obscurely, of affirmative action. She called him a fool in IsiNdebele: "Isiphukuphuku": which delighted Duiker who capped it with "Indwangu" (baboon). The chums gathered their things, mounted their bicycles, and rode off to the diminishing sounds of Mr Major’s voice: "Bleedin’ foreigners...lowering the value of property...proud to be English...fought against ’itler...pay my taxes...Queen Elizabeth...kippers.”
Duiker led the way. Out of consideration for Nothando’s age, he decided to try a shorter route to Earl’s Court. According to his London map, if they took the fat blue road called Westway A40 (M), it would lead them directly to Holland Road, thus reducing the distance by two or three miles. Duiker was proud of his bright blue Raleigh Roadster with Sturmey Archer gears and built-in dynamo. He’d bought it new with money earned from the Buckingham Palace curios. Nothando rode an ancient Rudge with no gears and with clip-on, battery charged lights. It had belonged to Fred’s late father, Shirley, who had kept it, if not himself, rust-free.
The feeder road that took them on to the A40 was rather steep and they were both pretty breathless by the time they reached the motorway. They got off their bikes and pushed for a while. They were surprised by the density of the traffic which prevented them for many minutes from crossing over the road. Duiker reasoned that since they would eventually have to turn right, the sooner they got onto the right hand side of the road the better. It seemed to be windier at that elevation and Nothando was compelled to tighten the doek on her head. Duiker’s thinning grey hair flapped free.
They re-mounted, Duiker still in front, and pedaled off. A concrete parapet was all that separated the westward bound traffic from the eastward bound traffic. So, the two cyclists, on the extreme right (the fast lane) of the westward bound traffic, were also on the extreme right (the fast lane) of the eastward bound traffic. The sensation was terrific. Juggernauts roared past them in both directions.
The cyclists began to relax a little when the hooting, then the shouting, started. They waved and beamed at the truckers as they hurtled past. This was more like it. Maybe the pommies weren’t so hostile after all. Just listen to them honking and parping and calling greetings, frantically waving. Ah, the Commonwealth! At last a sense of belonging. Duiker was almost moved to tears by what he felt to be a "camaraderie" of the road.
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.
