Bystander

Life meant life when I was young and stories started at the beginning with Hen-Len and Chicken-Licken and the sky falling down. I was born to a chicken farmer who didn’t know much about chickens and even less about farming. My mum was always the practical one. She left as soon as I was born. After mum left Dad was a very quiet man, who became much quieter when he died suddenly of a coronary, or even a heart-attack. My only friends up until the age of five were chickens and I’d guess that gave me a propensity towards being hen-pecked. I went to school and came home. I went to work and came home.

Life passed me by as I was cutting Dr Fleming’s grass just off Risk Street. ‘Oi,’ I shouted after him, ‘aren’t you goin’ to say anything?’ The cable-belt in the Mountfield lawnmower has a nick in it and the blade was gubbed, tended to miss a beat and didn’t bag properly and left cut grass in lazy heaps, unless it was privet hedge cuttings, which left the leaves in right swirly-swilled bits, which the machine tended to chew on, before grogging the greeness out. I’d disabled the deadman’s handle so the machine couldn’t really be turned off unless it was whacked into some really long grass which brought it to a coughing and spluttering halt with petrol fumes hanging in the air. By the time I’d found grass long enough, life that passed me by was standing fidgeting in the bus stop across from me waiting for the last bus out of here.

            I stormed across to have a word with him. I had the measure of him. The life that passed me by was the kind of guy who accepted a pint, but never went to the bar to buy a round, who spent lengthy dinner-breaks munching solidly at his desk through packet after packet of cheesy Wotsits, with the kind of teeth that would make a convention of dentists laugh. He was slightly stooped, a problem with the atlas and axis section of the spine that gave him headaches and he’d less hair than me, was practically baldy, with a few tufts around the ears. He turned to face me his designer specs catching the sun and darkening his eyes, which I didn’t like because they looked expensive. I was hoping that the life that passed me by would be having an even shitter life than me, but his glasses, like his suit, showed he’d a bit of money. He held the palm of his hand up in a stop sign as if I was the bus out of here.

            ‘Don’t say anything,’ he said

            ‘Fuck off.’

            ‘Exactly. I knew you were going to say that,’ he said. ‘You’re so predictable. Because you’re so predictable my life is so-ooooh boring.  If it wasn’t for you I could be dating a supermodel, or having to take it up the ass to pay off a drug debt in some Russian gulag. I might even have been a geography teacher, but what am I doing?’ He waved me away. ‘Fuck off. To think what the other life’s that have passed me by are doing now, the ones I started off with, went to school with--you’re pathetic.’

            ‘But…’ I spluttered.

            ‘But nothing.’ He pressed his face close to mine. ‘I’m not meant to tell you this, but you’re going to end up a pathetic old man that nobody likes. He sniffed the air close to my sweating face, ‘and you’re going to smell even worse than you do now’. He shoved me in the chest and I stepped back onto the road behind me, making a purple Ford Orion swerve slightly onto the other side of the tarmac, gunning its engine and tooting its horn.

            I snapped a punch into his pudgy face knocking his glasses askew. There was an O in his mouth. For all his big talk he hadn’t expected that. He barrelled into me flinging punches some of which caught me on the forehead and the top of the ear. We rolled about the hot tarmac scrapping and fighting, evenly matched. I caught him with an elbow in the lip, making him bleed, but his head buckled my big nose. We heard rather than saw the only bus out of here coming up to the bus stop and felt the draught of its bulk sucking in air, spilling out diesel fumes and heard the indicator ticking as it signalled to go right. The life that passed me by scrambled up and away from me, waving his arms, gesticulating and shouting:

            ‘Stop! Stop!’

            No punch I’d thrown could have caught him harder. He slid down the whitewashed wall and slumped on the pavement beside the sign for Risk Street. One of the lenses in his specs was broken and they sat like a ship that was sinking on his big nose. He looked through the good lense at me. ‘Have you got anything to say?’

            ‘It’s no’ that bad.’ I stood up, still winded where he’d caught me in the stomach.

            ‘Isn’t it?’ He felt about his mouth with his tongue and spat blood from the tear on his lip out onto the pavement. ‘Let me tell you something.’ He tested his jaw by opening and shutting it like a puppet. ‘I’m goin’ to kill myself just so that I have the satisfaction of you dying too.’    

            ‘Look mate,’ I said. ‘You don’t really exist.’ I poked at my ear, blood crusting the whorls of the shell like an unstuck crustacean and making it feel bigger with bruising. ‘And if you did exist there is any number of things you could do. Any number of things you could become. I need you, but you don’t need me.’ I held my hand out to help him up.

            ‘But…’ he said.

            ‘No buts.’ I held both hands out, mirroring his earlier action.

            Life passed me by straightened his specs out and it started sparking down with rain.

            ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I’ve got to finish cutting the grass before it gets too wet.’

            He sniffed. ‘I was just going to say, but I’ve missed the only bus out of here.’

            ‘Don’t worry about that,’ I stepped off the pavement and onto the road, watching out for the traffic. ‘Just because it’s the only bus out of here doesn’t mean it’s the only bus out of here.’