by Jacob Ross
It was only when I got to the bus stop I realised that the regular buses had stopped. I looked around. There were six of us at the bus stop, or spread about, waiting; only one of us, me, was sober. There is no greater hell than being the only sober person at a bus stop after Friday night’s pub and club chuck-out time. Everyone’s heaving or bawling or boasting. Nobody but you can read the bus timetable.
I could feel a long line of zeds waiting to rush my brain; I could feel my consciousness slipping off like petals from a fading flower; I could feel the God of Sleep arriving in her spray-gold Chariot.10 A not unpleasant numbness was just beginning to settle over me when the bus shelter frame shook and the glass I was leaning on shuddered.
This tattooed knucklehead, at least forty, staggers up to me – big chops, red face, rubber legs. He has this wary, I’m-a-hard-man-just-finished-my-prison-sentence-for-gbh look. He sways past me and he’s in front of the timetable board at the bus stop, squinting.
He turns to me. “When’s the next bus?”
It’s a bark, a command. Maybe he’s ex-military, I muse; there were many around now – damaged in mind and body – after all the illegal British wars.
“According to the timetable it’s at half past twelve – half past midnight,” I say, smiling at him.
“What time is it now?” he snaps back, swaying – which is a hard trick to pull off.
“Yeah, when’s it comin?” someone else calls out.
I’m wearing jeans and a black jacket. I don’t have a clip board or walkie-talkie or anything, but everyone seems to think I work for the bus company. Maybe it’s my rahtid11 flight bag.12 My mouth opens to tell them all to go fuck themselves, then closes again. I shrug off my zeds. The Windrushers13 arrived in Britain and became bus conductors. Although my roots are African – not West Indian – this subtlety is for another time. I bow to my role. This is honouring our predecessors. We are born to conduct buses.
“It’s half past,” I say, “bus should be along any minute.”
There’s a row of three young women, not past twenty, on the doorway steps behind the bus stop. Standing by them are two lads14 – the boyfriends I presume – both swaggering drunk, giving mouth15 to whoever passes by. One of them, the slightly heavier one, has a long stick by his side, like a cue stick. A Pakistani-looking bloke my age, still in kitchen whites under his coat, comes along. He pauses at the stop, takes in the scene and, wisely perhaps, carries on walking. So I’m still the only sober guy here. And I’m the only one who’s not white, not that anybody’s mentioned this so far. I’ve been around the world; I can handle the situation.
The two boyfriends get a quarrel going with a couple of bouncers standing outside the King’s Head just four doorways down. I thought bouncers were trained to be calm and negotiate a situation without violence. These must have been on holiday when they ran that course. The boyfriend with the cue stick that isn’t a cue stick starts doing these Bruce Lee kung fu moves, goading the bouncers. His mate is bopping about like the old style boxers used to. The bouncers are huge. The two lads are puny. Do I intervene? Are you crazy? I decide I can do without the bus, it’s only ten miles.16
As I walk on there are various yelps, expletives, splintering and ejaculations coming from the vicinity of the nightclub doors. I’m about to turn round but… nah, still not worth it. If people’s sense of fun extends to rushing at bouncers to get their heads busted, so be it.
I look down the road to Oldham. It’s a vast, bleak, empty landscape, known locally as Miles Platting. And now rain.
I suppose in this situation, for some, a hotel becomes a viable option. In my eyes I am a promising young black poet with several publications under his belt, on the cusp of literary and financial greatness. In the mean eyes of the grasping telephone loan arrangers, I am no more than a 37-year-old Lancastrian with 15 years of sporadic missed payments who, if I may speak off the record, sir, would be best advised to change career. The poetry obviously does not pay; after 15 years even you can do the maths on that one, with respect, sir.
Yeah, right. Expensive loans but free careers advice.17
So, I’m walking home out of the city centre along Oldham Rd. It’s 2 a.m-ish, dark, light rain – par for the course for Manchester. The street is deserted. I walk on and on. The rain keeps it up. A white woman comes into view on the same side of the street.
The navigation of public space by a lone black male in the night is problematic with or without hoodies, with or without “stand-your-ground” laws, with or without a Neighbourhood Watch committee in place – or whether or not that space is “gated”, should we say? Likewise, the ability (as opposed to the right) of a lone woman to move unmolested through the night in whatever kit she’s decided to don. I nudge my zeds18 aside and try to process the information provided by my eyes. From this distance she could be a very light-skinned black woman, in which case she might give me a short nod of recognition as we glide past each other, our black solidarity thing boosted. She is in a party dress. (I would like to provide more information on the dress: e.g. an A-line bolero effect with diamante detail and a flounced flapper hemline, scrunched at the midriff, clutched at the waist, and single shoulder strap. But a man’s got to know his limitations. It was a dress. A party dress.)19
You can speculate why she is walking late at night:
a. A party just finished and no taxi money?
b. A lover’s tiff?
c. She’s her auntie’s main carer and needs to get back to help her auntie dress in the morning?
d. Kids to get to school?
The gap between us is closing and I can see now she is alabaster white. Her body language – a stiffening of the back, a slight drop in the head, a faltering in her footwork – tells me we two are not about to duet to the soundtrack of Fame. Her increasing hesitation makes me decide that out of consideration for her, conscious of her vulnerability, and to make it easy for us both, I’ll cross to the other side of the street. But she must have had the same idea. Just as I cross, she crosses too. She’s convinced now I’m after her. We’re on the same side of the street again and closing. She crosses the road again and starts walking back in the direction she has just come – slowly at first, then faster till she’s running. Running away from me along the deserted London Rd.20 Ah well, I did my best.
It’s 2 something a.m. The light rain has lightened into almost a mist.
Beauty is everywhere, even on the road to Oldham. I come across a scene that slides my eyebrows up my forehead and bunches my cheeks. Rabbits. Like a scene out of Watership Down, a hundred rabbits are bobbing up and down, nibbling grass on the wide roadside verge where the Italian Restaurant used to be before they flattened it for lack of custom. By day, this arterial road roars with lorries, commuters, bankers, fish vans, prison vans, car-parts couriers, mobile hairdressers. And lo, by night, there appear jug-eared, white, bob-tailed, jerky-up-and-down, fluffy, cuddly-toyable, cookable rabbits. I’ve stopped. They look at me. I look at them. They dart, then sit. Dart, then sit. Like my career, or Jockey Wilson21 (Prince of the Flighted Arrow).
Misty rain is the long distance walker’s dream. This is the mist rain of my high school’s feeble showers, the mist rain of a dog’s sneeze, the mist rain of a girlfriend’s errant hair spray. It soothes the soul and coats my glasses so I have to keep taking them off and wiping them. It’s while doing this that I turn the corner and there’s a man, a white man, lying on the edge of the pavement. He’s shouting, “Help me! Help me!”
He looks in a bad way. Maybe a car has swiped him. It’s wet, late. I’m tired, but you can’t walk by. Did not that great Roman thinker, Thucydides22 say it is the duty of every citizen to come to the aid of his brother? This is the very essence of our civilisation, the foundation stone of citizenship itself, without which the Barbarians will soon be clambering over our city walls, our temples to destroy, and we will all be hastened to hell in a handcart? Something like that.
He’s seen me coming, and he’s been tryin
g, uselessly, to get up. All he needs is a helping hand. I shuffle my flight bag from one shoulder to the other, sweep my dreads off my face, bend down and offer my hand. He sees me close up and a mask of horror has installed itself on his face.
“Somebody else help me! Somebody else help me!” he shouts.
I pull back my hand and straighten up. Some civilisations deserve Barbarians inside their city walls.
This walking home business is not so simple, I decide. Maybe I should try hailing a cab. Three empty taxis have gone past in the last half hour of my walking, all of them heading back to the city centre. Surely they would want to make a little more money before calling it quits for the night? But I’ve got no cash. There’s a Post Office close by with a cash machine in its wall. No one around. No one to panic. I put my card in the machine. A police car screams round the corner.
“Stay right there! Hands where I can see them!”
It’s three something a.m., light rain, dark. I’m tired. “OK.”
I’m too wet to run anyway.
While they’re questioning me – who I am, where I live – a car with no headlights comes screaming round the corner and smacks into a bus stop, concertinas it, then catapults into a lamp post that crashes into the road.23
“You going to see to that?” I ask the cops. “You could do me later?”
They hate advice.
“We’re doing fine here,” they say. “Now, how long have you lived at this address and what is your mother’s maiden name?”
They continue frisking me. There’s blood oozing from the wrecked car, groans, but they display a complete insouciance to that. Once they’ve crawled all over me so they can recognise me in the dark by the shape of my frozen genitals, they let me go and proceed to the RTA23.
I turn to continue my transaction with the global capitalist system but my card has disappeared. Yeah. Still, the cops who frisked me found a tenner in my back pocket and handed it to me, though they kept my little bag of herbs.
I walk on, watching to hail a cab. For the same reason – known only to God – that buses do this – several come at once. The first has an “I Heart Pakistan” sticker. It flies right past me – en route to Lahore I suppose. The second cab’s driven by a huge Rasta. He appears to be pulling over, then speeds up and off. “Heh, heh, heh!” Yes, Rasta, you can laugh. The third cab has this bald-headed, olive-skinned guy at the wheel. He veers towards me, only to speed through this mother of a puddle, drenching me. In the back of that third cab I distinctly see the woman who fled back on London Road and the guy who’d been knocked over. The woman is waving my plastic cash card at me. And the guy’s waving my little bag of herbs. As I’m taking all this in, the late night bus, all its lights off, flies past me, empty.24
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1. Sic. Fact check: actually Oldham Street.
2. Sic. Cannot mean terrazza as in balcony. Probably means passaggio (walkway) though these are never marble.
3. Sic. Generally, horses are not found dozing on trains.
4. Sic. No London trains call at both Stoke-on-Trent and Crewe. Probably means Stafford and Crewe.
5. Sic. Fact check: there is no McDonalds between Manchester Piccadilly and Oldham Street.
6. Sic. See Note 5. No Spar All Night Kiosk either.
7. Sic. Miasma is an unpleasant smell. Prob. means ether.
8. Repetition: Inshallah means God willing.
9. I am not paid enough to untangle the confusion of tenses in this paragraph.
10. Sic. Perhaps a reference to the Greek God Hypnos (male). No reference in antiquity to him ever arriving in a gold chariot, whether sprayed, dipped or painted.
11. Jamaican patois. Yet later narrator says he is of African heritage?
12. If he slept like a horse, perhaps saddlebag is better here than a flight bag? He has after all stepped off a train, not a plane.
13. Only reference I can find to Windrushers is to a UK gliding club. Were they blown off course? I suggest cut or rephrase.
14. Maths is not this writer’s strong point I suspect. So far seven people “at or around” bus stop including himself, not six, as stated earlier.
15. Is this a Northern expression? It reads as slightly sexual, or is that just me? Suggest rephrase or omit.
16. The tenses are all over the place in this paragraph. Again.
17. Good advice for this writer. Every so often someone at a call centre speaks sense.
18. Infelicitous?
19. Should either describe the dress or not. Brackets become annoying. Dress as described is a logical impossibility.
20. Sic. It was Oldham Rd a couple of paragraphs earlier. Fact check: no London Rd in Manchester leads to or from Oldham.
21. Darts player. Died 2012. Fact check: his nickname was “Jocky”. Can find no reference to him being “the prince of the flighted arrow”.
22. Sic. Thucydides was Greek; need I say more? The entire reference is a load of cobblers, containing as many errors as you can shake a stick at.
23. No local newspaper articles cover this accident and I can find no official crime report on it.
24. Finished? Thank God!
LEONE ROSS
THE MÜLLERIAN EMINENCE
The Müllerian ducts end in an epithelial [membranous tissue] elevation, [called] the Müllerian eminence… in the male [foetus] the Müllerian ducts atrophy, but traces … are represented by the testes… In the female [foetus] the Müllerian ducts… undergo further development. The portions which lie in the genital core fuse to form the uterus and vagina… The hymen represents the remains of the Müllerian eminence.
In adult women, the Müllerian eminence has no function.
—Anatomy of the Human Body, Henry Gray, 1918
Charu Deol lived in the large cold city for five months and four days before he found the hymen, wedged between a wall and a filing cabinet in the small law office where he cleaned on Thursday nights. The building was an old government-protected church, but the local people only worshipped on the weekend, so the rector rented the empty rooms. If Charu Deol had been a half-inch to the right, he might have missed the hymen, but the sunshine coming through the stained glass window in streams of red, blue and green illuminated the corner where it lay.
Charu Deol thought it strange that a building could be protected. There were people playing music on the trains for money, and two nights ago, he’d seen a man wailing for cold in the street. He thought the government of such a fine, big city might make sure people were protected first.
Still, he’d known several buildings that acted like people, including his father’s summer house, with its white walls and sweating ceiling and its tendency to dance and creak when his parents argued. They’d argued a great deal, mostly because his mother worked there as a maid and complained that the walls were conspiring with his father’s wife. Charu Deol was also aware of a certain nihilism in the character of the room where he now lived – the eaves and floor crumbling at an ever-increasing and truculent rate. When he ate the reheated fish and chips with curry sauce that his landlady left him in the evenings before work, he could hear the room complaining loudly.
The hymen didn’t look anything like the small and fleshy curtain he might have imagined, not that he’d ever thought about such a thing. At first it didn’t occur to him that he’d found a sample of that much-prized remnant of gestational development, the existence – or lack thereof – which had caused so much pain and misery for millennia. He hardly knew what a hymen was, having only ever laid down with one woman in his life: the supple fifty-something maid who worked for his mother.
Away from his father’s summer house, his mother had her own maid, because what else did you work for, after all? She had offered warm and sausagey arms, the sweet breath of a much younger woman, and a kind of delighted amusement at his nakedness. After he’d expelled himself inside her – something that took longer than he’d foreseen, distracted as he was by the impending return of his mother
– she’d not let him up, but gripped his buttocks in her hands, pressing her entire pelvis into him and pistoning her hips with great purpose and breathlessness.
He was left quite sore and with the discouraging suspicion that she’d used him as one might a firm cushion, the curved end of a table, the water jetting out of a spigot, or any other thing that facilitated frottage. Afterwards, she treated him exactly as before: as if he was a vase she had to clean under and never quite found a place for.
He used the side of his broom to pull the soft, tiny crescent-shaped thing toward him; then, bent double, he touched the hymen with his forefinger.
First, he realised it was a hymen. Next, that the hymen had lived inside a twenty-seven-year old woman, for twenty-seven years. When she was twenty-four, her boyfriend returned home, bad tempered from a quarrel with his boss. When she asked him what was wrong one time too many, the boyfriend – who prior to that moment had washed dishes and protected her from the rain and gone with her to see band concerts and helped her home when she was drunk, and collapsed laughing with her on the sofa – grabbed her arm and squeezed it as tight as he could, causing a sharp pain in her shoulder and her heart. When she said, “You’re hurting me,” like the women in movies and books, he squeezed all the tighter and looked happy doing it, and the little flesh crescent inside her slid through her labia and down the leg of her jeans and onto their kitchen floor. The boyfriend swept it up the next day. The bin bag burst in the apartment rubbish dispenser; the hymen got stuck to the edge of someone’s yellow skirts and this little pink crescent was pulled along the cold and windy city streets.