Four Twenty One

Kelvin Beer-Jones 10 Buccleuch Close Dunchurch Warwickshire CV22 6QB Tel. 01788 812105 E: kelvinbeerjones@gmail.com Adult fiction 18000 words

FOUR TWENTY ONE

A Story By Kelvin Beer-Jones

For my mentor and good friend Ian Encouraged by Annalien.

(copyright Sebastiao Salgado) "When you move into the level of dream consciousness, all the laws of logic change.

There, although you think you are seeing something that is not you, it is actually you that you are seeing, because the dream is simply a manifestation of your own will and energy – you created the dream and yet you are surprised by it. So the duality there is illusory. There, subject and object, though apparently separate, are the same.

"The realms of the Gods and Demons – heaven, purgatory, hell – are of the substance of dream. Myth, in this view, is the dream of the world. If we accept gods as objective realities, then they are the counterpart of your dream – this is a very important point – dream and myth are of the same logic … and since the subject and the object seem to be separate but are not separate in the dream, so the god that seems to be outside you in myth (or religion, if you prefer) is not different from you. You and your god are one … All the heavens and gods are within you and are identical with aspects of your own consciousness on the dream level."

Joseph Campbell, Myths of Light, p.70

Brief Encounter

There would be winter evenings that I would spend with Kaz. We’d grab chocolate, curl up together on the sofa and just while away the hours, talking about nothing in particular. But sometimes these intimate conversations would so relax Kaz that he would feel happy enough to let his mind go back, and when he did he would always share with me, describing what he saw and also what he felt there, deep in his mind, at the back of things. I would always be so in the right mood with him for me to listen and accept what he had to say. It was always like that, we were just so at ease with each other. It would take very little for us both to drift into a dream time together if we were all alone with the lights down low.

If there ever was a trigger for these inner journeys I would say that it mostly happened when Kaz was responding to the mood created by a viewing of one of his collection of classic films. This is how it would happen. First he would call me a day or so before, ‘Isobelle, time for a cuddle.’ I would just laugh and say, ‘sure, Saturday?’

And I can remember one particular Saturday night more than any other.

He’d selected the film, it was to be Brief Encounter. He always selected, he never asked me what I might like to watch. This way he set out my role for the evening. I was to be his confessor but he never asked me to go on to shrive him. I was just there to

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listen. And I loved to do that, just listen to this man figuring out aloud all of the stuff of his life, turning it in his mind right in front of me, finding his own explanations for and accommodations with, his life experiences and thoughts. I could think of nothing more enjoyable or rewarding than to curl up with him and just let him talk in this reflective and unguarded way.

Any of the classic films in his collection might do the trick of sending him back in on himself. Kaz was a real enthusiast for cinematography. He delighted in how a film was crafted and put together. Very often the film would be weak on story line but that didn’t bother Kaz. As long as the camera work, editing, sound and styling was thoughtful and interesting he would love the film. All of David Lean got his passions aroused. I knew that we were in for a good evening together when Brief Encounter slipped into the CD player.

I think it was the first time in the film that a steam train burst into view that set us both off thinking about our earliest memories. Both of us could recollect our first steam train and we shared when and where and why this encounter had happened. Then we paused to eat more chocolate and watch a bit more of the film. Suddenly Kaz spoke, ‘It’s amazing how far back your memory will go if you receive a trigger like a steam train isn’t it. My mind has somehow wandered back to when I was three years old lying frightened in bed at night.’

‘Really, I said. Tell me about it.’

‘Well, I’m only three and maybe only just three. My bed is against a wall which is to my right, above my head is the bedroom window and at my feet and to the right is the bedroom door. Through that and immediately left is my parents’ bedroom. The walls are plain, magnolia I expect. Thinking about it, we would not long have moved into this

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brand new council house, my arrival probably being the reason why the house had been allocated to us.

I have just had that nightmare again, the same one I had over and over for many nights. It was so frightening that I was too frightened to go to bed or even to be left alone in the bedroom. And when I was put to bed unfortunately I would be quite unable to stay awake and so avoid a return to the dream.

In this dream I am wandering nervously and unsurely along a familiar city street. I know that this street is connected to many others just like it, and also that all of these dark city streets are deserted. It is night and eerily still. I seem to be compelled to walk down the street. It is as if I can’t just stand and wait until I wake up, something is forcing me to act by moving along the street. And so I edge my way. When I get to the end of the street what I find there are even more streets, all of which are in themselves pretty familiar but somehow they are in the wrong place. If I turn left I will then be in another part of town entirely, if right I will be back at the top of the street I have just left. This frightens me, I can’t find my way. But I’m not sure that I am actually trying to find a way out, maybe I am struggling to get to somewhere? I just don’t know. In the dream I simply know that am definitely not trying to get home or even to get away from something or someone. I have no idea why or where I am going. I just go.’

I could tell by Kaz’s voice which was falling softer as each phrase came along, and as well because he was now not at all focussed on viewing the film, that his entire being seemed to have slipped back to early childhood. I gently moved my fingers through his hair, just enough to let him know that I was there and listening. I had hoped not to break his reflective mood but I suppose I must have because he now looked into my eyes and frowning, mildly puzzled he said to me, ‘What I don’t understand is that I am three, three at the most. I had by then never been to the town near where we

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lived, never travelled out of my few nearby streets, I had no notion of a city at all. And yet here I was, a council estate kid, and in my dream I am somewhere I had never been, a major city very like London. We had no television so how could that be? How could I dream with such veracity of a place I had no experience of?’

Kaz grabbed some more chocolate and tried to get back into the film but his mind quickly slipped back again and he was soon reliving the dream from the point where my mild interference had disturbed him. He said ‘There was a big, big problem at the heart of this dream because no matter which way I turned, at each street ending left or right, and no matter how quietly I moved along, eventually I would find that I had entered the big square which lie at the heart of this city. It was vast, open, abandoned, dark, and silent. Only bits of rubbish were blowing about across the paved courtyard in the breeze. In the middle if the square stood a large Corinthian column hundreds of feet high. There was nothing else in this square just this one immense stone column.

Sat in judgement of me, and only me, and right at the very top of this column was a fully grown male lion. Other than to turn its head so as to face me it showed no other signs of movement, just a calm stillness. It fixed me with its deliberate, indifferent and somehow expectant stare and I would scream myself awake.’

‘Gosh’, I said, ‘poor Kaz.’ ‘Night after night it would be this way, the dream, the labyrinth, the lion. Each night I would creep along different streets as if their differentness offered me the hope that maybe this time things might then turn out differently, but they never did. No matter which route I took my destination always turned out to be the abandoned square with its column higher than any of the nearby buildings. And always the lion. It must have gone on for maybe a couple of weeks or so at least because this is my oldest, deepest

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memory. Even now I can’t watch lions, even on television. There’s this irrational fear.

Funny.’

But I knew that it wasn’t really funny. Looking at him lying with his head in my lap I mused, what if I had been there when Kaz was three? What if I had been his mother?

What would I have done to sooth what must have been a delicate and thoughtful child in distress? I didn’t know and I didn’t want to ask him how his own mother had reacted, I guessed that this might take his reflection off in another direction entirely and I could see by the puzzled look and the distance in his eyes that Kaz was not yet ready to let go of this big, big thought. It seemed such a long time ago, over fifty years.

It’s wonderful how a man grows, like a tree with its rings. Now after all of these years older and weather-beaten, having had to twist and bend to accept fates blessings and curses and through the years grown fatter, sometimes fleshly too but with the girth that comes with wisdom nevertheless. But always, always deep down in the seemingly inaccessible centre of all of these rings of life’s becoming there lies still the frightened little boy in his bed and the light going on as his mother rushes in to comfort him.

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Cerberus ‘Hello, how are you?’ Kaz wrote it out first and only then started to think about it.

‘Hello, how are you?’ He wasn’t sure about the comma and the question mark, should he leave them out?

‘Hello how are you’ Keep the capitalisation of the first word?

He was getting fed up with this already. Why was everything he tried to do just so difficult? He couldn’t fathom it all out. It seemed to him as if the things that really mattered were never comfortably out-there where he could just ignore them, instead the things that should have been out there had somehow pushed their way inside, where he could not ignore them.

‘Hello, how are you?’ The punctuation was now back as it started. He left it there, after all it really didn’t matter. It was how he would say the words later in the clinic that was going to be so difficult, not how he wrote them down here at home. So why pick these words, why not go for something easier to say? This was getting even more bizarre and Kaz could feel within himself a growing annoyance that added to the first tinges of embarrassment that he was already starting to feel. He couldn’t pick some other words, he knew that.

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‘We have been over this’, he told himself in exasperation. There were no easy words, none that weren’t loaded and difficult to say and then in the saying, to be dreaded. ‘These will have to do’, he told himself once again.

At least these words were short and over quite quickly when said, and once he had said them he could then try to disown them. Push them away from him, hopefully to somewhere out there, into the confusion that everyone else called ‘the real world’. And hopefully he would then be able to leave them there forever and walk away. But there was still this annoying doubt in his mind that Doctor Death would not let him walk away, that he would cajole Kaz and obligate him into a meaningless and artificial conversation that Kaz guessed would begin like this, ‘Now, Kaz, what do you mean by that, when you say, hello, how are you?’

Kaz had chosen this phrase because he understood Doctor Death very well. He’d known him for quite a while now and of course Kaz liked him too. He did want to please him, he was just annoyed that they had to play these silly artificial games almost every time they met up.

Kaz attended Hope Street Clinic the second Monday of every month, unless that day happened to fall on a Christmas day, or some other holiday. These holidays happened quite often and their indeterminacy added to the excitement and the anxiety about the frequency of these visits to the clinic. Would there be a visit this month? If not then, when they met up again at some later Monday, would they just take up where they left off, as if the intervening lost appointment and the whole month that it resided in had just not happened? Or would they forget the past and start anew? Sometimes Kaz sensed that they were starting anew because Doctor Death had found out something and as a result he had decided that it might be better to do that, to start anew. To start anew. Anew, there was another difficult word. Kaz would try hard not

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to simply collect large bin bags full of impossible words as the day, this day, every day, just…. was. Kaz was intensely annoyed at the was-ness of every repeating day.

Kaz stopped himself thinking and let go a sigh so big that it quite surprised him.

This sigh had so broken his reverie that he now momentarily screwed up his eyes and said, ‘Hah!’ really loudly, and rousing himself from the armchair he forayed towards the kitchen to make a cup of tea. Maybe. It wasn’t that far from the desk to the kitchen in this drab flat but Kaz was surprised how often the demands of this tiny journey from desk to kitchen took their toll, and he just forgot to do what he had set out to do, this time make tea. Or breakfast, or wash the dishes, or discover by exploring the inner parts of the fridge what food he should buy today.

Kaz was reflecting again. Life it seemed was made up of trillions of meaningless decisions and Kaz’s heart just wasn’t in it. These trillions of routine decisions took up a lot of time and concentration, too much so. They left him no time to think, or relax or better still to escape. So a lot of the time Kaz didn’t bother with these decisions. They just sort of came, were an annoyance for a while and then they went. Tomorrow they would be back again, the same or similar. There was little incentive to pay attention to these annoyances but there was no getting rid of them either.

It annoyed Kaz intensely that his daily performance was judged by others as either good or bad depending on their independent observations about whether, if and when, he performed life’s utterly boring and meaningless tasks. No-one it seemed knew or cared about him, Kaz, a fifty – five year old man who had just somehow lost it and couldn’t be bothered to go and get it back. It was like the clock on the wall.

‘Put new batteries in the clock Kaz, and you’ll be able to tell the time any time you want to.’ Klaudia, his carer said this almost every time she popped in for a little visit.

He hadn’t renewed the batteries in the clock and for over a year now Kaz had stayed

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happily at 4:21. He had once been worried whether it was time for tea or if instead he had got up too early in the morning? But he had long since put this uncertainty behind him. It was 4:21, both too early to get up and tea time. This pleased him. He thought, ‘Maybe this is a paradox. Or is it? Wasn’t a paradox two conflicting ideas held in one mind at the same time and not two conflicting times held in one mind at the same time?’

A little corrective voice inside him, he who was always right but was too timid to assert his convictions, said quietly, ‘It is a juxtaposition Kaz, not a paradox.’

Kaz was now in the kitchen but he couldn’t think why. ‘Dammit, why do I always forget what I’m doing?’ Annoyed with himself he made himself a solitary cup of tea as a consolation. Then he remembered, ‘Hello, how are you?’ He began to worry. He though he ought to prepare for the inevitable questioning from Doctor Death that would immediately follow on from Kaz saying these words. For example he might ask, ‘Now tell me Kaz, why you picked this phrase?’

A month ago when they last met, that Monday not having fallen on an auspicious day, the friendly and persuasively sly Doctor Reed had trapped Kaz into making a commitment. A promise. An obligation. A dread. A panic sure to be. Kaz had agreed that at their next visit he would tell the doctor some words that he might use as a greeting to a complete stranger. After many sleepless nights and several bouts of solitary sulking Kaz had decided to give in and to comply with the doctors request, and he had chosen, ‘Hello, how are you?’ to be his offered greeting.

The doctor would be pleased, he thought. He would give one of those tell-tale and almost imperceptible wriggles in his chair as his chest rose and fell and his eyes dilated slightly. The third finger of his right hand would tap just once and lightly, on his knee.

Kaz knew these signs much better than the said doctor himself. Kaz knew that this

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meant they were in that moment no longer playing ping pong with words, words going backwards and forwards between them until one of them, always Kaz, stumbled and came to a halt. No, right then, while they sat facing each other they would be communicating. No words mattered really, no finesse in verbal exchange actually said anything. Body to body, face to face, sweat to smile only then would they be communicating.

These days Kaz never listened to words or ever answered them because Kaz though that everyone else was focussed on a life filled with completely meaningless activities. They were obsessed with counting success at these activities in numerical quantities, ‘One, two, many, all of my objectives slash tasks achieved now, today, in my life’. That these activities added up to nothing, that life was a zero sum game had not occurred to them out there at all. They were just slaves to the cult of me. My external desires, my needs, my appetites, opinions and values and so on. All of this nonsense was the Summa Vita of the unfriendly world Kaz found himself trapped in and abandoned to.

Sometimes, when he was waiting at the bus stop for the number 32 to come along, a scruffy unfriended dog would come and sit beside him. Neither of them ever acknowledged the other. One stood and the other sat and there they were, sort of together. Sometimes the number 32 was late and then they were sort of together for quite a long time. Until the number 32 eventually did come around the corner. Then the dog always moved off. Until the next first Monday in the month. Kaz knew that the dog sometimes would not come to the bus stop on a particular Monday because it sensed that this Monday was an unMonday due to its falling on an auspicious day.

Kaz would be embarrassed and blush if a fellow queue member joked, ‘Hello Kaz, you taking the dog to town then?’

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On the other hand Kaz and the dog were co-nonconspiritors, both observing in a detached way the tawdriness of life. There was a bond between them and that bond held.

‘Hello, how are you?’ You would be wrong to think that Kaz had made a lazy choice and gone for the obvious answer, that he had taken the easy route out. He wanted to do that but he couldn’t find one. ‘Hello, how are you?’ was the option of last resort. In desperation it had come to him simply as a means of offering a way out of the dilemma of having to say something when Doctor Death asked him if he had thought about the question that they had both agreed to consider at their meeting this afternoon. Kaz had settled reluctantly on this one answer that he had selected from the many, many possible answers that had tormented and worried and frightened him in the intervening four weeks. This was to be the question. He would say it once and then immediately retreat, get it over and done with and then flee back inside himself.

He didn’t care that inside himself right now was just a blackness, night and deepocean. Without form, no horizon, no moon and no sunrise or sunset. On the other hand he was happy to retreat into what he cherished both as his primal womb and his eternal tomb. For him the boundless sea that was rising and falling in his head in its rhythmic tidal slumber was what produced for Kaz, all unremembered beginnings and it also accepted all unhoped for endings.

These words of greeting that he had conned also made a very clever response to the doctor’s challenge and the best answer, Kaz thought, and the right answer too. It was hopefully the one answer that didn’t answer the question but merely deflected it and dismissed it as irrelevant.

But now Kaz was worried and he looked up at the clock. It was 4:21 and there was little time now for him to change his mind, to select another phrase and get used to it

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before he had to leave for his appointment. He was worried that perhaps, ‘Hello, how are you?’ was just too damned clever an answer. This thought began to embarrass Kaz and he started to feel upset. He hated being thought of as clever. It was like scheming, or plotting, or making a show. And what for? To draw attention to oneself?

To be seen as clever? And what if Doctor Death spotted Kaz’s vanity? Would he be annoyed or amused, or even possibly both?

Kaz knew a lot about words, what deceitful, tricking and manipulative things they were, and these words ‘Hello, how are you?’ were right there at the beginning of the seemingly innocent but incisive abuse of, - well Kaz. ‘These are the words that begin the attack’, he thought, ‘the first flicker of the blade and the first trickle of blood down your cheek. Unfelt, painless but wet, warm and sticky to the touch, pungent when you put your bloody finger to your mouth to lick. Wounded and already scarred, vulnerable and unable to defend oneself. Thus it will have begun. Hello, how are you?’

He stopped himself from thinking. Doctor Death had warned him before not to take life this seriously and not to look too closely, not to peer too long into the deep. Yet when Kaz first heard Doctor Death tell him this Kaz did not believe what he was saying.

The doctor when he first appeared to Kaz seemed to be very much alive and exuding whiffs of testosterone and therefore he was inescapably sexual in his every move and gesture. So when the doctor said, ‘Don’t look too deeply’, Kaz felt that he knew what the doctor really wanted to say and so while Doctor Death droned on about treatment arrangements what Kaz heard in his head was, ‘Float, float on the surface foam as it caresses and gives itself up to dissipation.

Slide your fingers into the wet sands of life as they rapture and yield to the tender embrace of the sighing sea. Go with the flow, in and out. Look up to the dripping

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sunshine and follow the drift of the mopping clouds. From the pregnant distant hills on down to the yielding beach, run to where the warm golden flesh scoops up the surface foam and breathes it in, seducing the tide in the nothingness between the dark sea and the moist land’.

This is why Kaz liked the doctor, because Kaz thought that he knew the real doctor beneath all of the pretence, and Kaz thought him a wicked old dog. Kaz was just a bit annoyed that for him the dark sea fully filled his mind except for one tiny island far off into the middle that hid on it a dark cave, and in this cave Kaz had made his home. In Kaz’ dark cave he had now forgotten where the light switch was it had been so long since Kaz even wanted illumination, and as regards the cold embrace of the ocean well, there wasn’t any boat to take him across to the other side anyhow. Kaz seemed to be lost and yet contentedly so, so very far from any saving beach.

When someone, even a complete stranger attacked him with that vicious blade of a question, ‘Hello, how are you?’ he just could not muster himself to respond by pretending that he hadn’t heard the question or to try to counter offer it with a deflecting parry such as, ‘Terrible weather isn’t it!’

He knew that his failure to answer the question directly would expose him as a coward. In his dread he knew that there was an inexorable arc of pleasantries and good mannered conversation that led from here to another time and place and these words, once put to him would take him from this moment to that. A moment not of his own choosing and a place he didn’t want to be. In that place there were no paradoxes, no juxtapositions and it would no longer be 4:21. Time and space would have met and merged, pinning him down and extinguishing him in the collision. It was really brave of Kaz to select this phrase, but nobody else knew that. Kaz, hot, bothered and

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exhausted by all of this nonsense whirling about in his head fell asleep in the armchair and when he woke an hour later he realised that he was now probably going to be late for his appointment and that his tea was cold.

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Persephone

Even though it was raining the dog was as usual sat there beside him. Here Kaz was in the queue for the bus just down the road from his flat, and as always he knew everyone else standing in it. It seemed to him sometimes that a few of the newer queue members thought that he was the dog’s owner. He started to giggle at the idea. I mean, the impossibility that anything or anyone in this world and especially this dog, could be his, owned by him. What a stupid, vain and impossible idea ownership was!

Conspiratorially he looked towards the dog and in return the dog did the same to him in its own canine nonchalance whilst shaking raindrops from its ears. Were these two friends? Maybe. Kaz imagined that they would both be disconcerted if the other ever missed the rendezvous, which incidentally never happened. But Kaz wasn’t sure that either of them actually cared for the other. What he liked about the dog though, what he liked to think about the dog, was to do with their shared understanding on this point of non-ownership. It had never occurred to either him or the dog that ownership was a useful concept. However both of them knew of the concept and importantly that it was at the heart of the disaster of life.

Later than usual the number 32 appeared up ahead and coming around the corner.

When he first saw the bus Kaz looked quickly to his right and as he expected the dog had gone. Until next month then he thought, auspicious days notwithstanding. As he

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shook the rain from his coat and boarded the bus notwithstanding was floating around in his head. Words, so many words, and all of them so peculiar.

‘Hi Kaz’, the driver shouted ignoring Kaz’s waved bus pass.

Kaz looked at the driver somewhat unsurely and annoyed. An entire range of possible responses passed in electric speed though Kaz’s mind and a few even hovered momentarily on his lips. Words like, ‘thanks’ and ‘Please talk softer, people are looking’ and ‘you’re drawing attention to me, please stop it’, and finally an exasperated ‘I don’t want to be talked to!’ And all of these possible responses came to him but never made it to vocalisation, because as with all words that fought for room in Kaz mouth, they remained unspoken. But Kaz couldn’t possibly say any of these words anyway because there wasn’t time. He didn’t know how to manage the process of talking to the bus driver. And so instead he made do with a furtive glance and a twitch of his cheek. This would have to do. The happy driver grinned at him, Kaz thought too knowingly. Kaz moved to climb the staircase to get to the top of the bus.

Could he have said, ‘Hello, how are you?’

And now a disembodied voice spoke through the bus’s loud speaker system to noone at all. It was the spokesperson for the bus. She who chanted her sepulchral rite in an indifferent monotony every time the bus set off. ‘This is the 3.19 to Central, calling at…….’ And there then followed from the muffled speakers a dirge of uninspiring place names and all of these names were associated with various stops along the route at which the happy driver would bring his vehicle to a smooth and accomplished halt.

When at these bus stops he would loudly and with an almost idiotic cheeriness greet his regulars as they left and boarded the bus.

‘Hello Misses Thompson, saw your other half this morning, working on the new roundabout.’

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‘Really! You amaze me Tommy, there’s nothing happens round here you don’t find out first, ha-ha!’ The downstairs bus community murmured its approval of this banter. ‘……..and lastly Hope Street’, the loud speaker voice intoned from the underworld.

‘Ironic I suppose that hope is the last stop’, Kaz thought. Upstairs, the bus was quiet.

It usually was. That’s why Kaz went up there away from the happy driver and away too from the bustling to-ing and fro-ing of embarking and disembarking passengers at every stop. Up here there were less people.

Up here there were a few furtive weaselling schoolboys hopping about on both the front and back seats, but thankfully none of them occupied the middle seats. Amongst the boys certain alliances, conspiracies and hidden intimacies were constantly being made, broken and remade and at breath-taking speed. Boys pushed and wriggled and dived in bewildering rushes about the seats, as the bus veered from side to side making its way through the narrow urban streets, winding its way towards town. At each bus stop the boys would instantly flop down into the nearest available seat and slouch cool and languorous as if they had sat there for ever. Then when the bus once more moved off their instinctive game of musical chairs would recommence.

In the middle seats between the two groups of boys, sat two or three ancients studiously ignoring the boys and with benefit of much practise and determination pretending that the boys weren’t even there. These were Kaz’s people. They were solitaries and fiercely alone. Between them they managed to share the middle space on the upper deck of the bus so as not to acknowledge or encourage the occupancy of any adjacent seat by anyone else. They would never admit to each other that they shared a regular bus ride with familiar co-travellers. Each either looked steadfastly out of the window at absolutely nothing of any interest, or stared with practised and genteel hostility at the next passenger to come up the stairs, thereby making it clear that the

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new passenger should sit somewhere else. Kaz found his usual somewhere else and settled into arranging its defence.

And there he was, sitting just a few seats ahead. Benjamin. Kaz knew his name was Benjamin because one time a friend of this Benjamin had sat with him up here on the bus and this friend had in conversation, named him Benjamin. Benjamin. Kaz turned all of his attention to Benjamin.

The bus turned the corner from Regent Street into Albert Street and when it did so quite suddenly the sun, hanging low in the spring late afternoon sky, burst into the bus scattering a fierce, thin, sharp and painful light straight at them as it emerged suddenly from behind the wall of the City Bank up ahead.

Kaz was not aware that he was staring at Benjamin, and indeed he barely was. All there was to show in Kaz’s demeanour that might give away his interest was a slight tensing, an alertness as his body in each of its cells and even down to every tiny component of every cell responded with excitement to the nearness of Benjamin.

Did Kaz want Benjamin? Fancy him even? Kaz wasn’t sure, and if you had asked him he would have been quite thrown into confusion by the question. What Kaz knew was simply that Benjamin was, that in his was-ness his presence was somehow deeply significant and full of meaning. He had now-ness too Kaz thought, and he was achingly alive. Kaz had known about Benjamin for a long time but he had never plucked up the courage to talk to him or even just to nod a casual recognition to him. These last few days Benjamin had taken to meeting him (only him?) on this bus.

But as the sun flashed in through the west facing windows of the bus Kaz’s pupils quickly contracted, thereby closing down the volume of light flowing into his eyes and from there onward by electrochemical signals to his brain. But this light entering his eyes had refracted off Benjamin’s face in the last stage of its stellar journey to him,

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and so this otherwise insignificant and perfectly natural response of Kaz’s eye muscles to the impact of the too much light had acquired a much deeper and in fact a profound significance. This was light that had bathed Benjamin’s face before journeying purposefully to Kaz, and Kaz savoured it.

Looking at him Kaz could assess that Benjamin was about forty, a little shorter than Kaz maybe, but not much. He was slighter built too. Better proportioned. He had smaller hands with lines that indicated expressiveness rather than hard work.

Benjamin’s face was warm and Mediterranean, his soft nut brown curls almost girlish, his skin a creamy translucent white. He had a well formed but not overly muscular physique. Kaz was fascinated and absorbed, hopelessly captivated by Benjamin.

Benjamin, Kaz mused, would know where the light switch was, the one to light up his inner cave. He may even have a boat.

Kaz’s had encountered Benjamin in this and other similar ways many times over during the last two years. He would just be there, walking away around a corner, then lost in a crowd, sometimes crossing to the opposite side of the street, or even opening a door and then passing through the opening and away, away always away. Benjamin knew the way, Kaz was absolutely sure of this.

Benjamin’s large eyes were iridescent with dominant tones of hazel immersed in a whole palette of earth colours that were continually moving and merging, fading and brightening. Kaz in a reverie observed all of this from the short distance across the aisle of the bus, this play of colours that in their dancing formed and reformed Benjamin’s eyes. And yet still there were warm pistachio flecks and splashes of chestnut moving behind the autumnal greens and golds. And as Benjamin instinctively turned away in response to the assault of too much light from the window his eyes seemed to refashion the universe itself, as if they had in an instant made a full

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recalibration of it. To Kaz Benjamin in that moment was divine, he was Krsna on the battle bus to Hope Street.

You would be right to think that this was all a bit much for a middle aged man whose only contact with this lad was sharing a bus trip and that a trip in which it seemed they were not actually travelling together. But you would be mistaken. The bus you see was a magic bus that was how Kaz understood it. This bus was a living fragment of eternity, a point around which the cosmos turned. In turn the bus too went round and round on its fixed axis. Round and round every day. Every day people got on and people got off, some here and some there, as the bus stopped at each bus stop, as the bus circled round its route relentlessly, as the earth circled round the sun, as the sun circled round the Milky Way and so on and so on, until we embrace in its totality the great dance of everything.

If you got on this bus of course you would get off it too, and mostly you would repeat the exercise from day to day, and each time you would be a little older, the same but changed. Entropy would move you further each day towards dissolution. What these folks did when they were off the bus no-one really knew or cared, but there would be a keeping up amongst them of hard won pleasantries made up from the sound bites of shared and snatched conversations. Just like this one between Mrs Thompson and the driver. Thanks to these sound-bite micro-conversations everyone knew that Mrs Thompson’s husband was a part of the work gang that was installing new traffic lights on the gyratory. No-one actually cared, but that knowledge and the opportunities that it provided for small talk and the associated knowing smiles and winks, was an important part of the everyday world that these folk clung to and briefly enjoyed. Then on leaving the bus each of them completely forgot all of this small talk until the next day when mostly they re-joined the bus again.

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Kaz understood that it really didn’t matter where the bus was going to or who got on or who got off. What mattered to him was only that there was a bus, and that it ran for all time. Kaz was deeply sensitive to the realisation that as people got on the bus, although each day most of them were known to him, every now and then there would be a new traveller. Someone new to find her place on the bus, and to defend the place where she sat. Someone new to discover those one or two items of trivia that each day would bubble up between them and that seemed to encapsulate the totality of being for these passengers, but only for the duration of this trip.

At the same time there was also the missing passengers to consider if briefly. Those who no longer got on or off. Sometimes but not always there was a subdued appreciation of the reason for their absence. Perhaps they had died or moved away and yet others were possibly now travelling differently. It didn’t matter, the point was that, whatever the reason for their lack of continued attendance on the bus, they would be completely forgotten after just a few more trips. So much so that when reminded of the departed, the current travellers would enliven themselves and share for just a few moments a pinch of disconnected memories about the absent traveller, and then their attention would subside again into the routine of this journey to nowhere. And this was the meaning of life, buses going round and round, folk getting on and getting off. There was no life off the bus it seemed and the view out of the window was just that, a view, ever changing and yet always the same. Routine, just routine.

Now the bus was on the gyratory and the driver sounded his horn as he passed the men installing the new traffic lights. Mrs Thompson waved furiously through the window and laughed at her husband who also laughed back as he wiped his face with a dirty hand, smiling at his wife going by in the bus. Everyone else downstairs smiled too and shared in the moment while everyone upstairs either took no notice at all or

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was too preoccupied in their own micro-world to care. Then the bus moved on and Mr Thompson disappeared from view, until tomorrow maybe, or perhaps he was never to be seen again. Mrs Thompson and her fellow travellers settled back down into their practised routine and their minds went back to the trivia of life which once more absorbed all of their attention, wrapping them in a soft cloud of certainty. On the bus life was valueless and meaningless, but even so the little conversational niceties of each trip were in themselves pleasantly absorbing and the journey was moderately comfortable.

Kaz knew that Benjamin was somehow different to these folk. His presence on the bus was of a different order to that of these other travellers. It’s a bit weird, but it’s as if Benjamin never actually got on or off the bus, either he was on it already or he was not. And there was something else, a sense of urgency, a one-time offer about Benjamin’s presence. Kaz knew that Benjamin would not attempt to ride the bus forever, or even always try to be up ahead of him in the street. Kaz unavoidably knew that pretty soon he would need to make up his mind. But what about? What was it that Benjamin wanted of Kaz? Kaz could not find the answer to these questions anywhere on the becalmed horizon of the sea of his consciousness or even in the dark deep cave of his inner being. But there was indeed a sense of panic and desperation developing in Kaz’ mind and looking across at Benjamin he heard himself say out loud “nothing gold can stay”.

‘Hope Street’, the woman’s voice said and waking from his reverie Kaz left the bus.

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Samsara

Kaz looked around nervously as he entered the bar which was at the east end of the Strand where the Strand met the City. He had just about pushed his way in through the entrance door when he got an immediate rush as he was overwhelmed by the sounds, smells and sights that pulled him in. The bar was large, baroque in décor and with more standing room than seating. Helpfully there were lots of places where the customers could stand around in groups and put down drinks on the furnishings around them. It was very busy this evening, it always was! In here there were many groups of sometimes just two but mostly more people and all of them crowded jostling together. Each group no matter how small consisted of self-absorbed prisoners of excited chatter bound together by shrieks of laughter and intertwined by furtive and flirtive glances. Each group in this way defended its own group cohesion and that then excluded both physically and emotionally everyone else in the room. Kaz had to put his hand into the small of several backs and say, ‘Excuse me, excuse me,’ as he slowly pushed his way from the door towards the bar, which was now straight ahead of him.

Kaz eventually made it to the bar and when he got there he leaned forward and attracting the attention of a bar man, he ordered a pint. While he waited for his drink to be poured with a happy smiling face he sought to get a good view into the crowded

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depths of the main room behind him. There he could see his gang every now and again as people moved about. They were laughing and clearly having a good time way over at the back of the room. They began to notice him and were signalling their several welcomes with raised glasses and hand waves. Pint in hand he pushed through the crowd once more and soon joined his group of friends entering their inclusive and excluding bubble of shared consciousness. There were seven or eight friends gathered now.

‘Here’s Kaz! That means we’re all here, and so we can decide where to eat!’ Several voices were laughing and shouting over each other and they were arguing about the venue for dinner. It seemed that some favoured specific restaurants, and yet others different types of food such as Indian, Chinese, Japanese or Italian. Kaz beamed and left them to it.

Instead taking one friend by the elbow he asked her ‘So what happened to you last week, Brussels?’

‘Yes’, his friend said, ‘bloody commission called a special meeting and, you know, I had to bloody well go. So much rests on this contract and there was no way I could say no. Sorry about Kathryn’s birthday.’

‘That’s OK, she will understand, but you’d better tell her fast or she will be annoyed with you and you know how much she thinks of you.’

Kaz’s friend nodded and smiled as she turned back towards the group and shouted for ‘Italian!’

Another friend now came over and quizzed Kaz, ‘Westminster Monday evening?’

‘Should be’, said Kaz, ‘why?’

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‘Minister will be there this time unless there’s an early division on the Health Act. Good for you to meet her at last. She keeps asking after you and we can’t keep hiding you from her much longer.’

And so the conversation went on amongst the friends, holidays, conferences, sports and weekends at each other’s houses in the country. Kaz was in the middle of it all, confident and happy and very much at ease. He wished he had set out for London sooner in life. He mused over the fact that that he had perhaps wasted so many years staying in his home town when he was younger. Kaz thought that he would help move the friends towards a decision over dinner. He called out, ‘French! Whose idea was that?’

‘Isobelle’s’ ‘Fair enough. Come here Isobelle my sweet and take my arm. La Maison Bleu here we come. Dan, I’ll take Isobelle and the girls with me, you boys get the second cab, OK?’ Kaz pushed his way through the crowded room with Isobelle on his arm.

Suddenly Kaz noticed that a flaw in the cosmos had appeared right in front of him.

It was just like when you observe the flicker on a television screen, in that even though it lasts only for a moment, in that very moment the illusion of verisimilitude is utterly destroyed. Kaz felt sure that he had noticed someone just off to his left and when he, for just a fraction of a second saw this man, Kaz’s breath ran away from him spilling into the room and losing its energy, dissipating until it ceased to exist. Kaz looked again and yes there he was now. Kaz could see him just standing immovable and at ease, over by the side door. This guy seemed to not be a part of, or connected to the general play and sway of the room. No, he stood calm and erect almost as if he was a superimposition simply paintboxed into the room.

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Now, Kaz knew that this side door was always kept shut and as far as he could remember it hadn’t opened ever, indeed it could even have been nailed shut. But here it was standing slightly ajar, and the stranger was holding the edge of the door with one hand and he was looking straight at Kaz. He was smiling warmly, confidently and somehow with his gaze he was separating them both off from the rest of the crowd.

He seemed to do this just with his look which Kaz found intense and deeply compelling.

But it felt to Kaz that this look from this stranger was meant only for him. Could it be that this chap was there only for him? Was Kaz the only one who could see the beautiful stranger? Kaz didn’t know him or where he came from or even less who he was. In that moment Kaz was simply and utterly transfixed, transported perhaps into another dimension. Time slowed down quickly and nearly stopped. The noise of voices around him faded fast and floated away like flotsam, lapped and lulled into the deep which was rising all around him as if he were experiencing a flood. And all of these words that had filled the room and his head up until this moment were now sinking into the waters that gradually surrounded him and there they disappeared, leaving him for ever. With only his eyes this man was calling to Kaz as if to offer the only means of escape. He was just there and it seemed that he had been waiting for Kaz and now he was calmly gesturing with those wonderful eyes of his as if to say, ‘Follow me, I am the way’.

Then Kaz thought that maybe somehow he had been physically displaced and that suddenly he was standing right up beside this man, even close enough to have touched him. But he dare not touch. He wasn’t sure. However, it could be that he was still holding Isobelle on his arm and that he was actually making his way out of the pub. He wasn’t sure. Reality had somehow fractured and he was seemingly in two places at one time. He felt shaken, nervous and yet thrilled too. This was a new way

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of being for Kaz and it somehow felt as if all of his life had been but a preparation for this moment. From now on and beginning here nothing would ever be the same again.

In this very instant what was left of the rags of time, his rags of time, had now slowed so much that they had lost form and had become sort of wavy as if these rags of his were no more substantive than a line of washing fluttering limply in a summer breeze.

Correspondingly, space now bent and curved gracefully towards him and made him into a vanishing point and so much so that he even doubted his very presence. Equally from him outwards in the opposite direction, space seemed into yawn into an unwelcoming and hopelessly lost infinity. There was now no longer a point to a point.

Kaz suddenly felt immensely old and wise. He had never before doubted his meness or that he was a solid projection of the whim of his ego. But now he doubted.

Now he doubted that he was a form amongst forms positioned like furniture in time and space. Here and now this real-ness was irredeemably becoming translucent and slipping through his fingers and even his fingers themselves were now becoming permeable and almost fluid. Kaz began to see himself as a wave, he was no longer a particle.

Kaz remembered one time when he was working in New Delhi and he had been doing so for several months. He was working in a large new office block on the edge of the diplomatic quarter. It was just one new boring office block among very many other new office blocks in the area. He was on the sixth floor and working at his desk on a Saturday morning. There were not many others working on this day, but there were some. The desk he was working at was an old metal one and it was screwed to the wall. Kaz knew this because several times previously he had had to go under the desk to plug his laptop into the mains electricity supply. The sun was shining pleasantly outside and it was about eleven in the morning.

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Kaz thought that the desk had just moved slightly. ‘Can’t be’, he thought, ‘It’s screwed to the wall.’ Then he looked out of the window and the window frame as he watched it seemed to slide gently and slightly to the left. While Kaz was puzzling over this impossibility the desk actually popped its screws from the wall with a short sharp crack!

A colleague rushed over to him and shouted, ‘Earthquake! Run!’ Everyone ran helter-skelter down the staircase, Kaz included. It was a long way down to the street, down twelve sets of stairs, but down they all went at a run. No-one made a sound apart from short urgent gasps and grunts, because everyone was totally concentrating on moving quickly and in unison, to get out of the building safely. People held each other up and some steadied folks around corners but no-one stopped running.

When they reached the street everyone moved instinctively to the other side of the road and there they stood, turning to watch the high rise buildings that they had so suddenly evacuated. Here on the other side of the road there were only low rise buildings and so there was felt to be no danger from falling debris.

Standing there with the others Kaz in disbelief saw a wave rise several hundred yards ahead and behind the whole office complex. It was huge and gliding gracefully and silently towards them. Yes, they were standing on a paved street on a tarmacked road looking at a business park full of office blocks and yes, there was a wave coming towards them. It was totally beyond Kaz’ comprehension that there could be waves on land exactly the same as there were at sea, and yet here one was. No-one spoke, everyone just stood calmly and stared at the wave. This wave rolled unhurried but with immense power until it came immediately in front of the crowd, and right up to the office blocks on the other side of the road, including the office in which Kaz had only

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a couple of minutes before been sat at his desk working. When it did the office blocks simply bobbed and rode the wave, just as a bather or a tiny boat at sea would ride a water wave. The buildings gently rose, the wave slid under and through with no fuss and then the buildings fell back again into their customary places, and all observed in absolute silence by the bystanders. Next the wave crossed the road and passed beneath Kaz and the others and now it was his turn to feel himself bob the wave.

He was deeply in awe of this wave. Instinctively he knew the wave to be indifferent to him and to everyone else standing calmly around, and to the road, and even to the city itself. It just was and it made its way unhindered just under the skin of the earth where the land met the sky, and by ancient right it took its course as if it were some vast serpent that had coiled and uncoiled in its sleep just two feet below the street. It rose gently from beneath the world of living forms like an immense unchallengeable force as its dreaming made the arc of its restless journey up and through the surface world. Until, Kaz presumed, relinquishing its power, it would somewhere over there behind them, dive smoothly down and back, returning to the underworld from where it came. Kaz had in this moment become intimately aware of the presence of a subterranean world of old gods and huge forces. Forces of nature divine in their majesty and terrible if woken. ‘Watch the dogs!’ The friend who had urged Kaz to run shouted to Kaz. He looked around him and there were a few responsible, studious and it seemed deeply concerned dogs sitting amongst them on the pavement. Naturally assuming control and leadership the dogs stared and listened, thought and evaluated, and then stared and listened again. You would have thought that the dogs must know all about earthquakes, what they were and why they happened, and even how to manage their passing. And perhaps they did for after about two minutes or so the dogs acting

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together stood up, some yawned, some shook their heads and some gave a limp half wag of a tail. Then by utilising this semaphore language of their own it seemed that they had decided amongst themselves that the danger was at last passed. Each of them then and at the same time looked up at the humans around them and nodded their assent, indicating that everyone could now resume their interrupted affairs, the dogs themselves leading the way back across the street to the now becalmed offices.

Accepting the wisdom and advice of the dogs and in a very matter of fact way, everyone then returned to their offices and to their desks and everyone simply took up working again on their laptops where they had left off, each one quickly settling back into that day’s routine. But not so Kaz. For him reality was now going to be forever unreliable, changeable and capable of collapsing at any moment. Reality was now capricious and without any real substance. From now on Kaz found himself a nervous and soon a reluctant passenger as he continued his journey through life, a life which he now saw as strange, untrustworthy and often cruel. In this new world his foothold was going to be forever insecure.

Isobelle asked, ‘Are you dreaming again Kaz? These days you always seem to be only half with us. I’d love to discover what it is that’s on your mind.’

‘Oh, it’s nothing, just work I suppose.’

‘I think it’s something much more interesting than work, you old dog!’

The young man who had transfixed Kaz in the bank with just his gaze, the boy he would later know as Benjamin, had it seemed just slipped quietly through the closed door and had left. Kaz was sad, he felt guilty and curious, even somehow disloyal.

Why had he not followed Benjamin instead of clinging on to a pointless life? Isobelle laughed and they both, followed by Anne and Lisa, made their way out of the busy pub

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and onto the noisy street. Kaz waved down a cab and they all got in laughing. Kaz shouted, ‘La Maison Blue’ please driver!’

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Arjuna

“By me have these already been destroyed”. Kaz mused as he sat twiddling his thumbs in the waiting room of the Hope Street Clinic with lines from the Gita running through his head.

There were all sorts of people here, after all it was a general clinic. Quite a wide range of doctors had their outpatient surgeries at Hope Street and each weekday there would be different clinics, anything from maternity all the way through to dementia.

Mondays was cancer and mental health day. Kaz was of course on the mental health list but most of the other attendees here were on the cancer list. Kaz looked at them as they all sat huddled together in the waiting room. This waiting room was just like the bus really he thought, ‘they came in, they went out, and then they never came back again’. And the waiting room went on, for ever and ever amen. Pointless. It wasn’t the waiters in the room that manifest for Kaz the essential idea of the place, it seemed to him that it was the room itself that was actively waiting for patients to come in so that it could trap them in its web. Those not strong enough to keep free of the web somehow vibrated a string of it and then, here they all were caught in the web of treatment. ‘Amazing’, Kaz thought, ‘how this room sought out and drew into its lair the sick and the dying and then held them there ready for processing’. One at a time and

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many with a confused loved one limply holding their hands, (as if they were already ready to let go), they shuffled in one’s and two’s into one of the small consultation rooms. Here two medical staff in white coats would sit chewing pens and staring at computer screens.

Every now and then the doctor (one of these two was always a doctor and the other was always a nurse) would turn and look at his patient and smile and then ask the questions that the computer screen popped up. Next he would mechanically tap on the computer keyboard the patient’s brief answers. If any answer made did not fit in the allotted space or did not seem to satisfy the on screen questions, or even worse, if the answer given now prompted even more questions, then a forced and reluctant conversation must take place between the doctor and his patient. It would take up to fifteen minutes from the first ‘hello’ to the completion of the on-line form and its despatch to the World Wide Web. That then would signal the end of the consultation.

The professionals in the room would be congratulated at their monthly review meeting for their excellent time management skills if they hit this time target consistently.

There were so many interesting words in this world of clinics that provoked and amused Kaz as he sat there waiting. Besides waiting there was patient. Patient was what Kaz and the other non-professionals were known as by the medical staff. In reality all of these patients were anxious and frightened, even angry. They were anything but patient.

Another word that Kaz thought misused was consultation. There was a presumption that just one consultation took place here, and that it would always be between a doctor and his patient, but this was rarely what happened. There were usually two consultations taking place simultaneously. One was between a doctor and his computer screen and then another entirely separate conversation took place between

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each patient and his conscience. If either of these two consultations broke down, only then would there be a very brief exchange of words between the doctor and patient, until each of them was able to retreat back into his own comfort zone and to his own consultation, one framed by a keyboard, the other by a prayer.

Fifteen minutes and then a gap of a month till the next fifteen minutes. Unless next time happened to be an un-Monday. Kaz’s life looped without deviation or relief between these temporal nodes of fifteen minute consultations, and as far as he knew the doctor and his assistant had no life of their own outside of this arrangement because it seemed to Kaz that the doctors and nurses only came into existence at this meeting and after it was over they just fell away.

There was a fly buzzing and head butting the window. Kaz giggled to himself, ‘here was a happy fellow, head butting out of sheer joy. He’s not caught in this clinician’s web’, no the fly was eager to be off and fly away. A fly has no circularity in its life cycle.

It is, on its first day, a grub in the dark earth but then later when called by the light, the fly grub would rise and become a fly fly. Kaz thought, ‘this fly doesn’t need a faith, it has already been resurrected by the cosmos itself. It is risen from earth to heaven and its ascending life is always soaring, always full of wonder, always, always.

But today Kaz was more preoccupied with thoughts about Benjamin. It was Benjamin this and Benjamin that in his mind and these thoughts were crowding out all the other thoughts. For Kaz this was a happy day indeed.

Kaz had been coming to the clinic to see Doctor Reed for over a year now and Kaz had no idea why, he just did. Back then it was easier to do as he was told but he was not so sure today. Benjamin had at last stirred something in him, a something that required, invited and perhaps even offered hope. Here he was sitting in the Hope Street Clinic with Doctor Death and his assistant, and Kaz was watching and

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encouraging this fly to be free because in Kaz’ heart hope had risen. Well, maybe not yet actually risen but there was a hint, a thrill that somewhere beneath his horizon hope had begun to stir. It would be a new arrival, like a birth, and it felt near and expected and it could be relied upon.

Doctor Reed had been renamed Doctor Death by Kaz simply because one of the cancer patients who used to talk to Kaz had called his own doctor by that nick name.

This kind and caring person who had taken an unanticipated interest in Kaz while they were both sitting bored stupid in the waiting room one Monday, was one of the cancer lot. He had been coming to the other clinic since way before Kaz began attending his clinic and this chap always called his doctor, Doctor Death and poked fun at him in conversation with everyone else sat in the waiting room. This cheekiness had attracted Kaz to this chap even though he couldn’t now remember his name. This kind and befriended cancer patient now no longer attended clinic and Kaz knew why. Kaz had therefore chosen to transfer the pet name of the chap’s doctor to his own doctor and did so in the cancer patient’s honour. Doctor Reed was hence forth resurrected as Doctor Death.

Benjamin’s ears would go quite pink and Kaz guessed quite hot, when Benjamin had to talk to someone, which apart from that time when his friend was travelling with him, was possibly not very often. But Kaz remembered everything he had found out about Benjamin. Kaz thrilled, ‘Maybe soon Benjamin will talk to me!’

‘Take a seat Kaz.’ He did. ‘Want to take off your jacket Kaz, it’s awfully warm in here.’ He did. ‘Now. Let’s see it’s been four weeks hasn’t it.’ Kaz began to drift off as Doctor Death began his usual niceties. The fly had also gone off somewhere else too, presumably to explore some other window or maybe to dabble with a crumb in the cafeteria.

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Kaz stopped himself from thinking and quickly realigned his attention to Doctor Death and tried momentarily to listen. But suddenly he became very interested in the doctors hands, ‘All doctors have wonderful hands, and fingers, and finger nails,’ Kaz thought. ‘Not surprising really when you think where those fingers go, and all in a day’s work’. Kaz wondered what Doctor Death did with his fingers at other times and in other consultations? Kaz was quite relieved that so far their relationship had not become physical. Kaz imagined those fingers going into his mouth and other places. He stopped himself from thinking again.

‘Do you agree?’ the doctor was asking.

Kaz looked at him without displaying even a whiff of interest or engagement. ‘He’s asking me something, looks like he wants an answer. I wonder what?’ Kaz didn’t care really, he had learned to just sit there until the questions went away. That was always the best way to deal with these things, just ignore them and they would always go away. Kaz was no fool. He knew that the intention behind all this talk and all these silly questions was just to get him to do something. Even the over smiley nursey attendant person was nodding at him as if to nudge him into action. On request or on demand, that sort of thing. He could paraphrase it as if the doctor had said, “I’ll say, jump, and you jump Kaz.” Kaz was not for jumping. Neither was he for acting. Acting. As in doing something that is. Like an act of will, act of parliament, act of God. ‘Do you agree?’

Kaz was not agreeable today. He reckoned that Benjamin wouldn’t agree either, or would he? ‘What would Benjamin do or say in this situation? He would go pink and blush I expect’. Kaz withdrew deeper into his thoughts. ‘You could act out of love, act out of fear and also act out of self-interest. You could just about act out of anything

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you liked’. Kaz knew that all acting was just pretending and therefore not worth the effort.

‘Do you agree?’

There it was, the three times repeated, “Do you agree.” The doctor never as a rule made more than three attempts at saying anything and so Kaz knew that he was safe now. That line of questioning, whatever it was, was probably over for good. Kaz watched as the doctor scribbled notes in his cheap grubby A4 lined notebook. Kaz smiled at the doctor, he liked him a lot and he really looked forward to their monthly meetings. He thought that this consultation today was going along very well indeed.

‘Let’s try something else shall we Kaz, do you remember the exercise that we both said we might try today? I asked you to think about how you would greet someone you did not know, remember? You went home to think about that. Now tell me, have you come back today with your idea of an answer?’ Doctor Reed was not pressing Kaz, he was just encouraging and enticing Kaz really, like a serpent.

Benjamin. Now Kaz knew his name. He also knew that it was Benjamin who had been there in the pub on the Strand two years ago and it was Benjamin who wanted Kaz to go with him through the unopenable door. Since then he had also appeared to Kaz many times, sometimes at the end of the street and also in many a dream. He had been there, quietly inviting Kaz with his soft, warm, loving invitation, ‘Follow me, I am the way.’

Kaz became confused again. ‘What door, what pub?’ Kaz struggled to put it all into a coherent sequence so that he could understand it. Kaz stopped himself thinking.

Kaz was wary of Doctor Death’s word games and their entrapment. You see, if Kaz had said at this point in the conversation, ‘Yes doctor, I went home and thought a lot about this question and eventually after lots and lots of reflection I came up with the

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phrase, ‘Hello, how are you?’ then Kaz would feel that he had been caught. Kaz knew that once given, this answer would then lead on to more questions and perhaps more exercises and worst of all more and more pressure. Pressure for Kaz. So Kaz kept his mind free and did not let it go where the doctor wanted to lead it.

Today Kaz’s fondness for Doctor Reed was beginning to evaporate and instead one of those damned panics was starting to rise up inside. Kaz didn’t want to spoil their relationship by talking and thus to be dragged across a hostile sea of words like a water ski enthusiast who changes his mind as soon as the speedboat lurches away.

He began to feel hot and uncomfortable, as if he was going to be forced to go along one of those arcs of inevitability again and into one of those conversations that drove him into ever deeper silence. No-one had the right to make Kaz be how they wanted him to be. It was always this way now, one thing led to another and another until Kaz felt exposed and vulnerable, lost in a time and place not of his choosing. Maybe if he had taken a tablet before he set off for this appointment?

‘Sorry?’ Kaz said, albeit half-heartedly. Doctor Death repeated the question, swapping the words around a bit so as to make it sound less repetitive.

‘Sorry?’ Kaz in response said again. He was wondering if they were going to do the three denials that would complete this exercise.

‘Don’t you remember Kaz, I don’t mind at all if you decide not to have a go at it today?’

‘Sorry?’ That was it Kaz thought, ‘three goes at asking the question, three deflective replies and now we move on. Hurrah!’

Right then Kaz was reminded of Peter in Jerusalem after the death of Christ. Peter had known this fear, this predicament that Kaz now felt and he had also figured that this was the only real way out, denial. Kaz felt that he understood Peter well. ‘Let them

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ask three times and three times I will not answer, instead I’ll just say what will make them go away and leave me alone’. That way Kaz would keep his memories clean and unfingered by polluted hands and minds. Peter, Kaz was sure, had given the right answer too and he had shown Kaz integrity and purity, and how to keep fast a love that must be saved.

Kaz would not talk today because he held and cherished in the deepest part of his inner cave, itself far over in the midst of the deepest sea, a love. It was left to Kaz to protect this love by hiding it away and he found that he was good at hiding it and protecting it. He had become like a dragon sleeping on its hoard. If others ever tried to entice him into a conversation about this love then Kaz was sure that slowly and trickily they would eventually find it. And then what? Then they would be able to touch it and smudge it. No, Kaz’s love would forever remain ungroped and unfingered by who knows who these people were. Kaz was sure that Peter had felt like this too about his love for Jesus and therefore Peter was one of Kaz’s heroes.

Doctor Reed was wasting his time with Kaz. The doctor would now simply prescribe more medication and Kaz sometimes took it but not often. The doctor had finished with his tick-sheets and questionnaires, he had written down his observations of Kaz’s behaviour and recorded every statutory and mandatory detail. At the end of the day Kaz was to the doctor unexceptional and uninteresting and largely because he refused to engage in any sustained dialogue, preferring instead to just stare out of the window as if he were simply sat on a bus. Doctor Reed concluded that the consultation was over for this week. Kaz would continue on his current medication and another appointment would be scheduled for one month’s time, providing there was a clinic on that day. Kaz was encouraged to leave. Fourteen minutes had elapsed since he first went into the room and sat down.

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From Kaz’s point of view this was also a complete waste of time, but it did make a jolly afternoon out. Kaz as you can now see would not act out of his own volition and calls for him to do so, even from Doctor Death, would not prevail. Kaz was in a sort of twilight world separated from the hurly burly and the boring routines of life. Even though his was now perhaps an unwanted life, yet it was a safe life hidden away with his one and only treasure, and that was also hidden away in the darkest deepest place that Kaz could find. Kaz was completely without the desire to re-enter the world where all of the other folk lived out their meaningless lives.

Months back Kaz had discovered that he could get along quite reasonably without, well most things really, including quite a lot of human interaction. He was not unhappy but he could not help but get annoyed at the attempts of others to help him to return to normal. So he had over the last two years developed successful strategies that enabled him to completely withdraw from society and also from himself. There was really no need for anyone to be concerned. Kaz wasn’t a threat to anyone or even to himself. They had probed Kaz on that one already ages ago. Was he sometimes suicidal? No, never. To effect a suicide he would have to act and act he would not.

And so whilst he would not make the effort to kill himself neither would he make the effort to save himself. He was in this way vulnerable and his care was organised to target this vulnerability, but so far with only little success.

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Christos

‘Hey Kaz, you awake man?’ Someone was gently whispering in Kaz’s ear. ‘Kaz?’ ‘Sorry, what, who?’ Kaz did not yet open his eyes. He was lulling and sliding in the interface between sleep and waking and this could be a dream and so if it was then he would lie still and let it come.

‘Kaz, wake up man’. The voice was a tad insistent now. Kaz opened just his left eye and only by a fraction, but even so he could tell that he was in his bedroom and in his bed and that it was the middle of the night. He closed his eye again. The voice had called three times now and so it would not call again.

‘Kaz!’ This time whoever it was put a hand on Kaz’s shoulder in a determined effort to wake him.

Kaz woke up and found that it was Benjamin. ‘What, what are you doing here, now, in my bedroom?’

‘You wanted to talk.’

‘How do you know?’

‘We aren’t going to do all that question and answer stuff are we?’

Kaz was comforted by the softness in Benjamin’s voice. It was very dark in the room and it was hard for Kaz to see fully but he was searching the face for Benjamin’s eyes.

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There was just the odd moment when he could see them as Benjamin turned his head this way and that. His eyes were as inviting now as they had been in the full glare of sunshine on the bus. When was that, yesterday, last month? Kaz wasn’t sure. Kaz continued to look up searchingly into Benjamin’s face which was now very close to his and even so close that he could feel Benjamin’s breathing on his face. But now there was something new here that he discovered about Benjamin, his smile! Kaz yielded, and relinquishing all resistance, he submitted. He sat up in bed and using only his eyes he told Benjamin that he was his to command.

Benjamin urged him, ‘Get up man.’

‘Why, what do you want with me?’

‘We’re going out.’

‘What now, at this time of night? Where? I’m not dressed.’

‘You’ll be fine’, then Benjamin thought and looked around the room, ‘might need boots though.’

‘Boots?’

Although quite confused Kaz dutifully got up and hurriedly pulled on a coat and found his old boots. What on earth was he doing? This person he had never even spoken to before was encouraging him to go outside in the middle of the night and to go where and to do what Kaz had no idea. But gosh, it was exciting! Benjamin just kept smiling encouragingly, eager to get a move on.

“To be or not to be, that is the question.” A quote from Shakespeare for some reason now popped into Kaz’s head, his head that was practised at rolling around words and unpacking them. ‘Not now though surely’, he thought to himself, but too late, his mind had fixed on the phrase as if to cling to something familiar in all of this bewilderment.

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Kaz took up exploring the famous phrase as they were both tumbling downstairs and out into the street.

When he got there Kaz looked about him nervously. What if anyone saw him padding about in just his pyjamas and old coat and half laced boots, following like a lap dog behind this wonderful man? Nonetheless Kaz felt elated as the cool night air fully woke him up. He became aware of himself as he had not done for ages. Suddenly self-conscious he tried not to make any noise while walking tip-toe along the pavement. Benjamin of course walked casually ahead, ‘there is no need to be concerned about him being noisy’ Kaz laughed to himself.

Kaz did not ask Benjamin anything further because his mind was now fully occupied trying to understand that phrase from Shakespeare’s Hamlet to take much notice of what he was doing tip-toeing along the pavement. There was no time for questions Kaz thought, no time. ‘That’s it! That’s the answer to Hamlet’s dilemma. It wasn’t about the “to be” or the “not to be” parts at all, it was all and only about the “question” part at the end. It told how endless questions stole away time and all hope of action. Kaz had, over these last few months himself come to see all questioning as a potential dagger pointing at him, a threatening knife that would cut him off and cut him down. Now he understood that there were questions going round and round in Hamlet’s head just as there were in Kaz’s head and these questions trapped Hamlet just as they trapped Kaz, sapping away his energy and his will. Benjamin was right, “don’t ask questions, just get up and follow me”. ‘That’s what he’d said wasn’t it?’ And Kaz was doing just that and right now, thrilling to the night and the dream and he felt suddenly free in his heart as he did so.

Kaz had always tried to stop himself from thinking so as to avoid entrapment, but now stopping himself from thinking was actually empowering. This opened up a whole

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new world of possibilities for Kaz. He began to feel as if a hope that had promised to emerge had at last begun to wash him in sweet waters. ‘It is from here he thought’, tapping his chest, ‘from out of this empowering silence in a living beating heart, and in the face of all the world’s questioning, that salvation comes’. And from out of this silence Kaz thought that maybe he could act. Kaz thought that this silence of many sounds that the two men now shared was just like it would have been on a night in Milk Wood. Kaz stopped himself from thinking.

They turned right into a bumpy rubbish filled lane and then at the lanes bottom they moved quietly into an open field that sloped gently up ahead. From the fields end more fields rose gently and then on and up to the far hills that surrounded the town.

Although they had so far not walked very far into the field nonetheless they were now far enough away from the houses and the people and the night noises of the town, so that it was as if the town had fallen away and died without protest behind them. Kaz stopped and looked up into the still calm vastness that held all the was-nesses there ever were or indeed ever could be in its mantle of stars. The motherly comforting moon in its joyous waxing lit the hills, the two men and the sky in a gossamer blanket of fairy dust. Kaz had never seen and never before felt such blissful now-ness. He felt that ‘we two have walked through a door, my front door, and we’ve found another world and a better one’. A world that seemed to Kaz on the surface like the one they had just left, but this one sparkled in its clearness, and had about it such a quality of gentle one-ness that it seemed as if the land itself was breathing soft and deep as it slumbered and dreamed this night, carpeting their feet in cool grass. Benjamin and Kaz were the dream that the land had brought forth. Kaz felt himself to be deeply significant and needed, needed by the land and its dreaming.

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‘Is this it, are we here?’ Kaz looked all around pulling his coat closer to, and at the same time trying to make his tough old boots sit more comfortably on his now sore feet. Benjamin for answer just slowed to a halt and plunged his hands deep into his pockets as he began shuffling from foot to foot. Both men were looking about them and checking things out. Yes, they were alone out here and no, no-one else could see them from the towns few remaining lighted windows. There was a jet aircraft very high up there gliding beneath the stars but other than that all was night and silence. The slumbering clouds, the odd sleepy sigh that came from among the branches of the few scattered trees, and of course the waiting shuffle of the two men, none of these made any disturbance.

‘What now?’ Kaz asked softly. Benjamin raised an eyebrow as if letting his eyes form words for him and then he opened his mouth as if to say them, but suddenly he paused and shut it again letting his head fall arrestingly to one side. Was he looking or was he listening?

‘Shhhh!’ he said.

Kaz looked at Benjamin’s face and how it turned like that in the moonlight, his eyes were lit up like they had never been before. Kaz felt bathed in their glorious light ‘Gosh, you are so beautiful’ he thought. Kaz was plucking up the courage to tell Benjamin so when Benjamin’s head suddenly lifted to the heavens and with open mouth and arm stretched, and hand stretched and finger stretched, he reached up and touched the sky. Benjamin fixed Kaz with his eyes and implored, ‘Look!’

Following the path suggested by the pointing finger Kaz’s gaze penetrated deep into the galaxy that spread out like Indra’s net above them seeking he did not know what.

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‘Listen!’ Benjamin insisted.

Kaz could hear something, his ears straining down low to the ground as he listened.

What was it? Far away, even miles away a sonorous rumbling began as if it was the sound of millions of somethings coming this way.

Both at the same time, his ears were listening deeper and deeper and his eyes were looking further and further and the more Kaz attended to his listening the more he struggled to focus his eyes as they followed Benjamin’s raised arm and hand and finger. Kaz struggled as he tried to embrace the totality of this new experience.

Gradually Kaz became aware of an arc of meaning that stretched way back to that point on the horizon where the low drumming of millions of feet were dancing on the belly of the sleeping earth, and then from there it moved way up here to where they were both now standing and then away up and over to the hills and finally on up into the sky where – wait!

Kaz began to see something up there. Perhaps his eyes were getting accustomed to the light or perhaps it was just another aircraft, or maybe he just wanted to see something. Behind the thin veil of clouds lights were forming and gracefully moving and changing colours as they moved. It was a meteorite storm just beginning. ‘Wow, so this is what Benjamin wanted me to see?’ Kaz smiled at Benjamin, ‘thank you, thank you so much, I’ll enjoy this’.

Benjamin frowned at Kaz as if he didn’t understand him and then realising what Kaz must be thinking he smiled and touched Kaz’s arm while gesturing to the far horizon, ‘listen!’

Kaz could feel the ground beginning to vibrate, at first imperceptibly but growing all the time. A soft breeze had got up and that also was growing and quickly too. Soon the breeze became quite a strong wind and the noise of hoof thunder across the

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ground became very loud. Kaz now had to raise his voice to ask Benjamin, ‘What is it?’

Benjamin grinned and began to hop about. He ran up to Kaz and held his face in both his hands and beamed into Kaz’s eyes. Kaz thought he was going to kiss him, but no, he was just joyfully agitated. He let go of Kaz and danced. And danced. And danced. Benjamin’s dance danced both the coming multitude racing towards them and the now rapidly changing light show up ahead into one coordinated rhythmic cosmic event. Benjamin, Kaz began to realise, was bringing the two seemingly unconnected events together, the approaching land storm advancing towards them and the meteorite storm descending towards them. He was bringing them both to his hands as if he could with one hand touch the earth and the other the sky and in doing so marry them both. Looking across from one outstretched hand to the other, ‘They come!’

Benjamin shrieked in joy, ‘They come!’

To give you some idea what the two men were experiencing here, had Kaz been standing at that moment close to the edge and right by a tunnel entrance on the Underground he would have instantly recognised this rumbling and this mounting rush of air as signalling the imminent arrival of an oncoming train, but he was not on the underground, he was in a field just out of town and this train, if it was a train, must be immense. The wind was now howling so violently that Kaz was finding it hard to stand.

Benjamin meantime was delirious. Kaz thought this wasn’t at all like the earthquake in Delhi, somehow this was exciting and not a bit frightening. But all the same Kaz had half a mind that they might be exposing themselves to something too big to handle.

He was about to suggest to Benjamin that they move back a little when it came, suddenly and like a breaking avalanche. A vast phosphorescent tunnel of air roared across the ground and right up to them. Then as soon as it got right up close to the

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two men the tunnel of air turned sharply right and shot off several miles on up to the top of the surrounding hills. Once up there it then left the ground and rose higher and higher still, then up into the night sky until finally it disappeared into the meteorite storm.

As it passed the two men it looked to Kaz as if it was the belly of an enormous great snake, maybe thirty foot in girth. It didn’t have a skin as such but it had instead a kind of luminous boundary between its hurtling force and the calm, milky still air all around it and through which it made its course. The air or whatever it was that made up the atmosphere inside the great snake seemed to be contained within a vortex that made of it a vast empty corridor of rushing air. In its lightning fast thrusting forward movement, it formed this infinitely long tunnel that was separated from but held within the calm night air all around it. Kaz could see right into its belly. Kaz thought that this manifestation must be somehow related to the creature from the deep that he had felt moving beneath him at Delhi and now here it was a creature of the sky racing across the land.

‘They come!’ Benjamin shouted. And they did. Within the belly of the snake millions and millions of animals, animals of every kind, were suddenly racing and stampeding, crowding and jostling along, and as they hurtled past the two men pell mell, they thundered within the snakes belly moving at reckless speed from its tail to its head and therefore ultimately on up into the clear night sky. And all of the animals therein were themselves translucent, opaque and yet vividly alive and they were calling and bellowing in their excitement and joy as they ran. ‘Ho ho!’ Benjamin beamed at Kaz. He put his arm round Kaz and they both danced, hopping merrily from foot to foot. The great train of beasts roared on and on and on and when the front of the train was up at the top of the hill and rising up into the sky the back of the train was not yet in sight

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and indeed it would take several minutes more and at breakneck speed for this train to fully pass.

Suddenly Kaz and Benjamin were knocked over. A rushing zebra, trying to push past another had managed to have its bottom swing out and momentarily break through the boundary of the vortex and it lunged for an instant into the world of the two men. In doing so its fat, warm muscly rump bumped into the men and sent them both tumbling into the soft grass. Separated by this fall the two men rolled and giggled in the forming dew.

But then, as Kaz was recomposing himself, a superb large male lion fully in the prime of life leapt from the train and in doing so moved from insubstantiality back to utter physicality, such as it had known in life, and it trotted majestically and purposefully over to Kaz. Kaz was overwhelmed by the elemental puissance of this statesmanlike beast as it stood proudly over him as he lay on the grass. Kaz felt stunned and winded but not at all frightened. He imagined himself to be rather like a gazelle calmly accepting its fate. Kaz indeed was ready to be killed by this lion, and in that moment he thought ‘yes this is the death I want’. However the lion had other ideas.

The lion protectively lay down alongside Kaz and placed a great paw across his chest as if to calm him. Kaz could feel and hear the lion’s heartbeat invigorating his own heart so close together were they. He could smell the warm plains and the pollen and the sweat of a life lived under a different sun. The lion’s prickly unyielding coat lay uncomfortably upon his face and arms and its great breathing rocked Kaz as if he was a baby in a lions cradle. Kaz was fascinated, spell-bound. And then as if to make a gift to Kaz, Kaz could feel a tremendous healing power passing from the beast to him. In that brief moment the lion made Kaz righteous with the earth and the night and the dance.

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Then as suddenly as it came the lion rose up and in one great leap re-joined the back of the train just as the last section was passing by.

‘He likes you.’ Benjamin said.

Now departed, the train left no evidence of its track as the calm night air around them took the dying vortex into its slumbering embrace and as the trains exuberant rumbling faded first to a murmur and then finally lay sleeping on the softly sighing grass. In the night sky above, the slow putting out of the lights had almost now extinguished and the two men, in silently brushing each other down and hugging each other, were all that was left to remember. For a long time the two men just stood there looking contentedly at each other. Neither spoke or needed to.

Like a small sudden intake of breath Kaz found inside him a little sadness that tempered their shared joys and a little awkwardness that came just for a brief moment between them like an uninvited nervous cough. Kaz knew that this was the last time that he would see Benjamin and be with him. He had never held him, never told him how he felt, that he loved him, that he would miss him. Benjamin picked up this tiny awkwardness with a loving hand and put it gracefully away with a smile. Benjamin said tenderly, ‘You have something of mine’.

‘I know’, Kaz replied.

Benjamin said, ‘Well, if you give it to me I will take good care of it I promise.’

‘I know’, Kaz again replied. And this time to avoid the annoyance of three successive responses he quickly volunteered, ‘I don’t think I can keep hold of it much longer anyway. I’m so frightened of losing it or spoiling it. I hide it away where no-one, sometimes not even I, can get to it.’

‘I’m only keeping it for you, you know, it’s still yours, anytime’ Benjamin replied.

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Kaz smiled. It was an immense relief to let go and the letting go felt like the gentle wash of receding waters after a deluge, but there was no-one else Kaz would ever have trusted with it. ‘How do I go about giving it to you?’ Kaz asked.

‘You just did.’

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Tat Tvam Asi

Kaz woke up. He checked the clock one last time. It was 4.21 in the morning. He spent the next two hours just lying there in bed staring at the ceiling and the wall paper, but no longer at the clock. He had a long time to think and now he was happy to think.

His fear had left him and somehow he felt empowered and ready for the day. It had been ages since Kaz had actually seen, accepted and freely embraced a whole day.

It was a strange feeling and he would be careful to adjust himself to this new condition with tenderness. ‘One small step for Kaz, one giant leap for Kaz too’, he smiled to himself.

Later than usual he got up and washed and dressed in clean clothes. He made himself a good breakfast and then made a cup of tea and sat in his comfy chair waiting for his carer to arrive. When she did Klaudia was surprised to find Kaz alert and attentive and so she was a bit hesitant.

‘You OK Kaz?’ She went over to the side board and opening the drawer she checked that Kaz had taken his medication and it seemed that he had. ‘Well I must say Kaz, you are looking good today, quite bright and cheerful, and did you have a good night’s sleep?’

Kaz said, ‘Klaudia, you know that clock.’

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‘This one?’

‘Yes’ ‘Yes’ ‘It needs a new battery.’

‘I’ve been telling you that for ages Kaz.’ ‘I think there’s one in the drawer, shall we put it in and see if it will go?’

So Klaudia, unsure about this sudden but happy change in Kaz’s mood found the new battery and put it in the clock. ‘Well’ she said, ‘now we have a challenge don’t we.

Now we’ll have to look at the clock to find out what the time is. Let me see,’ she looked at her own watch to see what time it was now and then she adjusted the clock so that it said 12.40 pm. Then they both stood staring at the clock that had so long been unmoved but now it was sufficiently energised that it would begin to push both of its hands into the future. 12.41 pm.

‘What time is it Klaudia?’ Kaz asked.

‘You can see it on the clock now, look.’ Klaudia replied.

‘No, I mean, is it time for a coffee?’

‘Shall I make you one?’

‘No, no, you get on with what you have to do, I’ll make it. One sugar isn’t it?’

*****

Later Kaz called Isobelle. ‘Hello my sweet’, ‘Hi Kaz. What a surprise, not heard from you for ages, but Kathryn gives me all the news. So, - hello how are you?’

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Kaz was quite excited and asked Isobelle, ‘Listen, can we do lunch? Nothing special, just a bite in that little café in Wood Street. Please?’

‘Are you sure hon? This comes as a bit of a surprise, what did your doctor say yesterday?’

Kaz urged Isobelle past this mild awkwardness, ‘Forget him, will you come?

There’s something I have to do and you are the only person. I won’t ask anyone else.

Look I am taking the tablets and I feel fine, in fact never better. I called you because I knew you’d do it. Have lunch with me?’

It was only a cheap lunch in a cheap café. Isobelle had never been there before but she liked doing out of the ordinary things and so this lunch, if a bit of a challenge, was irresistible to her. When they met up she thought Kaz was so much changed and for the better. Isobelle was intrigued, what had brought this change about? But she felt deeply concerned for Kaz because he was her closest friend, and she pressed him very gently, ‘really Kaz, how are you?’

Kaz laughed. He told Isobelle all about this week’s visit to the clinic, how he had worried himself stupid over a silly greeting and then after all he had forgotten it when the time came to divulge it. Isobelle laughed and said, ‘Oh, I’m not surprised Kaz, you know how I feel about doctors, especially that kind of doctor, but I won’t go over that again. I’m just so glad to see you, and you’re looking so good’. She ran her fingers through his hair like she used to. ‘Good for you!’ she said as she brushed his cheek with her hand. ‘I’m so happy that you’re back with us Kaz, but don’t rush it my love, take it all very slowly and you’ll be fine.’

Isobelle sat back and looked at Kaz long and tenderly, puzzling over the sudden turn around, pleased but also determined to find out more about it. This she did out of love. She had missed Kaz so much, he was the only one who really understood and

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accepted her and she wanted him back, but she would not let her needs come before those of her friend. She thrilled to see him eating, drinking and chatting a little bit, and all without those awful nervous twitches and side glances. ‘Love!’ she smiled at him across the table as lunch was served.

‘Isobelle there’s something I have to ask you, will you do something with me today?

I mean right now, as soon as we finish here?’

‘What is it love?’ She reached across the table and placed her hand upon his and held it reassuringly, ‘You know I will’.

‘I’d like to visit the grave, will you come with me?’ Kaz now placed his other hand on top of both their joined hands and he pressed Isobelle. ‘Look, I am fine. I just need to do this. It won’t go badly, I am over all of that, really. But I need you Isobelle, I can’t ask anyone else. Don’t make me go alone.’

‘I am all yours, I’ll follow you anywhere Kaz and you know that.’ Isobelle wondered if she was doing the right thing here. Should Kaz go to the grave today? He had not been there for two years. She thrilled that Kaz seemed to be getting better, and so fast! But would a trip to the grave risk all of that? She had a moment’s indecision. Then Isobelle being the strong and adventurous woman that she was said, ‘of course!’

Kaz was delighted Isobelle would come with him to visit the grave. He didn’t know what he would do if she had not felt able to go or had just not trusted that Kaz would be OK and not get upset by the visit.

‘There’s a small general shop across the road, we could pop in there?’ Kaz ventured.

‘What for?’ Isobelle innocently asked still focussing all of her attention on reading Kaz’s face for signs, any signs.

‘I want to buy something, that’s all.’

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‘Sure hon, what do you have in mind?’

Kaz smiled in embarrassment and said, ‘Don’t laugh’ ‘I won’t, honest.’

‘I want to buy a dog collar, don’t laugh.’

Isobelle laughed, ‘Kaz, you don’t own a dog.’

‘I am going to buy it for a friend.’

‘Well if that’s all you want?’ she capitulated.

Kaz, at first hesitant but now keen to make the most of his new self-confidence suggested to Isobelle, ‘We could buy some flowers. To take to the grave.’

Isobelle’s face lit up, ‘Yes’ she said. ‘Roses, we must buy roses’.

Roses were Benjamin’s favourite flowers.

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The return

"[W]e are the children of this beautiful planet that we have lately seen photographed from the moon. We are not delivered into it by some god, but have come forth from it. We are its eyes and mind, its seeing and its thinking. And the earth, together, with its sun, this light around which it flies like a moth, came forth, we are told, from a nebula; and that nebula, in turn, from space. So that we are the mind, ultimately, of space ...

"No wonder, then, if its laws and ours are the same! Likewise our depths are the depths of space, whence all those gods sprang that men’s minds in the past projected onto animals and plants, onto hills and streams, the planets in their courses, and their own peculiar social observances."

Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By

(Copyright Sebastio Salgado)