by Wole Soyinka
The bus lane along High Street Kensington is clogged with double-deckers and I browse the clothes shops as we chug along, the heater under my feet burning the soles of my boots. A gaggle of Italian schoolchildren in matching pink T-shirts clamber aboard at the stop opposite the underground station while their beleaguered teacher negotiates the fare at length with the driver. Just as the doors beep ready to close, a bearded drunk staggers on. He presses the orange cover of a freedom pass hanging around his neck to the reader and then raises his hands to announce his presence.
The traffic clears and we fly past Kensington Gardens and the Albert Memorial, the dead prince shining golden on his plinth, what woman wouldn’t want her man struck in metal? Eternally loyal, silent and hard. I had chosen the Eros statue in Piccadilly as a meeting point to force some romance into what so often feels like a job interview. The little iron cherub with his bow and arrow also gave some charm to a part of the city that teemed with fast food packaging, prostitutes’ calling cards and lost tourists. Frigid trees in their winter nakedness stand against the jewel-toned monument, it’s impossible to imagine them lush, green and dense again but in a couple of months they will be clad in leaves and blossoms. The road widens to four lanes and doormen pose in red polyester frock coats outside heritage hotels with chintz curtains in their windows. I notice a nasty smell in my nostrils and turn away from the window; the drunk has moved seats again and is sitting beneath me. His thick, black, wavy hair is enviable but it’s also oily and peppered with large grey flakes of dandruff. The smell is hard to pull apart but there is sweat involved and urine and perhaps even vomit. He feels my gaze on him and turns his head sharply back until it hits the rail hard. Our eyes meet and he gives me a hazel-eyed, bloodshot stare. He must have once been a good-looking man, poetic in a way, with strong eyebrows, long eyelashes and a full mouth.
‘Suck. My. Dick,’ he mouths slowly in an Irish accent, then giggles to himself.
I roll my eyes dismissively and return to watching out of the window. We have passed the new development of hundred million pound flats, and armoured Bentleys and Range Rovers wait, their hazard lights flashing, for their Russian and Chinese owners to return. A batmobile-like Lamborghini overtakes the bus with an aggressive roar of its throttle and then has to stop abruptly at a red light. I look inside its leather interior as the bus crawls up beside it; two young Arab men lounge inside in distressed jeans and garish T-shirts, they have the stiff gelled hair and trimmed goatees of low-rent male strippers but they exude wealth from the gold on their wrists and their necks to the stack of parking tickets stuffed carelessly under the windscreen wiper. They speed off with Arabic pop wailing behind them. We reach Harrods and I check my phone. Twenty to seven. Another ten minutes and we should reach Piccadilly.
The sky is indigo now and a squall of rain falls lightly on to my cheek from the open window, I slam it shut. The exterior lights studding the facade of Harrods are lit and the skeleton of the building glows orange. I hate the place; its expense, disorder and incongruous Las Vegasness. The Italian students disembark giddily, boys and girls brazenly pawing each other on the pavement, all tongues, hands and sexual entitlement. At that age I was terrified even to be seen walking beside a boy, the shame alone would have killed me; my desires were lived out only in my mind.
The bus feels airy again even though the smell remains. The drunk’s legs splay out in front of him, his battered trainers tied clumsily around his toes with string, he smiles and hums to himself. A wealthy-looking family waits in the gangway for him to make room for their pushchair. The father is middle-aged, tall, sandy haired, wearing salmon pink trousers and a mustard tweed jacket, he must be cold but his face is flushed red. He tries to manoeuvre the buggy into the small gap while his blonde baby sleeps with her hands over her knees. His wife behind him is a narrow, brittle thing with chestnut hair and teeth that look like they have been whitened with Tipp-Ex. A shy boy in the clothes of a wartime evacuee, grey short trousers and a wool jacket with red piping, hides his face behind a new iPhone.
‘Do you mind moving?’ the mother says sharply to the drunk. Her lips move awkwardly as she speaks and I notice that they look swollen and stiff. Silicone.
He doesn’t move but reaches for the baby’s hands with both of his grimy ones, ‘Allo gorgeous . . .’
The father jerks the pushchair back. ‘What do you think you’re doing? Leave her alone. You shouldn’t be sitting here anyway, can’t you see the sign?’ he points a finger to the blue and white notice on the side, reserving this area for pushchairs and wheelchairs.
‘I’m disabled, yer posh cunt.’
‘I told you we should have got a cab,’ the wife looks like she is about to implode with anger.
Their son looks with widened eyes to his father then mother and then back again. His thumb is still twitching as he absentmindedly plays a game on the phone.
His father tightens his grip on the pushchair, the skin around his signet ring draining to yellow, ‘I’m not going to tell you again, clear off before I tell the driver to move you himself.’
‘That playing-fields of Eton shite ain’t gonna work on me, pal.’
‘I’m not your pal.’
‘Why don’t you take yer anorexic wife and little ponce of a son and feck off yerselves.’ He gestures dismissively to the exit and lounges even deeper into the seat.
I sigh, a fight seems to happen on every tenth ride I take, over petty nonsense like this mostly.
The mother rushes back to the driver and makes an appeal, her son staying close behind her.
People tut, kiss their teeth, curse at the unexpected delay. I check the time again. Eleven minutes until seven. I shouldn’t worry, Somalis are always late and even if I’m later than him that will be a good thing. I’ll look nonchalant, cool. Not desperate.
The driver turns off the engine and the bus sinks lower to the ground as does everyone’s mood.
‘Why don’t you jump into yer Merc or Aston Martin? Didn’t your queeeen Thatcher say only lowlifes get the bus? Fallen on hard times, have we old chap?’ He puts on a fancy accent and then continues. ‘One’s been to Harrods and now one’s heading to Fortnum and Mason’s for one’s turnips.’
I laugh despite my own irritation.
The parents huff and puff but they are impotent against him. I get the impression that the man is used to being listened to and obeyed in the same way the consultants at the hospital are; he just looks shell-shocked now, his hand constantly pushing his hair back from his face. His wife on the other hand has an edge to her; she has rolled her sleeves up and keeps trying to push around her husband to confront the drunk.
‘We pay our taxes; we give money to charities that help ingrates like you! The least you can do is give room to a working family, you wastrel!’ She thrusts her left hand in his face. A large diamond sends flares of light around her. She is more attractive suddenly; she looks alive and real.
‘Cha! Jus’ let the people sit down, bumbaclot,’ a teenage boy with an Afro comb plunged into his hair shouts, poorly imitating a Jamaican accent. ‘Why you have to go on? Keeping the whole damn bus waitin’.’
We murmur agreement.
‘So youse pay yer fucking taxes, do yer? Bully for you! It’s not like yer kith and kin didn’t fucking rape Ireland over and over again, is it? Oh no! You made all of your money from tea and scones and licking Prince Charles’ arse.’
‘I’m Irish, you dimwit! An O’Sullivan if that makes an ounce of difference,’ her brogue comes out now, ‘and it’s people like you who made me want to leave in the first place.’ The veins in her throat are pulled tight and her yelling makes her daughter startle awake. The child begins to cry and her father picks her up and rocks her against his chest.
‘Well, you landed on your feet then, duckface.’
The wife slaps him briskly across the mouth and before she can do it again, the driver leaps out from the cab. ‘All of you stop, police are coming, you and you have to wait here,’
he says pointing to the mother and the drunk, ‘the rest of you can get off.’ His foreign intonation sits lightly over his words; he was probably something big in Poland but earns twice that salary driving buses in London.
The boy with the Afro comb in his hair presses the emergency release button above the exit doors and they wheeze open. He sticks his middle finger up at the drunk and shouts another bumbaclot. We follow him off, we’re opposite Green Park Station and the traffic is blocked all the way up to the Circus. I decide to run rather than wait for another bus. Soon my shoes begin to slide against the damp concrete, I make slow progress against the crowds and lift my head only occasionally to measure the distance left. I can feel my make-up running from the sweat and damp air, I will look a mess by the time I reach him but I persist, led on by nerves and excitement. I cross the street and run past the Ritz, where I once saw one of my childhood movie crushes standing outside smoking a cigarette, up past Fortnum and Mason which has an ornate display of spring hampers in its windows before stopping to catch my breath. I need to walk so I don’t look so frantic when I reach Eros. I pant past the Japan Centre and Waterstones and then take out my compact. I look awful; mascara under my eyes, my nose running, my lips puffy and dry. I wipe Vaseline over them, quickly tidy my eye make-up and then blow my nose. I look across the road but the crowd is too large to spot him. The last bit of natural light is about to disappear from the sky but the large advertising screens cast a digital glare over everything. I take a deep breath and walk as elegantly as I can on my pinched feet across to Eros. I look first for men, then black men and then Somali men but I don’t see him. I check the time. Quarter past seven. I swivel my head from side to side, worried that I won’t recognise him from his pictures, for some reason my eyes begin to well up and I wonder how long I will have to wait. I can’t imagine not waiting, I have waited two weeks already for this to happen, I don’t even have food to go home to because I expected to eat out with him. I don’t care how desperate it makes me look, I’ll wait an hour if I have to. The rain starts to fall again, harder this time and I move away from my position right under the bow and arrow. Huddling in a corner with couples snuggling against the cold, I tell myself that this is the last time this will happen, that I won’t be the only woman who doesn’t have a man’s arm around her after tonight, nor the only one getting soaked while they hold their men’s jackets over their heads. I look up at the little iron brat and wonder why he never sees me. My phone vibrates in my pocket and I plunge my hand in to grab the call but it stops. I hold the phone close to my face and see a black message box on the screen, my heart is pounding and I have to read a few times before I understand what it says.
Sum ting came up, not gonna make it. raincheck?
from the forthcoming novel
Rusty Bell
Nthikeng Mohlele
Rusty Bell was a capable debater. I never knew when she would turn the tables, corner me with overwhelming facts. Once a week, mostly at the stroke of midnight, Rusty knocked at my door. We spoke, laughed, argued and reflected on things under the sun: poverty in the world, how sugar daddies preyed on willing campus sluts, sexual exhibitionism in America and, now, South African music videos. Our sudden friendship blossomed into walks around campus, to the fury and detriment of her multitude of hopeful suitors. I cannot say I did not enjoy basking in that glory, of being chosen.
Those midnight visits took a toll on my sleeping patterns, but the inconvenience of losing sleep was nothing compared to the bliss of seeing her throw her head back in unguarded laughter. It was during those visits that we stumbled on affectionate silences, that we resisted a magnetic desire to kiss. But it never seemed possible. So we kissed on the cheeks, like gangsters, conscious of the itch that got redder by the day. She, months later, developed audacious wishes: that I check her breasts for cancer lumps, for an opinion on a tattoo in provocative places (inner upper thigh, she wore an acceptable mini skirt; immodest silk underwear), a night in my bed whenever she was at the mercy of period pains.
As much as we knew we were playing with live grenades, the pending moment for looming wild unprintables, we also knew surrender to desire would ruin our friendship. It always felt out of place, incestuous even, every time we almost caved into desire. Besides being tempted by Rusty’s elaborate sensuality, I resolved to live with my raging nocturnal terrors, my self-inflicted depravations.
But how, amid such rampant fornication, to new found and abundant campus freedoms, away from glaring prison walls of mothers, fathers and religion, was it possible that we upheld brittle chastity? It seemed like the seventies all over again, only without the rock and roll, without such promiscuity being synonymous with Aids and ruin.
It was, quite alarmingly, within the walls of David Webster Hall that I observed the foundations of adult life: lessons in deception, accidental pregnancies and abortions, flexible romantic thrills without the terrors of marriage.
It was at university that our characters seemed to form: minor triumphs, terrors reserved for our unknown future lives, dormant seeds of frustrations yet to come. I observed campus thrills and cruelties, the hunting Rusty Bells come rain or shine, bedding lovesick ugly girls and later accusing them of being ambitious stalkers. I submitted a paper on this, The History of Life, for which I dethroned Columbus with an unheard of ninety-five per cent.
I, to fortify my defences against the inevitable, the gangster kisses that would ultimately evolve into other things, introduced Rusty Bell to Columbus at a Schindler’s List screening at the School of Drama. That was the day Columbus, laughing as always, disclosed his hepatitis diagnosis. It was only weeks later, with Rusty Bell now firmly the matriarch of the triumvirate, that we knew Columbus would require surgery, an organ donor.
Columbus said, ‘Death comes in a million guises.’ As it turned out, he was not, as Rusty Bell and I had expected, killed by tragedies of the liver.
I met Christopher Wentzel – handsome, with curly brown hair and watery, blue-ocean eyes – in a History of Art class. It was inevitable that we would be friends, that it would be a perfect friendship, ruined by laughter, by minor perversities of the mind. I, out of fondness and fooling around, pet named him Columbus. We debated: Dali’s molten and deformed watches. Modigliani’s Reclining Nude. That sly Mona Lisa smile. Kentridge. Gloria Mabasa. It was remarkable how Columbus could sit through an entire semester without a whisper; but suddenly shock everyone with a penetrating comment. All of art, Columbus once said, with the exception of a few unrelated artworks, in some way celebrates the beauty of the human body – particularly the nude woman. Artists, he argued, are obsessed with capturing longing and desire and in their fantasies capture naked beings in wood, stone and iron. On canvas. Art, according to Mr Wentzel, was the sum total of human depravation. I had never seen Professor Mbembe so elated, so agreeable, so exalted. So agreeable that he declared the course the History of Human Depravations. Columbus was quick to add, not without Professor Mbembe smiling from ear to ear, that it was ‘The History of Measured Human Depravations and Excesses and All the Splendour In Between.’
Rusty and I visited Columbus at Eugene’s apartment on Louis Botha Avenue, Orange Grove. He was horsing around as usual, said he was tired of lectures on dead artists of ‘meagre’ talents. He laughed until he collapsed, clutching his chest. I thought Columbus was clowning around, pulling faces, until paramedics, half an hour later, solemnly declared the unthinkable.
Medically, said the paramedic, it is rare but possible to die from laughter. Cardiac arrest. It is possible that Columbus had, unbeknown to him, problems with his heart.
His death certificate, according to Pete, a giant of a man with a twitchy mouth, said Columbus succumbed to natural causes. Laughter seemed too morbid an excuse for such a solemn incident. A story waited our friends of the future: we had a friend we called Columbus. He was killed by laughter.