She straightened up as he turned the car around. Pulling off, he glanced at her in the rear-view mirror. She stood curiously still, watching him as he drove away.

Chapter 16

Chapter 16

Priest awoke the following morning to the sound of pan pipes drifting in from the open bedroom window. He lay sprawled across the bed, partially clothed, and tried to open his eyes but they didn’t respond.

He remembered coming back home yesterday with his head spinning and a disturbing sensation of numbness in his fingers and toes. He had spent most of the evening in the lounge trying to make sense of it all until he felt the icy impression of his body detaching itself from its grip on reality. He perceived himself walk out of the room and collapse on the bed in what an onlooker might have assumed was a drunken stupor, if they did not know any better. There he had lain, face down on the covers, conjuring up images of Elinor Fox’s cleavage and the top of her pink bra until the picture was disturbed by a very angry-looking Jessica.

Now, in the emptiness between sleep and full consciousness, Priest struggled to regain traction.

The pan pipes emanated from a street performer outside the Royal Opera House, from where he was regularly regaled with music of varying quality and origin if the window was open. Priest liked the pan pipes the best; for reasons that he did not understand, they reminded him of his mother.

One of the many ghosts who inhabit my head.

The feeling of emptiness was familiar and depressing, but Priest reminded himself that he was lucky. He could still function, most of the time, and the feeling came and went. Some sufferers of depersonalisation disorder are left devastated, the breakdown in their perception of reality leaving them in a permanent state of disillusionment; they watch, helpless, as their bodies move around in front of them, like a horror film in which they are the star. Some even question whether they are in fact alive. Priest knew that sensation, but the worst of it was behind him – for now – although he still experienced both depersonalisation – the sense that the individual is not real – and derealisation – the perception that the world isn’t real – temporarily, and although unpredictable and terrifying, the hallucinations and out-of-body experiences never lasted for more than a few hours a day at most.

Like many DPD sufferers, Priest hated his condition. He had wasted months, years, obsessively ruminating – why could he think but not feel? What had happened? What if things had been different? What could he have achieved? Why him? Priest didn’t believe in souls, but it was the closest he had come to admitting that the body and the mind were two separate entities, and that the former could not function if the latter took leave.

And if his mind had departed from his body, where the hell had it gone?