Nu när vi ändå är igång
Hursomhelst... man får väl se om man kan glädja pöbeln genom att publicera ännu en gammal novell på bloggen.
Denna blogg skrevs i slutet av nian, en regnig eftermiddag och är nog den enda där jag försökt få igenom ett budskap. Enligt mig själv kan jag itne ha lyckats, eftersom jag varken minns eller kan klura ut vad jag kan ha menat. Menmen, det viktigaste är ju trots allt att någon kanske finner den trevlig att läsa.
Den har ingen officiell titel, men gick under arbetsnamnet "The gentleman and the robber".
Enjoy
He took a look at his wristwatch while running down the streets of Edinburgh. The digital wristwatch showed the numbers 21:17, which meant that he had to run a distant that would usually take fifteen minutes in eight minutes. No worries, he could do that. What he did worry about, though, was what excuse he was going to use for the fact that he hadn’t bought a birthday present for his sister. Jesus Christ, this was the second year in a row that he had put the buying of a gift further in time, and now it was to late. He at least had some flowers for her! Sure, they were cheap, broken, few and needed water in a desperate hurry in order to survive to the party.
Let’s see, what excuse did he use last year? Oh yes, he tried to use the old “my-boss-is-giving-me-a-hard-time-at-work-so-I-haven’t-had-any-time-to-buy-a-gift-I-am-terribly-sorry-tecnique.” Of course, it did not work. But he had made her happy by helping to clean up after the party and promise on their mother’s grave that he was going to buy something pretty for this year. So there he was, running on the wet pavement with some ugly tulips and no proper gift. He was screwed! He would loose the tiny fragment of respect that his sister had built up for him in a single evening. Maybe some store on the way was open at that hour? Other from Seven-Eleven, probably not, but it could be worth a try.
All of a sudden, he had a gun pointed in his face. He tried to stop right away but slipped on something and landed in a water puddle.
“You all-right there mate?” The man with the gun said and helped him back on his feet. “You ought to be more careful, it would be a shame to ruin that nice jacket of yours, wouldn’t it?”
“Well… yes, that would be a bummer. I’m actually on my way to a birthday party, and it would be a good laugh for everyone if I’d show up with a broken jacket. By the way, what’s with the gun mate? ”
“Oh, I’m robbing you, you see.” A silence suddenly fell over the odd couple in the damp street corner.
“I beg your pardon?”
“It’s a robbery. You know, I point a gun at you and you give me your money. ” There was a brief silence again.
“Why me?”
“Well, I don’t know really. You just seemed like a good victim, y’know, running a round in a nice jacket with a somehow glace expression. You just seem like a man who’s got money and isn’t too careful.”
“Oh”
“Yeah mate, nothing personal. “
“Well, I suppose I better give you something then. “
“That’d be nice.” The robber patiently watched the little, stressed man as he felt his pockets for his wallet so that he could give it to the beardy man in front of him, but his hands did find nothing but empty areas in all of his poor little pockets
“Bummers” he said”I must have left it at home.”
“How unfortunate” the robber said with a disappointed expression. “Well, I have to take something, don’t I?”
“You wouldn’t be much of a robber if you didn’t. “
As they stood there in the streetlights, the rain was beginning to come back. As any gentleman would do in this situation, the robber offered the man to buy him a cup of coffee in one of the cheap 24/7 diners downtown.
The choices in the diner were few. You could either get a coffee with a slice of mouldy lemon pie, just a coffee or a slap in the face and the opportunity to spend the evening outside the diner. They both went with the coffee.
“So, how’s business nowadays?” the man asked the robber.
“I wish I could say that it’d never been better, but those words won’t come out of any honest robbers mouth these days.” The robber said while stirring down a piece of sugar in his poorly made coffee. He took a sip, gazed out in the rainy emptiness outside and continued. “Things were just a whole lot easier in the old days. Back then you could just walk up to some random hippie, tell him to give away his money, kick him in the groin and hide out somewhere for a couple of hours. Nowadays, people whine a lot more. The police are better and our victims have a nasty habit of running away when we show up. There are simply no honest people in this town anymore. I’m just trying to make myself a living!”
You could do nothing but to feel bad for the poor man as he sat there with a tear falling down his beard and into his coffee.
“I feel with you, man. I myself work in a record store, and things have never been this bad. People don’t see any reason to walk all the way to a store and pay for a record, when they can just sit at their big arses and download it. By the time it takes to walk to the record-store and back to buy a record, you can get the artists entire discography while watching the telly, scratching your arse.”
“No honest people left…”
“I’ll to that, man.” They both drank some of their coffee-muck and stared down at the filthy table in silence for a while.
“You know what else sucks with this job?” The robber asked. “First of all, no girls want to go into a relation with a robber since it’s not a proper job. Apparently, they’ve realised that we don’t make too much of money, and we aren’t bad-ass enough to make women wet about it. But the worst part of it is that no one with a proper job wants to hire a robber. So no matter what, I’m stuck in a life without a future or even a woman. The only thing I can do, really, is to lie about myself to women in order to get a short romance with sex, or to walk down to the local market and shoot everybody.”
“Now that’s tough.” He thought a bit of what the robber had said and suddenly got a dark enlightenment. “You know what, man? I think I’m heading in that direction too! Let’s face it, the business is horrible and the store is close to bankruptcy. And since I’ve worked in that place for so long, I haven’t learned a got damn thing about anything in the past 30 years. So it’s either becoming a robber or starting to work at MacDonald’s with the other fuck-ups for me. And what woman would want a man like that?”
So there they sat, comparing sad futures when a bell suddenly rang in the man’s head.
“Fuck! The party! I’m like, an hour late already. Sorry mate, you’ll have to rob me some other time.”
“Bloody hell man, I’ll give you a ride.”
The robber dropped him off outside the lovely house of his sister and he ran up to the door, fixing his tie. But as he rang the doorbell, the robber ran up to him.
“You forgot your jacket, mate!” The door was at that exact moment opened by the man’s sister.
“Harry, where have you been?” she asked with a smile as huge as her forgiving heart. “I almost thought you weren’t going to show up. “
“Sorry, my boss held me back at work and my cell is out of battery.” She heard his explanation, but she stopped listening as her eyes met the robber’s. Her face shone up and she threw herself in his arms.
“Billy, I thought you were stuck at work all the night!” The robber glanced a bit embarrassed and excusing at Harry, who could do nothing but to stand there in pure confusion.
“Surprise honey, I managed to get the rest of the night off.” He said with an unsteady smile.
“Oh, how rude of me! Harry, this is my new boyfriend, Bill. Bill, this is my brother Harry.”
Harry and Bill looked each other in the eyes and shook hands. Harry should have warned his girlfriend and hit Billy in the mouth for using his sister, but he remembered the robber’s heart-warming story and got filled with compassion and smiled. Bill smiled back.
“Let’s go grab some cake, Billy-boy.”
“You said it, mate!”
