I’ve written the last couple of paragraphs of my story. Read them here: Andrew's Story. Final paragraphs.
I don’t know exactly where to place them in the text, but that’s my next job. And then I’m finished, more or less.
Looking at the final bit I’ve reworked it to replace the twins idea, which was just a bit too peculiar for its own good I think. Apart from that it’s substantially the same.
Andrew bobs up and down against cracked ceiling tiles, like a stray party balloon. He looks down on himself. The doctors have finished their dance and gone away, and his body looks like an old anorak discarded in a ditch. No returning to tell his out of body experience on breakfast television. He’s mildly irritated by the clichéd nature of the experience.
Then he’s in a dark tunnel and there’s a white light. Of course there is. Are you supposed to head into the light? Or avoid it? He can’t remember. And anyway isn’t it just a hallucination in a dying brain, like the picture on an old fashioned TV, shrinking to a white dot? It doesn’t seem to matter either way. He feels the suck and draw of the light pulling at him. “Sod it”, he thinks and flies away in a completely different direction, laughing to himself.
If you can’t break the rules when you’re dead, when can you?
He walks in the park with Viv. He likes the feeling of her brown hand, warm and dry, in his pale one. It’s the same park where he used to bring Megan. Now Megan is a grown woman, working in New Zealand. They Skype at the weekends.
The path leads to a maze inlaid in the ground with coloured brick. He remembers his daughter trotting round the maze to the centre and then out again. Andrew waiting for her, impatient to get home. “Why can’t you just walk straight across?” he asked her.
“It’s the rule!” Megan said.
The hardest rules to break are the ones we create for ourselves.
He strolls across the maze, hand in hand with Viv. They stroll to the Carillon in its tower as the bells start to ring out.