by Simon Okotie
17
He decided that if the conductor appeared on the upper deck, which traditionally they would do to check the tickets of upper deck passengers, that he would ask them whether they had ‘seen this woman’, as the traditional formulation would have it. Note that the tradition lay only partly in the verbal element ‘Have you seen this woman?’ or ‘Have you seen this man?’ or, probably much more often, ‘Have you seen this dog?’ or ‘Have you seen this cat?’ or, much more infrequently than the previously cited traditional examples, ‘Have you seen this guinea pig?’ and in the latter case the formulation would probably more likely be ‘Have you seen my guinea pig?’, the replacement of the definite article (if that is what it is) with the possessive pronoun (if etc), both bringing a more emotional tone to the appeal, perhaps indicative that the appeal was being made by a child, or someone child-like at least, and also capturing something of the fact that a missing guinea pig would be more unusual than a missing person or dog or cat with the recognition inherent in the unusualness of the disappearance, and the relative rarity of guinea pig as pet, that most people wouldn’t be able to identify one guinea pig from another, especially given the fact that the photos involved, which are often cut from newspaper appeals, such as the one that Marguerite felt sure must have initiated the search for Harold Absalon, would generally be in black and white, meaning that any colourful markings or other distinctive features that guinea pigs may or may not have would be somewhat obscured. The traditional formulation was, then, ‘Have you seen this whatever?’ where the word ‘whatever’ is used for succinctness and should be substituted, as appropriate, with ‘man’, ‘woman’, ‘dog’, ‘cat’, ‘guinea pig’, ‘terrapin’, ‘gerbil’, ‘umbrella’ or whatever, this second use of whatever not lending itself to substitution in place of the original use of the word in the question since that would be a waste of time and would achieve nothing, and that is why the second use of the word had not been flanked by inverted commas in Marguerite’s mind.
A photograph was the traditional accompaniment to this question. The formulation ‘Have you seen this whatever?’ would be quite meaningless, in fact, without an accompanying photograph. And it was not just any photograph that could be used to accompany the question. For instance, if one were to ask ‘Have you seen this gerbil?’ whilst holding out a picture of a labrador to the person that one is asking so that they can clearly see the labrador, that is, so that the photograph is face up, so to speak, and held in the direction of the viewing apparatus of the person being questioned about the disappearance (although one cannot, of course, be sure that even when these conditions are being met that the person being questioned would be able to see the labrador in question – they may, after all, be blind or, in the situation where the labrador has been photographed against a golden (that is to say labrador-coloured) background, colour-blind, in which latter case they would not be able to make out, perhaps, the outline of the hound against the similarly coloured background) – then that would be quite nonsensical to that person, the one, remember, who both has the wherewithal to see and is actually seeing the labrador in question – the image, that is, of the labrador in question, rather than the actual labrador, since it would be equally (more or less) nonsensical, but in a different way, to ask the person ‘Have you seen this gerbil?’ whilst pointing to a real labrador or hound of perhaps another breed.
Are labradors the same as golden retrievers, Marguerite then wondered? He would look into it at his earliest opportunity. Alternatively, if you know the answer and happen to be sitting next to, or near to him on the top deck of the bus pursuing what he now took to be a very warm lead (different sort) in his investigation into the disappearance of Harold Absalon, the Mayor’s transport advisor, with Isobel Absalon perhaps on the lower deck, as they continued to move down the tree-lined avenue and he waited for the bus conductor to appear at the top of the curved flight of stairs and onto the upper deck, then please do tap him on the shoulder and let him know the answer, but do so in a discreet way, in other words in a way that does not blow his cover (as it is known). He thought of himself as the golden retriever of detectives, whether or not they were the same as labradors, gold signifying in his mind the best of the best, the Olympic champion investigator, and retriever indicating the retrieval of missing persons – Harold Absalon in the current case – or suspects related to disappearances or crimes – of which he was the prime exponent, as will, by now, be clear.
Returning to the case at hand: holding out a picture of one domestic or domesticated animal – or pointing to the actual animal – whilst appealing for information about another species entirely would be equally nonsensical, then, more or less. What would be even more nonsensical, to Marguerite’s mind, though, would be to ask the question ‘Have you seen this woman?’ (to use the instance specific to his current situation of the general question that accompanied such an approach) when one didn’t have any sort of photograph in one’s possession to show the person that one was putting the question to. The previous cases were absurd, Marguerite now clarified in his mind, whereas this latter instance was pure nonsense. That was how he would distinguish them in the future if he were called upon to do so. Neither the absurd nor the nonsensical case pertained to his situation on the top deck of the bus, however, since he did in fact have a photograph of Isobel Absalon in his possession – a photograph of her with her baby shortly after giving birth8 – which he could show to the conductor when he or she finally appeared at his side, if, that is, he thought this would help him in his investigation into the disappearance of Harold Absalon, the Mayor’s transport advisor.
8. I took it up with my boss. I put it as plainly as I could: what has he got that I haven’t? He laughed in my face, and walked off. It seemed to put him in a good mood for the rest of the day.
18
Marguerite started using the broadsheet newspaper that he’d acquired to shield his face and the parts of his body in its vicinity as he swivelled, counter-clockwise, to check whether anyone had emerged at the top of the curved flight of stairs. In order to effect this swivelling and shielding, Marguerite, who was sitting towards the front of the top deck on the right of the aisle, remember, swung his left leg out into the aisle whilst leaving his right leg wedged into the well between his seat and the seat in front. This posture, which had not been taught to him in cadet school or in any other covert or overt training environment but which he had improvised and knew instinctively to adopt in the current situation, had a number of benefits: firstly, it effected the drawing of cooler air through a gap in his left trouser leg directly to the region of his genitals which, given the fact that it was a humid day and that the window to his right remained resolutely closed (he assumed that the mechanism was stuck), brought welcome relief to this area and, by extension, to his being as a whole. This could only be held to be a side benefit of the posture, however. After all, he’d had to endure far worse conditions on operations and even on campaigns in the past. Indeed if this ventilative relief were the only benefit of adopting the posture then he would not have been adopting it, for the simple reason that the posture had a number of disbenefits, if one could call them that, which he would come onto, in his mind (of course – where else?), once he had set out the benefits of the posture more fully. Another benefit of the posture, then – and this could perhaps be held to be the primary one – was that it provided him with a firm foundation for swivelling counter-clockwise in his seat as he looked over his left shoulder at the scene at the top of the stairs, whilst shielding his face (etc). This enabled him to assess, covertly, the comings and goings in that vicinity, something he wished to do for reasons that have already been made reasonably clear.
Why, though, didn’t he look over his right shoulder; that is to say, why did he not effect what was known as a clockwise swivel in his seat, given that the top of the curved flight of stairs could more accurately be said to be more directly over his right rather than over his left sho
ulder? His preference for looking over his left shoulder was not, he wanted to stress, so that he could refer to this part of his operation as ‘counter surveillance’. No, it had more to do with the fact that he was sitting next to someone in the double seat, someone, in other words, immediately to his right whom he felt he would disturb if he swivelled clockwise fashion, especially given the clearance required by his elbows and his newspaper and the importance of the former, together with his left foot and leg in the aisle, for stabilising his posture post-swivel and of the latter as a means of disguising himself from anyone emerging from the lower deck. It was for these reasons, then, that he chose the more expansive counter-clockwise swivel to the somewhat more contained clockwise swivel, even though the expansiveness of the former had the disadvantage, Marguerite felt, of potentially drawing attention to himself.
The foot in the aisle was akin, he thought, to the extendable feet that one found on mobile cranes and other load-bearing construction vehicles and structures. He was pleased with this analogy – it seemed to capture something of the situation that he found himself in; but he would now, he felt, have to explain more fully the benefits of stabilisation feet on mobile cranes and on other tall temporary structures, such as what were known, he thought, as cherry pickers, before clarifying which of these benefits pertained to his situation atop the double decker bus.
Firstly he noted that the primary reason that such tall temporary structures had extendable legs and firm feet in this way was safety. Having legs that extended out to the side and, at the end of them, or thereabouts, feet that placed themselves, or more usually were placed by others, firmly on the ground, meant that the chances of the load-bearing construction vehicle or structure toppling over were significantly reduced. Note that in stating that the feet were placed firmly on the ground, it has been assumed that the ground beneath those feet was itself firm. Examples of infirm ground, for those who have little or no experience of it, include sand of the shifting or quick varieties, loose-fitting manhole covers, as they are known (and no doubt most men would willingly accept the blame from women for the loose fit of such covers, even if in the modern city the holes that are covered in this way are no longer the exclusive domain of men, ie some women are now known, no doubt, to emerge from such holes in their hard hats, having serviced some underground utility or other, such as a sewer, storm drain or telecommunications network), loose paving slabs or wet turf.
In his case the stabilisation provided by his left foot being placed in the aisle mainly related to making sure he didn’t fall off his seat as he swivelled, which would, he thought, draw attention to himself further, thereby further compromising his operation. There was a tidy parity, in a sense, between him and all of the load-bearing construction vehicles and structures that contained stabilisation feet, in that the main purpose of the stabilisation feet was to ensure that the vehicles or structures in question also did not topple over. However, there was a key difference between him and some of these structures or vehicles: not all of them swivelled, in essence. For instance, he felt he could immediately rule out the cherry picker and the skip lorry. The reason that he could rule out these non-swivelling, load-bearing construction vehicles and structures was because he thought that the stabilisation feet used in that subset of such vehicles and structures were used only to counterbalance, if that was the correct term, the lifting of a heavy weight, whereas the use of such feet in the case of the mobile crane and other swivelling, load-bearing construction vehicles and structures must also relate to enabling them to swivel, with or without that heavy weight, in a stabilised way through a previously cleared or purposefully selected clear area. Another way of expressing this was to say that most load-bearing construction vehicles and structures containing stabilisation feet did not swivel, whereas the crane, whether of the mobile or tower variety, was perhaps the entity par excellence in this class that swivelled.
The fact that the primary purpose of the crane’s swivel was so as to position itself to enable it to pick something up or drop something, rather than to observe something or someone in a different direction, troubled Marguerite, as the bus slowed down to a stop at traffic lights, the redness of which was diffused in the windows of the bus and was briefly visible to him prior to his swivelling counter clockwise, once again, to peer over his left shoulder; this aspect troubled him because it did not pertain to the situation of his own swivel – he was not, in short, swivelling with the purpose of picking something up. But he left this troubling discrepancy to one side, as it were, given the sudden emergence at the end of the aisle on the top deck of the bus upon which he was travelling of the bus conductor, who happened to be a heavy-set black woman.
19
Marguerite didn’t have any precise data on the prevalence of females in the city’s bus-conducting workforce. In fact he had no data whatsoever in this area except, of course, for the singular datum (note) that had just appeared at the top of the stairs. But was this female conductor really the only datum upon which he could base his speculations about the prevalence or otherwise of women in this role, with girls presumably barred on account of their age, the job of conductor not really lending itself to being a Saturday job as they are known, the Saturday job being that sub-set of jobs that girls and boys from age fourteen upwards were allowed and even expected by some parents to work in, presumably so that they could earn what is known as pocket money whilst, for the remainder of what, in the adult population, would be deemed to be the working week, concentrating on their schooling? He would add this to his long list of things to look into.
Marguerite knew from previous observations of conductors, and not just on buses (but not, note, in orchestras – this was a different but related class which he would come on to), that as soon as they entered a compartment or deck they would say something along the lines of ‘All tickets please!’, and this was what the conductor now did. The exclamation mark indicated a certain loudness in the request, this loudness relating, Marguerite thought, not to that class of people known as fare dodgers; that is, the loudness was not designed as a warning to the fare dodger to vacate that carriage, compartment or deck to another one, that is to continue to try to dodge the conductor to avoid paying the fare; the loudness related, Marguerite thought, to trying to tell the whole compartment (etc), that is, all of the people in that compartment, whether hard or soft of hearing, asleep or awake, fare dodger or its opposite, once and for all, that she (in the current case) had arrived in their vicinity and wanted to check their tickets to ensure that her employers in the broad sense were not conveying people for free unless it was their express wish to do so; in other words, that everyone was paying their dues. Note that the conductress, as Marguerite now labelled that sub-set of conductors who are female, in collecting what was due, was not interested, for the time being, in ensuring that the bus company paid its dues to those, such as the bus driver (gender unspecified in the current instance), who, rather than paying their dues to travel on the bus, were paid dues to travel on the bus, these dues being paid as an incentive, nothing more, for that minority of bus travellers (including the conductress herself, note), if we can call them that, to perform a certain function, such as driving or conducting, to exhaust all of the possibilities in the case of buses, but not in the case of trains or orchestras (on which more shortly). She would, presumably, be interested, at some point in that week or month, depending on whether she was paid weekly or monthly, in ensuring that she was paid what was due at least to her – due, that is, to her for performing the role of bus conductress between certain prescribed hours no doubt, and on particular routes, evidently, and according to other conditions and terms, to reverse the traditional formulation of the title of such contracts so as to be able to view this title afresh, rather than the title being shrouded, somewhat, in familiarity, a cognitive coinage, that, with which Marguerite was particularly pleased.
There could, though, be a situation in which even the conductress herself was only in
terested in what was due to her employers, in the broad sense, rather than what was due to her; that is, she could be focused solely, within this context, on collecting fares rather than on her own wages. For the circumstances in which this could occur, Marguerite referred back to the previous situation of a girl who had not yet come of age and so was not able to conduct, even as a Saturday job. When that girl did become a woman it could be that her interest in bus conductressing had, perhaps through the frustration of its non-fulfilment during her formative years, turned into a passion and, to use a different term (and Marguerite was not sure, at that moment, how to express this difference succinctly), a vocation, to the extent that she would be quite content to become a bus conductress and not be paid to perform this function, such was her love of it. But was this a realistic scenario, one involving the driven, in more senses than one, female drawn to the conducting art, which it cannot really be called, Marguerite thought, except in the case of the orchestral conductor or, in even more exceptional cases than the public transport realm, conductress, of which etc, to the extent that she would do it for free or even pay her own bus fares to herself in order to increase the enjoyment even further? He thought not. And was the enjoyment taken in the job directly proportional to the number of fares taken in this way? He thought the two were related but that there were many other factors that needed to be included in the equation, factors that he wouldn’t enumerate now, given the tenuousness of the first premise, that of the bus conductress working for free through her love of the job, whether or not the woman (now) in question was of independent means, as they are known, or was the daughter of the owner of the bus company, although the latter was a better circumstance for the whole scenario of free conductressing as sketched by Marguerite quite fully now, but not, he thought, to exhaustion.