Death Departed

Chapter One

I was seventeen when I died. It was a snowboarding accident, I know that much. The evidence of it is still there – a silver scar that runs like a seam down my left leg. I remember a fall. I remember blinding pain. After that, the scientists kicked in.

What else do I know? That I had a family before I died, just like everyone else. I went to school, hung out with friends and did things I wasn’t meant to do. I can speak French so I must have learnt that at some point. I was preparing for my final exams, planning a future that involved boyfriends and university, and then a normal career. For seventeen years, the world was my oyster.

I know I took longer in rehabilitation than most. It took so long to convince me that I wasn’t in hell that the doctors almost regretted bringing me back. But I couldn’t die, I wasn’t allowed to, they wouldn’t let me: I still had a purpose.

The rest of my family wasn’t so lucky, if lucky is the right way to put it. I can’t remember any of the details of my past life, even glimpsing the shadow of someone I knew, their faint imprint on my memory, is like catching hold of the tail of a rainbow on a foggy day. But the doctor let it slip once in rehabilitation, he told me there was no point looking for my parents because they had died up in the mountains too. I know I had a sister, he told me she looked very beautiful when they found her, stiff in the snow. He said I should be grateful for being saved. But I wasn’t saved, not really. I was still, in so very many ways, dead.

The train skids over the icy tracks and I dig my nails into the leather of my armrest. I hate transport now, any form of it. I don’t want to look at the snow-capped landscape, at the mountains glittering dangerously like slippery daggers. Instead I close my eyes again and let myself drift to the memories I do have, the new ones I am collecting for my new life of half-existence.

Xenia is blowing out her birthday candles and in my mind’s eye I watch myself as I smile and hug her. It is her twenty-fifth birthday but you wouldn’t know it, she looks about twelve, like a fairy child – in fact she was fifteen when she died but even then she looked too young for her age: she is a tiny sliver of a person. Once you die your looks never change, ‘frozen in time’ I think is an expression people like to use. I scoop Xenia up and sing happy birthday in her ear until she begs me to put her back down. She picks the candles delicately out the cake then realises how many there are and looks at all of us crossly, hands on her hips, lips pursed.

“Who put the candles on my cake?” she demands.

Everyone’s looking at me and I shrug nonchantly but I can feel a blush spreading up my cheeks, “I did.”

“It’s very sweet Lina” she says patiently, as if I am dim-witted, “but I’ve only turned seventeen.” She sounds as if she wants to say something else as well but she doesn’t. I blink in confusion then what she’s saying dawns on me. I’d forgotten - we must always think of five human years as one year for us now. So if it has been ten years since she died – she is turning seventeen not twenty-five. My head spins and my body shakes but I am getting quite used to the feeling now, it is an adjustment one I’m told many suffer from for a few years after they have been resurrected: it comes from a strong desire or yearning to be truly human again. 

Xenia’s flat is brimming with furniture – we all live off state handouts but people who were rich in their past life, are given monetary donations, or are entrepreneurial (like Xenia who owns a chain of cupcake boutiques) have more cash than the rest of us.  I fling myself into one of the candy floss pink reading chairs and watch the little queue forming next to me for a slice of Xenia’s birthday cake. Sugar is a rarity for those with no money of their own, the government wants us to be healthy and fit so that when we get our purpose we will be able to excel in any physically demanding exercises that are put to us. Our food is painstakingly measured out to check we have the correct nutrients but it is a waste of time because once we leave one of their safe houses it is harder for them to monitor what we are eating anyway. One of the men, Brutus, is sixty-five and purposefully spends most of his time in Norway where it is harder for them to keep tabs on him. He is very small and weedy, in complete contrast to his name. Apparently, his purpose is to invent crops with a growing period of one day – I don’t believe it is a purpose that he will ever fulfill.