My Big Dream

“Get a job you idle bastard!”

So saying, the tall man in the pinstriped suit ripped the tin of beer from the beggar’s hands and poured it all over his face and shirt. Then he tipped over his paper cup full of change, and finally kicked him hard in the stomach, causing the poor man to curl up in agony.

His smartly dressed attacker looked down at him and grinned, appearing for all the world like an evil toad.

Something snapped inside me.

Without stopping to think, I ran across and punched the bastard in the face. Once. Then a second time. He collapsed and fell to the ground, apparently unconscious.

Meanwhile, the beggar had picked up his few possessions and was scampering off, down the road, and I saw him settle into a shop doorway further down the street.

I was in the town’s busy high street and after scooping up the beggars few coins and replacing them in the cup, I went into the nearby supermarket and found a six-pack of the same brand of beer that the poor bugger had been drinking. I also bought him some sandwiches and carried them out to where he’d set up his new camp.

“There you are mate,” I told him, handing the stuff over.

He just stared, unable to believe his luck, as I stuffed a ten-pound note into his money-cup on top of the coins.

“Th-thanks,” he muttered. “I dunno what to say. Most people don’t even notice I exist. Or occasionally they have a go at me, like that arsehole just now.”

“There but for fortune go you or I,” I told him. “And it’s true in my case. You see, my friend, you and me are pretty much in the same boat. I’ve got a place to live, but I’m well behind with the rent and the landlord’s probably going to chuck us out soon.” I frowned to myself, pondering on all my recent sleepless nights and how I’d been living in abject misery for years now. “Well, have a good day, mate, it was nice to meet you.”

I was an hour late for work, but I was feeling so depressed with my life that I was almost beyond caring.

“Come in Rupert, you stupid prat!” my friend and colleague Dave said in a panic as I entered the office, as he virtually dragged me across the big open-plan space towards my workstation. “Don’t you remember, our new boss is supposed to be arriving this morning?”

“Shit! I forgot all about it.”

“Well it’s your lucky day – he hasn’t arrived yet. I switched on your computer early, so we’ll all swear blind you’ve been here since nine.”

No sooner had I sat down at my desk than the door opened and the new boss – a man with the unlikely name of Gideon Spragglebyte – came striding through the door.

My heart sank as I recognised him. His lip was frothing blood from where it was split and he had an eye socket that was burgeoning into a variety of shades of black. God, who could believe my luck!

And he recognised me too.

“YOU! IN MY OFFICE NOW!” he roared, pointing at me, then charging into his room.

A while later I was standing in front of his desk in the large office with its large window overlooking the main road. He was already seated, sprawled out in his posh leather chair.

“I’ve been told that my first job here is to start cutting staff.” He smiled, then scowled as his lower lip split open again. “And you are number one on the list.” He was staring down at the open file on the desk in front of him. “So Mr –” he looked down at the file “ – Rupert Tweddle. Your employment here is immediately terminated and I’ll get security to accompany you to your desk. Don’t bother giving future employers my name for a reference. And I want you off the premises within thirty minutes.”

“You can’t just sack me like that,” I argued, panicking now. “I’ve been with the firm for five years, and I can sue you for unfair dismissal.”

He stood up, walked around the desk and moved up close to me. I noticed his horrible aftershave: a mixture of perfume and vanilla essence that made me want to puke. “Frankly, you bloody bastard, count yourself lucky that I just can’t be arsed to call the police and have you banged up for assault! Either fuck off out of here right now, or I will call the police and you’ll be in the cells for the day with a court case to look forward to. Take your choice. And by the way, if you’re planning to sue the firm I should first of all tell your solicitor that you punched your boss. It’s a sackable offence.”

When I got home, I dreaded to tell my wife Jackie that I’d lost my only source of income. Truth to tell our marriage wasn’t a happy one, and we hardly ever talked, but I was pretty sure that she would support me now that the chips were down.

But as I approached our block of flats something seemed a bit odd. I knew it was her day off, yet the car was in its usual spot, so she was likely to be at home. However, when I went up to our landing and opened the front door to our flat the place seemed unnaturally quiet, because she usually has the telly or the radio on. I walked through the hall and saw that the bedroom door was wide open.

My heart nearly stopped when I approached, and saw the bare backside of our neighbour, Garry, who was stark naked and lying on the bed between my wife’s legs and grunting like a pig as he had sex with her. I don’t think they were even aware I was standing there, and I quickly made myself scarce.

Later that afternoon, as I walked the streets, I pondered my fate: I’d lost my job and I’d lost my wife. And soon I was going to lose my home – in fact I’d already lost it, for I couldn’t imagine myself ever moving back there without remembering the humiliation of seeing Jackie having sex with another man.

So I decided that I felt entitled to get raving pissed.

Why not?

What did any of it matter anymore?

The pub wasn’t crowded and no one noticed me quietly drinking at my table in the corner, feeling more and more comatose and miserable, and wondering what the hell I was going to do with my life. I hardly noticed the time, wasn’t even hungry, but much later I realised that many hours must have passed. I’d switched off my phone and when I turned it on I noticed a lot of unanswered calls from Jackie – I looked at her latest text:

Where are you, Rupert? I’m worried.

Fuck her! Let her worry.

But I did have a big problem: Where on earth was I going to go for the night if I didn’t go home?

I stumbled to my feet, barged into someone as I pushed through the crowd and stumbled. Too late I realised that I was so drunk I could hardly walk, but I managed to negotiate the step onto the pavement with difficulty. But I failed, tripped and landed headfirst on the pavement.

People cursed and stepped over me, assuming I was a useless drunk who had collapsed. I staggered to my feet, then I’d hardly gone more than a few steps when I fell to the pavement again, this time banging my head and knocking myself unconscious.

“Hello mate!” said a voice I didn’t recognise, shaking my shoulder and waking me from my drunken stupor. To my surprise it was the homeless man I’d met this morning, and he was with another guy. “Are you all right?”

“Not really,” I confessed. “I’m raving pissed and I can’t go home to my wife. I’ve lost everything.” I told them all that had happened to me that day.

“Come along with us,” he said, and the two of them helped me to my feet. “We’re staying at the Ritz Hotel tonight, you can join us!”

We walked quite a way to the other side of town until we came to some open ground, where there were a lot of homeless people sitting around an open fire, all trying to keep warm in the freezing wind. I sat down between my two saviours.

The other people were a mixed bunch: all ages, mostly men but a few women, everyone sad-eyed and gloomy, yet there were occasional smiles. My drunkenness had worn off a bit and I was listening to my new friends, who were chatting listlessly to each other.

One of them seemed to be older than the rest, and seemed to be a kind of leader. Bill was tall and burly with a long white beard and an old army greatcoat, and he spoke with a Scottish accent.

“So laddie,” he was addressing me, I realised. “What’s your big dream?”

“My big dream?” I replied, confused.

“Most of us have got one,” he went on cheerfully. “It keeps us warm on cold nights. And it keeps us sane when we feel we’re going crazy. Take me. I was in the navy when I was young, Always loved the sea. My big dream is to get a wee boat – nothing too fancy, just a general working craft, and I’d like to get a stock of provisions – diesel, food and so on. And then to go anywhere in the world I fancy, and to stop off wherever I want, go around, meet people, make friends and move on. See the world, be a free spirit, roaming to my heart’s content. It’ll never happen of course, but I can dream.”

“My big dream isn’t quite as adventurous as Bill’s.” A man called Martin had joined in the conversation. He was thin and tall and looked to be in his 70s, and he had a habit of blinking a lot. “My son and his family emigrated to New Zealand and they live in a beautiful town on the coast. My big dream is to buy a little house near where they live and have enough money to get by and live out my days in the beautiful countryside of New Zealand. Of course it’s impossible because the only people who can emigrate there nowadays are people of working age with the kind of jobs they need – doctors, engineers and such. If you’re retired you’d have to be a millionaire before they’d let you in.”

There was a long, sad silence while we all reflected on things.

“My big dream?” I told them finally. “Well now you’re asking, I never really thought about it before. It’s funny. Because, you see I’m a qualified nurse. Fifteen years ago I was working in a big hospital, in the busy A and E department. I enjoyed it – life was never dull, it was great feeling to be part of a close-knit team. But my wife didn’t like the long shifts and wanted me to earn more money, so I got an office job, but I always hated it. So now here’s my dream, I suppose you could say. Every time I see people in war zones on the telly, when you see the hospitals and the poor suffering people being treated in primitive conditions, I long to go out there and do my bit to help them. When I worked in the hospital of course it was hard and stressful, but I still remember the satisfaction of being part of a big medical unit, mucking in and trying to help people. There’s nothing quite like it. So I suppose that’s my dream. Going out to a war zone and doing my bit to help in a hospital.”

There was another long silence, broken only by the crackling of the fire.

“If you’ll excuse my saying, Rupert,” Martin said, “that doesn’t sound like a dream at all to me. It’s nothing like our pipedreams, our hopeless fantasies. That sounds to me like a very good idea.  A plan, not a dream at all.”

“It certainly does,” added Bill, clapping me on the shoulder with his huge hand. “You go for it, Rupert. What have you got to lose?”

Another person, a woman who had been listening to us, had a phone and she was busily tapping away at the screen. “Médecins sans Frontières, that’s the organisation of doctors that goes out to war zones has an office not too far from here,” she told me. “So does the Red Cross. I don’t know what kind of qualifications you’d need, but if you were a fully qualified nurse fifteen years ago, then even if you have to do a refresher course or something I bet they’d be glad to have you.”

“Absolutely,” Martin joined in. “By the look of you you’re only in your forties, younger than most of us. And if you’ve lost your wife, your home and your job, then you’re a free agent, absolutely free to do whatever you want, aren’t you? You can start your life all over again.”

A free agent.

You can start your life all over again.

I hadn’t thought of it that way before.

Suddenly I realised that the day that had started so badly had ended on a high.

For the first time I could remember I was really really happy. . .