So many die impoverished

yet not for lack of cash

while most of us are oblivious

who count among those ranks.

But now it’s time that we declare

our bankruptcy in truth

face bailiffs and foreclosure

for nihilism’s dues.

For we’ve said it in so many ways

that faith is just for fools

when we thought we were in the driver’s seat

such faith it had no use.

But there is another way my friend

I’ll tell you what that is:

we just say yes with all our hearts

and hear how spirit sings.

As he backed away into the shadows he called out to him ‘pay heed my friend pay heed for, though I may look a fool, I am the only drop of hope in an ocean of despair, an ocean far more immense than any you can name’ and then he was gone.

Now on this remote windswept hillside, the white noise of the gale begins to overwhelm his stinging exposed ears, as his reddened skin is suddenly pelted by pins of merciless rain, and he wonders if he might ever again remember who he is, where he had come from and where it is that he had been going. He continues to watch the anoraked figure and sees him approach the village at the foot of the hill, which, as in a dream, has now been wiped for him of any vestige of familiarity, and so, without a thought, he follows in his wake.

Years ago when I ran a small business in London as a mobile computer technician, he had been one of my regular clients.

I don’t remember his name now but when you were up close you could get that smell of vodka or gin, the way it smells only after being processed and sweated through a human body, not an absolutely terrible smell or anything but a sad and telling one, and you would never have otherwise known. He had very red cheeks with some faint broken veins and I don’t know if he made any money from his squeezyball enterprise or whether it was just to pass the time or give him some sense of orientation.

His house was narrow and pokey and sat on the outer extreme of some vast nameless estate in Northwest London; the front garden was small and untended and overgrown and the rooms inside not so well lit, with their small windows. Everything seemed to be infused with a kind of gloomy grey light, with all the squeezyballs giving the house a smell of cheap plastic, the kind of smell you get in a discount shop, but it was clean enough, with walls covered in fading post-it notes.

He gave me a water bottle once and sang its virtues as a water filter giving me his whole shtick; then he said I could keep that one because he had plenty more, and proceeded to introduce me to the best of his squeezyball collection.

He had an old Mac running an old operating system and he ran a defunct Microsoft email system on it that he swore by, even though it was the source of ninety percent of his frustration – this was his constant struggle, with emails that would mysteriously duplicate themselves over and over like viruses or else just disappear with no apparent cause. ‘it just doesn’t make any bloody sense’ he would say in exasperated and confounded tones as if his understanding of the intricacies of computing and information systems was in all other respects complete. It was a hopeless battle full of despair but still he would keep calling me back to fix it.

Squeezyball man used to speak with his contacts over the phone while I was there saying things like, ‘I’m up to my bloody neck in due diligence here!’

Squeezyballman seemed a little high strung but was always amicable. We didn’t usually talk much beyond pleasantries and basic small talk but one day he suddenly and unexpectedly told me out of the blue that his son, a law student who I had met a couple of times during my visits, was the thing he was most proud of and he said that he was still constantly amazed to think that he could have played any part in producing something so impressive as he. He had raised him alone from what I could gather from the photos hanging everywhere, his wife, the mother of his son, having been either long dead or long gone.

Squeezyballman had contacts in China and could do me a good deal in some new and special state of the art type of filtered water bottle that is manufactured there.

I hadn’t given squeezyballman a second thought since our last encounter many years ago until today suddenly and unannounced he mysteriously crossed the porous threshold of my mind again. In the vastness of time and space and infinite possibility, some might say that our chances of existing in the first place let alone of our paths ever crossing were so infetisemally small as to be zero for all human purposes and scales but for some reason that I don’t quite understand I now find myself feeling grateful that they did.

Jo straightens a crease on the sleeve of her blouse, a nervous habit. Jackie on her right sucks in her cheeks all day long making wet sucking sounds, occasionally popping to release when the pressure builds up. Desmond Flynn on Jo’s left side taps his cane against the floor in perfect uniformity stopping regularly for a few moments respite before resuming with a fresh enthusiasm. In front of her, Pat Flaherty, the lanky Dub with Tourette syndrome, shouts some random obscenities while flinging his arms in the air, and every now and then Jackie turns to her saying ‘three hundred… did you know that there were three hundred guests at our wedding? We had a band too. It was in the Silver Moon hotel.’ In the two years since Jo arrived she has heard Jackie only ever talk about her wedding. Jo smiles pleasantly at her and nods as she always does, then for a brief moment Jackie’s countenance flashes with a sudden dread, as if she had suddenly recognised her surroundings and her predicament, before getting back to the sucking and popping noises again. Now Desmond provides a brief respite from his tapping, and then he’s off again. The sleazy pop music, loud as it is, can’t quite drown out the symphony of snores and farts that nobody notices anymore; nor does the plug-in orchard blossom air freshener from Mr. Price – that doesn’t smell anything at all like orchard blossom – make any kind of job of covering up the layers of soggy turnip and cabbage smells, the residual particles that have soaked into the walls over the fifty years or so of their existence, in fact it only serves to frame them somehow. Someone else is gyrating and twerking on the Plasma screen now but she looks just like the last one. She’s singing about how much she wishes that her car had a ‘bigger gear stick’.

‘Fucking Brussels sprouts!’ Pat Flaherty shouts involuntarily, jumping to his feet and flinging his right arm in the air before carefully lowering himself to his seat again.

As she does most days, Jo thinks about her father and the time when she was very small, must have been about five, and he took her for a walk near the seaside in Ballybunion where the family of six used to holiday for a week every summer. She had been her father’s firm favourite. She is remembering how he had picked her up in his strong arms and how he had smelled of pipe tobacco. She had been wearing her favourite blue dress. She remembers how they had stood at the top of the steps – she in his arms – high above the beach on one of those warm late-August evenings where the sun isn’t quite setting but everything is golden and shimmery; how the distant sounds had seemed to be right up beside them, so that they could hear every detail for it seemed like miles in every direction. They had looked at each other and both understood everything for an instant, each knowing that the other knew and understood too – no separation and no need for words – with the seagulls, the ocean and the distant shrieks of children playing on the beach, and how she had put her arms around his neck and squeezed him so hard that her whole little body shook with effort and affection. She remembers how, in his final days, he had told her not to ever accept pity from anyone even in her darkest moments. Lately when she feels tired, she sometimes sees a faint elusive shadowy figure in her periphery but when she looks there is nobody there.

Desmond gets up and hobbles towards his ward. Nurse Fitzmaurice comes on duty and immediately changes the channel before sitting down next to Jo. ‘I hear your grandson paid you a visit yesterday’ she says to Jo in that tone that always goes through her. ‘I hear he’s a very handsome young man!’ Jo stares ahead without responding or showing any flicker of acknowledgement. ‘You must miss your family very much you poor thing. It’s a shame they don’t visit you more often.’

Jo turns to her slowly ‘My family? Not so much. There is one thing I do really miss though.’

‘Oh!’ says nurse Fitzmaurice surprised to be getting a response from Jo for once, ‘what would that be Jo my dear?’

‘sex.’

‘Oh!’ the startled nurse exclaims as she shuffles uncomfortably in her chair ‘you … you must really miss your husband. Wa…was he a nice man?’ she asks trying to divert the subject but Jo isn’t following her lead.

‘He was ok but he had no sensitivity or sense of anatomy.’ The nurse stares at the floor and shuffles some more, visibly blushing now. ‘After he died I had a few lovers, though not as many as some other women I knew. You know you never really lose interest in it, the sex I mean. You just don’t really have the energy for it anymore or the opportunity, but it never fully leaves you.’ The flustered nurse stands up abruptly and walks across the room to pick up the remote, flushed and grinning awkwardly in a futile attempt to conceal her discomfort. ‘Oh “Dancing with the Stars” is on soon.’ she says.

Jo smiles to herself quietly and Pat Flaherty suddenly shouts something about Japanese arse dildos as he springs to his feet like a jack in the box, arms reaching suddenly towards the heavens as if in spontaneous praise.