Two Walkers

Their paths converged too often for either walker's likening. It was difficult parabola-wise for them not to collide for they lived as neighbours, exactly next door to one another in red-brick terraced houses. The one, the elder man, Tom, had lived all his life in Lower Tranmere, once a place of busy industry and shipbuilding. He’d never not lived with his mother, a cheery old soul who had recently died and, now that he did not have her to care for and tend to, he had little to do other than attempt a wank, watch trashy telly, or go out walking the streets to pass the time. For this, he dressed shabbily, as if deliberately. An ancient wax jacket, dusty trews and stour-caked boots: some twigs in his hair and he’d have passed for some relative of Worzel Gummidge. Tall and rangy, he actually thought he resembled the Duke of Edinburgh.

His neighbour, Dave, a good twenty years younger was meant to be researching a PhD but had some time ago decided he couldn’t be arsed and so, he too took to wandering the streets of Birkenhead, Oxton, Prenton and sometimes further distances. 

Two walkers, walking merely to waste time until sleep and another day! Not walking, exactly, for that suggests something athletic and vigorous. More ‘schlepping’ or ‘plodding’, even ‘meandering’ would be a more apt description of this near narcoleptic style. Reluctant, careworn, resigned: these are apt adjectives for the loping action of the Tom and maybe even the grouchy flounce of Dave whose legs seemed to have to be forced forward like those of a puppet on a string or as if imitating the Gormenghast servant, Flay, whose bones clicked as he walked.

All was well until those awkward meetings! You, as a spectator could see the body language shift. One may visibly shrug in annoyance, the other motion imperceptibly toward hiding in a phone box (these were the days of the red affairs that often smelled of piss but were a better option than meeting your neighbour on the street) but both had witnessed the other witnessing the other so social impact was the only option.

Tom obeyed convention first;

“Hi Dave, out walking I see?”

“Alright, Tom, you too?”

An awkward silence, an embarrassed scuffle of the feet then each plod on only faster and more purposeful than before, racing for home to avoid a further calamity on their respective doorsteps.

One day Dave decided to change the script. The alternative to not walking was to stay indoors and weep with boredom, so if meeting Tom was as inevitable as it seemed to be then something more upbeat was required; a dialogue of more human worth somehow. 

He wracked his brains as he schlepped again up Balls Road East, past the chippy on Ball’s Rd and on up to the Tam O’Shanter Urban Farm (being a Scot he felt an affinity with this incongruity), then down past the Shrewsbury Arms and down again to Borough Road near the Tranmere Rovers Football Ground. Unbeknownst to Dave, Tom had constructed in his head a similar idea concerning the meaning of their mutual existence on the planet.

The inevitable finally took place outside The Happy Kitchen on Borough Road. The one approached the other like Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster in Gunfight at the OK Corral.

“Hi Dave, nice day for it”

“It is that, Tom”

Feet-scuffling, then Dave thinks ‘Fuck it!’

“Life is about finding joy wherever and whenever you can”

Tom takes this full in the chin, clears his throat and in a voice from some dank dungeon in his soul retorts…

“Death can’t come quick enough!”

Only months later, Tom got his move to a one-bed flat in Prenton. Dave often saw him on his walks way off far in the gloaming of some dusk-horizon but their paths never crossed again.