A van packed with sardines inched towards the compound’s chain-linked gates. One narrow street, two monstrous cars, three pedi-cabs, a bus, the van, a dozen bicycles and now a traffic jam so static that even the fat fellow on crutches lurched past as though mercurial winglets tinkled his heels. The skinny girl dismounting her three-speed has a fanatic look, the fat man thought to himself. Their eyes met over the distance of the van’s perspiring hood and she looked away but not before he’d possessed her for a wordless moment. Night-owl madness or no, he’d gladly pay her Tuesday, gladly bellyflop his bomber on her runway of bone.
In the valley that forms the next leg of the imperial tour all is not well. The flooded plains shine like mirrors, the red mud of Babilonia drips from the sun. Runners come and go with messages of brief hope, a gown of peacock feathers to divert pedantic eyes from the buoys of bloated yaks, lily pads and manta rays gentling above the now-submarine urns of ancestors, signpost granaries steaming with flies. Ten careful steps in any direction through bobbing evidence of unwise decisions made at the moment of the sky’s blackening, the torrential incontinence of the jovial gods announced by a sound like marbles in a wok, then bowling balls down a lane of sheet metal. The holy man would wag his finger, thump his chest, pronounce his flock deserving of this and worse, were he not lilted by the tug and sog of bedroom tides, drowned while dreaming in his proud four-poster.
The steering wheel vibrated like a hummingbird, a hiss escaped from beneath the van’s dented cowl and then another, bees in its bonnet, which the nervous driver studiously ignored. Tinned in their various oils the sardines made no complaint.
The guard at the compound gate compared notes with Her Majesty’s majordomo, conveyed fraternal nonchalance regarding the watery goings-on in the valley below. It’s common then, the Household Master wanted to know, an everyday nothing not worth the exercise of worry? Any answer would have been better than the shrug, ball-scratching, and change of subject he received. The skinny girl walking her bicycle out of the mini-jam became the focus of their now-silent fraternity. The guard knew exactly what he’d like to do to her, down to the precise pinch and intimate ouf. Put a few pounds on her, shrink her impractical cyclist’s skirt by a size or tumbling two, spoonfeed her from a pail of yoghurt with a deft quiver of double meaning. All that, in the bat of a red-rimmed eye. The majordomo shanked his palace keys against the chain-links, pictured her tied down in a barber’s chair, black hair spread out behind her in a basin of rose petal suds. He’d soap her down like a skittish horse, scrub her till she was one loud squeak of polished gold, gleaming in the mirror and begging to admit his many virtues.
The girl felt like falling down but knew the madmen all around her would fail to break her swoon, stealing, rather, her bicycle right out from under and, adding insult to larceny, stealing a peek at her shapely knees in their settle and splay. They’d lasso her with red tape and send her packing in barefoot shame, back to her one-eyed uncle and his rum-raw fists.
The city-mouse in epaulettes and cutaway looked her up from lap to scalp, the country-mouse in dated khaki spied her down from chin to shin and from behind his bright bandanna the fat cripple sang to her. Fall down, little gazelle, fall down and be my prize. I’ll fork you up like a sardine on the tines of my hobble, I’ll crown you with a black market tam and serenade you from the shadows of the delousing shed. The driver of the van honked and shouted immediate apology, pretending it was an accident, a nod-off, a dropped cigarette, a tune on the radio he’d rather not sit through. She flinched with the memory of another squawk that counted down a crowded bridge to sudden abbreviated hell on earth. The waters rising and sisters sinking. There’s more than merely pigeons on the roofs these days. The majordomo said something which she didn’t catch, but his eyes were nicely hooded and the something wasn’t sideways said and so she smiled, brushed hair from eyes, flicked a finger at imaginary flies. Princes come in funny shapes and this one patted her handlebars with hands as delicate and pretty as her own. A small tribe of gardeners might leap to his words, he could smuggle her out in his pocket if he were so inclined. The guard cleared his throat, showed respect by swallowing his phlegm, stopped himself from scratching where his tunic ended, reminding himself that his cousins went away to the city and never came back. Drawn by neon and its promise and by other things, which, being senior, they didn’t think he ought to know.
-Open the gate, the cripple murmured.
-open the gate and let us pass.