Camel & Straw

The Khartoum uncle from the place a few doors up taken away again by ambulance, the fifth or sixth time according to Faisal, who never exaggerated. A second vehicle needed to be called when the trolley couldn't be fitted in the back of the first, for some reason. When the second arrived and the job was sized up again it was eventually managed in the rear of the first, perhaps because of the added manpower. Faisal remarked on the size of the old uncle and the man's son who was following the same form. Look just neck, said Faisal, as the later stood by his father on the trolley. While waiting for the second ambulance the uncle had been rolled over to the shade of a tree, something like the treatment patients would receive back in Sudan. The duty of seeing them off was continuing. You needed to remind yourself sometimes you were no longer the young, junior observer now. Even folk like the Greek Jasna lookalike across at the Oromo place was in fact 10-15 years younger, and possibly even 20. You had begun with this vocation in earliest years, in another era altogether. Dear me! the crucial matters in Jasna’s case herself  fetched back to the early 50s; then the subsequent mid ‘70s for the final break with Miso. (What had been Kum’s christened name actually, Milorad, Miodrag, Milan? From the root Dear.) No doubt the chain-smoking, foul-mouthed Greek had suffered something similar to her forerunner, disaster in love fair chance. Little was required to end up on the skids. The busker with the dog, wheeling a bike today, who had been king hit a few weeks before on Paisley Street, may actually have been the father of at least one of the young kids he had attempted to shoo away from here. The kids had congregated at the entry to the hub and kept hanging, one boyish girl, a leaner long haired brother possibly and a stick-thin African boy, probably Sudanese. Go home. Go home. How old are you? Fourteen, the lass answered. So go home. From where it escalated to unpleasantries and eventually the finger. Every chance his kids, the girl at least. At one point through the course she may have said, Come to see you.