‘I remember when I first met her. Well I can’t really, I think it’s one of those reconstituted memories. I’m not even clear as to why I’m going here’.

 

‘Going where?’ she laughed. She seemed to be in a state of perpetual happiness, always just so relaxed. I  was fascinated by her presence as she sat there, gliding us through the crazy streets of somewhere in London, in a bright bright yellow van, decorated with big bright red and orange flowers on the outside,  a kailedoscope of bouquets behind us.

 

‘First meetings, last meetings, births, deaths, they’re a good place to start’.

 

I was unsure exactly what I was starting. That’s not quite true either. Part of me was well aware of the path that lay ahead, or may lie ahead.  I was going round in circles and I had been aware of it for sometime. 

 

She was young, I was young. Neil Young played at our wedding. I am just a dreamer and you are just a dream, you could have been anyone to me.

 

‘You’re not wrong there…’ I murmured, unsure of myself, unsure of the ground ahead. As I was everytime this happened. ‘Perhaps that is the human condition’ I said to her.  Something was happening here. That something. 

 

‘As in something is happening here Mr Jones.’ she paused, looking across at me, before continuing, ‘and you don’t know what it is.’

 

Fucking hell, I thought, now, of all times. Yet why not? In fact it somehow seemed so so  ’appropriate’. I smiled as someone in my past raised their hands to their shoulders, fingers curled, bobbing up and down, and before long every second word I wrote was in quotation marks, or should have been I thought at the time.  Wittgenstein zoomed though my mind and he looked remarkedly like The Reverent Buckley, an ex-colleague of mine, when I was working as an auditor.

 

‘An auditor!’ She looked at me half-mockingly as she coasted us to a stop behind a pile of cars that stretched all the way up to the flashing lights of a police car parked in the middle of Wimbledon Village.

 

‘And what may I ask is so noteworthy about me being an auditor?’ I  gabbled.  It was a ploy, a piece of ego-stroking on my part. I had never matched most people’s views of what an auditor looked like, and  the type of auditor I had been had nothing to do with the numbers, which I have always made a point of avoiding.

 

The gabbling I was aware was a vain attempt to keep her next thought away from what lay ahead.

 

Of course I failed.

 

‘Well Mr Auditor’ she said with a grin, ‘it’s the one on your side of the road, down past the lights, you know it?’ Before I could answer, she spoke again, slowly it seemed, time was stretching out, I wanted to break into this extended moment, scream ‘STOP’, scream anything as the words came, ‘may be best, seeing as it’s getting a little late and there appears to be a slight hold-up, that you leave me here and cover the rest on foot’.  She finished with the most charming flutter of her face, and the wildest smile I had ever seen.

 

Right here, right now, sitting in this bright, beautiful vehicle, full of flowers, full of her smile, I didn’t want to leave. Though looking back, of course I did. I did. I left. With a quick ‘thanks’ I was out the door, and my head had control of my legs and I was down the road, striving it seemed to me then, to complete a mission that no longer seemed relevant.

 

Yet the further I left that delightful van and that delicious (he rolled the word around as he smiled slightly to himself) woman behind the more my focus returned to the task at hand. Or so I thought.

 

‘Now’, he paused for effect, ‘now I know that I was already confused,’ another pause and a slight tilt of the head, ‘well I’m always confused’.

 

‘Perhaps’, I ventured, ‘it was the scent of all those flowers?’  Perhaps you were intoxicated?’

 

 

to continue…

 

 

 

 

Tags: loosefiction

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