Boy Meet The Girl

Chapter 1

Outside a train station, on a desolate concrete apron, in full view of god and everyone and all the winter's clouds, a huffing, breathing, smoking crowd gathers, closes in. Taxi drivers. College students. Passersby. By the roadside where the well-to-do would form a disorderly line for a taxi into town a pair of young people urge an old woman off the arm of one skinny, disdainful white man. Aunty, they call her. She mumbles and moans and looks away from the small coins they offer. Augh, she cries into the dim morning sky, and tugs the man closer.

"Lady," says the man through gritted teeth, "that's enough." His lips twist. He'd stepped off the train with his coat under his arm. The train had been both over-heated and damp, and for hours he'd huddled against a frosted window, just waiting until he could get off and be done with this travel. The cold morning air had been glorious when he'd arrived, and freezing at the same time. And he'd been taken by the arm and dragged a step from where he stood.

What he could do is give her money himself.

He's not so different from these people. They can be skinny too, they can be tall, they can have lank black hair. He has a drooping handlebar moustache he might not have grown in his own country. What they lack is his license. As a foreigner he can at the cost of a punishingly bland curiosity expressed as staring blunder through more or less any cultural barrier. Passersby spotting him for the first, and sometimes the second and third time, will gaze blankly upon his person, sometimes look him up and down and pass on, sometimes stall out right where they stand, shocked and amazed, and just gaze and gaze on. The peculiar frisson this old woman has added to this daily unease with the visitors is extortion. The giant alien may, humorously, give up his money.

Except he won't.

Beside the monumental, mostly empty train station he is not the only entertainment, but he is the best. He'd dropped one unnecessary bag to the concrete and slung the other down beside it and he'd sighed. The place had been built for thousands, and they would have stormed the doors to get out. The few who gather here now could possibly have literally no better place to be, and in so grand an urban amphitheater too. It is as if the setting were designed for this drama.

The woman, a ragged, not-so-old lady, radiates misery. Except that Bob has stood resolutely upright, she might have dropped to the ground by now. She does fall to her knees. Girls gather around the call her Aunty. No one except the ring of brown-clad working fellows look him in the eye, and they can't be understood to be making eye contact. They're just watching.

The woman screws up her face and moans. She bunches her skinny shoulders in a shapeless grey-brown shawl and mumbles terrible stories in the tiniest of grumbling voices, tossing them over her shoulders at anyone who will listen. The men in the crowd nudge one another and smile. Bob grimaces. Are these halfwits recognizing something in her words? So he tells her no.

He takes his eyes off the high horizon over everyone's head and snarls down at her. "No," he says.

"Uhwww," she moans and her eyes begin to roll.

"No," he says. But she's not listening.

Some station staffer comes strolling by, wearing the dark blue uniform of the people who interact with passengers. She even has the tiny hat. She says something about ayi — aunty — and the woman becomes startled anew. She shelters — shelters! — by Bob's side. He stumbles trying to step away and they fall. He yelps with frustrated anger, clenching useless fists. He tries to roll. Comes down on his shoulder, his useless jacket bunched up under his arm, like being punched by a mop. He struggles abruptly, puts an angry elbow into the woman's chest. Many hands come down after him.

But there's no palsy in this woman, no weakness. Her grip on his arm proves to be iron. She stays on her knees beside him as he struggles and is yanked this way and that, thinking particularly of this jacket, the jacket he loves, which he would have sacrificed to his luggage when he was tired but of which he can no longer located. To himself he seems suddenly naked. The coat was an armor of sorts. The sweater he still wears is not proof against the winter air and as soon as this struggle ends he will chill and freeze unless he can find that coat again. He raises his fist. The woman squeals.

She lunges forward. And she bites.