The meeting

It’s funny how life goes. There I was minding my own business not thinking of anything in particular but wishing I could be someone different, special, someone to stand out from the crowd. When I saw him. It was 1994. 10 years ago.

I was waiting for the number 17 bus. He was looking in a shop window at hi-fi’s.

I saw his entourage first. Four people keeping perfect step a few feet behind him as he wandered down the street. He stops . They stop. I think one of them is talking into a mobile phone. He looks into the shop window. You know the kind, the place where they sell hi-fi’s that don’t look like hi-fi’s and you need a book the size of the Bible to figure out where the on switch is located.

I said to myself I bet he can afford every bit of kit in that shop. Bastard. And how come he has an entourage. Who is he? He’s nothing special.. He is a fake. A charlatan. Famous for doing one thing and one thing only. Bending spoons. Ha.

I had the urge to shout out “wanker” But then I thought no. if you’re so clever why can’t you read my thoughts and hear me say “Wanker” in your head eh?

So I said again you’re not real.. all that stuff about bending spoons and making watches stop. Well it never did impress me I thought. And I concentrated really hard on a point at the back of his neck. If you can read minds and link to the cosmos of all living things, I thought, how come you can’t react to the fact that my thoughts are boring into the back of your neck right now.. eh?

Suddenly he stops looking into the hi-fi shop and turns around as tho he has sensed something.
He looks in the general direction of the bus stop. There is a strange look in his eyes. Suddenly he focuses on me. Bugger. He walks over to where I am standing. BUGGER.

“Excuse me” he smiles “but I think this is yours”.

He hands me my bus pass.. I’m dumbstruck.. it is my buss pass. I’d lost it a few days earlier when my pet snake ate it. How did he..? What? Where did he..?

“oh, er thanks” I mutter.
“That’s ok” he says “have a nice day”

He walks off back to his entourage and continues to look into the window of the hi-fi shop. I look down at the bus pass in my hand. It was definitely my buss pass. Maybe he is ok after all. They’re not cheap bus passes and I didn’t have any change on me that day so I would have had to walk home if the bus driver had not believed me about the snake.

I looked at him again as he talked animatedly with his cronies about the merits of a particular expensive looking set of speakers. I felt ashamed of what I had thought earlier.

Go on my son I thought.. go for it.. you deserve those speakers, hang the cost, buy the most expensive set. You deserve them. I felt all warm and tingly inside.

Presently the bus comes, I get on, I go to present my bus pass and drop it because lo and behold all my finger joints are bent round the wrong way and are now totally useless.

I looked back down the street and saw him glancing back as he entered the hi-fi shop. He winked at me. Bastard I thought.

That was 10 years ago.

I am not bitter.. not now. I guess every cloud has a silver lining. If he had not bent my fingers round the wrong way I would not have spent the past ten years learning to write and paint with my feet and probably would not be the local celebrity I am today.

P.S. I am appearing in an amateur celebrity charades competition this weekend for the local hospice and yep you guessed it XXX is on my team. It will be funny to meet him again after all these years. He is great tho.

The end.

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