'Looking where I'm going so you don't have to.'
This had become my unpleasant mantra, running continuously around my undisciplined mind like a demented rat, spitting and snarling in its exercise wheel.
I had become obsessed with this thought and it would often be the only thing that I was thinking and I had to do something about it, clearly, instead of just thinking it all the time, making me ill. Instead of saying 'Can I have one of your bags please', to the lady at the supermarket checkout, I would blurt, apropos of nothing in her eyes: 'Looking where I'm going so you don't have to'.
And so there came a day when I decided that it was up to me to actually do something about it, because it was making me ill and I had a permanent, fearful lump in my throat.
It was on this day (a Tuesday, which are usually nice ones) that I was Bumped three times before tea, which upset me, a usually mild mannered (and anxious) gentleman, to the point of vengeful retribution, which wasn't a good fit for my weak body.
BUMP 1
The first was during the morning commute. The routine march into the building, a young man, face deep in his pad and, from the little that I glimpsed, watching hard core pornography. At that time of the morning (tut). As he approached I waited for him to look up, in order that he might avoid me, but he continued directly into my path.
BUMP! My left shoulder into his left shoulder. He was barely able to hold his pad steady for the money shot.
'Careful, mate!'
He said that, to me, would you believe. Barely looking up to see who he'd bumped into, he carried on, presumably rewinding the good bits that he'd missed and somehow negotiating the subsequent stream of good, correct thinking, pedestrians.
Upon my recent awareness that this Bumping was becoming a thing, I had been forgiving. Thinking that they had a perfect right to behave in this way and that it wasn't an issue and that I shoudn't, under any circumstances, let it become so. I decided, on this morning, that this had been an incorrect epiphany, if that is what it was. I don't have many of them and I didn't want to waste one on something that was a wrong one.
BUMP 2
The second bump of the day came during my lunch hour. I have a desperate need to claim this time as my own and will not be put off from this daily extraction from my opressive office and the idiots therein, as is my preference, just through anxiety of the Bumpers. I will not let this become my problem.
This time it was a middle aged woman, a woman within my age bracket who should surely, therefore, have been in better possession of herself. She approached, one of the new fangled portable screens in front of her, dangling precariously, vision obscured by that and hearing impeded by the the aural feed.
BUMP! My left elbow on her left hand as she was trying to type.
'You cretin! This call is of optimum importance. You made me do a typo!' she said, not taking her eyes away from the comically boinging screen. Had I said anything in reply it would have been unheard, such was her concentration in the virtual thing she was within.
DAVE'S DOUBLE BUMP
I had got off lightly, of course. My mate Dave, he got hospitalised by a pair of them, he got Double-Bumped and fractured his arm. They fractured his arm. He was minding his own business, but got Bumped (double) and got the blame. They said it served him right and that he shouldn't have been such a clumsy man, or words that conveyed this opinion with far greater hostile representation.
Yet we (incorrectly, as I say) forgave them, as we thought we should, because this is sometimes the way things are when the world is adapting to new ways of being.
The trouble was they kept on Bumping and there was never ANY remorse from them, the Bumpers.
BUMP 3
I had successfully made it back to my street, post-work, without getting bumped by anybody. Some weren't so lucky. I saw one poor girl, being wheeled into the back of an ambulance, one of the attending Paramedics, tutting and shaking his head at her, telling her she should have been more careful and considerate and watched where she was going and got out of the way of the school boy who had been writing his hourly blog on his lap top. She shook, her shaking making the tears come out that much faster.
My third Bump of this day was the worst. A teenage girl, wearing the latest fashion, which was no fashion, a blind assembly of bland high street clothing, hard to tell whether it had come from this year or any one of the last twenty. She did, however, have the latest kit. Portable mixing decks, attached to her, umbilically. Oversized cans, but the volume still at a level where you could make out every unfortunate note of the music she was 'doing'.
I had no chance.
BUMP! Full body Bump, the force landing me backwards onto the cruel, unsympathetic pavement.
Accusation by her, of my incompetence as an individual, coloured by bland vindictive swearing. Coldplay swearing. I can forgive creative swearing, but just being called the bad things with no sense of why I might be these things is just disheartening.
This juvenile, potty mouthed automaton had, however, led me to form my resolve that this must stop, and that The Bumpers must be taken seriously and dealt with effectively, and that it was, specifically, MY job to do it.
MY PAL, MUG THOMPSON, AND THE PLANNING
Of course, this wasn't an undertaking for just one man, no matter how resolute and determined.
I am, after all, just a man, not a superhero, nor a Time Lord or a big Fireman, more is the pity, for all concerned.
These people, The Bumpers, had evolved. They were a new sub-species of human being, albeit one unconsciously becoming undeserving of the term human as I understood it.
I was surprised there hadn't been some sort of national, or at least, localised uproar in the press. This was exactly the kind of issue that should be defined and reported in order to avert the growth of the problem.
I asked my mate, Double-Bumped Dave, to help, but he was having none of it. He was scared and clearly thought that I was loopy. He would have been a liabilty with that useless, slinged arm, mind. Before I left him, I asked if I could write on his cast, as the tradition has it. Upon his agreement I wrote 'Beware the Bumpers!' It was a small gesture, but consistent with my newly stated vision and purpose.
So I went to see my best pal, Mug Thompson to enlist his aid. Not the smartest man in the line-up, but with a good heart and firm in his opinions, providing you told him what those opinions were (and providing he wasn't stoned).
'It's the Bumpers', I elucidated. 'They're everywhere. Becoming dangerous. Threatening our way of life'.
Mug scratched his head and looked for the bits that were falling out as a result.
'Dunno'.
'What do you mean 'Dunno'?'
'Well, it's like...' Mug broke off and coughed.
'It's quite simple, Mug. These people, have become something other than human. There would appear to be no hope for them. It's up to me to do something and I need your help. Please, man'.
'Tell me what you need, man.'
Mug had been a loyal friend to me since we were kids and I helped him work out how to set the timer on his VHS so he could record the Laurel & Hardy films that were shown on regional TV in the mornings, so he didn't have to keep bunking off work. 'Blockheads' was his favourite, which seemed appropriate.
I gave him a printed list of instructions, which I'd laminated, just in case stuff from his being or any objects associated with him got onto it and reduced legibility of any percentage of the important content.
(And I wrote this list of instructions, sitting at my laptop, on my desk, in my house, and not some ludicrously expensive device while I was out riding a child's scooter, for example).
This was going to be expensive, but I had (with considerable foresight) recently created a small pot of money my way from a fraudulent accident claim. (These people are asking for it). I therefore gave Mug a tightly wrapped coil of used bank notes, in order to pay off his dealer (so he wouldn't be violated, of his person, by his 'dealers') and to pay for those things necessary for the execution of my plan.
FALL OF THE BUMPERS
A fortnight later and things were falling into place. Mug had done me proud, apart from one afternoon, where he had taken a bad trip and been found partially clothed in a freezer in Tesco shouting 'All aboard the nude chicken train'. And laughing, (naturally), and not appreciating the volume at which he'd been doing so, due to wearing headphones and playing, loudly, the greatest hits of Foster and Allen.
The situation vis a viz the Bumpers had become unbearable and untenable, at least for me. The more that everybody was Bumped, however, the greater their resignation to it. This, they concluded, was just the way things were these days.
The Bumpers by this point had totally lost any ability to appreciate that they had bumped into anybody, let alone cursing their victim.
Their skin had started to grow over their appliances.
I was Bumped by an old man driving a motorised scooter, working on a novel. He also crippled a nurse who was in his way, and that was just the way things were these days? I didn't think so.
Mug, however, had come through. Via his bizarre and, thankfully, random list of contacts, he had managed to facilitate my every requirement, which I am quite certain that other companions would have regarded as mere fancy. He had got all the things on the list.
1. Dodgem car rink
2. Wasteland of appropriate size to house the first item.
3. Man with a van.
Mug then rounded up a number of the worst bumpers who I had kept under surveillance. All my years of voyeurism were finally starting to pay off.
He didn't need to capture them or drug them, he merely got the man in the van to park his van in their path, and they walked/drove/rode in up the tail gate, without the slightest cessation of their activities when they had come to a full stop, so unaware and uncaring were they of their surroundings.
They were they then driven to and unloaded onto the dodgem car rink.
As soon as they were let into this enclosure, they began to Bump into one another. I sat in a comfy chair, laughing heartily, as I believe I had the earned the right to do.
LOOKING WHERE I'M GOING SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO
Using my Facebook account, I advertised this as an amusement. 'Roll up', I said, 'and ride the Bumpers. They have no feelings and thus can knock into one another with no apparent injury to mind or body'.
Within the first week, two people responded to the advertisement, on a whim, and not entirely certain of what to expect and, indeed, whether this was a genuine thing.
Mug had made a little booth at the entrance to the attraction and had managed to attract a popular coffee retailer to run a small (and ultimately unprofitable) stand.
He had also managed to procure some bespoke saddles which he placed on the backs of the Bumpers.
As a demonstration for the punters, I mounted a Bumper. This was easier said than achievable, as they just didn't stand still for very long.
However, I eventually managed to wrangle one of the older men, who was busy writing a music blog, where he was attempting to list all the running times of all the songs by Showaddywaddy, and writing about how those things were important to their relative chart positions.
He was oblivious to me. As he crashed into his fellow Bumpers, I screamed at him. 'This is what it's come to hasn't it! There was no need for this, but you had to be told. I was sick of it. What was I sick of? Looking where I'm going so you don't have to!' I shouted at his old head. Which I then reiterated, by repeating what I'd said, only louder, and straight at his old head: 'LOOKING WHERE I'M GOING SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO!'
The gathered crowd of two undertstood what was afoot and mounted their respective rides.
That's all the Bumpers were good for now, in my (correct thinking) mind.
Within 2 days the word had spread on social media. They came from as far away as Dusseldorf to ride the Bumpers.
My cause had been recognised and the revenge aspect of it was absolutely wonderful.
THE END
The eventual press coverage had been localised but there were some damn good people who had identified it as a worthy cause.
I was reading such a piece, in the local free paper, walking along the busy main road by my work building. I was proudly looking at a picture of myself and Mug, riding a Bumper apiece, when I stepped in front of a courier bike and was carried two metres down the road until the rider stopped suddenly, bouncing me off into the road, whereupon a London Bus (a 73) crushed my legs, unforgivingly, under its wheels, going round and round.
I was too embarrased to wait for an ambulance and hailed a Black Cab. The driver saw that I was in considerable agony, but under the influence of cash, he dragged me into his vehicle and drove me the 13 miles to the dodgem rink.
I phoned Mug, telling him what had happened, and to expect me. Upon my arrival, he gave me some of his nice drugs to take the edge off of the agony, emanating from my shattered limbs.
Under my instructions, he then placed a saddle on my back, and stuck the next punter on me.
As I dragged my customer along, Bumping into the Bumpers, I giggled about the irony of my situation, until I passed out due to loss of blood.
The Police took a dim view of just about everything that they saw that day and the operation came to an end.
I had, however, made my point, and that was the most important thing.