Great Inventors Of Our Time

Directly across the road from the hospital was a greasy spoon café. Jean had taken a peek into the hospital café; enormous and empty, the pine and steel décor looking hard, clinical and cold. The greasy spoon looked tatty but welcoming. It had three wooden picnic tables outside where a woman sat smoking, even though the day was chilly and overcast.

Jean stood at the kerb while the traffic roared passed. The green man lit up and she waited for the traffic to stop, not trusting the drivers to do as they were told. They stopped and she crossed the road quickly, went into the café and ordered a cup of tea. It came in an enormous mug and was dark brown, like tea used to be. She took her tea outside and sat at one of the two empty tables and rolled a cigarette, aware that the smoking woman, the only other person outside, was watching her. Jean sipped her tea and lit her cigarette.

‘Do you mind me smoking?’ the woman asked, raising her voice so that Jean could hear her over the din of traffic.
‘No,’ Jean said, ‘look…I’m smoking as well.’
Jean pulled a paperback from her bag; an American crime novel written by a woman about a woman detective who, Jean thought, acted just like a man.
‘I read sometimes,’ the woman said.
‘That’s good,’ Jean said, and thought ‘please don’t talk to me…please oh please just leave me alone.’

The woman stood and walked over to Jean’s table and sat opposite her. ‘Damn’ Jean thought and pretended to be immersed in her book.
‘What’s that you’re reading?’ the woman asked.
‘A detective novel. American,’ Jean said, watching as the woman lit a fresh cigarette from the stub of the finished one.
‘I’m an inventor,’ the woman said.
Jean thought that the woman must be from the hospital across the road. She placed her bookmark into the open pages and closed the book, resigned to talking to the woman. ‘And why not?’ she thought.
‘What have you invented?’ she asked.
‘Several things over the years. The first thing I invented was the burger bar. That was back in the sixties. I was helping my sister with a party for her kids and I made little meat patties and put them in bread rolls. That’s how I got the idea.’
‘Oh yes,’ Jean said, ‘a very good idea.’
‘Yes’, said the woman, ‘and as you’ve no doubt noticed they are everywhere now, everywhere you go there’s a burger bar.’
‘That’s true,’ Jean said.
‘Then,’ the woman said sucking hard on her cigarette, making the lit end sparkle, ‘I invented felt tipped pens. I was painting with water colours and I thought, wouldn’t it be a good idea to put paint in a pen and give it a soft felt nib. Now you see them everywhere don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Jean nodded, ‘you see them everywhere.’
‘Every shop you go into has got shelves full of ‘em! I’ll get plenty of money for inventing them.’

She looked at Jean expectantly and Jean realised it was a prompt for her to comment on money.
‘Yes, I’m sure there must be lots of money in felt tipped pens,’ she said.
The woman looked around furtively and lowered her voice, ‘I expect to be paid any day now,’ she said, ‘and,’ she looked around again and spoke even quieter, just above a whisper, ‘and I intend to give the money to God and The World.’
‘That’s nice,’ Jean said, and the woman nodded with satisfaction.

They sat in silence while the woman craned her neck to watch what was going on inside the café. Jean remembered that as a child she had come up with the idea of the dimmer switch. She had only been about ten and the idea had come to her one night when she was reading The Secret Seven in bed. The ceiling light of her bedroom was bright (they were not a bedside lamp sort of family) and she thought how nice it would be if she could turn the bulb down. She had even visualised the knob on the wall, where the switch was, and how a person would be able to turn it up or down according to need. A couple of years later Jean had gone to visit her friend Carol in hospital, (Carol had been hit on the head with a cricket ball on the school playing field, knocking her unconscious and, thrillingly, requiring an ambulance) and the hospital room had had a dimmer switch on the wall. Jean had told everyone around the hospital bed – Carol’s parents, the headmaster, the P.E. teacher – that she had invented the dimmer switch when she was ten. She remembered the strange looks they had given her and the abrupt change of subject.

‘And blue ice-lollies,’ the woman said, returning her attention to Jean.
‘Are they popular?’ Jean asked.
‘Oh yes…I expect to get a fortune for them. Kids nowadays much prefer blue ice-lollies to any other colour.’
‘I invented the dimmer switch,’ Jean said, feeling the joy – the sheer liberation – of saying something she hadn’t said for forty years.
‘Did you?’ the woman said excitedly, ‘did you really?’
‘Yes I did, when I was ten years old.’
‘You must have got a fortune for that.’
‘Nothing as yet, like you, I’m still waiting.’
The woman nodded empathetically.
‘And I invented the duvet,’ Jean said, ‘I was even younger, eight or nine I think. I remember thinking that the blankets on my bed were so heavy that I felt weighed down by them and I thought, wouldn’t it be good if you could just have one blanket that was made in a way that would keep you warm, even in winter.’
‘That was a brilliant invention,’ the woman said admiringly.
‘Yes,’ Jean said, ‘everyone has duvets nowadays.’
‘It’s true,’ the woman said, ‘just you wait till the money starts rolling in.’

The woman looked around again and motioned to Jean to lean closer. ‘I invented the mobile phone,’ she said conspiratorially, ‘I was stuck on a broken down bus in the middle of nowhere and I thought wouldn’t it be good if you could have a phone that you could carry around in your bag.’ She took another hard puff on her cigarette, ‘that was in the seventies, way before anyone else thought of it.’
‘That’s hard to beat,’ Jean said, ‘that really was a stroke of genius.’
‘Yes,’ the woman said proudly, ‘a stroke of genius that was.’

The woman threw her cigarette butt on the ground and pulled herself up. ‘I have to get back now,’ she said, ‘I’m having a little holiday at the place across the road. Lovely it is.’
‘Yes,’ Jean said, ‘it is lovely. I was just over there myself.’
‘Are you having a little holiday as well?’
‘No. An outpatient.’
The woman bent close to Jean and cupped her hand, whispering loudly in Jean’s ear. ‘Don’t tell them about your inventions. They won’t believe you. They’ll think you’re mad.’ She straightened up and smiled.
‘Bye bye then. I hope we run into each other again.’
‘Bye,’ Jean said, ‘see you around.’
She watched as the woman stood at the crossing, waiting for the green man. Jean opened her book and began to read.

After a while an old woman with a walking stick sat at the table next to Jean’s and lit a cigarette. Jean smiled at her and the woman nodded and smiled.
‘I invented the dimmer switch,’ Jean said.
‘Did you really,’ the woman said enthusiastically, ‘that’s a funny thing because I invented the video recorder…I know that DVD’s have made them virtually redundant, but the concept remains the same.’
‘I was just chatting to a woman who invented various things including the burger bar.’
‘Ah,’ said the woman, ‘yes, I’ve spoken with her myself.’
The old woman sipped her tea and puffed on her cigarette. ‘Isn’t this pleasant,’ she said, ‘I take my hat off to whoever invented sitting outside of cafés.’
‘Me too,’ said Jean, ‘if I had a hat to take off, I’d take it off to whoever that was.’
She looked around at the busy noisy road and up at the dark clouds rolling across the wide open sky.
‘The world is so busy,’ she said, ‘everyone running here and racing there and talking about this or arguing about that and not stopping for a single second and I cannot bear be part of it…I cannot…I will not be part of it any more.’

The two women watched as an orange-beaked blackbird swooped down and pulled an earthworm, fat, wriggling and pink, out of a narrow crack between two paving stones. The bird held the worm in its sharp beak and shook its black velvety head from side to side.
‘It is a pleasure, is it not,’ Jean said to the woman, ‘to be sitting here and thinking of one’s inventions?’
’It is,’ the woman said nodding, ‘it is a very great pleasure indeed.’
End