Fierce homesickness transports one to the priorities of childhood, when simply being in the presence of love and familiarity is enough.
In the great tiled intestine of the underground station, all along the platform the passengers bunched like bacteria. The world was present, a jaded deputation of economic refugees seeking a middle-class dream in London. But home was absent.
Everywhere were faces, endlessly distracting if one wanted to watch. Couples — once called lovers, before self-consciousness and apologies — mouthed their delicate, smug affirmations into earlobes or collars. Tired adults swayed in an intangible breeze, making the best of regrets. A child, at home and therefore a glutton for the priorities of adulthood, chatted preciously and inappropriately to an expensively dressed man, whose mistimed nods betrayed a yearning to be somewhere else. A vision of vanity stalked past, and the man’s eyes followed her midriff, a smooth sash of skin slung tightly between almost prehensile hips; the goddess revealed but the mysteries retained.
Beyond, four schoolchildren excreted entitlement on a bench, worrying whiteheads with stubby fingers. Too much has been said about excess, an irony that spared them from the brisk thrashing that simmered beyond almost every pair of eyes that was tripped up by their vileness.
But not everything goes soft in the melting pot. Russian girls, self contained and disdainful, sniffed at the wealth of the English. Pretty eyes ruined by naively applied mascara glanced across and glanced away; little mouths drew briefly into disapproving o’s in a fragment of nonchalant conversation, tight lips pulled tighter by their isolation and the pursed vowels and sibilants of their language. A woman from south of Mexico and north of Brazil jammed her finger into the map of the tube system, and harangued her children in Spanish on the relative merits of getting off at Peekadeely Sehrkus and Lykester Square. Disconcertingly they replied in German. Her voice carried through the station, and reverberated from the tiles; and the English swaying in the intangible breeze next to her died silent, discrete deaths, and started the leader column again, having forgotten what it was about. The schoolchildren gazed at them blankly, licking their chins and wiping pus on their socks.
Faces were everywhere, the soft and the hard, the assimilated and the peripheral. But home was absent. Certainly there were people from there: somewhere behind the Russians a white Durban voice was explaining, illuminated with nasal snorts, how raging the pordy had been. But geography has little to do with place, and there was no one there from my place.
Until she walked in. Late and out of breath, as one would expect from a visitor harassed by crowds and non-negotiable departure times, she herded her two plastic bags ahead of her through the press, and wiped her cheek with her wrist. Forty-something, black, plainly but painstakingly dressed, she was instantly familiar. It was more than the open face, with eyes not yet dimmed or disappointed by trying in vain to find other eyes. It wasn’t the beret, or the slow passing of the palm across the sweat on her forehead and cheeks, eyes jammed shut as she husbanded her pores. It was a gravity that only the homesick feel; the pull of a distant world, briefly conferred upon one of its wandering inhabitants. It was easy to reach her and stand next to her.
But that was just geography again. Without words the proximity meant nothing. And yet how would one begin this conversation? A tap on the shoulder was the international sign of the dropped item: she would almost certainly grope for the bags at her feet. A strongly cleared throat risked uninvited mucus. A sentence boldly presented would inevitably be misheard, in that curious manner in which we seem unable to hear unexpected words, no matter how clearly they are spoken. It would have to be repeated, and the spontaneity would be lost. And what would that sentence be? How could one possibly explain the gravity in terms that didn’t seem either racist (“Because you look Xhosa.”) or terrifying (“Because I feel so comfortable standing next to you”)?
And then a hand fell on her shoulder, and she didn’t go for her shopping. A young woman in a headscarf, with a broad crooked smile and similar bags, saying something about having caught her up after all.
The emissary from home turned slowly, and smiled broadly.
“Bloody ridiculous with the escalators off,” she said. It was the confident astringent London whine. It was ferociously dispiriting.
The Russian girls, having spotted a stalker thwarted in the nick of time, were shuffling further down the platform when the train came.