Dexter and Eugene

What do you do with your life, when you have all the money you will ever need? Now in some cases that doesn’t mean it’s a lot of money. Sometimes folks are happy with a few coins here and there, because a roof above their heads, a warm bed to sleep in and food in their stomach is all that is required. However, in the case of Dexter Foster it was about all the money in the world. 

He was a dollar millionaire by the time he was nineteen years of age. He never knew his father and he didn’t take this as a great loss in his life. By the time he was twenty-five, he was worth over half a billion. Shrewd investments, and his helping in the development of a new way of thinking with computers put him at the top of the tree.

He’d had partners, but most were after his money and his power – so he found he became cynical in his belief with the souls of others. Money couldn’t buy love but it could buy companions, and he made do with that for a few years. When Dexter hit fifty, he went through a kind of mid-life crisis – he realized that he was rich, lonely and had lost the hunger that had put him where he was.

One sunny Saturday morning, he took a few thousand dollars from his wallet and went down to the streets below his penthouse and gave a hundred-dollar note to every homeless person he could find – not that they were hard to find in this city.  

Some smiled, some got up and shook his hand, a couple used it to light their cigarettes – and then he came to Eugene, and he was different.

Eugene didn’t want Dexter’s money, no sir, not a cent interested him. What he wanted was a favor. He wanted Dexter to cut Eugene’s hair.

“Why can’t you take the money and get a barber to do it?” Asked Dexter.

“Because I would have to pay them, and I want you to do it because you want to. You don’t get much kindness down here on the streets,” said Eugene.

Dexter felt that was a fair comment and so nodded that he’d do it.  He bought a bottle of water, some shampoo and scissors from a near-by Seven Eleven store, and sat Eugene on the wall and began to cut his hair.

Now this is where Dexter shocked himself because he was actually really good at it. Eugene was content at the job he had done and so was Dexter, and that was what started it all. 

Every weekend, Dexter would set up a hair salon in the back of a yard off Eight Avenue and he’d spend the Saturday and Sunday cutting the hair of homeless folks. He got to know all about their lives and stories. Some had been professors, some soldiers, one a ballerina and several had been doctors; all of them had fallen on hard times, mostly through no fault of their own.

Then one Saturday, a few years later, Dexter failed to show at the little yard at the back of the building. Scott, a younger guy, who had recently started getting his hair cut by ‘Dexy’ (as he called him) grew concerned and went to talk to a cop who always stood on the corner.

The cop sent someone around to Dexter’s apartment on Fifth Avenue where they had to break into the place. ‘Dexy’ had suffered a stroke and had probably been lying there for a while. Dexter never got his ability to speak back. He lay in the hospital for several weeks before he died, but at night the nurse would let some of the homeless folks in to sit by Dexter’s bed. One of the girls, Evelyn, would make sure his hair looked neat and tidy and would cut it when it was needed.

By the time  Dexter died, he had given away most of his money to charity and after his funeral, he instructed a lawyer to give every homeless person in the area a hundred-dollar note.

He also left a little store to Eugene, who used it to let folks sleep in the upper floor and in the shop below Eugene started a salon to cut hair for any homeless person who wanted it.

They still talk about Dexter around this way – ‘the man who had cut poor people’s hair’.  It was just a little kindness in a world that so badly needed it.

Bobby Stevenson 2018

Catching Falling Stars

I remember you,

All of you,

When one smile from your lips could light a path to Heaven,

When your dreams and hopes were brighter and more glorious

Than the sun.

Those summer days were the easiest of all,

And everything you touched,

Turned to gold in your hands.

All the universe was yours,

And your very eyes told a story,

About owning every last single thing you saw.

But now your hearts have rusted some,

Your sparkle is duller than once it was,

And your orbits have dropped a little lower

In the sky.

And so my friends, I spend the days,

Catching falling stars,

And remembering what you all once were.

bobby stevenson 2018

The Day I Heard The News

The day I heard the news,
The World didn’t end – at least not that day.
Instead the sky grew a little darker,
And I realised there was no longer any way
That we’d accidentally bump into one another
On some far-flung shore, and laugh about the old times.
That morning I said, ‘see you later’ was to be our very last and
Neither of us even knew.
The day I heard the news,
A billion candles on the Sun blew themselves out,
And my shadow grew a little paler against the Earth.  

bobby stevenson 2018

Peter Rabbit

He remembers one night - when Peter was about twelve summers old - that he and his best friend were sitting in the light of the dusk, puffing a found cigarette butt and talking about love.

Peter’s pal was excited about the prospect of kissing a girl – a human girl – and although Peter went along with the conversation, he couldn’t stop himself feeling empty and lonely inside. Peter wanted to tell his best friend in all the world, that on the outside he might look human but on the inside, he was most definitely a rabbit.

As the days continued into weeks, and the weeks bound together to make months, Peter felt more and more that he would be happier in this life, if he lived it as a rabbit.

One of the kinder teachers in school had noticed the differences in Peter and told him that if he ever need to talk, he could call on her at any time. Peter made a lying smile, and told her that he was happy, thanks for asking, but he felt happier than he had ever felt.

That year, the head of the government in Peter’s country changed the law about promoting being different in schools. It was against the law to talk about wanting to be anything other than human, so Peter’s teacher could no longer talk to him about his feelings of being different. It was said that many humans who had felt that they should be animals wanted took their own lives. Peter never forgave the head of the government for that.

When he was a teenager, Peter and his family went to church. It was there that the vicar gave a sermon on the topic of being what God made you. If God had wanted a person to be a rabbit than he would have created them as such.

Peter wondered about the fact that God might have made you a human who thought that they should be a rabbit. Peter hadn’t invented his rabbit desires – so how could it be a sin to believe what was in your head?

Some of the kids in school suspected that Peter was not really human and would call him names or make rabbit ears behind his head. Peter knew that these kids came from homes, where difference were ridiculed, because the people in those homes were scared of differences.

One day, on his eighteenth birthday to be exact, he sat his mother and father down and told them the truth about wanting to be a rabbit. His mother cried, and paced about the room, saying that it was all right to be who he was, but she would have loved human grandchildren. His father stood up, went upstairs and threw all Peter’s belongings into the road. He was never to darken their doorstep again – whatever that meant.

He never did.
Peter went to the big city and found that some folks were bad, and some were good – probably more of them were good, he decided. Then one night as he passed a little café, he saw a whole warren of rabbits sitting having coffee and talking. He wasn’t alone. He cried.

It took him several more years to have the operations but in the end Peter became the rabbit he had always dreamed of. He found a lady rabbit who was an ‘Ex’,as they called it (ex human), and they adopted several little rabbits to bring up as their own.

Peter knew deep down that if any of his children grew up and wanted to be human (because it was in their hearts) then he would never stand in their way.

bobby stevenson 2018

Amy and Hector

There are two people in this story – as well as Hector.

Hector’s the elephant. The little girl is Amy, and her granddad is the other fellow. From the moment she could walk Amy took Hector everywhere - after all he was a real elephant and wasn’t he Amy’s best friend in the whole wide world? So why wouldn’t you?

Amy loved Hector and Hector loved Amy. Amy’s mother could hear them having discussions in the bedroom directly above the lounge –  at least, she could hear Amy, only Amy could hear Hector – and perhaps that is the way it should be.
One fine, sunny, morning Amy and Hector were talking about this and that in the garden – and although Hector seemed to know more about that, than this - it didn’t seem to bother him at all.  Amy and her pal were in the middle of a tea party when a little kid from a house along the street stood and watched as Amy and Hector enjoyed a day in the Sun.

“It isn’t real you know,” said the horrible little kid with the runny nose.
“What isn’t?” Asked Amy.
“That stupid toy of yours,” added the boy with some relish.
“I haven’t got a toy, there’s just me and Hector here. That’s all.”
“You call your toy, Hector?” He sneered.
“No, I call my elephant, Hector but I’ve already told you, I don’t have a toy.” 

Amy went back to having tea and chit-chat with her elephant.
That night, was Granddad’s night to baby-sit and as he was putting Amy to bed, he noticed that she seemed a little upset.

“What’s the matter, honey?”

At first Amy didn’t want to talk about it, but Granddad being Granddad, he eventually got it out of her. And it was worse than expected.

“Perhaps, Hector is a toy after all,” she said.

This cut Granddad to the core.
Granddad wanted to be there the day that his little precious, Honey discovered gravity but today wasn’t going to be the day that it happened.
A few days earlier, Granddad had been watching a movie on television about Santa Claus and how people didn’t believe it was him, and this gave Granddad an idea.

The next day, he telephoned his friend in the Town Hall and asked him to put a notice on the front door. Later, Granddad and Amy went into town to take a stroll. Granddad said that he had to go into the Town Hall to register something or other. When Amy and Granddad got to the door there was a sign that said: ‘Strictly No Elephants’.

Amy looked worried, so Granddad went into the Town Hall and fetched his pal. The man came out with Granddad and he looked at Hector, and ‘tutted’ some, then he walked around the elephant and ‘tutted’ some more. Then the man shook his head and said to Granddad straight out – “I’m sorry sir, but this is a genuine elephant and as such is not allowed in the Town Hall.”

On the way home, Amy (who had started to smile again) apologised to her friend, Hector about the man being so mean to elephants.

bobby stevenson 2018

When I Was Out Walking

 

Sometime while I was out walking, the wind changed,

No longer at my back with my face always towards the sun,

It cuts a sheer cold front that takes my breath away,

And steals the words out of my mouth,

Names are harder to recall and thoughts are grainy,

It blows the dust of time into my eyes,

Causing them to stream and flow with tears,

Friends wander into the fog and don’t return,

Sometime while I was out walking, the wind changed,

Never to blow this way again. 

bobby stevenson 2018

Enough Sunshine For Everyone

That summer, that sultry humid one, in ’46 was the hottest on record. She still remembers it. How could ever she forget?

From her apartment window on the first floor she could view most of the comings and goings for a block. And she never got bored. Never.  There was always the odd soldier returning home from the war overseas. Those kids in khaki would run up the sidewalk throwing themselves into the arms of lovers, mothers, brothers, kids, and wives and always the same hugs, as if to say: ‘I’m home – let’s never be so stupid again’. 


Before the war, there had been Edith and her son, Eugene. Now Edith was alone. Her last letter from her only son had come from a prisoner of war camp in the Far East. That was two years ago, and she still had heard nothing. She felt that if he was dead she would know, and she was sure she could still feel the tick of his heart in the universe.

When Eugene, or Gene as the liked to be known, was eight years old, he had 
run out in front of an automobile which had been speeding up Montrose. The car clipped her son and knocked him flying back on to the sidewalk. Her boy, her love, had been in a coma for six weeks before he had opened his eyes again. Edith had never, ever prayed so much in her life.

It was the Japanese lady on the second floor who had saved Gene’s life. She was a nurse and had been approaching home after a double night shift at St Edwards, when she saw the automobile hit Eugene. She had given him the kiss-of-life until the ambulance had arrived. Her name was Hana Tanaka, and after that accident, both Hana and Edith had become close friends.

When Eugene lay unconscious in St Edwards, Hana would come around to the room and sit with Edith during her darkest hours. In fact, Hana had been attending Gene when he first opened his eyes.Hana had given Edith the good news in the morning.

“You and your son deserve happiness, after all, isn’t there there is enough sunshine for everyone,” said Hana, as she hugged Edith.

The war ended, and many folks danced and kissed their way up and down Montrose Avenue. Edith watched most of it from the safety and sterility of her apartment window. She couldn’t party until she knew her boy was home and safe.

It was in the Spring of 1946, that George, a single man, who had also been captured by the Japanese, moved into Edith’s apartment block. George tended to keep himself to himself, but on the odd occasion when Edith passed him in the corridor, Edith would exchange a ‘hello’. She was desperate to ask if he had seen or talked to her son, but she never seemed to get the chance.

So it was in shock that Edith found herself in the backyard of the apartment block that sultry summer in 1946, staring into the face of George as he held a knife to Hana’s throat.

“Goddamn Japs! Ain’t no good. Ain’t no good at all, with what these folks done to me,” shouted George as he pressed the knife closer to Hana’s neck. Edith was sure she could see some blood appearing. From a top window across the way, a woman signalled to Edith that she was going for help. Until then, Edith would have to think of something quick.

“This woman, George – can I call you George? – This woman saved the life of my boy right outside here a few years back,” said Edith.
“Don’t care if she did, don’t care if she didn’t,” said George. “She’s a Jap and they all deserve to die.”
“Why George?” Asked Edith.
“Just ‘cause, just ‘cause. Just ‘cause of what they did to me and every other poor soul. They is the devil. They is the devil. They surely are”. Edith noticed a tear running down George’s face, and so decided that now was the time to act.
“She saved my boy’s life, George. What kind of devil does that George? Tell me? You can’t blame Hana for the sins of others. She’s a kind decent heart and deserves to be treated as such. She grew up here, George. She’s an American. She’s proud of being an American. She is love, George. Love. You understand?  After she saved my boy’s life, she sat with him day and night tending to his every need. She’s an angel, George. She ain’t a devil.  Know what she said to me, George? Hana said we all deserve happiness. Each and every one of us. I know folks out there did some pretty bad things to you, George. Things you might not forgive, but it wasn’t Hana. Not this gently lady. Hana said to me that there’s enough sunshine for everyone and I think she’s right George. I surely do”.

George thought for a bit, then dropped to his knees. Edith picked up the knife and threw the object as far as she could. The cops never arrived that day and a few weeks later George disappeared.

Edith still stands on the steps of her apartment waiting for her boy, Eugene to walk home up Montrose avenue.  She still has hope in her heart.

bobby stevenson 2018

The Man From Montana

It was on a mild Spring Thursday morning when it happened. No church bells, or fireworks, or even a spontaneous applause marked the occasion; for on that Thursday, at 9.24am, the last book that had been read was closed for the very last time.

It’s not as if anyone could have failed to see it coming. For years people had read their stories on little pads – never having the satisfaction of turning and folding paper pages. The population would binge on streaming drama, and comedy, and documentaries from Amazon, Hulu, Netflix and a million others. 

People didn’t want to read anymore – because with reading meant bringing your imagination to work – and that took time which no one could spare.
You see it wasn’t just books – for, not long after the last book was read, the electronic versions, also got discarded. Reading was so last decade. To be honest, most folks found it difficult to write in anything other than EstuaryText (ET): ‘You’re’ had become, ‘Your’, had transmuted into ‘UR’. Slogans were written in ET. Shop signs and street signs, the same. Mostly graphics provided information – the way you knew where a toilet was, or a car parking, back in the 20^th century.

But there was still the need for stories, meaning there was always a requirement for story writers. Sure, people read scripts for movies – but the words were projected immediately in front of them. No one needed to commit lines to memory.  Some of the team of media writers would still use old methods to record their thoughts for stories – but these were the exception.

Then it happened – one day, about 130 years after the last book had been read, a man turned up who had spent his early life in the hills of northern Montana. 

He had grown up with his grandmother, in a small cabin. He had hunted and fished, and in the evenings, his grandmother told him stories that had been handed down through the generations. His favourite story was one called ‘Great Expects’ – which had been written by a man called Chuck Dikkens, apparently this dude had written stories in sections, and would sell them bit by bit, leaving the readers excited about what would take place next. Of course, they had to buy the next instalment to see what had occurred.

This man from Montana, called Aster, decided that perhaps he could be like Chuck Dikkens and create stories.

At first, they were verbal. He would drone-travel around the town and tell a story or two. Most folks told him to be quiet while they would binge inside on their latest streamer, but one or two listened and asked him when he would be back with the next story.  Two became four, which became fifty, then a hundred. Aster’s visits would be greatly anticipated.

One of those listening to Aster’s stories was a woman by the name of Fara. She had studied stories and story making, and this included a rudimentary understanding of a written language, once known as EstuaryText.  She started to convert Aster’s stories into Text Speak – and one day, when she had the courage, she showed it to him. Of course, there could be anything written in the strange shapes – according to Aster. So, to appease him, Fara taught him all she knew about writing language. Eventually Aster not only told his stories but handed out single page leaflets which contained the same in Text. Not many could read these stories to begin with, but after Sara started up a class in town, more and more folks began to understand what the shapes meant.

More than a few folks got excited, as they had probably done, several hundred years before with the stories of Chuck Dikkens and – okay, so it wasn’t a book – but people began to read for pleasure and the world lightened a little.

And perhaps one day, maybe in the far-distant future, books would come back and be read on hillsides.

bobby stevenson 2018
painting: Quint Bucholz.

You Think You Have Time

You think you have time,
To be annoyed, or to be angry,
To not speak, or not call.
You think you have time,
To work up the courage to say hello,
Or tell the one you want, that you love them.
You think you have time,
To consider this, or ponder that,
Or shrug and say, next week I will,
You think you have time,
To return a long-lost kindness,
Or make a long-held deal.
You think you have time,
To begin to learn to love yourself,
And to cease the worrying in your heart,
But you don’t,
And you won’t,
And you probably never will;
Because you see, you think you have time…..
bobby stevenson 2018

EASY

 

 

 

You see the lovers, sitting,

Holding hands outside the café,

Perfect you would think to yourself,

Just perfect,

Yet for a fleeting moment there is a look in one of their eyes

Which screams, that the end has arrived.

 

The woman walks the long street, watching and smiling at

The babies in their prams, and the mothers and fathers,

Smile back wondering what the woman wants.

What the woman wants - is to know, that had her child lived

What she would have been doing today.

 

The vicar sits by the window of the church, looking out to the world

That he has tried to save for nearly forty years,

He slips down another whisky, and another but nothing

Can warm his soul the way that God has done in the past,

That was, until he stopped believing.

 

The little boy stands outside the house where his father has moved,

This is the place where that woman lives, the one who destroyed the family

According to his mother.

And all around the houses, and streets, and villages, and towns, and cities,

They are all singing the same hymn:

“No one gets it easy any more”.

 

 

bobby stevenson 2017

STRANGE LOVES

She hadn’t spoken to him, but then again, she didn’t need to. She knew what made him tick, what took his breath away, and, most importantly, what put fire in his eyes. Of course, she could only see what she saw and in her mind as she joined up the dots – it was a space where she turned him into everything she wanted in a man. So, perhaps he wasn’t good with kids, or animals or old people (delete where necessary) but she couldn’t see that in him. From her point of view, she could only see kindness in that beautiful face. He had brought women back, but she had told herself that they were only friends and nothing more.  He left for work every morning at 7.15 (except that morning after his Christmas party) and would return most nights at 6.35. She always made sure that in the evening, her pillows were pushed up the bed a little, so that she could see him. She was limited to the time she could sit upright – it impacted her breathing and as a paraplegic it could cause complications. But her mother would help her sit up for a few minutes around 6.30 and was unsure why her daughter would have a smile on her face. The girl knew that the boy across the street didn’t even know she was alive, but one day she’d get her faculties back and she’d walk across that road and kiss him.

It was the day after his wife had died that the dog had first turned up at his front door. She’d sent him, he was sure of that. There wasn’t any identification with the dog, so he took him in his home and decided to see what would happen. He’d thought of putting a ‘lost dog’ poster on some of the trees in the street – but what was the point? The dog had been given to him by his wife to keep him company until they could all meet up again. It was almost a year to the day of his arrival when he was walking ‘Jedi’ in the park, that the dog had run off. He searched and searched and couldn’t find his best friend anywhere. This time he did put posters up on the trees, ‘dog lost’ – I mean what would his wife say when they met at last?  It was only a day later when a lovely woman came to the door (not unlike his wife) and had asked ‘was this his dog’. It was indeed, so he invited her to come in for a cup of tea as a way of thanking her. She’s still there.

The man spent every single spare penny he had on her – she was an old Jaguar car, racing green, and perhaps a little over-the-hill. He cleaned her, polished her, sometimes slept in the car, and never ever drove her. He kept her in the garage and refused to open the door in case she got damaged. He had lady friends, but they always insisted that they spend more time with them than with that ‘damn car’. It wasn’t just a car – she was his family. He respected her, and she respected him.  To him it was love and no amount, of red-blooded women could ever replace her.  He was happy, and even although folks would tell told him that it was all a one-way thing, no one could convince him that she didn’t love him back.  It was on the day of his 50^th birthday that he decided to let her see the sunlight a little. He opened the garage door and pushed her on to the drive. He put the keys in the ignition and started her up. He could have kicked himself, as he’d only quickly nipped to the bathroom and when he came back she had gone. She had left him for some else. Where the whole racing green centre of his universe had stood purring away, was now a great space. They found the man downstream several days later. The police reckon he must have jumped from the old stone bridge.

He was always sure he was being watched. As he went to work every day at 7.15am and returned at 6.35pm, but he could almost feel eyes glaring into the back of his neck. He knew there was a strange girl across the road, but he’d never seen her. Tonight, was a very special night and he almost skipped back home. Some days were worse than others when there wasn’t that much to steal, but today he’d come across a racing green Jaguar just sitting in a drive with the keys in the ignition. He couldn’t help himself, he loved stealing and especially old cars. He’d sold it for 2000 and that for him, that was the best of all days.

bobby stevenson 2017

SANTA and the BATTLE of HASTINGS

He chose the highest room in town. Which, I suppose, is fair enough. What it doesn’t explain is why he chose Hastings, a seaside town on the south coast of England. His wife explained it by telling everyone that he was obsessed by history, and more specifically by the Battle of Hastings. Okay, to be totally accurate, the battle wasn’t exactly at Hastings but then the Norsemen weren’t caring that much back in 1066.

He knew what to expect with a Lapland winter, but it was the summers up there that really got to him. Lapland in July to August was humid and full of mosquitoes. It didn’t seem to bother his wife or the helpers – although to be honest most of them took their yearly vacation around about that time, letting them rest up before the onslaught of Christmas and all that entailed.

So, Santa decided he’d have a little break of his own (a break that Mrs Claus wasn’t unhappy about) and planned to go to Hastings and study the invasion of William the Conqueror. The highest room in the town was the only one available at the time, but it seemed to him that it was meant. The room and the views were perfect.

He had taken the sleigh all the way to a little airport in Tornio, then he’d given Rudolf and the other reindeer a few dollars to enjoy themselves. Santa told them he’d see them soon and then he went into a bathroom, cut down his beard, gelled back his hair and placed his red clothes in a locker.  He flew from Lapland to Helsinki and then onto London using a cheap airline. Santa wondered if maybe cheap airlines were the future of Christmas and that the reindeer were perhaps past their sell-by-date.  

He loved the seaside and the beaches, although the seagulls could be annoying, especially the ones that realised he was Santa and therefore would keep swooping down and asking him for Christmas stuff.  Santa, like most folks in Hastings, just threw the birds a hot potato chip, and told the gulls that he’d put their request on a list.

There were somethings that he wouldn’t (or couldn’t) tell Mrs Claus – after all, what happened in Hastings, stayed in Hastings. He hadn’t actually tried beer in the past and before he knew it, Santa was being arrested by the cops for lying drunk under Hastings’ pier, and shouting out the words to ‘Jingle Bells’.  He used the name Mr Claus at the Police Station, and he was sure that he hadn’t imagined hearing a couple of the police folks sniggering at the back.

As for the other thing – he was definite that those men on the beach (he had befriended) had told him that ‘breaking into a bank’ was another name for a party in Hastings. Luckily Santa had escaped before the police had shown up. One of the older guys had stuffed some of the bank money in Santa’s pocket – money, which Santa had given to several homeless folks on the front of the town.

But the thing that he really remembered about that summer, was the lady who had lived in the rooms below him. He had literally bumped into her as she was climbing the steep steps to the second highest room in the building, and he was sliding down the bannister. He picked her up off the stairs, apologised and then continued sliding down the shiny slide.

A few days later, Santa was passing one of the many fish and chip shops in town when he saw the lady sitting on her own. She was playing with the food rather than eating it. Santa knocked the window.  She didn’t recognise him at first – then she put on her spectacles on and eventually gave him a little smile. Santa took this as an invitation and went in the tiny shop and sat next to the lady.

It seems that the woman and her husband had been married in Hastings and had honeymooned there. Her husband was long dead, they’d had no children and now she spent a few weeks in the summer reliving the old days in Hastings.

Santa and the woman met a few more times in the days and weeks ahead, and when Santa asked what she wanted for Christmas – she replied that apart from her Bert coming back, nothing much else. She lived in a little village in Hampshire with her dog, Cheeky (who her sister was currently looking after) – and both she and Cheeky would eat everything in sight and then watch Christmas television. That was her Christmas day and that was enough for her.

She never got to say a proper goodbye to Mr Claus (he told her it was a well-known Finnish name) but several days before she was due to return home water started coming through her roof from the rooms above – the ones that Mr Clause had stayed in.

The man who came to fix the leak was called Bertie (just like her husband) – he was a widower who had a little dog called ‘Rascal’.  The last few days of her holidays were a whirlwind. She and Bertie (and Rascal) went for walks along the beach, they even went for fish and chips – and this time she ate them rather than just picking at the food.

As Bertie walked her to the train station for her trip back to Hampshire, he told her that he had a break over Christmas and wondered if the two of them could perhaps meet up.

She smiled at Bertie and said she would love to.


bobby stevenson 2017

Breathers

It wasn’t hurting anyone; now was it?  She’d give the kids a difficult problem to solve, although if she was being honest, there wasn’t an answer to it. Then, when all their heads were down staring at the desk, she’d nip outside for a smoke on a delicious cigarette. She loved teaching – don’t get her wrong, it was her life. Yet it left no time for anything else. Most evenings she’d take her kids’ work back to the bed sit and drink gin while she ran red lines through the essays. One day she’d meet someone – that special someone – but until then five minutes with a cigarette behind the school was as good as it got.
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He’d bathe her, then feed her some cereal – the way she had done with him, a long time ago. She was his mother, after all – at least she had been, but she was gone somewhere else now – to an undiscovered country where he could not follow.  He missed her and the chats, and the laughter and tears. What would you choose for a parent, if you had to choose; cancer or dementia? Jeez, what would you choose for yourself?  He wasn’t meant to leave her, but he would, just for five minutes each morning. He would tuck her into her bed, then take a pillow from the side his father used to sleep on and go outside. And for those five minutes he would put the pillow over his face and scream and scream until the tears were washing his cheeks. That’s all it was. A few minutes, each day, to keep himself sane.
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He loved her. They were getting married in a few weeks. She was everything that he wanted. Everything that he needed in this life. And yet, if it wasn’t for that one person across the street. The one he would say ‘hello’ to, from time-to-time. The one who made his stomach jump in circles – those things that never happened with his fiancée. Never. Yet, he could see a life stretching into the future with his girl, but what about the person across the street? Perhaps they were difficult to live with? Maybe it was all in his stupid, stupid head - but once a week – and yeah, he knew it was creepy, he would look out of the window at the house where that special person lived, and he would imagine that he lived there too. It was only for five minutes, as that was all it took before his fiancée would notice he was missing and call him back to look at wedding plans.
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Sometimes the shaking got so bad, that he would have to hold on to the side of the bed, just to stop himself from falling out. ‘Degenerative’ was the word of his life. The nurse was a kind soul and she would take her lunch at 12.15 every day, without fail. She always left the matches beside his bed, and then she’d smile and wink before she left the room. It was she who brought him in the special cigarettes. Her brother liked a blow and she’d get him to roll one extra. So, when she went to have something to eat, and through his shaking hands, he would light up the joint and for a few minutes, his troubles would float away in a cloud of smoke.   

bobby stevenson 2017

The Bo Peep Tunnel Mystery

Most people will never notice it. They’ll be too busy on their commute, or containing their excitement as they head to the seashore. Yet it is there, and it is waiting, and it did happen.

Between Hastings and Bexhill on the south coast of England, is a tunnel; a railway tunnel. It lies just off the Bopeep Junction, and naturally enough is known as the Bopeep Tunnel. Yet it was here in a warm Autumn night in 1941 that a most peculiar thing happened. A train of 77 soldiers and 13 civilians disappeared.

It was that simple.

The train had halted at St Leonard’s Warrior Square, to let another twenty troops to board the train and then it was off to allow them to be stationed at several points along the south coast.

Except they never got there. The train left St Leonard’s at 10.31 pm and was only reported missing by Bexhill staff at 3.15am, the following morning. There were initial thoughts that the train had fallen victim to a bomb, or even sabotage, but there were no raids that evening, and no reported explosions.

To put things simply: the train had just vanished off the face of the earth.

The men from Whitehall, sat on the news and three days later released a statement that the train had been bombed and no one had survived. The statement noted that the train had been waiting in a siding at Eastbourne when it had met its fate.

It was the War and information could be, and was, controlled. No one recalled a train being destroyed at Eastbourne station, but then there were many things that couldn’t be recalled in those days.

The truth was, that a train had entered a railway tunnel from the east side and had failed to exit on the west, all with 90 souls on board.

Coffins turned up for funerals, with the proviso that no family members were to look inside: it was all due to the state of the bodies – they were mutilated.

And so the War continued and no more trains went missing at the Bo Peep tunnel.

“Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep and nobody knows where to find them….”

The story was largely forgotten, and a monument to the loss stood on the spot where the train had been destroyed by the bomb. The monument was torn down a few years ago to make way for restaurants and a carpark.

Then on the evening of October the 31st, 2017, a train driver taking the 11.40pm from London Charing Cross into Hastings noticed a light on in the signal box at Bopeep Junction.

He reported it to the staff at West St Leonard’s station, who decided it was just the usual vandals and called the police.

What the police found wasn’t any one attempting to destroy the junction box, what they found was a young man in a World War 2 uniform. When they asked him his date of birth he said the 12th of December 1922.

bobby stevenson 2017

The Letter

You know.

I know you know. It’s just whether you remember the facts or not. The thing is, I must have learned to write and then I learned to live. We kind of knew it was always going to be that way – didn’t we?
Am I getting ahead of myself? Probably. I was always getting ahead. So I’ll just start at the beginning like most people would.
Dear Me,
I am writing you a letter from your past – from our past. I have been to the doctor and he has told me. He said it in the most matter of fact way possible. 

He looked out of his window, asked did I want a glass of water, then turned and said ‘you have Alzheimer’s’.  I said ‘sorry’ and he said so was he, I then asked him to repeat himself. And as you know and I now know, I’ve got Alzheimer’s.
What am I like from where you are? Are you reading this, or perhaps some help has found it and is reading it to you? Or maybe they are reading it to themselves and wondering if they should read it to you.
I just wanted to write to you – well, me, the future me, a letter to say goodbye and to say I’m sorry. Was it something I did, something in my life that led us down this road of sorrow?
I wonder what went first? Did you start to forget the lovers, you and I once knew? I always was proud of myself that I could remember all their names. It was always a little exercise I did on dark days – to remember when love and life were easy. When I had enough offers to be careless with those who had said they loved me. Forgive me.
My fear is that you – well, me in the future will be talked about by strangers. They will look at me with pity and tears and forget how young and alive I once was. Please don’t let them talk about me. Please don’t let them say I am mad. I am not mad – am I’m only dying.
Something we will all do.
I remember one of my lovers said to me, that you should never judge a life by how it ends. I was alive once, I was a child, a kid, a teenager, a lover, a partner – but all of those things are dependent on being able to remember.
And my memories are being cruelly stolen, so that in the end I am nothing. 

More than nothing.
I am not feeling sorry for you or me, for I had a life and that is more than some souls get.
I just wanted to write and say I love you, I didn’t always love you – learning to love yourself takes a lifetime.
I hope you are happy in your dreams.
With all the love in the world,
Yourself, from all the way back here.
X

(bobby stevenson 2017)

The Great Traffic Jam

It had been last summer when Suzie had seen her first driverless car. It had been taking that kid, Trig to school. Trig’s father had more money than all the other kid’s parents put together. The story was that he’d been kicked out of every private education establishment in the tri-state area and Suzie’s school was the only one left – at least that was the talk .

Over the winter there were more and more of the driverless cars which were soon joined by taxi cabs with no chauffeurs. As Suzie told her brother – “the world has gone mad, Billy. Really, totally mad”.

Billy, her younger brother, wasn’t caring that much, he had his computer games and that was good enough for him. He didn’t like to go outside all the much anyway.  

So, it was on that Spring day, that it all went horribly wrong. Folks said that it was some terrorist group or other who had hacked into the cars’ systems and made them all jam up. 
Billy, to be honest, thought that it was cool idea and wished he’d thought of it. Leastways it would have stopped him having to go to school.

Still others said it was a flare from the Sun which had broken all the world’s electrics and had caused all the traffic to pile-up. Now let me say right here and now, no one was hurt – let’s get that straight – but the jam caused such a problem that people and business probably lost a lot of money. Folks got stuck on the way to hospitals and stuff – so serious things did happen.

What really amazed Suzie was that some of the teachers had made it into school that day, it all started. “They probably sleep there,” said Billy, totally disgusted with those types of teachers. Suzie mother telephoned the school to ask if it was to be a ‘driverless-car-jam-holiday’, and she was told that it wasn’t and that perhaps the kids could just walk to school – like people used to.

“Walk!” Shouted Billy. “Not in my lifetime,” he shouted louder.
That was when their Granddad, Bobby came up from the cellar with another one of his inventions.

“They are called Bobby Pods, and you wear them on your back. Your school is only three blocks away and it will be easy enough to pull yourselves along the walls”.
“Are you crazy?” Shouted Billy, again. “What if a strong wind comes and blows us away?”
“The weather is going to be kind today. I checked it out,” Said Granddad.

So, with a lot of struggle and a bit of shouting, Granddad fitted the balloons (or Bobby Pods) to their backs.

Suzie’s mother wasn’t too sure about the whole thing but trusted her father, a man who usually made things work. Suzie and Billy climbed out of the window and without any nerves threw themselves into the great blue yonder.

Suzie pulled herself along the wall, in the general direction of the school. It was just as they turned the corner that they felt the missile whiz past their heads.  Andy, the school bully, was hanging out his bedroom and firing stones to try to burst their balloons. He reckoned that if those weird kids, Suzie and Billy, made it as far as school, then he’d have to go in as well.

When Andy fired another of his rockets, Billy caught it with his foot and kicked it right back at Andy’s window, accidentally smashing the glass. Andy’s mother came running into his bedroom to see what happened and when he blamed it on a passing kid who was flying with balloons – she felt that maybe her son was even more crazy than she had first thought, and took him to see the doctor. At least he got the morning off school.

Anyway, Billy and Suzie managed to make it into class, even if they did turn up a few wrong alleys on the way. The next day several other kids joined them and by the end of the week, they had a ‘flying train’, led by a teacher (who needed a lot of balloons) and who used her personal battery fan to navigate all the way to school.

bobby stevenson 2017

Broken Pieces

Jake remembered what his Grandmother used to call it: ‘your grandad is away down the doctors’. That’s what she called it – the pub at the end of the street.
“If life wasn’t so shit, there would be no need for pubs”, was her usual follow-up. “Don’t matter what it was; just back from the war, or the birth of his first-born, the night his mother died, the day his brother got thrown in jail – those times all ended up with your grandfather down the doctors”.

Andrew looked on the pub across the street as some sort of church. Whatever sin he had committed, all he had to do was spend a few hours in the pub and it was all sorted between him and God. I mean it wasn’t his fault, it was always Karen who started the arguments. The way she’d serve his dinner warm, rather than piping hot – or the fact that she’d run out of chips when he wanted nothing else in the world. Sometimes she wouldn’t get his coffee fast enough – so who could blame him, if he had to raise his hand and give her a gentle slap now and again? He’d tell the lads in the pub the story as he saw it, and none of them seemed to object, ‘Just natural, init?’ So, he’d go back to the house that night, say he was sorry to his darling Karen and then he’d enter her little body until he fell asleep on top of her.   

Annie slipped into the pub at the corner at 5.20 every night. They always said in the bar, that if she missed a night they would have to send a wreath and a condolence card around to her house; ‘cause only death would stop her having her ale’. Annie did the same thing each evening. She’d give her mother double the dose that the doctor had recommended, and that would keep her mother fast asleep for a few hours while Annie had a drink or two. What harm was she doing? After all, wasn’t it her mother’s fault that Annie had never married? She was stuck with an old woman who couldn’t speak anymore. When Donald, her man, had run off with her sister – she thought she had known loneliness then -  but this living, night after night wasn’t a life – Annie felt she was only existing. She lifted her head and asked the barman for another drink to wash away the day.

Jacob was a happy sort. Everyone said so. He’d pop in the bar at the corner of the street and he’d buy the person next to him a drink – be it stranger or best friend. There was a little jukebox in the corner that was seldom used during the day, but in the evening the younger drinkers would pile their coins into it. It was then that Jacob would put on that tune. He only did it when the person he wanted to hear it was in the pub. He wondered did they ever notice it was Jacob who put it on, and even more curiously, he wondered did they ever listen to the words.

Leona, only went the pub when she felt crushingly lonely. Then she’d wear her lowest top, push up her chest and wait on getting drinks bought for her. Some mornings she’d waken next to the last person in the world that she wanted to be there. Some mornings, she woke alone – as some always left after they got what they came for. All she really wanted was for someone to put their arms around her, and hold her while the sun came up.

Connor only went into the pub because it was a happy place, and everyone in it was happy too - and uncomplicated – just like his life.

bobby stevenson 2017