watching him bleeding from his mouth and left ear.
Suddenly his eyes open, he reaches out his hand and I stretch out mine.
But that’s where my recollection ends. If it is a recollection.
Melissa said he was the first thing I spoke of on the beach as we awaited the ambulance. Then I kept repeating it on the way to hospital, where I spent two nights under observation before being discharged.
‘You were imagining him,’ she told me during visiting hours. ‘You haven’t killed anyone.’
‘The way I saw him . . . it was like my other memories, absolutely crystal-clear.’
‘You wouldn’t have forgotten killing someone.’
‘But you know some of my memories as a kid are patchy. So it could only have happened then.’
She shook her head. ‘Come on, Damon. That’s not something you’re likely to forget.’
I was, and still am, inclined to believe her because Melissa is almost always right.
I pull myself together – for now, at least – paint on a smile, and return to the others inside the pub.
‘Drink up boys and girls,’ says Tommy, and cups his hand around his ear. ‘Time for the next pub. The Old House at Home is a-calling.’
As the others lead, Melissa hangs back to wait for me and we exit together, arm in arm. Only two people on earth make me feel safe, and she is one of them.
‘You okay?’ she asks.
‘Once this ear infection goes, I’ll start feeling more like myself.’
‘And aside from the infection?’
‘Getting there,’ I lie.
‘Good,’ she replies, seemingly placated.
A young woman in a thick, stained coat sits on top of a sleeping bag with an unlit cigarette butt balanced between her fingers. Inside my wallet I find a ten-pound note and give it to her.
‘Have you ever walked past a homeless person and not given them money?’ asks Melissa.
‘I could have so easily been like her.’
I know how quickly I could’ve slipped between the cracks.
Half of children who end up in care have criminal convictions by early adulthood.
A further ten per cent become homeless. If it weren’t for Helena .
. . my thoughts tail off when a figure suddenly catches my attention across the road.
He’s sitting midway inside a single-decker bus.
A young lad with red hair, his head turned towards me, his face expressionless.
Slowly he raises his hand and points a finger at me.
For a split second, my breath leaves my body, as he looks so much like the boy I saw when I died.
Then a van overtakes the bus and obscures my view, and like in a movie, he vanishes.
‘Damon!’ Melissa yells and yanks me sharply towards her. A car horn blares and I realise I’ve stepped on to the road. ‘Are you trying to get yourself killed again?’ she says with a gravity behind her smile.
‘Sorry,’ I reply, trying to mask the unease in my tone. I don’t want her to pick up on how rattled I am and add to her worries about me. ‘You know how much I enjoy a sequel.’