Billy ordered his breakfast then took his seat at one of the sparse cubicles in the café. While he waited for his food he checked for news updates on his mobile bulletin.
Freak tidal wave wrecks havoc in Hawaii.
The war on terror enters its 26th year.
Brooklyn Beckham resigns as England’s captain.
At last, the USA TV series, Lost, finally ends.

As his truffle omelette and toast are brought to the table along with his Soya protein dairy free latte a man joins him at the cubicle. Billy does not look up, he doesn’t like sharing his meal space with strangers, in fact he’s not very happy eating amongst family and friends either.

Just as well really as Bobby also loathes sharing tables. Sometimes it puts him right off his food and even causes him to gag. But this café has a very good reputation; the food is fresh and the service excellent. Bobby, unwilling to acknowledge Billy, presses up against the wall of the cubicle as though creeping along a cliff edge at a great height. He checks his mobile bulletin for news updates and waits anxiously for his truffle omelette and toast while sipping his Soya protein dairy free latte.

Billy’s phone trills.

Hi Mum, just having breakfast, yep, haven’t forgotten, see you Sunday, love you.

Bobby looks up for the first time, he clocks the sudden comfort Billy has sunken into. A mother’s love can do that in the strangest of places. Bobby not for the first time in his life, feels that all too familiar bleakness settle on him. He takes his medication and wills it to work. Happy pills he calls them, but sometimes they don’t always do what it says on the tin. Bobby knows he’ll call in sick, not again, they’ll bitch. Bobby will go back home and lie down in a darkened room until the sorrow passes, then he’ll begin again.

Neither man speaks; they finish their breakfast without any interaction each leaving a small portion of toast and a bite size slice of omelette. They mop their mouths from left to right then left again and leave the table.

Though one is blonde and the other dark it’s easy to see a resemblance between the two. Thick sensuous lips, light hazel eyes, that so often talked about Grecian nose. They leave and go their separate ways not noticing each other at all. Perhaps that’s for the best, what good would it do either of them after all these years to find out the truth?


Why should they know that they share a mother, Caroline, a woman so eager to have a baby she volunteered in the then revolutionary egg sharing scheme. She held Billy n her arms and told him over and over how loved he was. Her other eggs went to work to create Bobby who’s forever grateful parents were killed in a car crash when Bobby was just three, his grandparents did their best to love him, but they were from a different generation and he was never fully accepted or trusted.

Still Bobby has his life and Billy has his and off they go, into the world to make their way, one will live till he’s 94 the other will die at before he’s 40 and so it goes on and on and on and we define it as progress.