BLUE BIRD ( PART TWO )

Three years had passed since Kate had last seen
Raymond, now here he was standing at her front door. She thought he looked so pale, she hardly
recognized him.
"What are you doing here?" she enquired of him.
"Why have you come back after so long?"
Raymond seemed anxious.
"I need to speak with you Kate, it's really important."
"Well you had better come in," she replied.
Raymond followed Kate into the kitchen. She wanted
to get to the bottom of this visit.
"Well come on Raymond speak to me, tell me why you
feel the need to come back after all this time?"

Raymond started to fidget nervously, playing with
his fingers, he bit his lip.
"Its not what you think Kate, I haven't come here
to rekindle our relationship. Hell! I really hate
to say this, but it's about your brother Lawrence."
Kate stared at Raymond.
"What about Lawrence, where is he? it's been so
long since we last saw him, mum and dad have been
frantic these past years."

She started to pace the room. Raymond grabbed her
arm, "where to start, it's so difficult?"
Kate came face to face with Raymond, her hands on
her hips.
"Why don't you just start at the beginning."

Raymond sat down at the kitchen table, Kate sat
opposite him.
"Well come on then," she was getting agitated.
Raymond proceeded to explain:

"Three years ago Lawrence approached me, while I
was on one of my morning jogs, you know how I used
to love jogging."
Kate smiled and nodded. Raymond continued.
"As you probably remember I didn't like being
disturbed while out jogging, but Lawrence was adamant that he needed to talk with me, so we stopped off in the park and bought a couple of
coffees. Sitting on one of the park benches, he
started to tell me of his future plans, he said
he intended on going to work in Spain, but he didn't want to go alone. He pleaded with me to go
with him, well I was down on my luck at the time,
you and I had split up, I just felt like I wasn't
going anywhere, there wasn't anything keeping me
in England, so then and there I agreed that it would be a great idea."
Kate interrupted Raymond.

"Why didn't you at least let me know where Lawrence
was?"
Raymond looked at Kate.
"Because he told me not to say anything to you."
Kate sighed. "Well so much for brotherly love,
anyway go on."
"Well I told Lawrence I would need to renew my
passport, so there was no way we would beable to go
straight away."
"That's fine," he said.
"You get your passport sorted and I'll sort out the
plane tickets."

"Two months later we were touching down in Spain."
Kate questioned Raymond once again.
"So what did you do for money and what about jobs?"
"I'm just getting around to that," Raymond said.
"We managed to get jobs in one of the hotels, with
board aswell, we were very lucky, it was almost to
good to be true. Lawrence managed to get a day time
job as a waiter in the hotel restaurant, he only
had to work five hours a day, it was a doddle, I
managed to get a job working in the hotel grounds
as a gardener.

We worked in Spain for two and half years, we had
a great time, but we didn't really make any close
friends, you know what Lawrence was like, he didn't
really socialise that much, but we did meet a
couple who owned a local bar, that we started
hanging out in, they were a nice couple named
Celia and Jack, they seemed to take a shine to us,
we bought them drinks and they did the same for us.

One paticular evening we were sitting around the
bar, having a good time, when Jack asked us if we
fancied coming over to their place for supper the
following night, Lawrence was up for it, so we said
okay."
"You come around about 7.30pm," said Jack,
"you know where we live, don't you?"
"Yeah! okay," said Lawrence, "see you around 7.30
tomorrow night then."

To be continued ..........