Minus Me by Ingelin Rossland Read Free Book Online Page B

shuts her eyes. Her heart is juddering like an old engine.

Chapter 13
    Linda shoots through the water like an otter. She tries to come to the surface, but there’s a hand clutching at her foot. Linda backs away, trying to get loose. Then she sees Axel’s face in front of her. His lips are moving. Although she can’t hear him, his words reach her: I’ve missed you.
    ‘Hi!’
    It is Zak’s voice. Linda opens her eyes and looks up at him. There are snowflakes floating down from the sky, gently hitting her face and melting, but otherwise she’s completely dry and still in one piece. They haven’t landed in the water after all. Zak has snow in his hair, and he is caressing her cheek.
    ‘Am I dead?’
    ‘What do you think?’ he answers.
    He plonks himself down so hard that the wooden surface beneath them rocks. They’ve landed on a floating jetty below the quay. Did Zak know it was here? Had he planned this? Linda feels her body all over. It doesn’t hurt anywhere. Zak gets up and stretches out a hand to help her up. She pretends not to have noticed and scrambles up on all fours.
    ‘Where did the moped go?’ she asks.
    Zak smiles, and tosses his head back towards the water.
    ‘My God, you’re crazy. I was sure that was the end,’ says Linda, creeping to the edge of the jetty, and looking down into the sea. She breathes in the faint smell of salt and seaweed, but can see nothing other than her own reflection in the still water.
    ‘It was only a moped,’ says Zak.
    He stands behind her on the jetty, legs wide apart and hands on hips.
    ‘You scare me,’ says Linda, sitting back down on the jetty.
    ‘Good.’
    ‘Good?’
    ‘Yes. That means you’ll forget to be afraid of all the other stuff.’
    ‘You mean, that I’m going to die.’
    ‘Well, strictly speaking you’ve already been through that.’
    ‘What do you mean?’ asks Linda, tucking her knees up under her chin.
    ‘In the swimming hall, of course.’
    ‘I don’t really remember much. But I suppose that might be true,’ she says hesitantly, before falling silent and resting her chin on her knees. Even though it’s snowing, she isn’t shivering. ‘But it was as though I saw everything from a bird’s-eye view. And I saw you too. I saw you running towards me, and I saw you smash your fist into my chest. It was that punch in my chest that saved my life,’ says Linda, looking up at him.
    ‘You just left your body,’ Zak says matter-of-factly, as though that was a daily occurrence.
    ‘Was that why you looked up at me? You were the only person who looked up. Everybody else was busy looking down at my body,’ says Linda, aware of her growing curiosity about Zak.
    ‘That’s right. But how did it feel to leave your body?’ he asks enthusiastically.
    ‘It was . . . peaceful. As though everything down there, all the drama, was meaningless and unimportant.’
    ‘Were you frightened?’
    ‘No, not then. Or yes, when I realized I was about to die, I was frightened I might not come down to my body again,’ says Linda, looking down at her hands. She looks at her nails that are bitten right down. Maria is always telling her off about it, but she puts her right index finger in her mouth and chews her nail a bit more, before continuing: ‘And later, in the ambulance, when we were on the way to the hospital, I was terrified.’
    Linda can see the whole scene before her. And she feels the same chill go through her body as she felt when she saw her parents: sitting close together in the ambulance, their faces so thin, their mouths like pale, narrow streaks, her mother’s hand clutching at the edge of the blanket that lay over her, the nervous flashing light and the screech of the siren. Yes, that was when she’d been seriously scared.
    ‘I got frightened when I saw Mum and Dad,’ she says.
    ‘You caught their fear?’
    ‘Yes. And perhaps it sounds stupid, but it was as though there was a wall between us. And that wall seemed to grow even