Living for Disco

It is 1 am. The lights of the 24 hour Shell garage shine warmly into the thick darkness of the frog-filled night. My eyes are heavy with the bleariness of aeroplane sleep. My arse feels like a lifetime’s worth of cellulite has settled in the past 8 hours and will continue to make itself comfortable over the next 7. I have not eaten since lunch time, as I mistakenly assumed that 24 hour Shell garages were ubiquitous on Namibia’s rather swanky roads.

I have already fallen victim to the tolley-nazi once on this journey. Fortunately I had almost finished by beer before she marched up, all indignant bosom and accusing eyebrows, beckoned towards my can with an imperious wave of her talons, and said ‘Yes, please, thank you very much’ while staring off into the distance as if I did not exist. I think she may also have been tapping her foot. This is a woman who loves her job.

So, 1 am ticks slowly by. I am waiting for the door to open so that I can step outside and get some food. So is another man, standing patiently behind me.

“This is not a disembark”, barks the trolley-nazi, with an alarming degree of satisfaction at the idea of imprisoning a busload of clients so tantalizingly close to food.

“Would it be possible to get some food from the shop?” I ask politely, only to receive a glare in return.

The man behind me moves towards the door.

“Where do you think you’re going? I said this is not a disembark.”

I have not paid almost a third of my monthly allowance to be dictated to by a sexually-frustrated harridan in a stretchy orange shirt who probably whiles away the hours by conducting lurid fantasies involving the driver’s enormous couch-potato stomach. I follow her down to the door at the front of the bus, and demand to be allowed out to go to the shop. She ignores me. I make towards the open door. She stands in my way.

“I have opened the door at the back for you”.

I am not in the mood for nonsense, but nonsense seems to be in the mood for me.

“Why can’t I use the door at the front? It’s right here.”

She ignores me, and stands bulkily in my path. I’m glad that this woman is only in charge of making the lives of Intercape passengers intolerable, and not of something important, like passport control. I consider delivering a swift kick to the back of her head, but feel that this may result in me being stranded in Grootfontein in the middle of the night, with only a thousand frogs and a lascivious pump attendant for company, so I stomp off to the back door, wishing her very ill.

It is now 1.15 am. I am very tired, but I do, at least, have a hot steak and kidney pie in my hand. I move to pay, and a pleasant looking man standing at the till starts to make small talk.

“Are you going to Japan?” he asks, as if this is a perfectly normal question to be asking someone who has just got off the Intercape in fucking Grootfontein-over-nowhere in the middle of the night.

“No. Not today”, I reply.

“Where are you going?”

“Windhoek.”

“Windhoek?” He manages to make it sound as if I said ‘Mars’. “Are you German?”

“No, I’m English.”

“Aaaaaaah! I see. Have you been checking out these Olympics?”

“No.” By this point I am utterly confused, and starting to suspect that this is the aim of this conversation-from-the-twilight-zone. All I want is to eat my pie, and maybe the opportunity to drill holes in the trolley-nazi’s head, just for a little while.

I get back on the bus and she looks at me accusingly. “The kettle is broken. I don’t know who did it. You can’t have any coffee.”

At 6.10 this morning I was woken by the announcement that we had reached our destination. “All seats to be returned to an upright position, and luggage to be stored under the seat in front of you” she instructs us all. Realisation dawns. She clearly wants to be an airborne trolley-nazi, so that she can terrorise people at 30,000 ft, and not have to deal with the chaos engendered by the uncontrollable and untidy wandering of passengers over Shell station forecourts at silly o’clock in the morning.

I’m tying my shoelace when I feel my seat shaking. “Seats in an upright position I said!”, she shouts, whacking the back of my chair vigorously.

I step off the bus into the slow, chilly dawn and am instantly surrounded by taxi drivers. It’s going to be a long, long day.