NAG need a god E-Book

Colm Michael O'Driscoll

• Herausgeber: Europa Edizioni
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Can the sight of a fly landing on a rock lead to the realisation of the ephemerality of existence? For Clem, it can. He is in his forties, he drives a taxi in Cork, and he lives in waiting: waiting to earn more money, waiting to finish his book of poems, waiting to move to Madrid – the promised land – where he hopes to open a bar and start living for real. And while he waits, he thinks. A lot.
Reading this book, we soon find ourselves floating in a complex stream of consciousness featuring cosmic journeys, epiphanies, cold wars fought online with ex-girlfriends, and a good dose of self-sabotage. In the midst of all this, a single, obsessive question keeps coming back with haunting insistence – the only question worth asking: What is the meaning of life?

Colm Michael O’Driscoll was born in 1971 in Ireland. He has had a passion for writing from an early age, developing a unique forthright style by composing multitudes of poems and scripts in his bedroom throughout his teenage years. Working with the public, helped him empathise with the many of the masses who encounter difficulties that go unseen or unheard, whilst realising his own shortcomings.
He moved to Madrid in 2012, where he lives and works as an English Teacher. He has published a well-received poetry book I n the Latter Stages of Something Else (2012), and a novel Not Quite a Christmas Carol (2019).

Leseprobe

Colm Michael O'Driscoll

NAG need a god

© 2022 Europe Books| London www.europebooks.co.uk | [email protected]

ISBN 9791220139571

First edition: April 2023

NAG

need a god

Chapter 1 So, It Is! Amen!!

It’s a fly, by a rock pool.

“Haven’t seen you in years!!” Clem says.

“Well… not you, but your grandfather.” Clem starts the calculation in his head.

‘About fifteen years since I’ve seen one of you, so it’s…’ He without calculating much further accepts it is indeed many generations on.

It is March, mid-morning, mild but a little sting of winter lingers. He considers himself and slowly lifts his view to the cliffs.

“So that’s how you see me!! I’m the fly!

“You’ve seen my parents and grandparents!!!... And all before me.”

Clem looks to the sky. The moon is in the right quarter.

“And you, you have seen the cliffs move like Olympic athletes… and us,” his voice fades “crawl from the sea.” It’s the death of heaven. He sees it now.

Clem smiled oddly, he’d struck upon something that had engulfed him of relief and fear. Inside, he didn’t want to be right on this but it was time to start facing facts. It is a search that he alone, without assistance, decided to embark upon. He felt closer to the essence of the universe. Had it eaten and fascinated him all this time?

“So what force is there? That relates to the moon as it does the cliffs, to humans as to the fly?”

“The stars!” As he spoke it, he thought, ‘just another step’. “Big Bang! Or God?”

He paused on that thought and instead moved to the thought of humanity. He knows we have crawled from the sea. This is indisputable now.

“Why have children stillborn?” he asks.

“Why have a baby die after a second, ten seconds, a minute, twenty minutes, a day, a week.” Clem starts to walk along the beach, removing himself physically so his mind may follow, for he is not entirely comfortable with the depth to which this subject could lead.

“Like roadkill, like the carcass of rabbits, crows, cats.” He saw a cat once, the silhouette of one, in the glare of his headlights kicking its legs and feet skyward, exhaustive last struggle of life as he drove a secondary country road one night.

“Is that all we are?” he thinks of the food animals become that pass on into the eco chain. He realises we are part of the whole system whether integral or not, he remains unsure, “but we are of it!”

Clem ponders some more, he is now heading away from the beach towards his car. ‘What of the first time we as humans see an animal? That experience stays with us. It is carried with us, through our life.’ He continues, ‘so we carry experiences with us and pass them on to others. Good, bad, brilliant, mundane.’

Clem leans against his taxi. “The pain, the joy. Who, what inflicts or impresses us? Everything that has gone before,” he answers. “Everything that has ever happened in the universe!!...My first memory?” he ponders. Clem looks quickly around again, enters the car and drives home. It is 2010.

Everything has changed. He’s still gambling, if only he could save two thousand euros. He’d put it into a stock account and build from there. He just couldn’t stop gambling. He was running away, hiding always hiding.

Why did he keep going? He’d got a loan for his own taxi, no bills with a free run of a relatively big house but he still couldn’t stop gambling. It was the draw, the comfort, the ability to hide away from the world outside. He hated it now though. He worked hard but constantly gambled it away. Was this his existence? To go earn, pay some bills and gamble? Surely not? Surely not now? His friends were moving on, getting girlfriends, marrying, having babies, buying houses. He’d seen enough as a child to believe this was not necessarily the only way.

It wasn’t always glory and light and somewhere behind many a four walled house resided a lot of pain. He’d rather be something else but he was pushing on, wasn’t this the thing to do though?

Yes, but not for him, not now anyway, not yet. ‘But when? Maybe never.’ He’d seen his parents ending up in dead-end existences. Glossed over by time and false memories. But pain had existed, lots of it. Clem wanted glory, comfort, sweetness. He really didn’t know what he wanted. As imperfect as his father was, his mother, a lovely woman, was no saint either. Whether they were loyal to each other sexually or not, he presumed so, but assumed nothing, for if their loyalty to each other led to this, then what was the point.

Clem had to call to mum, it was Saturday, the day he brought her for a spin. Saturdays had drawn tiresome. Mother was heading back toward dementia, old age and poor health.

The process began. “Will we be back for tea?” Up to two hundred questions in over an hour. The stop in the carpark. The walk to the shop. Tea, loads of milk no sugar. Latte. A cream doughnut. The return to the car. Fast eating, fast drinking, questions coming through the bubbles, coughing. Spillage. Cleaning, Clem wasn’t fussed on that. It happens. It was a little annoying. No answer he gave ever enough. It had driven his father crazy. It was easy to see why. It hurt, it frustrated. It was a case of being there, wanting to be there was not the purpose. She suffered the most. Clem knew that, they all knew that. In the midst of all the questions she was still there, conscience. ‘Seeing oneself frustratingly suffer a mental form of incontinence, that must be a really really strange thing to witness.’ He could understand.

Clem had done it. Did it all the time. That point where he’d do or say something that was done by the time he tried to stop but Clem still had brakes. He could still pull it, recognise it, steer it. This control was gone from his mother.

Saturday duty was done, he needed a rest. Away. A few hours in bed, an hour in front of the television.

It was just a mess. And Clem’s life without a mess was as normal as it was with one. A million euros and he’d be out of there. Everything would be so different. Somewhere, someday down the line he’d get there but it hadn’t happened yet, already all these years on. Still gambling, still hoping, still losing, inherently self-destructive. He promised himself so many times as he left the casino, ‘this will be the last time ... I promise!’

He pulled at every piece of symbolism going. It was likely he’d be there again tomorrow or in two days or three. The hours crept by, turned to days, months, years. He was heading towards forty now. Too old for a lot of things, still time if he got his act together. He’d run away so many times.

The second time when he was eighteen, he was staying in the college suburbs. He’d turned into a petty thief and got rumbled. Gambled it all. He returned home. Got his bicycle the following morning and traded it in for enough money to get a ticket to London. Walked fifty miles that day, hungry with barely enough to rattle in his pockets, making it to his Aunt’s house and waited a few days for his brother to collect him. He’d survived. Situations would happen, had happened, in his family life, getting himself into needless bother but he would survive.

Between thirty and forty he settled a bit. No relationships. They were still wishy-washy affairs, hypothetical as much as real. He formed two great friendships though. They would be a great help and bring some semblance of normality to his life. Clem was a misfit of sorts, fundamentally happy with life but having to dust himself down more regularly than most, finding the will to get up and fight again, that was getting harder.

It was sticking out, starting to. What a lot of people said. Clem needed to get two tyres changed. The guy was in the cabin of the workshop. Clem walked through and knocked.

“What can I do for you?” the worker asked.

“Two tyres, front right and boot!” Clem suggested.

It was cold. A sharp wind blew along the quiet street. The worker was well covered in clothes. His runners, nondescript health issue, pushed against the pedal to start the turning wheel. Clem didn’t ask himself how many times those dirty oily runners pushed that pedal, he stopped in the flow of thought, he didn’t need to know. Clem waited, not too long, but waited. He’d been there last month and waited then too.

“What is it?” Clem asked, “the tyres! They're gone I’d say,” he continued.

Hoping it was only a puncture but if it was a tyre, then it was a tyre. He just really wanted it to be over. To be away. It didn’t hold him, but for a second, the trainers did.

“I’ll have a look at them for ya.” “Ta!” Clem said.

A man, in a pick-up, just taking off was reaching to light a cigarette “You should…” he paused in midstream, “you’re right too.” It was still cold. The wind.

“Are ye busy?”

“Nah!” Clem hadn’t thought much about the answer but it was the easiest one, the one that had least follow on.

“Ye?” he asked.

“Nah, dead.” The worker was as reluctant as Clem about a conversation. A local old guy, Clem recognised his face, something seemingly strange or wrong with him passed by, he’d been involved in a football team or a small bookie, he was stretching to say something, looking, waiting for something from Clem. Two birds caught his attention in the sky. Clem managed an acknowledgement of the man, with his head. He turned away, that was enough.

“The boss is a bollocks… always moaning when it’s quiet,” the worker said.

“I know, they’re always the same,” Clem agreed. The wind still stinging.

“The winter’s a bitch here I’d say,” Clem claimed.

The worker gave him an affirming look.

“Do you work days or nights?” the worker asked, the questions still basic.

“Nights,” Clem answered.

“Couldn’t do those days? Hanging around, traffic!” the worker replied. Clem could see he was saying it from experience, he knew about waiting, just waiting.

“As bad and all as I am now, I’d go completely crazy if I did days,” Clem offered.

“Yesterday was busy but the rest of the days are…” the worker needed to say no more. They knew. It ended up being only two punctures. It was good to be in the warmth of the car, driving.

Conversations, all the conversations. People gave themselves up in conversations. Clem had had too many of them. The conversation with that worker was fine. He knew, he knew Clem knew. There wasn’t the need for extra words. It wasn’t their thing. Clem needed the tyres repaired, the worker needed to work his hours.

Chapter 2 Why Are We Here?

Clem has been driving a taxi for nine years. He’s forty years old now and counting down the days until he leaves Ireland and heads for Spain. Two hundred and sixty-four days. There’s a girl, ‘there’s always a girl.’ They met once, only once, two and a half years ago in Zaragoza. Their friendship, as modern ones sometimes do, grew over the internet.

Both are complex, seem quite open but are terribly shy, and extremely stubborn. He has decided after a few aborted attempts to make a permanent move. Well, permanent enough to give it a chance anyway. Mariella, could well be making a fool of him or visa verse.

It was November now, 2011. The economy in Ireland was grim. It had been late June when Clem set his ‘plan’ in place. On a wet summer’s evening he went to work. At four thirty in the evening. Hungover, relative broke, both metaphorically and literally running from the bookies, this time saying nothing, knowing. He did not want to live this life anymore. The carpets, the lights, the screens, the sounds, the buzz. He wasn’t in here.

Clem wasn’t too dismayed about what he was. He seemed okay knowing he could have done more aesthetically but that would be just cheap recognition for toeing a line he didn’t believe in. He’d toe the line to some degree, caring for his mother, showing up for things, understanding people. He’d done donkey work and received plaudits for it but that rarely put extra on a kitchen table. Reward was reward. Inside himself there was an issue to deal with that no money, love or praise could answer. That if he could find it, it would be the greatest reward of all.

What did he know? About what? About anything? Too vague! About himself?

He’s good at messing up, messing up his life?

According to who? The general consensus, what does that mean? Hmmm…

It was Thursday in June, he just turned on the cab radio. The base was working. It took him a little while to push himself. The base operator was busy. “Car six!!” he checked in for work. “Clem? At this time?” the operator called back. From then he just started working, he worked the weekend, twelve hours each day. He worked Monday, Tuesday, big shifts, big hours. Whatever zone he was in, he didn’t want to be disturbed. There was the odd call from inside his mind, ‘take a break’, ‘an hour’, ‘you deserve it!’ He was calm, ignored himself.

He worked hard and within two weeks he’d around fifteen hundred euros. Picked the seventh of August 2012 as a confirmed date for departure. He told everyone and anyone, whether they wanted to listen or not, he knew he was doing it to brainwash himself.

On July twenty-seventh, he walked away from the bookies for the last time. “One year, just give it one good year!” He worked well until the end of August and was above three thousand euros. He had opened an investment account. Clem had completed a stock market course two years previous, he acknowledged the importance of money for this period, this was everything that he was. As that part inside of him, fought with the part of him that was pushing him on. Clem was determined to use every means possibly to get the task done.

Mariella and his online relationship was hitting another rocky patch. They had a blazing row which ended in him deleting her in late September… She was about to set him up. He’d begged for a day and half but when she was ruthless, she was ruthless. Clem continued with his plan. He wanted her in his ideal world but he also knew he really wanted out of this one. It was his ‘leap of faith’. She’d be a prize at the end of this but he was also using it to drive himself. He wanted to leave with about forty thousand euros. He’d love to have sixty thousand, but he’d accept twenty thousand as a minimum… he’d still go with ten.

September, October and Clem started running out of steam. Twelve-hour shifts started turning into ten, to eight, to six or seven… enough to keep him going, without adding to or detracting from his lump sum which stood at six thousand. He’d lost twelve hundred in the stock market, he’d leave those shares alone and go long.

Clem, had been drifting back to the question. It was a way to stop thinking of Mariella. ‘You think of that! ...instead of distracting me from getting money together,’ he’d scold himself. It would be good to be rid of as much emotional baggage when he boarded that plane. He’d deal with it now! For the duration, as best he could. He had to keep going.

‘My first memory?’ he asked himself. ‘My first memory, that is still with me, it’s a poor one, I remember falling out of a cot. And then, my grandparents in dark clothes, climbing to the landing of the stairs, before coming to my side.’

His mother told him stories of how he sat on his grandfather’s knee and wouldn’t say a word. Clem didn’t remember it now but could remember remembering a gold and red lid of a small tea-chest. ‘I managed to get my hands on it once, I didn’t like the contents. It was better with the lid on. I don’t think I liked my grandparents either.’ Clem paused thinking if he had to go on with it.

‘I remember baby food, then it was changed for something gruesome. Why this, instead of the other stuff?

…the beginning of what’s good for you!’

He again ventured back into his memory. One morning the kitchen was busy but not loud. There were figures, people. Other people existed. He’d a new coat. Dark blue with a red ladybird pattern. Clem stayed in the corner of the kitchen. Out of the way but in the way of the door that led to the side drive. The figures left one by one and as the door swung back to close, the space in the kitchen grew, until the door remained closed. Absence. Only that person in the chair between the fridge and the table remained. She was his favourite thing in the world. She would pick him up and swing him wildly before chewing into his cheek. It was wonderful.

Between the ages of four and seven, memories become a little more lucid. By the time he was seven, he had learnt to hate! He learnt to steal.

A neighbour’s friend worked in the post office and dropped Clem and Peter twenty yards from the school gate every morning. They waited through all weathers for the fat grey man, Mr. Andersson, to open the gate. They were always the first there. He was liked by most kids, Clem was indifferent. They played in the yard until it was time for assembly. The nuns would bring them to the class. When the coldest part of winter arrived, they skipped assembly and went straight to the classroom. Older neighbourhood children, Tim and Brian started coming too, they had a bigger school nearby.

Biscuits. The sister had a box of biscuits that she would hand out as a reward for good behaviour. Iced caramel biscuits. Clem loved those biscuits. Every morning, the box became more and more tempting. He can’t remember precisely the moment they took the first biscuits but as the days went on they took more and more. One day, as they were gathered around the box, the door behind them opened. A strange feeling entered his entire body. Not a good one.

His pockets were stuffed to the brim and only crumbs remained. Crumbs to feed the rest of the class. The rest of the winter was cold in the yard.

The next memory of school was being berated by his mother after walking triumphantly, the one-and-a-half mile home on his own. Not only was it irresponsible but he never told his sister, who up until that point had collected him. It wasn’t that he forgot her, he was fed up of waiting, always waiting, so to put an end to this situation he’d resolved to take matters into his own hands. He was promptly ordered to walk back to the school and find her. A week or so later, Clem was allowed walk home on his own.

December now. The effects of the economy were kicking in harder than ever and society never seemed more united in its alienation. The stories of how bad things were, were not entertained in Clem’s taxi. Straight to the point, generally.

Clem became a little non plussed about the whole idea. ‘Looking for what?’ He quickly realised that ‘shit happens’. He was really trying to find out stuff about himself, before he got to that day.

Yeah, his father could be an over-the-top at times, seldom, a big violent prick. He’d been getting it in the ear from Kate now on her last three visits. Or was it forever? “He’s dead.” Clem had trouble for a while after his death. His father was still giving out to him in dreams.

He berated him in those dreams ‘Aren’t you dead?’ when his father would give out. Clem had summoned the courage to tell him ‘Fuck off,’ a few times during those dreams. The thing is Clem had told him in real life too. Were dreams meant to be a place where you said ‘I love you’? ‘Movie crock.’

Clem had been like that during the latter stages of his death. One of his regrets was not slipping him more cigarettes on his death bed. His father seemed to be okay with dying more than the rest of them. “It mustn’t be that bad, with all those drugs.” Clem would prefer to go that way. A year to say goodbye, ‘high’ on everything. Companionship, which was strange because his father liked time on his own. Was there a bit of his father thinking, ‘oh just let me go’, ‘that’s enough’? He died magnificently if there is such a thing.

He’d been a bitch of a patient. A quadruple bypass ten years earlier, ordered not to smoke. Too old, too set in his ways, too independent. It was the spirit of the working class. “I’ll do your work, give me my money and don’t tell me what to do.” If he could only stop telling people what to do, or how to do it himself… “We’re all at that!” Clem interjected.

But Clem was Clem, and his father asked what Kate asked, what a lot of people thought. “You’re twenty now, what are you going to do with your life? You’re twentyfive now what are you going to do with your life? You're thirty now, what are you going do with your life?” “Don’t ya think I’d like to know!” Clem would answer. That vexed him so much. The buffer between any line of crap, any lie, any scheme, to avoid hearing those questions. It was always a kangaroo court, otherwise why were those questions being asked. It was really saying ‘fit in’, ‘don’t be weird,’ definitely elements of concern, Clem was on his way to a whole lot of sorrow if he didn’t stop his ways. It was the most certain thing!

Clem buried it deep. Put it away so deep that those echoes would never come back to him. It might be construed as bottling it up but Clem was happy with the persona he’d developed over the years. Yeah, he was a capitalist now but that was temporary, that was to just get money, to get the hell away from here. He’d drop that cloak in Spain and become himself again.

The problem was Kate with her constant bitching and harping on about the past was ruining Clem’s already fulfilled closer on the subject of father. He had huge problems with Kate. She had problems with their father, Clem had. But his problems were as equal if not higher with Kate, personally and with what she represented. Her mantra was mind numbing. Clem came from a family of mantras.

They agreed that the nurture wasn’t great. In arguments with Kate he’d argue that it was better to come from a “dysfunctional family,” as she’d go on about it so often. “If you came from a perfectly functioning, normal, cradle-to-grave family, you’d be boring!! An endless bore!! The madness one must admit is rather entertaining, enlightening, educational. Yes, there were times it was horrible. But look around you,” he suggested, gesticulating around the estate “are they happy? ...That must be the most boring way to live a life ever, drab, dull, dreary, ‘Welcome to Stepford!’ way to exist of them all!!”

Kate would agree, and then rant off continuing to agree at first before going through a plethora of arguments, calling the whole world ‘dumb’ before finding

herself back at ‘why her?’

‘Why me?’ Clem would think.

Clem had never taken a cold rational look at himself. ‘Who’s rational?’ ‘What system? What ideology?’ but he was doing it, taking the modern twenty-first century view of himself as an individual, as a being, as a person. He already knew he was a ‘fuck-up,’ in that regard but he’d find a conclusion and then challenge that ideology.

Clem and his friends caught frogs. He was remembering again. It was a thing, they just did it. Clem wanted to do it too. They were about eleven or twelve. Clem had been taught how to steal. He became good at it. He was able to slip a glass litre of lemonade down inside the wellington boot in his plastic bag and fill the sides with chocolate biscuits. He was good at catching frogs. He didn’t care as much about frogs after that. He didn’t like what happened to them in the hands of the boys, but he was good at catching them.

He caught them and chucked them in the box. He was good with bees and butterflies, really good with butterflies but really good at stealing. He’d the knack!

For whatever period, be it six months or two years he was able to whip anything from the store. He didn’t like it but he got admiration. Then, one day he got caught, nearly shit his pants and stopped. Why did he go further? Why again did he have to wait until he was caught? Caught by the same person who’d caught him at the biscuits.

He was deathly over the consequences, not the wooden spoon that would be meted out to him but of being bold, being bad in his mother’s eyes. She never found out. In one of the lighter moments of the Saturday spins, she spontaneously burst into laughter. On further explanation she’d spotted the bookstore where she hocked her schoolbooks back in the day.

Clem played pitch and putt in the summers. He was okay, but everything was such a deadly competition to him. To be the best. He’d played more often than anyone, and instead of learning the correct techniques, would persist with his own methodology. He would cheat. He would cheat with younger kids. Have them stand near the hole and let it bounce off their shoe if it wasn’t going in on its own. Often he’d start again after three holes or two holes because he didn’t get the start he wanted. Eventually he would surrender to the guilt.

“So I was a weird child!” Clem interjected, thinking ‘where’s the crime?’ It took to him that he wasn’t always as innocent as he perceived himself to be. He got in trouble? What’s the measure? There was no great comfort or pleasure in what Clem was doing.

Clem got better, no cheating, he got to hole thirteen holding a ‘hot’ score. Hole fifteen holding a hot score. It was more than dribbling through to Clem that as an adult he’d been up to something similar recently enough, accompanied by a Kate cliché in the back of his mind “If you don’t learn from history…”, “Ah piss off, Kate!”

The memory evaporated. He can’t remember a significant roar! But he’d won a provincial chess championship as a child, on his own and in teams, a bit of inner happiness about that. ‘But there was no roar there either!!’ He argues.

Echoes came back in his head, ‘you never won a school championship’, tournaments, yes, championship, no, was that a thing to be regretful about? Was it a symptom? He hadn’t thought about it for years. With the open field of a provincial championship was he able to be a bit more inconspicuous as opposed the closer environment of the few, up close and personal? Clem wanted to brush it off but wanted to face it too. A Leonard Cohen song, Bird on the wire, rang through his mind.

There had been two events in his life, both while driving the taxi, where he had to deal with a situation. Coldly, efficiently, close. Where things depended on him. He’d done it both times with military precision, proficient military precision. He knew that. With all others, the consequences, in his control, were never going to result in death or life. Was it the space for choice in all other events that led to particular failures? Or was he being harsh? He scored winning goals in finals, he scored goals when they were needed, only ultimately to fail and sometimes, not often, he played poorly. Isn’t that just life? The way it works, no particular reflection on Clem? Wasn’t he just ordinary?

“Clem, what are you up to?” he said loudly to himself. “Is this movie crock?” Were those guys better than him, better because he cracked in certain fields of pressure. Is that why he cracked with women, was he a bit claustrophobic? Was he right to be claustrophobic? ‘Maybe.’

So why are we here? With all that has seemed bold, bad, mediocre or good isn’t it just a whole lot of ordinary! ‘Really, does that matter? Does it matter at all? Does it still hold a great effect on me now? Come on!!!’ yeah, you can see the map but is that going to make Clem run out and murder someone or marry someone because everything is better now, because he realised his father didn’t hug him enough?

Once a traveller was in his taxi, trying to do better for himself. He got the flesh beaten out of him every day by his father with a big stick. Everyday, that’s something to be a bit messed over. And that traveller was messed up over it but learnt from it. Understood in time, that it was wrong what had happened to him and did something about it. Finding for himself what he thought was the best life for him.

Clem didn’t have it that bad. It effected him but it was more an education, a curiosity that held him. The moon, the sky, time, the workings of things. Was it his escape? “Talk to a psychiatrist,” Kate goes off in his head again, she’s coming home for a holiday soon. “He’s a psychiatrist, he’s got a PHD!!”

Clem has got “and George Bush was the president of the United States” lined up as a rebuttal to an argument they’ll have. Kate hates Bush. She’s a socialist, Clem thinks only maybe, she insists on it.

And she’ll agree again with him, and Clem will add “and how many people will psychiatrists cure?” and she’ll agree some more and she’ll find her way back to ‘PHD’, ‘University’ and ‘Me, Me, Me’… Clem knows he’s got his own problems with ‘Me, Me, Me’ and they come out in him as visible to her, as hers to him.

‘What other shit is there?’

Clem parks it, the thinking, the rational, goes working. He’s not in the mood tonight. The thinking has taken over his work ethic. Mariella’s on his mind. Spain’s on his mind, his mum is on his mind, she’s supposed to be on his mind. ‘Me, Me, Me’. It was just a period thing. A thing to do while he’s here, waiting. He wonders, consciously accepting he’d ask himself to stop, upon the notion of self. What is he of?

‘You’re a taxi driver!’ Is that all they see? ‘I’m a man who drives a taxi. That person in the bar is not a barwoman, she’s a woman who works behind a bar. That beggar on the ground is a human who needs money! That policeman is a man who works… okay, bad example… cheap, Clem, cheap.’ He’s driving around, giggling a little to himself. Shrugging his shoulders. As if what does the whole of it matter anyway? To who? Who are ‘they’? As much as what Clem is to Clem? As close to gods as much as near to nothing, that’s what we are really. Like a lot of pieces of grain. From the skies, that’s what we look like, pieces of grain. The day, an ever--changing perspective.