It Had to Be You (33 page)

He looked up into the – not the heavens … heavens, no – into the sky. He was alone, alone with only the whole solar system, the vast galaxies, the unimaginable distances, the inconceivable immensity of it, and here mankind was on one piddling little planet, and he was of no significance on this planet, he wasn’t even important in so-called Great Britain, he was just a speck in the vast sprawling city of London, he didn’t even stand out in Islington, he didn’t stand out in his street in Islington, damn it, until last Wednesday he hadn’t even been the best person living in his house.

And now he believed – he wasn’t arrogant enough to say that he knew – that there was no life after death. His time on this earth would be, in cosmic terms, laughably short. He also believed, therefore, that he was not serving some overall purpose outside his own life. He realised that the excitement that had surprised him a few minutes ago was not something that would be recognised as exciting by a lot of people in this world of ours. It was an excitement that would involve no death, no blood, not a pathologist in sight. It was an excitement that involved only himself and the most important part of his body. And it was not – and oh goodness how it was not, and oh goodness how until now it might well have been and almost certainly had been – his penis. It was his brain. Perhaps people ignored their brains because they were invisible. Perhaps if every time a man had a thought his brain grew large and erect, men would respect their brains more.

He felt excited, challenged, by his belief that his life was not serving God’s purpose. It meant either that life was without purpose or that we must find our own purpose in it. He felt, with a surge of optimism, that without belief in a received purpose in life, he had the strength to make his own life purposeful, that indeed those who did not believe in God were in a stronger position to make their lives meaningful and responsible, because there was no divine being onto whom they could thrust the responsibility.

He sat on his cast-iron bench in the lovely garden that Deborah had built. He looked up into the vast universe, and could see nothing, not a star, because in the glow of lights over London it’s not easy to see the vastness of space. But he knew that it was all there, in its immensity, and that Deborah’s lovingly created garden had no more significance than a pinhead. But you can store all the words of
War and Peace
on a pinhead, and he felt encouraged by his knowledge of his insignificance, he felt freed by his puniness, stimulated by his unimportance, intoxicated by the brevity of his life. There was no reason for anyone to be pompous or self-important, to boast of success, to seek high office by low means. In the tininess of our lives compared to the infinite nature of space, in the brevity of our lives in the context of eternity, there lay freedom, release, and a need, oh, such a need if one really believed in this, to make the most of one’s little life, and to try to bring something into the little lives of other people. It was worthwhile, however little, because those lives were so little. Goodness, that sounded preachy, but in view of the amount of preaching done to us in the name of God, why should a humanist be ashamed of one small sentence of good intent?

And the good intent that he so miraculously felt, this to him was the final and the biggest happening on this day of happenings. He could hardly wait, time sped by so fast, to begin the rest of his life, and he knew that there was nothing in this wish that was disrespectful to Deborah and her untimely death. He would remember her, and honour her in his thoughts, every day for the remainder of his little life.

A clock, somewhere over towards Stoke Newington, struck twelve. An owl, somewhere near Highbury, struck two in reply, or that was how it seemed to James. He had read of birds bonding unsuitably. Could an owl bond with a clock? Could it believe that it was getting a message of love every fifteen minutes?

He smiled, and he thought, even as he smiled, that it was odd, and perhaps a little miraculous, that he could still smile at the end of such a day as this.

He walked towards his sleeping, snoring house, and he realised that he felt – and this was strange too – as calm as he had ever felt in his life.