He’s looking at me through narrowed eyes, slits in the mystery of a face: a furrowed mock-serious forehead, fleshy lips, and a non-descript sort of nose and the usual grizzled hair and beard. Plus he’s wearing a heavy overcoat and a scarf that is wound tight around his neck.
‘You,’ he says, in a somewhat high-pitched voice, ‘alienated . . . ‘ There’s a grin of stained teeth, ‘you want to buy your soul back?’
I’m not too sure about this. Why can’t he sell smuggled watches or cigarettes, mobile phones or cocaine? But souls? And my own soul, my soul, which I assumed was already an integral part of me, not to be separated from.
‘You’ve got my soul?’ I try to turn it into a joke. Perhaps he’s one of these people who hang around the high street, smiling, who are going to want to tell me about some charity, prior to persuading me to set up a direct debit.
‘Of course,’ he says, ‘I picked it up for a song in 1963.’
1963? JFK, Dylan, the Beatles, nuclear bombs? That was the year I came off a motorbike and ended up having emergency surgery. Was he hovering outside the window or perhaps he was the surgeon?
‘Wouldn’t I have known it was missing?’
He laughed.
‘You didn’t care then, you are stupid, you wouldn’t know either way.’
Stupid! That seems unnecessarily brutal.
‘How much?’ I ask. Let’s get this over and done with.
‘Cheap,’ he says, ‘a million euros.’
‘That sounds like a bargain, is that all my soul is worth?’
Sarcasm or not, that’s a big heap of money but the funny thing is only yesterday I had been slipped a bundle of used 500 euro notes that I suspect are counterfeit. But I remain curious as to the mechanics of the deal. What would be the exchange? A million euros in notes sounds tangible; a soul, well, who knows (excepting the devil or God, I guess) what that looks like if anything at all. Does it come in a jar? How and where had he stored it for the last forty eight years?
He slips me a card. I peer at it but all I can see is some Arabic script and as I peer at it he slips away into the crowd.