Friday evening in London

The bus finally arrives and the driver — young with black hair and bloodshot eyes — barely gives us enough time to make it to our seats before taking off. The drive that normally takes half an hour is completed in less than 20 minutes. He takes corners like he doesn’t want to put them back, as my friend David likes to say when he’s driving through the streets of Port-of-Spain. He may not be drunk, but it won’t be because of a lack of effort.

The first sight that greets us when the train door opens is a small puddle of the distinctive, substance-less vomit that is the end result of an evening of drinking, the seemingly favourite pastime of the British regardless of ages, sex or occupation. Running a close second — and often neck and neck — is smoking.

On the train itself a few stops later a man boards, sits opposite us. He is slight of build, average looking, average height. His mouth has a strange twist to the left, as though he has suffered a stroke at a young age.

"Do you know if this train goes to All Saints?" he asks falteringly. "Yes," we reply. "I need to get to All Saints." He leans forward, eyes animated, the twist in his mouth exaggerated when he speaks. I get wary.

"Are you afraid?" he asks, his English broken, his twist disconcerting. The alarm bells start to go off in my companion’s head, I think. "What?" he asks, allowing an edge in his voice in response to what may or may not be a threat. "Are you afraid? The trains. are you afraid of the trains? After the bombs."

He goes on to tell us his story, starts to smile in his crooked way. I relax as he explains his own experience with the London bombings. About him working close to one of the stations that was bombed, going into a station and meeting a man who was coming out, his face pale, unable to answer him when he asked what happened. He went to another station and got trapped there, was unable to leave for over an hour. He saw another man whose face was covered in blood.

"Are you afraid?" I ask him.

"Am I afraid?" he repeats, smiles. "Yes, I am afraid. I am also drunk eh. I am Polish. The Polish and the Russkies like to drink the vodka. I don’t know why we like to drink the vodka. I am drunk. Yes, I am afraid."

He misses his stop, decides to come off at the next one. He misses that one also. He misses all the stops, in fact, rides the train until it reaches its final destination, Canary Wharf. He comes off, looks around and goes back on, sitting next to a man who may very well be a Russky drunk on vodka. It would be a match in alcohol heaven.

We’ve just missed the last train from Canary Wharf to Lewisham so we decide to ride the train back to All Saints and switch to the bus from there. Only thing no one told us at the station that the service had been diverted because part of the road way was closed. There was a girl on the platform at Stratford who I noticed because she looked like a Trini, the indecipherable mix that is our cultural stamp. She also stops off in All Saint, unlike our Polish friend who, surprise, surprise, stopped off in Poplar. For all I know he’s still travelling on the trains he’s afraid of, trying to make his way home.

We join forces and over the next hour that we spend tracking the train I find out her name is Sharlene and she’s from South Africa. She’s been here three months. "London is nice, but it is hard when you don’t know anybody. People here are different. This is not home." She talks about her impending trip to Capetown in November to visit her family. We exchange numbers and part ways when she leaves to switch buses.

At 2 am I get a text on my phone. "It was nice meeting you. Got home safe and hope u do 2. Hope we can meet again. Let me know when you get home. Sharlene."

And I do.

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