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He thought himself all of 22 until he looked in the mirror. There he saw a kind of reality. His eyes were still sharp blue, the slightdullness at the edges from the one to many spliffs the night before fast disappearing. The face had enough creases to give it some character and deepen the mark of his lineage. Typically English - ahotch-potch of Anglo-Saxon, Celt, Roma, and Jewish features that somehow fell agreeably once. He hoped that the closely clipped salt and pepper beard and greying temples offered a distinguished touch.He wasn't sure of that. His weight was good at the moment, at his lightest since twenty-two, but not as lithe. His handsome 22 was not before him and it was only now that he knew he was handsome then.

“Fuck. I'm fifty”, he admitted. Then, totally unconsciously as he turned from the honest mirror, withdrew the confession and reverted to thinking 22.

“Why am I up at 6.30? Oh, of course". Today is important. It's the start of his training as a London bus driver.

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Elizabeth Boro and Jon Peters had passed the bus driving test to the relief of Protheroe. He didn't have to reorganise."Well done." He had said on their arrival for the next briefing. "Peters, it has been arranged that within the next couple of months you will be relieved for your break from the bus by Blunt. We want you to 'sellon', recycle a used ticket just before the change over. An Inspectorfor the bus company will get on the bus the next stop that Blunt makesafter taking over. It will be obvious that Blunt was not responsible butit should act as a decoy for Elizabeth. You will be sacked and back inhere for another job.

"Elizabeth, you will bide your time. Blunt will at some point approach you. He is not slow at coming forward when he sees a beautiful woman.Be very cool to him and try and involve the other women in garage.You know, disparage him to them. We will not be acting against himuntil next year then we want you to hook him. OK any questions?"Elizabeth Boro was the first to respond. "It sounds quite easy, butwhat is multiple sclerosis?"

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Still the same - the innocents being slaughtered in the Holy Land, Blunt thought, while wrestling with a tie and checking the clock,nervous about being late for his first day at training. Not being latewas all that was left of army discipline. Plenty of time. Another mug of tea and a fag before he left.He was told the next posting was to be Northern Ireland. No.

 That was enough. Seven years a soldier and now 22, it was time to moveon and besides, the Royal Irish Rangers had taught him the wrongnessof the Orange. He would not let himself be party to suppressing thecivil rights of British citizens. Even if those citizens did not wish to beBritish. With four years left on his contract he purchased hisdischarge. £200.00 it cost, all saved while in Cyprus. GenerousCyprus giving him time to try and repair a shattered heart and save.

Now what? Adjustment to a new life-style, one that you choose yourself, proved difficult for him. His references had all beeninformed by the army. In and out of jobs, mostly driving lorries.You could do that then - walk out of one job one day and intoanother the next. Never settled, never satisfied and still looking for love.

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Akinyemi Ola was pleased with the meeting with Oritse and its success. But then again he knew it was a forgone conclusion. Oritsehad no option. Ola had secured another exit point for the marijuana that was now coming from Morocco as well as sub-sahara Africa.There seemed to be an expanding market for Morocco's Khatema Treble Zero in London and New York. Akin had recommended it tohis father, reckoning that a detour via Lagos to London from Morocco had less chance of being detected. It would increase the Cost of course, but the margins were so good that the slight extracost would be absorbed by the increase in volume. So far Akin had Been proved right and Jones in London had been helpful as promised.

After the deal, Rosemary's life expectancy improved dramatically. She was shielded from the worst that Warri could offer, growingstrong and fit. Not for her the ravages of hunger or the gastrointestinal diseases that came in waves and decimated her peers.

The oil had brought misery for most, those at the bottom of the corrupted Nigerian economy were mired in squalor. The oilcompanies enjoyed the situation. Super-profits from the Delta's misery were nearly comparable to the super-profits the Portuguese,Dutch and British enjoyed from the times of slavery. Wages could bekept low because so many people were desperate for the work. There was never less than five hundred people chasing every job withthe oil companies. Wages just enough for the people to reproducethemselves. Nothing more. No welfare except from charity. Noenvironmental controls. It all helped with the bottom line - moreprofit and shareholders dividends increased.

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The bus was filling up with morning commuters, school children and shoppers or like Blunt making his way to bus driver training. He wasstaring out of the window at the people hurrying their way through as hower, wondering what had happened to Jim. The last time theyspoke was twenty years ago when Jim phoned from Amsterdam. Hesounded happy. Playing guitar in a band. Playing left handed with aguitar whose strings were strung for a right handed player. TypicalJim - upside down. When they had got back to Britain they'd splitup. Jim had headed for Manchester while he went to London andjoined some acquintances from Marrakech in a squat. Blunt thought itstrange the way it is so easy to lose touch with friends.

There was a succession of squats in Stoke Newington and jobs in Hackney, mostly driving. A poor inner city borough where affluencesat cheek by jowl with poverty. A multilingual hive of activity, its schools teaching children with 79 different mother tongues. A worldcould be explored or a prison for the poor could it make.

He was still writing poetry. The aid to his psyche whilst isolated bylanguage in Stammheim was still his learning tool and the acid yearswere over. Of all the LSD he dropped, Blunt couldn't replicate the first, repeat the depth and clarity of the purple haze. Marijuana? That was something else. His drug of choice that he wouldoccassionally wish to forsake but always returned to. Unlike alcohol which he could take or leave.

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Rosemary arrived in London in late 1983 while Thatcher was still asking in the glories of the slaughter she committed in the Falklands and planning to use it to win the 1984 election.

Rosemary was broken. Her dreams finally, irrevocably shattered. She was in London, had achieved a single goal in her dream. But at what cost. Dada Acacia had Rosemary now. The two decades of the 60's and 70's were good to Dada Acacia. She was in her 70's when Rosemary first met her. Her ruthlessness, cruelty and devoted service to the Ola's had made her affluent, feared and admired. The Prima Donna of madams. Her girls sought after. Her strategy for a successful prostitution business had proved right.

Get the best looking girls who can hold a conversation, target the directors of international companies, diplomats, overseas delegations, minor aristocracy and MPs and you can build up a formidable bulwark of protection against detection. A Deputy Commissioner or two would not go amiss. Respectable white society has its own rules of 'Omerta' and can afford to pay well for the exoticof a beautiful African whore.

The diplomats, the charge d'affairs from the newly independent states of Africa were Dada Acacia's first targets. The guinea pigs of her strategy at the beginning of the sixties. They of course preferred the white girls in the stable, saw them as exotic and the sex as confirmation of their new found power and place in the world. They could now join the elite world's white society and sink their faces in the same trough of pig swill.

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He arrived early, 10 minutes or so, but he wasn't the first. Half a dozen people wanting training as bus drivers were queueing to register for the start of themonth long course. Nigerian, Barbadian, Iraqi, Indian and English/Welsh. Black and white and all the tints between. They had all passed the initial multi-answertest and interviews the month before. 

Red Ken. the anti-communist had just introduced congestion charging to central London. It had immediately cut car use in the centre by 20%. and thebus companies were on a recruitment spree to meet the increased frequency and demand. A success story against all the cynics. Bus profits and shareprices soared. Pity about the tube.

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Kamara was lucky on that unlucky day when the RUF arrived in Koidu. He had woken unusually early, something gnawing at him, growling deep in the pit ofhis soul, disrupted his sleep. He hoped he wasn't falling ill. A walk might help. It was still ten minutes before the sun was up as he headed through town. Thelights from homes picked out the muddy-orange of the deep craters against the black-green of savannah bush, and stopped him falling into one. It was only lastweek that he helped search throughout the night for a lost 4 year old boy, Blimblim. Blimblim was found an hour after sunrise face down in a puddle at thebottom of a five foot deep hollow. The father's early morning wails still fill him with foreboding. Maybe it was that that had disturbed his sleep.
 

Kamara had clawed out some of the craters, or so his hands told him with their thick muddy-orange, cracked leathery hardness. Digging in the diamond richalluvial soil, all he had wanted was “to take a diamond” which would make him enough money to buy the seeds and tools to start farming, carry on the familytradition. He passed the school playing fields where once he and his best friend Foday entertained proud fantasies of playing football for Sierra Leone, and was now a muddy-orange moonscape of diamond diggings. Football just another memory.

When he reached the banks of the muddy-orange Meya River it was light. No slow lazy dawns - no twilights - in the tropics. Kamara and thousands of bare-backed boys and men used to bend double in the river for hour after hour sifting diamonds. He knew the river well. He turned left before the bridge, keeping the bank and now hippopotamusless Meya to his right. Thirty yards to his left were a row of single story homes, those still occupied fast coming awake with the noises of morning. The empty ones in their quiet loneliness seemed like nests recently fledged, the occupants on annual migration fleeing the harsh sand-laced Harmattan winds. He was heading the two-hundred yards toward a giant baobab tree he had climbed and fell out of more than once as a boy. He came here often to think and reinvigorate his soul, calling up good times with the
baobab and boyhood friends before the diamond rush. This day the baobab saved his life.

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