For Your Pies Only
I passed an old heap on the bridge steps one night last week as I was returning home. A pathetic bundle of grimy and smelly old rags, coughing and swigging from a plastic bottle of meths. It was such a pitiful sight that I stopped, fishing in my pocket for change. I dropped a few coins into the vagrant’s sad little tin, reflecting on the injustice of homelessness, how intolerable it was that it should exist in this day and age.

As I walked away, the old heap mumbled a thank-you - and I stopped dead in my tracks. I recognised the voice! That Plymothian drawl - could it be...? I turned back, peering into the heap of clothes to where its head should be.

‘I - Ivor?’ I said.

Rags moved and a face was revealed: the unmistakable lardy round face of Ivor Dewdney. It was filthy and unshaven, but definitely him.

‘Leave me alone,’ he muttered; he sounded drunk. Meths drunk. The worst sort - a violent, brain-buggering stupor. I had to be careful.

‘Ivor,’ I said, gesturing at the piss-stinking pile of rags he inhabited. ‘What has brought you down to this?’

Ivor’s lips parted in a snarl. ‘Piss off,’ he growled. So he still had some of the old spark in him.

‘Ivor, let me help you,’ I said. ‘I live just up the road - come with me and I can give you a bath, pies and ale.’

Ivor frowned at the mention of baths but I could see his face light up at the prospect of pies.

I thought he was going to acquiesce, but then he frowned again, and shifted in his rags. ‘I - I can’t,’ he said in a strange strangled voice. ‘Y’see... y’see, I’m on a mission.’ His eyes gleamed in the orange glow of the streetlamp. ‘I’m not really Ivor Dewdney, I’m James Bond! Blofeld has been spotted in the Old Fox and I’m staking out the area... to assassinate Blofeld and stop him launching his Atom Bomb from that church up there.’

I didn’t need to look where Ivor was pointing. Right at the top of the town is a red-brick church with a square tower topped off with a green spire. I always thought it looked like a rocket, rearing up into the sky - but it obviously wasn’t.

‘Ivor...’

‘James Bond!’ he insisted in a gurgling voice.

‘Balls!’ I shouted back. ‘You’re not James Bond, you’re Ivor Dewdney, pasty entrepreneur extraordinaire!

He buried his head into his grimy hands and wailed. ‘I’m James Bond,’ he blubbed. ‘James fucking Bond O O bastard 7, you cunt.’

I crouched down beside him. ‘Okay, Mr Bond,’ I murmured soothingly. ‘Is there anything I can do to assist you in your mission?’

Ivor beckoned me closer, and, braving the smell of meths, urine and months-old sweat I leaned towards him so that my ear was next to his pudgy mouth. His rank breath caressed my ear as he whispered the immortal words: ‘Yes there is. Go into the 24-hour garage, get us some fags, a pie and a jazzmag. The cunts won’t let me in after I pissed on their forecourt.’

I did as he bade me, but when I returned, he wasn’t there. All that remained was a piss-soaked pair of trousers and an empty Ivor Dewdney pasty wrapper.

I never saw him again.

Oh Ivor, wherever you are, I hope you are okay.
(Dr Skagra glorious glargzhem, Tue 10 Dec 2013, 20:20, Reply)