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(Published in Cadenza, September 2002)
At the bus stop, all colours, ages and races. Big, small, plain, flash, tarty, weird, mad, and god this morning I feel so afraid.
Oh no, not this morning please, not this morning! Yes, coming towards me, can of beer in one hand, aluminium stick waving in the other, his face blotchy-red, hair like a silver-grey Brillo pad. Yeah, here he comes.
His lance-like stick scatters a young girl student and a man wearing yellow lycra shorts, right up to me, the shiny glint of his stick is tickling my ribs. He pins me against the glass side of the bus shelter.
'Spare a few pounds? Can yer spare some'at, mate?'
Everyone looks at us, then backs away. I can't slip out.
Then this little old black lady in a floppy, white hat steps forward.
'No!, move away, you shouldn't do that. Here, me give you some chocolate and I pray for you....'
Now he stamps his stick on my toe and my knees knock.
The little black lady touches his shoulder, and she simultaneously turns her head to glance up the slope of Mare Street. An old white woman, with peroxide-blonde hair and face held together with foundation, looks too, then another, and another. Soon the entire straggle of us are looking up Mare Street (though I can only peer out between the little old black lady's white hat and the cropped hair of my captor. Even he looks, but doesn't take his stick off my foot).
Walking down the middle of the road, followed at a respectful distance by a 38 bus, is a tall, Arab-looking man, his thick dark hair a mop of lustrous curls, and a smile as wide as a camel's mouth.
His arms are dancing high at his sides as he directs the strings of the large, furry pink-and-black mouse that is leading now not one but two, three, four buses.
He stops adjacent to the bus stop.
'Get out the way will you, mate!' shouts a bus inspector.
'No, man, no, this is art!' sings a Nigerian man in a swirling African print green-and-gold shirt.
A few schoolboys clap, and the little black lady brings her hands together in prayer, 'Hallelujah! Hallelujah!'
The Arab man lifts his right hand and the red front feet of the mouse rise up and the mouse's head greets the crowd by lurching from side to side. At the bus stop we all huddle round as the mouse begins to dance.
From the other side of the road, outside Marks and Spencer and McDonald's, people are watching. Even the long engine-noses of the red buses squint to see.
Soon there is a circle round the magic mouse who dances like Shiva. The man presses a button in a plastic bag at his side and strange dance music serenades the dancing mouse. The mouse darts forward, backwards, a sideways role, and soon no on sees the strings because this mouse is alive!
A policeman, smiling, taps the Arab on the shoulder.
'That's enough, don't you think, guv?'
The strings reappear, the mouse is folded into a plastic bag and the Arab becomes just another in the crowd as he wanders off.
I look down and the tip of the aluminium stick has left my toe, and the empty can of beer is laid carefully against the bus shelter. Then the man slips away, eating a slab from a thick bar of chocolate as his stick twinkles in the Mare Street sun.
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