The Sun shone gently into my consciousness, feelings mixed almost slightly confused. It had been a long time, Ruth and I, never far apart, our thoughts always coinciding, the flat always possessing an atmosphere of certainty, a calm indifference to the world outside racing incessantly between the large trees overhanging Clapton Common, never... hardly ever, feeling alone, isolated, always together, yet there had always been a underlying uncertainty between us, a vague knowledge on her part that I had not made a complete revelation about the past, the incident in Weymouth, when I smashed the mirror with my head, had always left a question mark in hers. Perhaps this inability on my part to totally discard the past, to forget the long hot years enveloped in a grating feeling of failure, trying to hide myself between the legs of whichever woman would have me, this, plus my refusal to completely commit myself to marriage became the inevitable blow between us. Now uncertainty, suddenly time to contemplate, my first stirring, the realisation.... going to be a long haul alone, always imagining in my more compressed moments being alone would have certain advantages, no need to concern myself any further as to Ruth’s whereabouts, wondering if I would be in time to pick her up from the afternoon Bingo or from the long late night Kalooki session at the Victoria Sporting Club. I would be ‘free’, unaware this freedom was double edged ... having precisely nothing to show for the interminable years. A council flat, a few sticks of furniture and little to do other than drive the cab, hang about the cafes and try to analyse the situation, never able to answer the question mark which has hung over me since childhood ... in the Air Raid shelters, crouched, huddled together, waiting, expectant, in our cold concrete tomb for the next cluster of bombs, a totally silent torment gripping us. What had that been about? What was it/is it all about! Millions of people intimidated into believing that death itself, the ultimate answer, walking into its arms in any way they were able, fighting each other with a flat fatalism, the sheer magnificence of War, its overpowering, all consuming fire, ravaging reason to nothingness.
Concerned myself with very little, lying on my solitary bed, which ever hour of the day or night suited, wandering aimlessly, the streets of London stretched out taunt in my brain, only the rumbling of the Taxi with its drifting blue smoke giving any indication of my contact with the reality, that I existed at all. Occasionally, becoming aware I did have passengers in the rear of the vehicle, that a certain direction was required.
It was ‘Nothing’, this word becoming a key in my existence, following insidiously where ever life was to take me. Years later, in Thailand, was to find a very young woman stating two very interesting ideas, one, that she ‘loved me’, a deep surprise, something I had never concerned myself with, having long given up. The other was to make me stop still in my tracks. She had written a small note in English, thin wavery writing on a piece of school note paper, (she was a College Student) a few lines. The one that stood out being “life for me has no meaning ... it is ...’nothing’...”
From one so young, such a remark could only create sadness, but to use what I considered my word, caused me seriously to look at her.
Her deep, brown, clear, untroubled eyes staring straight past my dark glasses, straight into the hidden, innermost recesses of my consciousness, very few people, if anyone at all, had ever caught me so completely off guard ... so unaware.
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