Jim read Chapter Seven of the story again and again.

“He came back.”

He hadn’t written that. It wasn’t his hand. In fact, that had been the area of the story he had struggled with. Now, it was perfect. He stared at the plate, empty, save for a few clean chicken bones and smears of spice sauce. Those to whom he’d been introduced in the previous days filled his head. The Yemeni woman, the even younger Japanese pilot and the apprentice fisherman, taken a couple of days after his seventeenth birthday.

He looked at the veins on the backs of his hands, the blood pumping, a miracle of nature; not of God. He recalled the stagnant blood in the veins of his late wife, seconds after her last breath. The burden upon him now was huge.

The rest of his day was filled with chores. Jobs which he’d previously side-stepped. Laundry, ironing, dishwashing; everything now had a value, a currency. In a strange way, he cherished every seemingly trivial task. None of them were pointless. He’d witnessed pointless first hand, thanks to his trio of spirits.

He decided to take a walk to the beach, something else he’d given up in his singularity. Pulling on a fleece, he stepped out into the cool autumn air. It was incredible how he saw the world in a different light, through a new pair of eyes.

Walking through Village Court, a small residential development for retired people, Jim considered how most of the inhabitants would fail to exist in any form soon. These thoughts were compounded as he passed the imposing red brick building of St Mary’s church.

‘There is no afterlife, no Heaven and no Hell.’

Marguerita’s words came back to him as he cast his eyes over the representation of an institution dedicated to–nothing.

He knew he’d have to get used to these thoughts, whether he could deal with them was another story. The North Sea opened out before him, as still as that ocean into which the young Kamikaze pilot had plunged.

Then, his mind wandered to João. A century earlier the young man had taken his first voyage across that very same sea; only to be swallowed up by its anger. Another example of the power of nature.

The late autumn sun was painting a colourful pallet behind him in the west, the clouds like dark blue strokes from the brush of Van Gogh. Nature was the true religion, he contemplated. Hundreds of millions of years of minute changes. Billions of days and trillions of hours, each one different to the one before. How absurd it was, humanity. How sensible was nature’s answer to it.

Something pushed its way to the front of Jim’s crowded mind, as he took a seat on one of the memorial benches. These items of outdoor furniture were placed there by relatives of the recently deceased. Each one bore a tiny brass plaque, with the name of the loved one and their birth and death dates. Some were adorned with gifts.

Eric Johnston 

1932 – 2014

“He loved this special place”

Sandwiched between a sorry looking toy dog and a vase full of plastic daffodils, both attached to the bench with cable ties, a picture came to focus in Jim’s mind. Absurdism meant Albert Camus, his other literary hero.

A large black crow landed on the pavement before him. Tilting its head, it looked at Jim with one, black unblinking eye. He was momentarily in its spell. Then, emitting a loud ‘caw’, the bird crouched and launched itself into the air above the sea. Jim watched the bird gliding back and forth with the air currents.

He recalled looking at the Camus accident scene in monochrome. The photograph showed what was left of a car, wedged up against a giant plane tree. It was only recognisable from the single remaining wheel.

Albert Camus was a French philosopher and author, born in Algeria to French Pied Noir parents. The expression, black foot, refers to people of largely French descent, who were born in Algeria. 

Camus had his fingers in many literary pies, including novelist, playwright and journalist, as well as being a political activist. However, it is as an author of both fiction and non fiction and his philosophy for which he will be remembered. He died as a result of a road accident in January 1960, the circumstances of which are still open to conspiracy theories. 

As a keen reader, Jim absorbed the novels of Camus and he became a huge influence on him. Another university assignment sprang to mind. The one about the Algerian-French philosopher. He had often wondered where the story originated. Taking out his phone, he located the document and opened it.