Book 3
No one wants to read my books or my blogs or anything. I do not exist.
So unedited Book 3 is here
I’m hoping that digital data will survive is some way after I die and the world has ended, and stories of how the world was are of interest again.
The traffic ploughed with a menacing hiss the black fast road beside me. My hair was wet. Water dripped onto my neck and down my back. I felt resentful. A man could die on a night like this, I thought, and yet no one stopped to offer me a lift. My thumb was cold: my face like stone.
I was a fool to stand and wait and yet I had thought that the human race would not have by passed a chance to play the Good Samaritan, especially in rain like that. It was a common evil, a British evil that should have brought forth some sympathetic comfort: a warm car in which to steam a bit. But it had not.
With my hands in my pocket I jigged a bit and almost stumbled over iced feet. Another passenger-less car passed and joined the perpetual stream of light down the shiny slip road. I cursed every businessman who ever lived to drive. A full bouncing family car looked upon me with disapproving pleasure. People did not have to stand out in the rain; I could almost hear them saying. I must have deserved it or desired it.
I did not desire it. I could say nothing about what I deserved for I judged no one, least of all myself. I had no other thoughts except the wish to be warm and dry – to be enclosed and cut off from those people who saw, and as I imagined judged, me. But the night drove on and the wind seemed to grow worse not better. I was a statue when at last a car slowed down in front of me. I watched it with bemused eyes. With an effort, I persuaded my muscles to move again to pick up my saturated bag and to walk towards the black car. Although there were many orange lights shining all around me, the darkness seemed intense against the brilliance of the car’s blood red brake lights. With the curling mist that escaped from the car’s exhaust it was almost daunting like a scene from a horror film. The car door swung open, and the sound of music drifted out, intertwining with the scarlet light, and I tried to shake these images from me.
The rain still struck me with intensity as if it knew and disliked me. I looked inside the car and saw a young man, with an oddly familiar but likeable face. Sitting down, I shut out the rain. I felt the dampness of my clothes and hair again, senses refreshed perhaps by relief and warmth.
‘Not a pleasant evening,” the young man said. I could agree with that wholeheartedly.
‘Where are you trying to get to?”
‘Where are you going to?”
‘London.”
‘That will be fine,” I answered.
The car began to move again, and slipped into the mainstream traffic of the motorway with the silent elegance of a snake. The music, which completely surrounded me, was also oddly familiar and yet I was unable to put a name to it or even to remember where I had heard it before.
I found the rain a comfort; racing down the nose cone window. Being inside the car was like being inside a warm house at Christmas time. The dark skies outside and the chill in the air were reminders that humanity was no longer dependent upon nature. They could set themselves aside from the irritations of the world and pretend that there was no other existence than the one they created. And even this thought was not comfortable. It led me to consider nature as a lurking intruder determined to break up the party.
Without rattling, almost without a sound the car sped along the inner light-framed lane. I fell into sleep, only disturbed by the knowledge that some people would have expected me to make conversation. Somehow, I felt that the young man who said nothing to me preferred it that way. It was a great relief, and this relief coloured my dreams with warmth.
Chapter One.
