Nowhere People by Paulo Scott Page B

on his stool, which is tall and doesn’t have footrests. ‘Yeah. Another hour and a half. Bastard manager. Well, I suppose it’s just tough shit, this is my job. I’ll give you some more wine,’ Fabio mutters. ‘Don’t bother. I’ll make the most of the fact that I’m at a loose end and you’re doing this overtime, I’ll go by the anti-apartheid vigil outside the South African embassy. Apparently there are these two big-shot militants who’re going to talk about the negotiations to end Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment.’ He gets down from the stool with no footrests. ‘Son-of-a-bitch South African government, this whole segregation thing, I just don’t get it,’ says Fabio without ever losing his elegant, Italian movie-star pose (an absolute prerequisite for getting a job at the Pelican). ‘You get segregation everywhere, Fabinho, theirs is just more brazen than the others,’ he muses, ‘or rather, it’s the first one I’d like to see brought to an end. So look, keep your very expensive wine for some other day. Today our business is with some Mexican beer courtesy of Drake, right?’ Picking Fabio up at work was to have been part of the arrangement for going together to the exclusive party for friends of the staff at Bar Sol, the restaurant everyone wants to work at because, besides being a fun place to serve, it’s far and away the bar where the customers, most of them American tourists, leave the best tips. Fabio was invited to work there by Drake, who has a Brazilian mother and an English father and has worked at the restaurant ever since it first opened and always manages to get himself back in work there when he decides to come over from Brazil and spend a few months in the city. ‘We’ll talk at Bar Sol, Paulo … And watch out for any trouble, those gatherings outside the South African embassy sometimes end up in confrontations with the police.’ Paulo puts on his jacket. ‘So I just ask for Drake, right?’ and he gives one last glance at Thomas Alan Waits, one of the few idols in his life right now. ‘Yeah, he’ll be expecting you.’ Paulo turns, heads off towards the door. On the street, he turns left down St Martin’s Lane, which will take him straight to the South African embassy.
    The people who are not on the pavement directly outside the building have positioned themselves across the road on the paved central area of Trafalgar Square. The young black man wearing a white shirt buttoned up to his neck and holding a microphone turns towards the embassy, he says: ‘Nelson Mandela is still in prison, but he won’t be for long.’ The people clap. Paulo is with them now, already feeling the effects of the wine he drank hurriedly at the Pelican. He finds it surreal how explicit they are, these manifestations of belief in the possibility of Mandela being released without bargaining before he dies. It isn’t, for him, a question of witnessing what could perhaps be part of a significant historical process; he is there out of curiosity. As it happens, he lied when he was questioned at the immigration counter, saying he was here as a tourist and that he wouldn’t stay longer than twenty days in the United Kingdom; he did that out of curiosity. He drinks with people he doesn’t know, some of them even younger than him, people from all over the world, he does this out of curiosity. He drinks until things get dangerous, out of curiosity. He hangs out with people who are rich and spoiled, with Turks playing football in Hyde Park on the weekend, people who live it up because they’re in London and then become the domesticated little wives of other people who make a point of complaining nastily and telling their friends that their domesticated little wives can’t cook properly and don’t swallow their sperm when they suck their huge cocks, with couples from Madeira with their totally incomprehensible Portuguese, he does all this out of curiosity. He walks alone, in the early hours, from the