They’d traversed about a mile of the motorway when it began to dawn on Nothando that the hoots and shouts of the motorists were not greetings but warnings, dire warnings. This became quite clear when one of the truckers - driving a Scania, she noted with brief nostalgia - actually slowed down, creating an instant bottleneck in the fast lane, and shook his fist at them, calling them “Bloody idiots”. Didn’t they know that this was a motorway, not a bloody cycle track. “Turn around! Get back!” Apparently Duiker didn’t get the message because he waved with gay abandon and, almost ecstatically, cried, “Yoo hoo! Camaraderie!”
Nothando called to him to stop but he could not hear her. Instead he went faster, hunching himself, backside adrift, over the handlebars, and pedaling with fury. After all, he WAS in the fast lane. Then she too went faster, in order to stop him, and although her Rudge wasn’t a 3-speed, it had 28 inch wheels against Duiker’s 26 inch wheels; so once it got going, it went! In a minute she had caught up with him. “Duiker!” she gasped, “stop!”
He slowed to a stop, put his right foot on the road to steady himself, and turned to her. His face was radiant. “What’s up, pardner? Do you need the loo?” They had to shout to be heard above the traffic.
“Duiker, we’ve got to turn back.”
“Turn back! Why?”
In answer she pointed to a hairy face sticking out of a pantechnicon in the fast lane of the eastbound carriageway. It was not a friendly looking face and it seemed to be swearing. Then she pointed to a fist being shaken from an articulated lorry that careered past them in their lane. “They aren’t greeting us, Berry, they are cursing us. We are not allowed to cycle on the motorway.”
Duiker’s face fell. “But how can we turn back, Nottie? It’s one-way. Unless we can get our bikes over this wall.”
The traffic continued to hoot, the drivers to curse. Duiker began to panic but Nothando kept calm. She wasn’t for nothing a descendant of Chaka the Great. “That would be impossible,” she shouted. “We must turn round and go back. Push our bikes.”
Turning round was easier said than done. The vehicles that hurtled past them were sometimes only a few inches away. The stink of hot rubber suddenly made Duiker feel nauseous. His face went doughy. “It’s the tomato,” he muttered.
“What?”
“The tomato.”
“Speak louder, Duiker; I can’t hear you.”
They leaned towards each other, traffic screaming by. “The curse we put on your husband. It’s rebounding on us.”
“Yes. We should have consulted um-thakathi (witch).”
“Get real, Nottie; where you going to find um-thakathi in London?”
Parp, parp! "Idiots!”
Toot, toot! "Fools!”
Honk, honk! "Get off the bloody motorway!”
“In London you can find anything except Blue Ribbon roller meal. Get real yourself, Berry!”
Thus, the perilous A40 which sweeps across England’s capital city, was the venue for their first quarrel, the first of many, initiated, they feared, by an Israeli tomato which was sold by a Pakistani to a Zimbabwean and "given" to an Englishman.
In the second of carbon monoxide-sickened space between one truck and another, Nothando and Duiker swung their bikes around and began to push them the mile or so back to the off-ramp. The truckers continued to hoot and shout at them, and it was no use trying to explain that they realised they were in the wrong, and they were getting off the motorway as humbly and as unobtrusively as they could. Duiker tried for a while. He shouted "Sorry! We didn’t mean to!” until he was hoarse. He made apologetic gestures with those parts of his body that were free to make apologetic gestures. His face was abject with apology. But it did nothing to assuage the righteous indignation of those men in blue vests, leaning out of cab windows, and shouting, swearing, hurling abuse.
Two exhausted but deeply relieved Zimbabweans finally got off the motorway and were proceeding along Duiker’s normal circuitous route to Earl’s Court. In Uxbridge Road, not far from Shepherd’s Bush Underground, they stopped for a rest and a cup of tea, still hot, from Duiker’s thermos flask. Before Holland Road becomes Warwick Road, they turned left into Kensington High Street. They went past the Commonwealth Institute on their left and then turned right into Earl’s Court Road where Duiker’s bed-sit was situated. He had already made arrangements with his landlady, Mrs Grub, to have another bed moved in for his friend, nudge nudge, wink wink. “Who are you trying to fool, Mr Berry? Friend indeed! I vosn’t born yesterday, vos I, Mr Berry? You foreigners are all the same. You come here from all corners of the vorld, all corners of the vorld, Mr Berry, and vot do you do? - please don’t interrupt me ven I’m speaking - vot do you do, Mr Berry? You bleed us dry. Bleed
us dry, you do. Take advantage of our National ’ealth, take our jobs, take the food from the mouths of our youngsters - I said PLEASE... don’t interrupt me ven I am speaking... and then, on top of it all, you behave like animals. Not that I have got anything against sex per se, Mr... er... Berry, but there is a limit, isn’t there? A limit, Mr Berry.”
“Yes, Mrs Grub. I’ve come to pay you for my friend’s accommodation. It’s just till the end of April.”
The sight of hard cash always brought Mrs Grub down from her moral high horse; she became almost kindly for a while. “Of course - thank you - not that I think of you in that vay, Mr Berry. You Rhodesians... the same as us really... your English aunt and all... such a pity about that Bishop Tutu - ”
“Mugabe.”
“That Bishop Mugabe. Stealing your land.”
“No, Mrs Grub, WE stole the land. The English settlers. We stole the land from the Africans.” Duiker wondered if he would have admitted as much before his reunification with Nothando who, incidentally, was waiting patiently outside the blue, four storey house, holding both bicycles. Earl’s Court Road, even on a Sunday, was teeming with people from almost every country on earth.
The cash in Mrs Grub’s hand and the thought of the Spanish sherry it would purchase, softened her response to: "ve’re all entitled to our own opinions, aren’t ve, Mr Berry. Leastways in England ve are. Free country, England. Not like your Rhodesia.”
“Zimbabwe. May I introduce you to my friend? She’s waiting outside.”
“Certainly. Mind you, I ’aven’t got all day to chin-vag vith ewery Tom, Dick, and ’arriet. Make it snappy, vill you, Mr Berry.”
“Of course.” He went outside to call Nothando. They carried their bikes in. Mrs Grub allowed her tenants to keep bicycles in their rooms as long as they carried them everywhere. She wasn’t going to have dirty tyre tracks on her carpets.
When she saw the elderly black lady with a white doek on her head and off-white tackies (the English called them sand shoes) on her feet, she took a step backwards, said "Gawd alive!” and shut herself into her apartment.
“Come along, Ma Sibanda,” said Duiker putting his free hand on Nothando’s shoulder, “I’m going to cook you a meal to remember. What do you say to eggs, bacon, tomato, and toast?”
“Go easy on the tomato, Umqobompunzi.”
The second quarrel between Nothando Sibanda and Duiker Berry was at an advanced stage. So was their first meal together in the Earl’s Court bed-sit. Duiker had surprised and delighted Nothando by following up the fry with a wonderful pudding. It consisted of a sponge flan topped