What Eddie Learned Today
written by: Roger Haydon
Those fat-bellied men from out of nowhere, a mob with its angry breath fouled with hate, cornered quiet little Eddie on his way home that evening in the chilly drenching autumn rain. They took his phone, his guitar, his shoes, and the soft sheepskin coat off his back, gave him a beating for being different, and pissed themselves laughing and punched each other in fun as he ran away, crying out like a madman. Eddie, well known around here, part of the community, even with his strange ideas to match his strange clothes, vomited from the violence as he ran.
Now, breathless and panting, he needs to get to the phone box outside the post office across the slippery, rain-soaked pavement before those shouting potty-mouthed bastards get here and their hands grip his arms and pin him down and beat the shit out of him again. If he can get there and he can remember her number, he will call his beautiful Jo and tell her that he might not make it home at all. He will tell her to please, please phone Big Ray and Angie to get down here fast, those terrible people he feared would come for him sooner or later are here. But he has those few yards to cross, and it’s raining like hell, and he’s wet and cold to his soul and his feet hurt like hell.
Now, coming out of the general store, there’s a family in raincoats with hoods up, mum and dad and two teenage children, girl and boy, straggling in slow motion across the pavement between Eddie and the phonebox, they’re in his way. They seem unaffected by the sluicing rain and wind, and they’re chattering to each other, the girl dancing happily in a puddle and whooping loudly while her much taller, younger brother pokes fun and splashes her in return, and they’re all laughing. They’re not seeing what’s happening about three yards from them, where Eddie is standing, forehead and right cheek bleeding, lips gashed and swollen, and nose broken, shirt almost torn from his back, and his naked feet bruised and cut.
They don’t hear him whimpering his message in this pleasant, so-quiet town where all sorts of people mix in harmony most of the time, and nothing much ever happens, and there is ample time for conversations in the street in all weathers, and they swap stories at the supermarket checkout and in the pubs over pints and glasses of wine. He’s trying to call out a warning, but nobody hears, and he remembers his lovely Jo saying time and again with that furrowed brow, dark-eyed, pretty face of hers, Eddie, I love you, but you’re always too little too late, you can do better than this, stop hiding. And he tried, but nothing changed, and the love began to leak out of his life and brought him to this. In this, he knows something for sure at last, he knows that he can stop pain being visited on the citizens who live here and he knows that the bastards, the mob just around the corner, are looking for people like him and for gentle places like this town where people just don’t ever expect to be attacked and hurt and have no defence.
And now, here they are. They’re tearing him from the phonebox, peeling his clinging fingers from the door frame with the receiver left dangling, and Jo hearing his groans. The blows crunch down on his body, curled in a foetal ball on the muddy paving stones, as he’s crying out to them to leave him alone, to leave these people alone, they’ve done nothing to you. The straggling family links arms and is now standing beside Eddie, and they are screaming defiance, and the post office and the general store are locking their doors and phoning for the police to come NOW. And now he hears big Ray’s full-throated voice booming and Angie’s fury and Liam and Gary and Martin and Barbara and the others yelling NO alongside the family and two elderly women with umbrellas and loud angry voices who have just exited the post office and joined the defensive front line. Eddie’s mates drag him out of harm’s way, help him to his feet, and they all stand together in resistance like he, Eddie, with the soft voice and quiet eyes, now knows he should have done long ago.
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