Numberless!

   “Well Number……..?” the woman asked
   “Well enough, thank you for asking” he replied
   “I wasn’t enquiring about your health. I was wondering what your number is” the woman asked somewhat brusquely.
    “Oh, sorry. My mistake.”
    “Don’t worry, we all have to make mistakes. Sometimes we have to Number……………?”
    “I haven’t got a number.”
    “What do you mean you haven‘t got a number? Everyone has a number.” the woman said.
    “I am a numberless person, a free spirit roaming an alien world!”
    The woman looked at him “You shouldn‘t talk like that, someone might hear. You know you’re not who I might have expected you to be.”
        The man looked puzzled “Really, and who might you have expected me to be?”
    “Six!”
    “Oh I’m no Number Six” the man told her.
    “So what are you doing here?”
    “What, in The Village?”
    “Where else?”
    “I don’t really know, I just sort of………arrived.”
    “That’s how most people turn up here. They just arrive.”
    “Number Two is a very calming woman.”
    “Is she, I wouldn’t know, not having met her.”
    “I would expect her assistant to be the same.”
    The woman looked at the man across the table in astonishment “Surely you don’t mean me?”
    “There’s no-one else sat at this table!”
    The woman stared at him “Except for you mister no number!”
    “Look I’m not one of them, you are!”
    “I’ve had just about enough for one day!”
    “Me thinks the lady doth protest too much.”
    “How do you make that out?”
    “You asked me my number, so you’ve been assigned to me!”
    “I merely asked you your number, because you’re not wearing a badge.”
    “I thought everyone knew everybody here?”
    “The flower seller does. She knows who is ill, and who is getting better.”
   “How?”
    “Its really quite simple. If someone buys flowers for someone else, then it’s a fair bet that someone is ill in hospital. But once they stop buying flowers, it’s a fair bet that that person is getting better.”
    “Ah. And you’ve bought those flowers for………….?”
    “Myself.”
    “No-one to buy you flowers then?”
    “I’d be very careful what I’d say if I were you.”
    “Is that a threat Number Six hundred and sixty-six?”
    “Beastly to give anyone isn’t it?”
    “I bet you have the very Devil of a time here………….doctor!”
    “Your impertinence will get you nowhere” she told him
    “You know, and to misquote Oscar Wild. There’s only one thing worse than being a number, and that’s not being a number.”
    “Why is that”
    “Because then you don’t exist!”
    There came a sudden cold wind that gathered up the dust blowing it all around. And suddenly the chair opposite, where the numberless man had been seated………………………was empty!

Be seeing you