She eyes
both me and her desired conquest triumphantly. The driver studies her
in his overhead mirror, then gives a haunted look. Control is lost. He
knows it.
"An inmate" - shrieks the agitator for all the bus to hear - "The
perfect couple! A felon and an Arab! Perhaps you are an Arab too?"
"I am not an Arab" - I respond calmly - "They are too well mannered for
the likes of me and you."
She blows up:
"Son of a bitch, maniac, look who's talking!" - She leans towards me
and scratches my face with broken, patchily varnished nails - "A
prisoner piece of shit and whoring stench of an Arab stink up this bus!"
My neighbour half rises from our common seat, grabs her extended arm
and affixes it firmly behind her back. She screams to her dumbfounded
audience: "They are together in it, this entire group, and they are a
menace. Driver, stop this instant, I want the police, now!"
I do not react. It was foolish of me to have partaken in this tiff in
the first place. Prisoners involved in incidents of public unrest end
up spending a week or more in the nearest squalid detention centre,
away from the relative safety of the penitentiary. Anything can happen
in these infernos of perspiring, drug-addicted flesh, those killing
fields of haemorrhaging syringes, those purgatories of squeals and
whimpers and shaking of the bars, draped tight in sooty air.
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