by Simon Okotie
The additional time would crucially allow him to create what is known as a diversion. This would, he judged, buy him sufficient time to elude his pursuers. In other words, time being money, he would invest the time bought for or bequeathed to him, by the aforementioned people, in a diversion that would give him sufficient time to give his pursuers the slip, as it is known. And, looking at the backs of the legs of the woman in the pinstriped suit as she continued towards the stairs, he knew just the sort of diversion that he would need.
36
Marguerite’s inquiries had established, beyond reasonable doubt, that the bus that he was travelling upon had already stopped. Regardless of whether it had stopped at an official stop or not, this afforded the woman in the pinstriped suit the opportunity of disembarking, and, as she started down the stairs, she seemed eager not to miss that opportunity. Indeed she might be aware, in a way that Marguerite was not, that the bus had not stopped at an official stop, in which case her window of opportunity might be smaller than if it had stopped at an official stop. The reason for this was that the driver, whether male or female, was not obliged to wait at this unofficial stop until all of the passengers who wanted to leave the bus had left the bus and all of the potential passengers who wanted to join the bus had joined the bus. Essentially, in this situation of alighting from or embarking upon the bus away from an official (etc) stop, regardless of whether the bus was stationary or in motion, one ‘took one’s chances’, as it was known. The bus driver might pause out of kindness and consideration, having seen you moving left to right or right to left in his mirror, but this wouldn’t go on indefinitely.
This contrasted with the official stop, where the driver was obliged to wait until everyone who wanted to exit the bus had exited and all those who wanted to enter the bus had entered. Well, as so often, it wasn’t quite as simple as that, Marguerite reflected, as he watched the woman in the pinstriped suit descending the stairs and prepared to follow suit (no pun intended). In order to stand a good chance of entering the bus, you had to be at, or close to, the bus stop and you, or someone who fulfilled the condition of being at or close to the bus stop, must signal successfully to the driver that you wanted him or her to stop. Marguerite had often seen people racing to the stop, on foot this generally was, with the bus already stopped and the last passengers having already boarded the bus; the bus driver was not obliged to wait for these tardy sprinters, although he may choose to do so if he was of that mien, or if he was of that mien on that particular day, or at that particular hour or minute of that particular day. Similarly, the driver was not obliged to wait indefinitely at the bus stop if someone had pushed the button, if it was a button, or pulled the cord (etc) if that latter situation pertained, but had not disembarked for whatever reason, as might be the case with the woman in the pinstriped suit, hence, perhaps, her haste. Similarly in the case where the person wishing to disembark had not pushed the button or pulled the cord, on which situation pertained, but had relied upon the fact that another person had pushed the button or pulled the cord, regardless of whether they were acquainted with that person or related to them or whatever, in which case they would only push or pull the button or cord respectively for emphasis which, in the situation under examination was hardly ever necessary. It was this latter situation, then, that pertained to Marguerite and the woman in the pinstriped suit, namely, the cord, in this case, had been pulled, ringing the bell both in the driver’s cab and on both the lower and upper deck, since if the bell only rang in the driver’s cab then each passenger wishing to disembark would have to ring it; at least each passenger wishing to disembark who had not seen another passenger pulling the cord, sticking with the current scenario, in advance of the stop that they wanted, but not so far in advance that it was also before the stop before the one that they wanted, would have themselves to pull the cord and this would inevitably lead, to Marguerite’s mind, more often than not, to more than one bell ring in the driver’s cab when one bell ring would more often than not suffice. That was why the system was rigged up so that when anyone (excluding the driver, note, at least when he was in his cab) pulled the cord then everyone else on the bus, including the driver this time, would hear it provided that they had suitable auditory apparatus and that other sounds were relatively quiet at the moment that the bell in question rang.
The bell had rung, then, a little while earlier and the woman in the pinstriped suit was eager, it would appear, to disembark at this stop, which was, Marguerite was sure, a so-called official stop and one, moreover, that the woman in the pinstriped suit seemingly identified as her own, as it were. In fact she needn’t have worried, to Marguerite’s mind, because it was the job of the conductor or conductress on the type of open-platformed buses on which they (as before) were travelling to indicate to the driver, whether male or female, that they – the driver – could set off again from the stop. The reason that it was the job of the conductress, to bring it back to the current actual situation again, was that she was more at liberty than the driver to check that all of the passengers that wanted to disembark had indeed disembarked and also that all those who wanted and were able to board had indeed done so. She was more at liberty to check this because she could walk around the bus from top to bottom, checking whether everyone who wanted to had exited or entered. The driver was generally stuck in his cab, at least whilst he was driving (and Marguerite included waiting at a bus stop, engine running, under the rubric of ‘driving’) and, whilst he had a number of mirrors, these contained blind spots within which passengers waiting to disembark at the last minute could lurk. Thus the bus authorities had devised the ingenious team-working system whereby the conductress was the eyes of the driver whilst the bus was stationary at a bus stop and she would indicate the all-clear, that is that everyone had exited or entered who wanted to exit or enter, within the confines of time and space alluded to above, by pulling the cord, or pressing the button, twice, note, and this double push served to differentiate it from the single push of the passenger; indeed it was only the conductress who was allowed to execute the double push – this was part of the authority vested in her, alongside her revenue collection and other functions. And indeed the conductress was now right behind Marguerite, who wanted to point this out to the woman in the pinstriped suit. He wanted to explain to the woman in the pinstriped suit, now that she had moved so hastily away from him, that she needn’t have worried about missing her stop – the bus would not be moving again until the conductress had done the double push, if we can call it that, and she wouldn’t be in a position to do that, Marguerite thought, until both he and the woman in the pinstriped suit had in any case exited the bus, for the simple reason that the conductress would need to move down to the bottom deck before undertaking the double push, to ensure that all of the passengers and potential passengers who wanted to travel on that bus at that particular moment, within the confines outlined above, had safely got onto the bus, and she would have to wait for Marguerite and the woman in the pinstriped suit to at least descend the stairs before she could do this, thereby giving them ample time, in Marguerite’s estimation, to exit the bus. What Marguerite did next, however, changed this situation somewhat: he stood to one side of the top step; more specifically he stood to the right hand side of the top step to allow the conductress to move in front of him and down the stairs, which she duly did, without brushing past him, alas, and with just the faintest of quizzical looks in his direction.
37
Having waited a few moments for the conductress to descend a number of stairs, Marguerite reached up and swiftly double-pressed the button on the rear wall of the top deck of the bus. The bus immediately lurched forwards, causing the conductress and a number (unspecified) of passengers on the lower deck, or on their way to the lower deck, to exclaim in a variety of ways, one emitting an abrupt scream, another saying ‘Oi!’, and also there was a bark, surprisingly enough.
Notice that Marguerite had waited a few moments before dou
ble-pressing the button. What were his intentions in pausing in this way? What were his intentions more widely? In asking those two questions of himself, as he quickly moved away from the vicinity of the button and towards the stairs again with the aid of a vertical handrail located immediately to the right of the top step, Marguerite was aware that the answers were related. In fact, it could be said that a single answer might suffice to answer both questions and, indeed, the following, tertiary, question: what was that answer? The answer to the three questions was that he wanted the curved stairway to be clear or clearing to allow him to alight from the bus, an act he wished to engage in whilst, note, the bus was in motion. He was unhappy with how he had formulated this answer in his mind, and he immediately attempted to reformulate it. He had paused to ensure that it was simpler for the people who had hitherto occupied the stairway to vacate that stairway by continuing to descend, thereby allowing him to alight. No, that did not quite do it either, he realised, as he took the first step down the stairway. In attempting to answer the three questions succinctly for the third time, he would focus, as he very much enjoyed doing, on the conductress and her role in the affair of the double-pressing, as he now came to think of it. He had paused to allow the conductress to pass the half-way down mark on the curved stairway at the rear of the bus – not that there was an actual mark of course. The purpose of the pause, then, was to attempt to ensure that it was easier for the conductress to continue to descend rather than to turn around on the stairs and start ascending towards him, thereby preventing his own descent and eventual alighting from the bus. But he hadn’t wanted to pause for too long, since this might have meant that the conductress may, by that time, have attained, so to speak, the lower deck and might have been reaching up herself to the button for her own official, as it were, double-press, which would have put Marguerite in a difficult position, he judged, since it might have enabled his pursuers from the top deck of the other bus to have alighted from that bus and to have boarded the bus that he was on – to have joined, in short, Isobel Absalon21 on the bottom deck, assuming that she was there, meaning that his own options for alighting and eluding them would have been substantially diminished. He didn’t want that. He wanted to remain ‘at large’, as it was known, for as long as possible. Tempted, as he was, by an inquiry into this term ‘at large’ – an analysis, say, of the traditional, that is to say, textbook use of it as compared with more modernist interpretations if, indeed, such latter interpretations existed – he parked this for now, alongside an inquiry into the conditions for ignoring the ‘Press Once’ instruction printed pleasingly in red around the button that he had so recently pressed twice, focused, as he was, on the situation that he had so cunningly engineered by the very act of pressing the button twice.
Despite the new paragraph in his mind he continued trying to formulate an answer to the questions that he had set himself a little while earlier. His hand moved towards the handrail that ran diagonally or thereabouts down the right-hand side of the stairs as he reflected that he had now expressed to his satisfaction the relationship between the position of the conductress on the stairs, a position of just having crossed the mid-way point or more accurately perhaps, the middle of her torso having just moved from the space occupied by the top deck to the space occupied by the bottom deck, and the timing of his double-pressing of the button at the back of the top deck of the bus. He had, then, explained this juxtaposition to his satisfaction but there remained, to his mind, a pending description of the reasons that he instinctively judged this to be the moment to double-press, or more accurately, that he instinctively judged that the stillness at the mid-point of the double-pressing of the button should correspond to the moment at which the mid-point of the torso of the conductress passed the plane demarcating the lower from the upper deck of the bus. He now attempted to formulate this description. In short, he hoped that the conductress, in being part way down the stairs, would not be able to actually see Marguerite executing the double-press, and, further, would not even be able to tell whether the double-press had taken place on the top or bottom deck of the bus. Granted, that in being aware of Marguerite, with his unkempt appearance, having allowed her to pass before him down the stairs, that the conductress might suspect that it was Marguerite who had undertaken the double-press and that, given the circumstances, he had undertaken it on the top deck. Part of his judgement in waiting for her to pass the stair half-way point was that despite this potential suspicion she would, for simplicity’s sake, continue to descend, her main concern being the safety of passengers, whether on the bus, having just alighted or attempting to board the bus, a bus, note, that was now moving again. He judged, in short, that she would want to assist confused and possibly injured passengers on the lower deck or in its vicinity before launching an impromptu inquiry, perhaps by asking other passengers where the double-press had taken place and who had been responsible for it. His hand gripped the cool handrail, now, and he reflected that he’d had no intention to cause injury or death in acting as he had. All that he had wanted to do was: a) cause confusion; b) cause the bus to resume its journey, and c) ensure that the stairwell would most likely be clear for his descent, hence the pause which, note, had occurred between chapters, and Marguerite wondered whether this meant that his mind had been entirely blank for the duration of the pause or that there had been nothing of interest occurring in his mind and, if the latter, who judged what was of interest and whether it was a team or an individual who was responsible for this judgement. It was with these thoughts that he came to the end of the chapter, wondering what, if anything, might occur between this ending and the commencement of the next chapter.
21. I would stay up through the night sometimes, analysing tapes, trying to place the faces around her. That’s when the key strand – or shard, I should say – of evidence came into my hands. That’s when I knew I was really onto something.
38
Marguerite moved his left leg downstairs. More accurately and elegantly, perhaps, he moved his left foot down from the top of the stairs, past the first step down, a step more-over upon which his right foot was resting; he brought, in short, his left foot to rest, momentarily, on the second step down. That was the clearest expression that he could find in his mind at that moment for the act that he was currently engaged in, namely, walking down the curved flight of stairs at the rear of the bus.
He judged that his description of how he was walking down the stairs had advantages and disadvantages. That didn’t seem to really capture the action, for him, was one of the disadvantages. One reason he felt it didn’t really capture the action was that it failed to bring in the more or less subtle movements of body and mind associated with, or inherent in, the act of swiftly moving a foot, to continue to use that means of describing it, down the stairs, to ensure that he could alight from the bus before it had attained a speed that would be too excessive to be safe for him to alight, this balanced by his wish to have put enough distance between himself and the trailing bus which contained, or had contained, the agents who were trying to apprehend him, as far as he could judge. So much for just one of the disadvantages.
The advantages to his chosen expression included a clear conveyance of the precariousness and the inherent daring and danger associated with the act of moving his left foot down two steps at once: the chosen description conveyed something of the risk involved in what was an instinctive action undertaken at great (or at least at a good) height on an accelerating vehicle in a situation where a slip could have greater than usual consequences – that is, as well as causing himself bodily injury, potentially, if he were to slip, he might also lay himself open to being apprehended by Isobel Absalon and his other pursuers. In describing his movements, then, from the left foot’s point of view, as it were, he had emphasised – perhaps overemphasised – the great distance travelled, the constrained space for the reception of that foot at the other end of the process – relative to the size of the foot in question �
� and the concomitant danger involved in the manoeuvre he was currently engaged in.
Focusing on the toes of the left foot might explicate the point even further. In moving the left foot from the top step to the second step down he was, in a sense, moving the toes of his left foot, which were his final point of contact with the top deck, from the top deck, through the air just above it and then through the air below it, downwards and through a great distance relative to the size of the toes, regardless of whether one chose the big, an intermediate, or the little toe as the yardstick as it were, to land on a constrained area known as the second step down. In focusing more and more on smaller and smaller parts of his anatomy – those parts, such as left leg, left foot and toes of the left foot, note, at the forefront of the action of moving to the second step down, rather than other parts more often at the forefront of his considerations, especially latterly – he was meaning to convey the danger inherent in this act of walking down the stairs.
He hoped it was clear that what he was saying was not inaccurate – the toes on his left foot had taken off, so to speak, from the top deck and were about to land, he hoped safely, on the second step down. He could perhaps be accused of not telling the whole truth, but he would vigorously deny this on the basis that he hadn’t finished his discourse in this area, m’lud, so how can this accusation be brought against him? Granted that hitherto he had chosen to emphasise smaller and smaller parts of the lower left side of his anatomy (excluding, note, his left testicle) in order to emphasise the precariousness of his swift flight down the stairs, primarily; but who was to say that he wasn’t about to bring in the firm foundation provided by his right foot established securely as it was on the first step down and his right hand gripping the diagonal (or thereabouts) handrail running down the right-hand side of the stairwell, a wider perspective that shifted the emphasis to the safety measures that he had implemented to try to ensure his safe passage down the stairs? (No mention, note, of the right testicle, either.) Who could say with certainty that he wasn’t about to allude to the rest of his body, that is to say, to the fine balance that he had adopted, instinctively, using his extremities, that is both arms and legs, that is both arms and both legs, in such situations, to ensure, to the best of his ability, that he didn’t topple over and fall down the stairs? He had been coming to that, but had intuitively judged that a narrower and narrower focus on smaller and smaller left-side areas of his anatomy (excluding his you-know-what) would best convey the heightened tension that he felt in executing the aforementioned action of moving from the top step to the second step down, stepping over, note, the first step down which, remember, was partially occupied by his right foot, a stepping over that was indicative of his haste in moving down the stairs and of his somewhat reckless attitude to alighting from the bus, an attitude balanced, remember, by the right side of his body which grounded him, as best it could, in the ways described, which is not to say that the different halves of his body or his mind were acting independently of each other. It wasn’t to say that at all.