Truth, Lies, Dreams
I won a prize beauty treatment.
As I sit down for my pedicure, in a small white living room, a man squares up in front of me and raises my naked left foot, puts it on his knee. He takes a large dressmaker’s scissors and, starting from the bottom of my pant leg, he cuts vertically up.
Next to me, another man assures me I will like it.
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We have just gotten off the island. It is bright and sunny. The car ferry docks at Yung Shue Wan pier and our bus drives off the ferry and pulls into the bus station. We still have to switch buses.
The four of us are trying to get out but we are at the back, and there are more people doing the same. And when it is our turn, others are already getting on.
Liam, Lizzie, Siobhan finally leave when I see a shopping bag left behind. I pick the bag up but a black woman says to me, No, that is mine!
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I am having a lovely time watching family videos with Connor who has the Russian bride.
“Is that your wife’s sister?” I point at a taller blonde woman, on the grainy video. She is sitting in a deck chair at the beach, is pretty, has an early Lady Di haircut.
“No that’s someone else.”
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A boy had a COVID test in hospital chair, had a hard time of it, so I think I’ll try the same. To see if it was that bad.
I sit down in the blue hospital armchair. The nurse puts the tube in my arm, but I can’t get comfortable. There’s no pain, but there’s a strange feel of the rubber hose rolling under the skin of my bicep as I move from side to side.
I hold up my hands, trying to adjust my position. My hands are frozen in the shape of duck feet, pale webbing and pink fingers. They might look strange but they don’t hurt, they’re just amusing to looking at.
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“I just got fed up,” I explained to two women I had bumped into in the street. I had landed in Libya . “I am going to travel around Africa,” I continued. “I’ve done it before…” I pictured my route, westbound from Libya then down towards the equator. “Upped and left.”
My company had given me a new phone just before I departed, bright orange cover, large and rectangular, not like the iPhone I was used to, or like the flip phones the business women were carrying.
Perhaps I could go with them, even join their company?
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