Standing in the high street Grimble mutters, he mumbles, sometimes he talks.
- No one listens. No one hears him or wants to. They just keep on waddling past, laden down with fat bags of fat shopping.
- Grimble sits on the pavement.
- Not on the side, not in a shop doorway, on a kerb, out of the way, he will not be conveniently invisible. No. Grimble sits in the middle of the pavement. The busy, busy pavement.
- People walk around him.
- He cries. He sobs and shakes. Hunched on the pavement a shaggy island of human shamble. He is waste. Grimble the waste man. He does not think he has wasted his life. There were moments; all the way through there were moments. Isolated, but there none the less. Times when he shone, times when he was alive, really alive. Times when he was the moment, the cause, the catalyst, the reason.
- Bright times.
- Someone almost trips over him, a man, a young man, a young man in the full strength of his own bright times.
- “Fucking twat.”
- Grimble does not care, that does not hurt, he has been punched and punched and punched, body, head, body, jab, jab, uppercut, hook. He has been stabbed, shot, mortared, and near murdered. Ran over, bitten by dogs, once even by a man, he has fallen from trees, been pushed from moving cars, and jumped from a burning building. All these things hurt, to be called names is a small thing. Most of all he has lost. To lose, to have lost, that hurts the most.
- Grimble stops crying and starts to laugh. There is little difference, not for him. People still walk around him.
- Names. He wasn't always Grimble. Once he was Mr Person Somebody. He lived with Mrs Wife Somebody and the two little Somebodies. Now they are just bodies and he is Grimble on the pavement. Lost.
- Once he was good with his hands. Very good. Once he was a boxer, with fast hands, then a soldier with calm hands, then a carpenter with strong, carving, steady hands, and all the time he was a lover and good with his hands, and all the time he was a father and gentle with his hands.
- Now his hands are dirty, dirty hands. Black like charred things. Twisted, crooked, ragged, broken like their owner. But they do not shake. No, they do not shake, for Grimble will not, has not, does not take a drink. Not now, not anymore. Not ever. Not again. Not today. No.
- Someone walks past and looks at Grimble. This man is not young, this man is not strong in his bright times, but paunched and waning, a man in his dimmer, dimming, near dark times and his eyes are full of fear. Full of it.
- Grimble cackles and pats the pavement beside him.
The dim man's eyes widen he rushes on, stumble-skips, nearly falls before turning away forever. He is heading for a darkness of his own. Grimble knows it. Can see it.
- Grimble sighs, looks around. The pavement is dark and slick with hours ago rain, and all around him shoes, ankles, trouser legs, clacking heels. It's all he can see, for he will not look up. He does not have it in him to look up. These people are not worth looking up to.
- Someone touches Grimble. A hand on his shoulder, he cringes away with a whimpered curse, but the hand follows and rests on his shoulder.
- Deep, feel for the world eyes, edged with care-line crow's feet, fill Grimble's world.
“It's okay.” the voice melodious and warm, has a tilting, lean to, lilt that oozes assurance, “I won't hurt you.”
- A liar then.
- “Here take this…” a crisp clean note is pressed into Grimble's hand, “get something to eat or, well, whatever you want.”
- Yes a liar.
- A dazzle goodbye smile, then the do-gooder is turn and gone happy. Contented, back into the flow of passing humanty.
- Grimble looks at the note in his palm, rocks back and forth on the still wet pavement, cries, laughs, and screams.
- People walk by.
- Grimble stands up, lets the river of pavement people carry him downstream, the note clasped firm in a hand that now, and only now starts to shake.
