Peter

I spent the day at the park. I sat on my bench. I watched the people, the pigeons, the crows. It was a nice day – it was not too cold. I don’t like the cold. If it is cold I have to find another place to go. I like the shopping centre. Sometimes I go there and I find a bench and I sit there. But at the shopping centre there are men in uniforms. They make me move. They don’t hurt me – they just make me move. I don’t like to move. But if I sit at the same bench every time they notice me. I have to find different places to sit. Not the same place. I don’t like that. I like to sit on the same bench. It is nice. I like the park. At the park I can sit on the same bench every time. Nobody makes me move.

Today was a nice day.

When the park closed, I went home. I don’t get very hungry usually, but after a day at the park I want to eat something. It is something I do. I walked home. On the way home I went to the supermarket and I got some bread and some cheese. It is a big supermarket. The ladies at the cash registers know me, but they don’t try to talk to me anymore. Some of them tried when they were new. They would say ‘hello luv, bread and cheese again?’ or something like that. Sometimes I buy ham. I don’t say anything to them. I never say anything. Sometimes I want to say something. But I am not good at talking to people, so I keep quiet and I pay for my things. Soon they stop talking to me. That is good.

At home I made a cheese sandwich and I got a glass of water. I ate the cheese sandwich and I drank the water. It was nice. I wasn’t hungry any more. I don’t like to be hungry. It is not nice.

I sat down on my sofa. I have a nice sofa. I like to sit there in the evening. When it is dark I go to bed. 

I was comfortable, sitting on my sofa. But I felt strange – not settled. I thought about it. Why did I not feel settled? Today was a nice day. It was a nice sandwich. The sofa was nice. It made me worry. I like to feel settled. Settled is nice.

It was a strange feeling. I felt like I wanted to do something.

Usually, I don’t do things. I like to sit and watch things in the park. Or I sit down at home. I don’t have a television – televisions are too noisy, and they keep changing too quickly. They are not nice. I don’t read books – not usually – except for one or two. My favourite book is about a boy called Max. Max goes to a special place. He is there for a long, long time. All the time he is gone, every night, his mother leaves food for him in his bedroom. Then he goes home. I like that story. It is nice. I decided to read my favourite book again. Maybe that would make me feel better – not strange.

I read it. It did make me feel better. I like to see the pictures with the monsters. But, after I finished, I started to feel strange again. I do not like to feel strange. I got up and I started to tidy my room. I have one room for living and I have a bathroom and toilet. My bed is on one side, my sofa is in the middle, and there is a sink and a cooker and a fridge near the door. It is a nice room.

Really, today is not the day to tidy my room. But I feel strange, so I have to do something – I have to feel settled. After I tidied my room I sat down on my sofa again.

The feeling came back. It came back stronger this time. It was not nice. I decided to take a walk.

Usually I do not go outside in the night-time. I worry about monsters. But I knew the moon would not be full, or new, or just dying, so I decided that it would be alright. I put on my coat and I went outside for a walk. I could not see the moon, but I could feel it. I thought everything would be alright now. The night-time air felt nice. I like the smell of night. I relaxed a little. I walked to the park. The gates were closed for the night. The park has nice gates – strong iron gates – they keep the park safe. I watched the gates for a while, then I turned around to walk back home. I always walk this way. It is a nice road with trees and a safe part for walking on where the cars do not go. I do not like cars. They move very fast and they surprise me. They smell bad. They are not nice.

I heard a noise behind me. I stopped and looked. There are not very many street-lights here, but I see well in the dark – there was a cat behind me. I think it was a cat. A big black cat. I think black cats are supposed to be lucky. I like cats. They do not make me confused. They are nice. Sometimes they sit with me on my park bench. I said hello to the cat and then I continued my walk. I saw bats flying – little flitter-mice. I stopped to watch them. The cat stopped too. We watched the bats. They are very fast, but I like them. They do not frighten me. On the other side of the road there was a group of people. They were loud. I think they were young men. They were very noisy. One of them shouted and said I was an old loony. They all laughed. It is not a nice thing to say and it is not nice to laugh at people. I didn’t like it. I walked away. But now I felt very, very strange. 

Then I had an idea.

I do not usually have ideas. Usually I just watch things. So I was surprised. My idea said, why not go to a pub? 

There is a pub near here which is old and dirty and not very busy. It does not have music or television or sport, and it is never crowded. I have been there before. I feel comfortable in the pub. Usually I do not drink alcohol, but sometimes I do. On my birthday. At midsummer. At new year. It was not my birthday today. It was not midsummer or new year, but I thought a glass of beer would help me to settle. I do not like to feel strange.

I went inside and I asked for a pint of bitter please. Then I sat down in a corner. It was quiet and dark. It was nice. I thought I must come to the pub more often. The pub is nice. I drank the beer and I watched the people. People are strange. They are very busy, even in a pub. But no one spoke to me. That was good. I began to relax.

I saw two of the little people in the pub. They like to steal beer. They were very drunk, I think. I like to watch the little people. They are funny, but usually they are difficult to see. Sometimes I can’t see them at all. Sometimes I can.

After a while, I had finished my beer. There was water on the outside of the glass. I know cold things make water – milk bottles – things like that. I was watching the water run down and soak into the cardboard beer-mat. It made a wet circle. It was nice to watch. I like circles. I was feeling much better then.

“You stupid bitch.”

There was a man near me with a lady. He was angry. I do not like it when people are angry. He called the lady bad names and he shouted. Then he stood up and he picked up his beer glass. He tried to break it on the table. His other hand grabbed the lady by her throat and he pushed her against the wall of the pub. This is not a nice thing to do. I do not like shouting. I do not like violence. I did not want to see the man cut the lady with a broken beer glass. It is not nice. I stood up and I went up to him and I asked him to stop. I asked him nicely. I was polite. It is important to be polite. I called him ‘sir’. He turned to me very quickly and he said, “It’s none of your business you mad old git. Now bugger off!”

I told him that I do not like to hear shouting or see people bleed. It is uncomfortable for me. And then he tried to hit me with his glass. It was not broken because he was not very good at breaking beer glasses, but it would hurt me if he hit me. I did not want to be hurt so I moved a little and pushed his arm so it would swing past – so it would not hit me. I kept my hand on his arm to keep it moving and I pushed his shoulder back a little. He was swinging the glass very hard so he lost his balance and he fell over onto the table. He made a lot of mess and he broke the table. I think he banged his head because he did not get up. He made a strange noise. I was sorry. The lady shouted at me. She said I hurt her man. She hit me on the back of the head with something. It hurt. I felt strange. Dizzy. I fell down on top of the man.

The Ancient and Honourable Society

It weren’t right. He put another entry into his small red notebook, made a habitual but purely token effort to wipe off the grubby finger-smudges, and walked over to his map. It was a pretty damn good map, and so big that he had to stand on a chair whenever he wanted to push pins in it anywhere further north than Manchester. You could trust a map as big as that, even if it was multi-sourced, on a variety of scales, taped together with bits of re-purposed sellotape and stuck to the wall with an amusing mix of fluffy blu-tack and old chewing gum. It truly was a map of substance!

This new pin was a bit of a tiptoe stretch but he didn’t actually need a chair. One more blue pin for the City of Birmingham. One blue pin equalled ten missing people. Ten missing was a hell of a lot and there were three other pins in Birmingham already.

He’d spent time hanging around electrical stores and pubs with loud fuzzy televisions and badly synced subtitles (who hadn’t!) and he knew that even humans got upset if their people went a bit missing. But there were so many humans! There were bound to be some going missing. But this was different. There were much fewer of his people, so even just a couple disappearing was big news. Or could be. Even amongst the little folk, people mostly just assumed that someone had wandered off, or decided to try a new town or city (or even, in a few cases of debatable sanity, that they’d gone for the largely pub and Starbucks free countryside), or that they had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time vis-a-vis dogs, foxes or fast moving automobiles. But this was different. Too many, too close together. This was, potentially, big trouble. This was, he thought proudly, precisely why the society had been formed in the first place. 

Birmingham now had four blue pins. Forty people gone missing. And those were only the ones he had heard about. After all, Birmingham was a long way off, and news, even if it did make its way down towards the capital didn’t always make it in a very direct or efficient way. Sometimes it was word of mouth, sometimes it was a friend or relative looking for their lost one, sometimes it came all official via a bosses convention (otherwise known as high level piss-up), sometimes it got to London but never got brought to the attention of the Society, and sometimes it stopped off for a throat moistener on the way and never actually made more than five miles from where it started. Which all added up to the unpleasant conclusion that there were quite probably a lot more than forty people gone missing in the mysterious land of Brum. 

“Which means,” he said to himself (on account of there was no one else there) “that the society should send somebugger up to check things out.” And then he sighed, because ancient and honourable though the society was, it was also pretty underfunded and understaffed. In fact, despite his best efforts in deciphering the scrawled and badly spelled list of registered abodes and contact addresses, and of trying to sniff/ferret/winkle out other members of the society, he had found precisely no one, and he himself was, therefore, quite conceivably and worryingly the only one left. Which made him, by default, the leader and esteemed cod-whalloper of the society. But it also meant, unfortunately, that he was now the somebugger due a trip up to the fair and famous city of Birmingham. Why not Brighton, or Norwich? Or somewhere else famous for its relative density of pubs per square mile of real estate? Why Birmingham, which as far as he could tell, was, like Belgium, famous only for not being very famous.

Still, it was not without a fair helping of pride and self-importance that he packed up his earthly possessions, shoved them into his pockets, checked to make sure he still had room in his other pockets for a borrowed hot dog or so, and set off to hitch an unpaid ride on the tube (the little people were not eligible for Oyster cards by virtue of not being tall enough to reach the sensor on the ticket gate, so they would generally wait until things were a bit quiet, and then sneak-slither-saunter around or under the barrier. 

Peter

When I woke up my head hurt. It was light. I opened my eyes. The light hurt, but not too much. I looked around. I was in a strange room. I don’t think I’d ever been in a place like this before. Very clean. Strange smells. Lots of white – walls, bed, sheets, all white. There was a man in the corner. He was wearing a uniform. For a moment I thought he was a guard from the shopping centre – but he wasn’t. 

“Good Morning Mr Smith,” he said. It was strange. I suppose Smith is my name, but it is strange to hear it. I looked at him.

“Mr Smith, my name is Police Constable John McAlister. I just want to bring you up to date and ask you a few questions.” I had never met a police officer before – at least I don’t think I have. I watched him carefully. He was quiet, and he didn’t move around too much. I decided he was probably nice.

“Are you feeling all right, Mr Smith?” he said. “You’ve had a nasty knock on the head.” I remembered something about a pub, and a bang on the head. I touched the back of my head. Cloth – bandages.

“All right,” I said.

“Good. We have several witnesses to last night’s little fracas,” he said, “but we would like you to confirm to us what happened”. I didn’t understand very well so I just smiled. Police Constable McAlister made some notes in his notebook and nodded to himself. “It seems,” he said, “that you got caught up in a rather unpleasant bit of a domestic conflict. You apparently intervened and interrupted an attack, which, had you not intervened, might have led to some very serious injuries, possibly a fatality. And you got knocked on the head for your troubles.” 

I nodded, then I wished I hadn’t.

“You were knocked unconscious, and were brought here, to the City Hospital.” He looked more closely at me and frowned. “Do you want me to call a doctor?” he said.

I shook my head – carefully.

“OK, then. Well, we just need to check a couple more points.”

He asked me some questions, and I tried to answer them as briefly as I could. I don’t usually talk to people, but I knew that you were supposed to answer questions from the police. I’m not sure how I knew that – or even if it was true. I was still feeling very peculiar.

Police Constable McAlister left after a little while, and then a doctor came in. She said she was sorry she hadn’t been there when I woke up. I thought, I always wake up at seven o’clock – but then I realised that the doctor wouldn’t know that. She said I’d been given x-rays last night and my skull was not cracked or broken. I knew that anyway. I had some bruises and some swelling, and a cut on my scalp, but they would be better soon. I am good at getting better. There was no bleeding inside my brain. Then she very politely asked me to count her fingers, or watch them as she moved them around. I think I did reasonably well. She told me I was alright, and if I felt well enough I could go home. She told me lots of other stuff. It was difficult to follow – but right at the end, she gave me a smile and said I did a brave thing, trying to protect that lady. Even if she was a psychopath.

And then I understood, really understood, what I had done.

I was shocked. 

I don’t do things like that. It is very important that I don’t get noticed. I don’t know why. I must be quiet and must not get noticed. It is the main rule of my everyday life. Don’t stand out. Bad things will happen. I don’t do brave things. I don’t help strange women in pubs. I hardly ever go to pubs. I certainly don’t fight dangerous idiots with beer glasses. 

It was all very, horribly, confusing. After the doctor left, I got dressed and I left too. My clothes were a bit smelly from spilled beer, but not so very bad. I should go home and get changed – get cleaned up.

But I didn’t want to. Going home scared me. And it scared me more than a little bit – it scared me gut wobblingly through to my jellied core. That was strange. Home is safe and comfortable. But thinking about going home made me feel very worried – very nervous, very, very uncomfortable. I went for a walk.

There were a few people around. It was nice. It was sunny. When I walked out of the hospital, I found that I knew where I was. Police Constable John McAlister said it was the City Hospital, but it was the Dudley Road Hospital. It was near to my park. I walked to the park and found my bench. I sat down. After a few minutes, I got a little bored. I watched a young couple walking together, laughing. I saw a dog trying to catch a pigeon. I wondered how many times it would have to fail before it gave up. I looked around. I shuffled a little to get more comfortable. I failed. So I stood up and I started to walk around the park. 

Then I stopped. Stopped dead.

Something was wrong. Something was very wrong. 

I don’t do those things! I don’t get bored. I never get bored! I don’t leave my bench unless it rains. And I certainly don’t wonder about things, especially dogs and pigeons. I watch. I don’t wonder. I don’t judge. I don’t think. All I do is just watch. I watch. That is what I do. That is what I always do. That is good. That is a good way to be.

Now I was really worried. Really, really, worried. Something had changed. Change was bad. I looked around, but no one was watching me – at least no one that I could see. But I did not feel safe, my skin prickled and my guts churned.

All right, I thought to myself. Calm down. Calm down and sit down. Think. I sat down on a bench. Not my usual bench, but right now I didn’t care. At least that was normal – normally I don’t care much about anything. All right. My name is Peter Smith. I think. I mean, I know my name is Peter Smith, but somehow it doesn’t feel right. Doesn’t seem to fit, like someone else’s clothes.

But anyway – I’m Peter Smith, I’m – how old? I should know how old I am. Everybody knows how old they are. I went through my pockets. There wasn’t much but I found a wallet. Some money, some cards, a few receipts. Ah, and a driver’s licence – with a date of birth. Why do I have a driver’s licence? I don’t drive. I don’t like cars. They are too noisy. But I had a date of birth. I wasn’t sure what year it was now, but after a while I noticed that the receipts had dates printed on them. I did the sums – I must be, thirty-five years old. That didn’t feel right either, but I let it pass. Do I have a job? I can’t think of one. I just go to places like the park, and I sit through the day. But I have money – where from? The government? Disability allowance? Pension? Something like that? And I live in flat 23A, Summer Gardens, Birmingham. That is what it says on my licence. I put my head between my hands – how could I not know these things!

The cat is back. It is the same cat as last night (I think). It is sitting next to my bench. It must have come up while I was thinking. It is a very large cat.

“Hello,” I said. The cat just looked at me. “I think I’m in trouble,” I said. “Because something has changed.” The cat licked its paws, but it kept on looking at me. “I know my name and I know where I live, and I know what I do,” – not that I do anything but sit on benches and sofas, I thought – “and how I live,” – if you call doing nothing all day long ‘living’ – “but it is all wrong.” The cat started to clean its private parts. I hoped that wasn’t some kind of comment on what I was saying. I said, “I feel different. I feel very strange.” And I did. I was thinking about things. This was not good. As far as I can remember I’ve spent my life just sitting, quietly – at the park, on the sofa – doing nothing, thinking nothing, just letting the world softly pass in front of my eyes, and thinking it was nice. 

It’s a horrible thought. It’s not a nice thought. How could I ever think it was nice? How many years have I spent on ‘my bench’ or ‘my sofa’? I didn’t know what to do. Maybe I should go back to my flat? But what for? I didn’t want to go back to the flat – it still scared me. But it was somewhere to start. I didn’t know who or what I was. Knowing your name doesn’t mean anything – you need memories to be a person, and my memories were full up with park benches, old sofas and cheese sandwiches. Which basically equals nothing because there was nothing else! No people, no friends, no family. No family? I must have had family! I must have had a childhood – schooling. I could read, I knew that, so I must have learned to read. But all I remember is that same old fixed routine, going back, and back, and back, as far as my memory goes. Years and years. I started to shake.

“Hey, hello, you all right, there?”

I looked up. There was a young man standing in front of me.