Free Ways to Live Forever by Sally Nicholls Page B

nodded. “Right,” she said. The lady smiled and set off back down the corridor. “Thank you!” Granny called after her. She turned and waved her hand.
    Me and Granny looked at each other.
    “Still time for an honourable retreat,” she said.
    I shook my head.
    “Sure?”
    I nodded. She squeezed my shoulder.
    “Good man,” she said and opened the door.
     
    The room was small and very plain. There were white walls, another picture of pink flowers and a sort of bed with Felix on it. Granny went over to the bed, quietly. I hung back. She didn’t say anything, to me or him. She just stood there, looking. I edged closer, slowly, until I stood right beside her. Then I looked too.
    Felix was lying on his back. He was dressed in his old Green Day T-shirt, all streaky from too much washing, and his black French resistance beret. He looked exactly like Felix, just exactly as if he were sleeping, except he was too stiff and still to be asleep. He looked cleaner and neater than he ever did in real life. His eyes were closed.
    I reached out and touched his shoulder, on the T-shirt. Then I touched him properly, on the jaw, on the skin.
    He was very cold. Not cold like fingers in the snow are cold, still warm under the skin. Stone cold, like statues of old knights in cathedrals. With no warmth left in them at all.
    I realized I’d been hoping, somehow, that they’d made some sort of mistake. They might have done. But now as I stood there, I knew there hadn’t been any mistake. He was so still and quiet. He looked exactly like Felix, but there wasn’t any person left in him at all. Wherever he was now, it wasn’t here.
    I’d thought he’d be frightening. He wasn’t. He was just quiet and empty.
     
    I fell asleep again on the way back, curled up on Granny’s front seat with my feet on a bag of tulip bulbs. I was so, so tired. I slept all the way home. When I woke, it was evening. I was in my own bed, Granny had gone and it was raining.

 
     
THE STORY OF THE MAN WHO
WEIGHED THE HUMAN SOUL
 
     
     
     
     
    This is a story I read in a book. It’s true. In 1907, a surgeon called Dr Duncan MacDougall decided to find out how much a human soul weighed. So he made a special bed on a set of scales. He put one of his patients on the bed and weighed him while he was dying. He said that the man got lighter very, very slowly, because of the sweat that was evaporating. But at last he died and CLUNK! the scales dropped. Dr MacDougall said that the moment the man died, he lost three-fourths of an ounce, or twenty-one grams.
    When I heard this story I got out our kitchen scales to try and find out how much twenty-one grams really is. I was a bit disappointed. According to Dr MacDougall, the human soul weighs as much as four and a half pencils. Or three greetings cards. 8 Or a wooden letter opener, a sheet of stickers and a used-up glitter pen.
    Which isn’t very much.
    Anyway. Dr MacDougall tried his experiment on three other patients. Once, the patient lost less weight than the first patient, and twice they lost some weight first and more weight later. Then Dr MacDougall tried the same thing with fifteen dogs and none of them got lighter at all. He said that this proved he was measuring the soul, because he didn’t think dogs have souls. But there were lots of problems with his experiment. Often it’s hard to tell exactly when someone has died. And six patients weren’t enough to test it properly. And his scales weren’t very accurate. And there could’ve been loads of reasons for what happened that he didn’t know about.
    But nobody since has been able to explain why they got lighter. It wasn’t from water evaporating. And it wasn’t because air had left their lungs, because Dr MacDougall tried breathing air in and out of the first man’s mouth and it didn’t change his weight. Sometimes they wet themselves, but that didn’t matter because the wee stayed on the bed and was still being weighed.
    Nobody has ever repeated