Harrison Abbott

With those lush refreshening sounds. Rain had returned. And you wished it would keep going. There’d been something nightmarish about the dryness in recent times. The gluey sense of the air.

And the vapour was much welcomed. Of course, there was places where the drought was way worse.

Why weren’t we, as a collective people, doing something far more dramatic about the climate? Why wait for it to get worse?

It’s already bad.

Who knows what will happen in this generation or the next. Whether there will be an inhabitable planet for humans in x amount of years. Scary stuff.

My bank card stopped working. For some reason.

This had never happened to me before. The chip wouldn’t register in the supermarket when I was trying to buy the groceries. And because I didn’t have any cash money I had to take the items back to the stalls, after the nervy counterguy doubted my excuse. I did have money on my card. No physical cash.

I also knew that I needed to get home. And the bus required me to get a card or cash payment for the fare. So what I did was, head around the corner of the supermarket to the ATM. To get out a tenner to then break at the shop. I typed in the PIN number and waited … and then the screen came up saying DECLINED and it fed me my card back.

Okay, what now?

I wandered down to the bus stop.

My place was 30 minutes the other side of the city. And so about an hour plus on foot. I really didn’t want to walk home tonight.

When I got to the bus stop I noticed this older man sitting on the banister. Here was hope. I went up to him.

“Excuse me sir?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m in a wee bit of trouble. First off. I’m not trying to rob you of anything. My bank card is down. I don’t know why. It’s stopped working. But I still have online banking. So – if I transferred you £2.40 right now online, would you be able to pay the bus driver when he comes? I’m really sorry to ask, it’s just that I haven’t had a card bail on me in the past and I’m unsure what to –”

“Honey. Calm down. You didn’t need to say all that. I can pay you for your fare. You don’t need to transfer the money.”

“I can happily pay you the money for it. No problem. All I need is your card details. Can send it across right now.”

“Honestly. An extra £2.40 is no bother.”

“Okay thank you.”

“No bother. Where are you from?”

“Here. In the city.”

“What do you do for a living?”

“I work in a gymnasium.”

“Oh. Right. Cool.” He said. “Come and sit down here next to me. I don’t hear so well these days.”

I sat next to him on the banister. He had George Clooney hair, salt and pepper. And his accent didn’t sound from here. But his voice was real crisp.

“How do you like working in the gymnasium?” he said.

“I don’t really enjoy it. But I need the cash.”

“What do you do when you’re not at the gym?”

“Not much.”

“You must do some things.”

“I try with songs. Songwriting.”

“Okay. You want to send me some of your stuff?”

“I don’t have any ‘published stuff’.”

“No recordings at all?”

“Well. There are some things on my phone but they aren’t complete. They’re embarrassing.”

“Send them along to me. By email. I can show you me email.”

He took his phone out and gave me his email address and I clumsily logged into my files and sent him along a few WAV. Files. Which were my songs.

The man opened one of them and began listening to it.

And suddenly one of my songs was being played in the city and the tinny noise of my voice was hard to combat that urban weight.

I looked at his face as he was listening. He was already half deaf. But I sought in his expression whether he liked the music or not.

When you place a fresh meal in front of somebody. Or pass them the football. Or dial them up to see what they’re saying.

He didn’t like my song.

Though he said to me: “That was good,” it was a synthetic compliment.

The way people have a bad taste in their mouth after it goes between the gums. That’s how they react to your songs, and it can be pretty brutal. But this old man was being kind. He listened to my song in its entirety and he handed it back to me.

“It’s good to be creative,” he said to me. “Keep going with your songs. And feel free to send along any stuff in the future.”

This man was well dressed. He had nice shoes. Smelled good.

I was about to ask him why he didn’t like my song … but then our bus bloomed up on the horizon. This pearly double decker bus.

“That’s us!” the man said.

We got up from the banister.

“Thanks so much for helping me out with this,” I said to him.

“No bother.”

“What’s your name, by the way?”

“I’m Martin. You?”

“Cassie.”

An old chap called Martin who was helping me out with the bus.

When we got on board, Martin actually had a bus pass – due to his being old. But he paid with his debit card for my fare. Before doing so he said to the driver:

“She has an issue with her card, so I’m paying for her fare.”

The driver nodded morosely.

Martin walked slowly down the lower deck – headed towards those closer seats for older people. I followed him. Wondering what to do next. Should I sit with him, considering that he’d saved me? I didn’t know this man well. And obviously I could trust him, but I’ve never been that confident a conversationalist. And so I hovered nearby him as he found a seat and sat down.

He looked up at me and he sensed my thoughts. For, he said:

“It’s okay, Cassie, if you want to sit somewhere else. You don’t have to spend more time with a deaf codger like me.”

His smile washed away his self deprecation.

“All right,” I responded, “but it was super nice of you to help me out.”

He raised a modest palm.

“Have a nice night Cassie. Bye bye.”

“You too.”

I went upstairs and there was nobody else on the deck.

Going through the dark city and each neighbourhood, it really was lucky that Martin had been at the bus stop.

Many people, I know, would have turned me down. That happened to me a few times when I was a schoolgirl when I lost my coins.

I lay my head on the window.

Martin was, as far as I know, still downstairs. Because I hadn’t seen him get off the bus below yet. And despite his kindness, I kept thinking about how he’d reacted to my song. And I wished that I hadn’t said that I wrote songs. Because I’d seen that honest dislike in his face.

There was the irony about the night. I’d been lucky with being able to get the bus home. And on the bus ride that I so coveted, I went into a gloomy place artistically – wondering whether my music was any good or not.

The bus reached a fair suburb, where there were many B&Bs and nice detached houses. Of a bus stop, I saw Martin get off. He was slow but not awkward.

And I tried to wave at him. But he didn’t look up or see me. He walked the other way from the bus, that off, and I did not see this man again in my days.

After that, my attitude towards my songs became negative. But then I had to fess up to musicality. Perhaps I should try other fields. Or / and alter the way I was composing. I did both of these things. And though such processes were hard, they helped me out in the long run.

Lucy had some messages in her inbox, which wasn’t all too common in recent times. It was from a man called Tony.

He’d just started working at her cafe and she’d noticed him a few shifts. He was handsome. She’d showed him how to work the coffee machine the other day. Tony was half shy, half confident.

‘Hey there Lucy. You doing anything tonight?’

That’s what she read on her phone. She had plans to read a book in her bedroom and this was about it. How should she respond?

‘Hi Tony,’ she came up with, ‘I’m not busy tonight. You? What are you up to?’

She pinged the message and then waited for him to reply.

He didn’t do so for three hours. She struggled throughout that stretch of time. Until he replied:

‘Not much. You wanna hook up for a beer in town? Unless it’s too late for you?’

Ah. He was asking her out. Lucy hadn’t been asked out in over eight years. Jeepers.

‘No, it’s not too late for me. Yeah I’d love a beer. Where do you want to meet up?’

He suggested this cocktail joint in the city centre. She used to go there when she was ‘still young’ – in her university days. He asked if ten p.m. would be a good time to meet? This was fine.

Okay so she was going on a date. What should Lucy wear?

She picked an apricot dress that she’d worn to her sister’s wedding years ago. And she shaved her legs. And tried not to get too nervous about the date. Why be nervous? It was supposed to be fun. Perhaps it was the eight and a half years of celibacy. Hmm. She looked at herself in the mirror wearing the dress and tried to confirm she looked okay.

Lucy’s flatmate wasn’t in. She was on holiday and so she didn’t have anybody to tell, that she was going on a date.

Was this trivial or not? She didn’t know.

But when she left the flat into the evening warmth she felt girlish all over again. She got the bus and sat on the upper deck and she thought about what she would say to Tony.

Lucy had had quite the fucked up childhood and this was laced with memories of an abusive father, who had passed away in his fifties. Her adolescence was smothered with the wickedness of high school. Also no fun story. But Lucy had bloomed at university, and, minus one suicide attempt, had been better off from thereon.

Her café job had helped, with its sobering rigidness. Adulthood was easier than her teens and her 20s periods. Now she was in her 30s she didn’t self harm anymore and there was a simple, medicinal formality about turning up to work every day.

And this was where she met handsome Tony.

Lucy looked at his social media photos when she got to the cocktail bar early. She ordered a Bloody Mary, which cost £8. Fine. Tony had dense eyelashes and effeminate lips.

She thought that she could tell him about her artwork. Lucy liked to do watercolours and oil pastels and charcoal sketches and she had a little Instagram that had a jumble of followers who she hoped weren’t being kind when hearting her stuff.

Her pictures, she thought, were about the only cool thing going for her. Aside from the artwork she may as well be nobody on the planet.

Tony was supposed to be here at 22:00.

Lucy watched the clock on her phone. 21.58, it was. Tony would be here any second, she was sure.

By 22:06, her Bloody Mary was drying up. Should she order another one? Lucy waited until half past and then she messaged Tony to say:

‘Hi Tony. I’m here at the bar. You want a cocktail? You a fan of Bloody Marys? I can get you one if you like?’

Tony saw the message, she knew, because his pic bloomed up in the circle.

At twenty past, she did order another cocktail. Tomato and vodka. You wouldn’t think those would be a good mix.

By half past, she had downed far too much of her plush drink. Tony wasn’t here and was unnervingly late and she had far few options on what to do about it. Lucy thought she would go up to the bar again and order a third Bloody Mary. The girl at the bar was maybe ten years younger than she was. A student, likely, pretty.

“How spicy would you like it?” the girl asked.

“Strong, please.”

“Okay.”

The girl set about making the cocktail. With whizzy skill. Lucy marvelled that she wouldn’t be able to do that. That the younger person was more skilled than she was.

“There you go,” the girl said when handing the Bloody Mary over.

“Thank you. Hey. Are you a student?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you study?”

“Anthropology.”

“Oh really? I did a module in anthropology too. Really liked it.”

The bargirl nodded. Then walked away.

Lucy looked at her drink. And took a huge gulp of it.

Had Tony stood her up? Or was he standing her up currently, by not showing up. Lucy was supposed to be at the café at noon tomorrow. Tony was on shift as well. [She knew because she had been watching what shifts he was on ever since he started. Because she’d fancied him since then.]

There was nobody in the world to speak to about Tony standing her up apart from this pretty girl behind the bar. Who wasn’t interested in speaking about anthropology.

Should Lucy order her fourth drink? This would take her bar tally up to £32. To spent on a bailed date.

The pretty girl came over when Lucy was still pondering.

“You after another Bloody Mary?” she said to Lucy.

“I’m waiting here for a handsome man called Tony. I think he’s stood me up.”

“Oh …”

It was as if the ‘word’ Oh was a convenient way of dealing with modern life. Every time you clicked on the news. To see who was in charge of the countries, and what they were doing. You just thought, Oh lord. And you couldn’t do anything to change the content in the articles.

“So do you want another drink?” the pretty gal said.

“No. Fuck it.”

Lucy put her coat on and she left the counter and the pretty girl stared after her and then Lucy was out in the hot night in the city centre, as out of place as possible. She shouldn’t have trusted handsome Tony.

She got to the bus stop with her apricot dress which was grey in the reflection of the shelter plastic and she had to sit on the banister and wait for her bus, which was 29 mins away. If Lucy hadn’t bothered to speak to that bartender then she would have caught the earlier bus.

Lucy logged into YouTube and she stuck her headphones in and listened to some tunes. Beatles. Radiohead. Kinks. Anything.

Had heard all of these tunes before and knew all of the words and yet they were a form of escapism.

She shouldn’t have gotten her hopes up about handsome Tony. And the tomato and vodka was an absurd combination in her gut whence riding through town back home. Lucy leaned her head on the window. The streets clocked by in withered sleepiness. Lucy looked up at the camera on the front centre of the deck. To let the passengers know they were being watched.

He got sentenced to death. They were going to guillotine him in three days time. He wondered why they didn’t just chop his head off now instead of making him wait for three days. To make it more sadistic? Who knew.

That night in his cell he could barely sleep. What was the point in sleeping? If he only had x amount of time left then why would he waste it on sleep? So he got up. And he mooched around his cell.

Inside there he had a toilet and a plastic jug of water and that’s all he had.

Somewhere around the infant morning he tried to break the plastic jug. Hoping that the sharpness of the broken jug may be efficient to dash his wrists. He banged and crushed at the jug and it wouldn’t break. And all that ended up happening was a loss of his only water. He would rather be dead right now rather than wait for a crowd of people to see his head lopped off.

After several hours of walking around his cell his body grew tired. And he had nothing else to do save collapse on his bed. There were no covers. Only a flat plastic surface and his unwashed clothes.

He fell asleep.

And he dreamed. He dreamed that he wasn’t in prison anymore and that he was a nobody walking down the street to get some bread from the local supermarket. That was the simplicity of the dream. That he was a free civilian and was allowed to do such simple things.

But then a warden woke him up. Calling his name.

He wasn’t free. Inside the cell again. With two hours of sleep, and here was the warden followed by two people who he’d never met before. They were young, in their twenties. A pair of young ladies.

“These gals want to speak to you,” the warden said. “You okay with that?”

“What about?” he said.

“I dunno. They want to ask you questions.”

“Are they reporters?” he asked the warden. Who didn’t answer. So he asked the ladies: “Are you journalists?”

“We’re curious about your situation,” one of the ladies said and she came up the bars of his cell. “We’d like to ask you some things.”

“Why?” he said. “What good will that do me?”

The warden and the ladies stared at him and they had no further dialogue. So he had to speak instead. He addressed the warden first hand. And said to him:

“I don’t want to speak, but, can I write something down for them. If one of the ladies gives me her notebook and pencil, I can write out what I totally feel. I’m better at writing than speaking. It isn’t possible for me to write anything offensive. I’m not getting out of this situation. Please? Can I do that?”

The lady journalists looked up at the warden. Who looked like a boy. He shuffled. And eventually said,

“Yes that’s fine.”

A lady handed her notebook and pencil across the cell bars.

He took the items and went into the corner of the room. And he handwrote a message there. Whilst the others wondered what he was writing.

He then folded the paper over and he handed it back to the journalist. She took it.

“Thank you,” she said to him, “I’m so sorry what’s going to happen to you.”

“Just take the paper and make sure it gets seen,” he said.

She took it off him. The word ‘sorry’ is bloated around far too often. She was apologetic that he was facing execution … No. Wasn’t sorry a blink. How could she possibly understand how he was feeling?

However, there was a morsel of hope in the warden allowing him to pass the note onto the journalist.

The warden himself was younger than the ladies. Perhaps that was why. Youth. Was there an ingredient of morality in young people?

Either or, the warden let the letter be passed on to the lady journalist.

There were no further visitations for the next two days.

He spent all of those hours on his own. And within this spell he had many regrets and he had to face up to how he’d gotten here. It would have been better to be pacifistic. How can you confront the State? By being different he had ended up behind these cell bars.

And in the morning after the other one a group of three men took him out of his cell and they handcuffed him and brought him around the back of the building where there was a huge guillotine and they propped him under the massive blade in the nook where you were supposed to put your neck. And as the blade came down he thought about how absurd this whole action was.

His execution was promoted across the media.

With mixed public reactions.

Many of them hated this man. Many of them loved him. And he did have a mother and father, and siblings, as many of us do.

The lady journalist still had his handwritten note that she got from him in prison. Because of the way it was written she didn’t know quite what to do with it. Because it didn’t belong in a newspaper.

His handwriting was tricky to read. And it took a while for her to decipher all the letters. But this is what she finally deciphered – what he wrote:

“I’ve never killed anybody.

There was a time when I was a boy when I beat up a boy in school who wasn’t able to fight back. And I did it for no other reason than to be sadistic.

I think about that on a daily basis and it’s likely the worst thing I’ve ever done. That boy had mental difficulties and he was an easy target. I picked on him without provocation and it was absurd, what I did.

That happened in childhood and during adulthood I’ve tried to be moral. There have been no violent actions throughout my adult years.

Just before I was arrested in my house. I was sitting in my bedroom. And looking up at the corner of the window outside. Where there was a spiderweb. A spider had built its web and was looking to catch a fly. And … a fly flew into the web.

It was stunning. All in silent. The fly bounced into the web and the spider sprang up out of the corner and went to chase the fly and paralyse and kill it.

But I couldn’t watch it happen.

I just could not sit there and watch the fly be paralysed by the spider. So what I did was get up and, as the spider flumed to the fly, I cut the web in half with my fingers.

As in, I didn’t crush the fly or the spider. Did not want either of them to die.

And, it worked. The spider hurtled back into its corridor gloomily. And the fly flew off down below into the garden, without those spiderweb binds.”

The lady journalist read that over and over. And she didn’t know how to show it to her newspaper What could journalism do with this note?

She knew that this man had had his head cut off by the State. He wasn’t going to have his head glued back on if she published his letter.

She remembered seeing him in the cell. Though he had been frightened, behind those bars, there was a defiance in the way he acted. To be able to write out that note whilst under scrutiny took immense power. And the upmost thing was that she agreed with him. We should not be killing living things.

The State was still legally allowed to execute a human being and this was complete insanity.

This man deeply regretted beating somebody else up. But he’d never killed anybody.

When she returned to her table from the toilet, he wasn’t there.

His coat and bag weren’t there either. Her coat and bag were next to the table. She assumed he had gone to the male toilet. And that he would be back in a minute.

Their flight was in 30 mins.

Before she had gone to the toilet she had said a snappy line to him. Something mean. Neither of them had been in the finest of moods. Despite them flying over to Greece today. They’d been a bit bitchy. And before heading for a pee she had said a line of dialogue that might’ve gone too far. Had it? She knew he was sensitive.

But, she waited five minutes and he hadn’t come back from the toilet yet. And the gate was closing in 24 minutes. They usually turned up at the gate early. She took out her phone and called him.

Bring bring bring. This was in a Wetherspoons pub where there were a hundred other people larking about at full volume. He didn’t pick up. So she thought about texting him:

‘Hey. Where did you go? I came back from the toilet and you aren’t here. Your stuff has gone too. Everything okay? The plane is in a short while and we need to get to the gate.’

When the plane was in 19 mins time she called him again and he didn’t pick up so she messaged him:

‘Did I say something rude earlier? Sorry if so. But, please, we need to get to the Gate because it’s closing soon. Where about are you?’

She put her coat and bag on and left the Wetherspoons, and headed down to the Brewdog – where he maybe went because he was upset. She milled through the interweaving mayhem of the airport. Which was normally so fun. She liked the bustle of airports; expectation and bustle.

But right now it wasn’t fun a jot. Unbearable. Where was he?

She wished for his image to appear. With his big eyebrows and his awkward six foot frame. A shy man who was embarrassed about being taller than most.

I was stupid to offend him, she thought. Shouldn’t have said that. She reached the Brewdog and scanned around the seats and they were all filled with other people who were all merrily awaiting their flights.

She looked up at the Departures screen. Their flight gate was closing in 13 minutes. She took out her phone and called him. “Please pick up. Please pick up,” she whispered. She’d been with him for two years and now all she wanted was to see him again. And gored herself at having been so cruel.

The phone call rang out to nothing. And he didn’t have an answerphone message. She pulled her hair in the middle of the airport.

There was nobody to ask about where he had gone. ‘Have you seen this tall man with brown hair?’ She had plenty of photos of him on her phone. Now that she was on her own she had no clue what to do.

Airport romance was what she associated with him. She’d been to Polska with him. To Prague, London. There was a quiet goodness about this man that she hadn’t experienced in other people before.

So why did she say horrible things to him?

She thought he might have gone to the Gate early. As a way of making her catch up to him. The Gate was number 19. She went there.

And she improvised, by sending him a voice message on her phone. She said:

“Hello I’m just running to the Gate and I hope you are there too. I’m really sorry about what I said earlier before I went to the toilet. I’m a bitch. I don’t know why I say mean things. But I hope you’re at the Gate too waiting there? Please. If you could respond it will help me out. I’m going crazy.”

She ended the call and quickly afterwards got to Gate 19. It was thronged with people waiting to go to Greece. She looked through all of them and none of them was him.

The doors of Gate 19 opened. And a pair of Ryanair lady workers came out of them, wearing their navy uniforms. And they switched on the computers.

They were taking the Priority bookings first. And these folks were called forward.

She couldn’t go to Greece on her own.

Any minute, she hoped, he would pop out and kill the joke. That he was doing all of this to hoodwink her. As a way of getting back at her for that ugly comment earlier. He was going to Greece with her.

On all the messages she had sent him, none had clocked in as being noticed. He hadn’t read any of them. But she had to try. So she sent him another voice message:

“Please, just tell me where you are. If you’ve left the airport then let me know. Because the flight is literally about to take off. Please please please.”

She stared at the screen, waiting for him to see all of her messages and calls. This phone screen was her only option for him. The phone was made of plastic and glass. She needed his blood and muscle. “Please,” she whispered, “come back to me.”

The screen looked back at her unblinking.

Just as the Ryanair ladies called for the Non Priority queue to come ahead.

Her heartbeat yammered as if she was a girl again at disco parties where she felt left out. Thumped like that time when she was in the school hockey team, as the goalkeeper – and she kept letting in goals whenever the ball was whacked at her.

But she wasn’t a kid, now, she was an adult. And she needed to know where he was.

Normally she’d be fretting about the security of the flight. The documentation.

Now she was heading up to the Ryanair ladies, at the very back of the queue. Holding her phone, with a picture of him. When the last person in front of her had gone, she showed her screen to the lady, and asked:

“Do you recognise this man? Did he go through the gate? He’s my partner; I’m looking for him.”

The lady winced at her. As did her colleague. Shocked misunderstanding.

“No, I don’t think I’ve seen this man,” the nearest one said. “I don’t recognise this person.”

“But I need him. He’s supposed to be going with me to Athens. Right now. And I don’t know where he is! Can you please help? I don’t know what to do.”

The Ryanair ladies gaped back at her with that subdued half alarm, which is how most people react when something isn’t their immediate problem. They didn’t know what to say. And so they just blinked.

Self doubt can follow you

around your whole life.

It doesn’t help with the

history of mockery.

Everybody laughing at you

around a dinner table.

Folks who were supposed

to love you.

If they loved you then

why did they

ridicule you so much?

You twitch and scramble

against sadistic memories

when riding into town on

the bus.

The laughter is the worst.

This time it was from a man claiming to come from an agency in New York. And the email body itself seemed legit. I.e., like the person was frank. I then looked up this agency to see if it was indeed legitimate. And then sought out on the website whether there was a man by this name who worked there.

And there was. I was considering responding to the email. Because it looked like a ‘top’ company.

But ... then I saw on the agency’s real website, a warning that scammers had been impersonating their agents. And ripping people off, basically. Sometimes even speaking to them on the phone.

As well as being thieves, or attempted thieves – these people tend to get your hopes up.

Writers are especially lonesome. And glimmers of ‘success’ are rare. You might get published. But that’s seldom. Brilliant when it happens, but after a publication you can go for months without another one. Or you might have books out, but barely anybody seems interested in them.

It can be hard to keep encouraging yourself to keep going. When nobody is properly listening. And then this person pretends to be intrigued in your work, and you get thrilled at the prospects of popularity, of loads of folks reading your material, etc etc.

Then it turns out that it’s some criminal who is only interested in conning you for money.

What can you do about it?

Well, I just reported the email address for phishing. And so Microsoft are now onto them. As well as blocking them, so won’t be hearing from them again.

An ex UK politician has been murdered.

Yesterday they told us she’d died but today it was upgraded to murder and there are smudged images of police cars and taped off roads in the countryside somewhere.

Another murder suspect has been caught in South Africa.

Something about Prince Harry and him battling the media.

The latest World Cup score.

A new type of dinosaur has been discovered in south east Asia and apparently it used to have an insanely long neck.

The Russian miliary are bombing schools, workplaces and transport in a Ukrainian town.

There’s a new Prime Minister coming into the UK soon and apparently he could abolish stamp duty!

On top of the heatwave, there’s a ‘wild’ fire in Spain that has killed a dozen people and it doesn’t look good for the 23 missing.

And there’s been another plan to attack the White House grounds but the police have foiled it.

The UK leaders of the main parties are all super sad that this ex politician has been killed. Their faces are super pensive and you can watch a video of them saying their bit, if you wish.

Under that there is a fat allocation for World Cup 2026. Men hugging each other in snaps. Why is it that men are more likely to touch each other heartily when it comes to soccer?

Albeit under this there is some advice from NHS paramedics in how to cope with a heat wave.

When we get to Europe news there is a surreal story of a man who was almost sucked out of a Ryanair plane window mid flight. His wife had to hold onto his legs, with his head and shoulders out in the air at that colossal a distance from the ground. Fucking crazy, and you are glad that the man survived.

There has been a Legionnaires disease outbreak in New York City, USA, of all plush places.

The Brit guy (who was born in France) lost in the Semi Final at Wimbledon.