Ibrahim & Reenie by David Llewellyn Read Free Book Online

knew was asleep. Dreaming, not dreaming. Snoring, not snoring. With someone, alone. Sleeping. And nobody, not even Emma, knew where he was. Most of the people he and Emma knew had regular jobs, Monday to Friday, nine till five. They woke at respectable hours and enjoyed peaceful, unbroken nights of sleep. Their weekends were sacred, their time precious. Whenever there were parties, at Christmas or on birthdays, these friends made a point of sympathising with Gary. Always the first to leave, hardly ever drinking.
    â€˜That must be horrible ,’ they’d say, as if they understood, but they didn’t.
    The achievements and successes of his friends and family were a sore point, but those were thoughts he kept to himself, knowing how bitter it would make him sound. When he congratulated his mates on their promotions, it had that veneer of sincerity, and sometimes it was genuine – he wasn’t yet bitter enough to wish for their failure – but behind it lay a shadow of regret.
    Gary ate his breakfast quickly, pausing just once to watch as an old man in a heavy, camel-coloured duffel coat shuffled along the street outside, bending down to pick half-smoked cigarette butts from the gutter.
    Disgusting. What was the world coming to? He saw these things more often now, but were they always there, or had something changed? Driving around the city in the early mornings, everything looked shabbier, more worn. Paint peeling. Windows boarded up. Graffiti everywhere. Broken glass everywhere. Dog shit everywhere. Things were beginning to slide, as if no one cared about anything any more. He was the only person in the café to notice the old man picking soggy cigarette ends from the gutter. When did people stop seeing these things?
    The city was waking up, the traffic getting heavier. Soon it would be time for him to go home, which was just as well, because he wanted nothing more than to leave this place and forget about the old man and his damp, second-hand cigarettes. And his timing was important. Emma hated being woken in the night, but more than that she hated waking in an empty house.
    Later that day, when it was time for him to sleep again, Gary contemplated the importance of timing; how time and coincidence play such an important part in anyone’s life. It was typical for that kind of thought to pop into his head just as he was trying to get some sleep, and that night he was kept awake by the idea that just a few minutes difference could change somebody’s life completely, and that this could in turn begin a chain reaction, influencing others, each minor event triggering another, until the shape of the world was somehow different. The next morning he sat in front of his computer and read about the so-called Butterfly Effect and chaos theory and fractals, but he came away no wiser than when he had sat down.
    If he stayed in the café a few minutes longer, or took a different route home, he wouldn’t have entered their house just as Emma turned on the television. She was standing in the centre of their living room, still wearing her dressing gown, a steaming mug of tea in one hand and the remote control in the other. He kissed her on the cheek, noticing that she still had that morning smell – stale but not unpleasant – and he said ‘Good morning’, but then his attention was drawn to the television.
    On the screen was the night-time image of an orange tent pitched beneath a concrete flyover.
    â€˜The Coldra, Newport,’ said the television: a woman’s voice, soft but sincere. ‘Irene Glickman is seventy-five years old. She’s lived in Cardiff more than forty years, but is returning to London, the city where she grew up.’
    A pause, as the camera lingered on the image of an old woman in a deckchair, sipping from a white mug.
    â€˜What makes Irene’s journey remarkable,’ the voiceover continued, ‘is that she’s doing it on foot. Irene is walking