A Petal from the Lotus.

Martin Lunghi

As I write these lines I am being paid. Not a lot, mind you but then, on Coll, many of us are only too grateful for any sort of pay. If you're interested, I'm earning a pretty average rate of £2.50 per hour.

And how, you ask, do I earn this princely sum? What little service do I render,- what product passes from my hands; with what complexities does my finely honed mind have to grapple? Well, the answer, Im embarrassed to say, eludes me.

Perhaps you remember a TV panel game that used to he screened in the 50s, called 'What's My Line; where four questioning and questionable celebrities tried to arrive at contestants ' occupations. It wasn't really all that rivetting but one of the occupations seems to have made a lasting impression on my pubescent mind, namely, that of mattress tester.

Now, whether it was the obliquely sexual connotations of mattresses or the promise of paid supine indolence, I don't know, but since that time, I may well have been unconsciously seeking some sort of comparable profession. At any rate, I can think of no other explanation for my present peculiar sense of fitness for the job, of having arrived at some longsought destination.

My time here is spent sitting in a chair in an empty hall - the Community Hall actually. It is peaceful and warm. Outside the sun lends an uncharacteristic glow to the Hebridean 'summer' and the normally spiteful midges have been lulled into a mindless indifference to human flesh. Bees and flies hover and buzz aimlessly and there is a barely perceptible movement of the trees around the nearby Lodge as they are nuzzled by little updraughts of warm air.

Outside, against the whitewashed walls of the hall, a derelict piano saggs and a wheelbarrow of discarded books lies toppled to one side. The wheel of the barrow is heavily rusted and the barrow will probably stay there for ever. The books - numerous copies by Barbara Cartland and a Holy Bible (presumably misplaced by the Gideons) - will never be read again.

No cars pass. It is still. I am still. I ponder for a moment over why anyone should wish to throw out a Bible. Was it perhaps an unwanted gift? Was it's owner dissappointed with the ending or had some cataclysmic loss of faith occurred? Who knows.

I notice that the rusted wrought iron gate to the Hall grounds is open. I go out and shut it and check that the notice advertising the Halls facilities cannot quite be seen from the road.

By such dispicable initiative is my sanctum defended.

I rest. Subtle skills and years of training lie unused. I am content. What, after all, is so admirable about realising one potential?

I sit here like this each day - simply 'being' - for six hours a day without break. Indeed, I suppose that the very idea of taking a break from doing nothing is insupportable - rather like digging a hole in a hole.

No one comes. I doze.

Still, no one comes.

From time to time I feel my grasp on reality slipping so that I seem to merge with the Hall around me, we become a single being - waiting timelessly and purposelessly for visitors.

And still nobody comes.

Suddenly, I jerk awake with a panicky urgency - desperate to escape from my inertia, to come alive again. And I find myself unaccountably seized by a single glorious purpose. I go out of the Hall and pile together the piano, the Bible and all those Barbara Cartlands and, in one splendid act of threefold desecration, - I burn them!