It was going to be a beautiful day, thought William Eric Kinloch Onyeama, as he walked across Lambeth Bridge.
No. Wait.
He stopped, and his delighted eye scanned the landscape, dapply and wavy and branchy. He could do better than that.
He searched for his new favourite word. It was on the tip of his tongue. He had just confirmed its rough area of meaning with his teachers at the Euro language school in Peckham Rye.
He looked at the happy brown river, winking beneath the bituminous scum.
He looked at the gilt flèches and steeples of the Houses of Parliament, which inspired in him a deep and unfashionable reverence. That building was, in his view, heart-stoppingly lovely, but too spiky, surely, to qualify for the adjective he was now struggling to recall.
He took in the roses in Victoria Tower Gardens, and the red, white and blue flags that flew over the heart of Westminster on this day of glorious commemoration; the white ellipse of the London Eye; the leaves on the plane trees, turning up their light undersides in the breeze.
They were all beautiful, beautiful, but they were not exactly b— What was it again?
He looked down at his shoes, which he had polished the night before. They were fat Doc Martens, burnished and blushing like bumps or buns. They were bu— What was it? They were like the black rumps of the taxis, the bashful bums that beetled before him over the bridge. They were b—; they were bu— they were busty – no, they were buck, they were bucks—
That was it.
It was going to be a buxom day.
He grinned, and thought of all the things that might be classified as buxom.
Obviously there was Mrs (Nellie) Naaotwa Onyeama. She was as buxom as all get out. This he had amply confirmed a little while ago, just before he rose from her bed.
And the clouds above him were high and fleecy. How foolish they were to talk of rain, thought Eric; and how typically gloomy of the Apcoa people to make them take their pacamacs.
If you added it all together, thought Eric, if you looked at all the glitter and lustre and promise of the new summer’s day, then you could argue – and he stood to be corrected – that this July morning stood fully in the semantic field of his new best word.
So he went on down Horseferry Road, past the obelisks with their odd pineapple finials, past the bearded stone Victorians who had conquered the continent from which he came, and he, the colonial, began to hunt in the former imperial metropolis.
He checked the Resparks. He checked the tax. If someone had stuck a ticket in the window, he noted the time of expiry and plotted his return.
All the while he was savouring this language which ruled the world, and over which he was acquiring mastery …
And there in Maunsel Street was his first prey of the morning, buxom in the curvature of its forequarters, a gleaming black four by four which had flouted the Respark and was therefore in defiance of Code 04 and a thoroughly ticketable vehicle.
He reached down for his Sanderson Huskie computer, the wizard device that has given the parkie the whip hand over the motorist. Eric started to record the time, place, and exact dereliction of a Pajero station wagon, licence plate L8 AG41N.
But now a woman was running back down the pavement towards him. She had a kid in tow, with a satchel and a blazer, and she wore an expression of tragic supplication.
‘Oh please,’ she wailed.
She was dressed with terrific chic. She had long blonde hair, dark eyebrows, a tight black T-shirt over a willowy figure and a belt made out of copper plates. It was hard to believe she could be the mother of a ten-year-old.
‘I am very sorry,’ he said and continued to tap.
‘I’ll be literally THREE minutes.’
‘It is not for me to say. It is de rule.’ Eric had caught a glimpse of himself in the smoked Pajero pane, and he knew what she was looking at: six foot two of anthracite handsomeness and power, as richly accoutred with high technology as an American infantryman. He had a smart peaked cap with the cap-badge of the council; he had metallic silver numbers on his epaulettes. He carried a TDS Huskie minicomputer. He had a two-way T8 288 Motorola radio. He had a Radix FP40 printer, ready to discharge his literary efforts, and he was about to print the ticket now.
‘Oh please,’ she said, ‘I’ve got to drop him off at school, and he’s got an exam.’
Eric smiled. ‘What kind of exam?’
‘It’s a maths exam, isn’t it, darling? Oh please, he’s going to be late.’
‘I don’t care,’ said the child.
‘Oh darling.’
Eric approved of maths exams. A cadet branch of Eric’s family had made a great deal of money by scamming arithmetically untalented Europeans, and he was generally in favour of encouraging our children to better themselves.
‘Just one minute,’ wheedled the woman.
The parkie considered. Many traffic wardens are traumatized by the verbals, as they are called, COON, NIGGER, MONKEY, APE.
Those were some of the names Eric had been called, shorn of their participial expletives.
IS THIS YOUR IDEA OF POWER? WHY DON’T YOU GET A BETTER JOB? These were some of the questions he was asked.
Faced with such disgusting behaviour, some traffic wardens respond with a merciless taciturnity. The louder the rant of the traffic offenders, the more acute are the wardens’ feelings of pleasure that they, the stakeless, the outcasts, the niggers, are a valued part of the empire of law, and in a position to chastise the arrogance and selfishness of the indigenous people.
Eric was unusual in that he liked sometimes – every once in a while – to show mercy, as befitted his kingly lineage. The scars on his cheeks denoted that he was a prince of the royal blood in the Hausa tribe, and it was only the evil of primogeniture that debarred him from substantial estates outside Lagos.
Sometimes he would exercise clemency, if he were offered a really rococo excuse, as a bored tutor will indulge a crapulous undergraduate if his reason for missing a class is truly bizarre and degenerate. Sometimes, as today, he could be moved by the appeal of a damn good-looking woman. But today he had a peculiar reason of his own for not wanting to prolong the conversation.
The night before Mrs Onyeama had been very good to him. She had made him his favourite meal, a chicken Kiev with a kind of special West African garlic called kulu, rather like the North American ramps, and he had slept well on it. But he knew from experience that Mrs Onyeama’s chicken Kievs had an amazing effect on the digestive system. There was nothing normally detectable, but from time to time the kraken would wake, and then a globule of air would force itself up the oesophagus and press on the palate … until he was obliged to let it go.
It had happened to him at a wedding party recently. He had been telling a joke, and he came to the punchline, and everyone was crowded around him, like maternity unit staff, waiting for the birth of the joke, and he had suddenly felt – whup – this thing come out of him, involuntarily, rather like the thing in Alien coming out of John Hurt. His audience had reacted in much the same way as the characters in the movie.
So he beamed at her, without a word.
‘Mmm-hmmm,’ he murmured, and