Story

The pedestrian light was red, and everybody at the crossing seemed willing to obey it except my eyes.

They had stopped on the words printed across a stranger's T-shirt.

“Jesus wept, can you make me wet?”

I read it once because it was there. I read it a second time because I could not believe somebody had worn it into the centre of Bristol on a grey Saturday morning. By the third reading, I had forgotten that I was meant to be crossing Temple Gate Road towards Bristol Temple Meads.

The South West weather had not decided what it wanted. The pavement still held the shine of earlier rain, but the clouds had opened enough to let pale light fall over the red-brick station buildings. Commuters stood under coats and umbrellas they were no longer using. Buses hissed at the kerb. Wheels rattled over wet paving stones.

I had arrived in Bristol at half past ten with three hours to waste before my train to London. The plan had been simple. I would meet my old friend Nsinda, from Kampala, at the Holiday Inn, drink something warm, complain about life, laugh about things that had stopped being funny years ago, then carry on to London.

My phone rang before I reached Station Approach.

Nsinda.

“Man, something has come up,” he said. “I won't manage. We'll meet when you come back.”

I stopped walking.

“Jesus!”

The word came out louder than I intended.

The woman in the T-shirt turned.

For one embarrassing second, she looked down at her chest and then back at me, as though she had caught a man reading aloud from a billboard.

“No,” I said quickly, although I was already smiling. “Not the shirt.”

That was not completely true.

Up close, however, the shirt was not what held me. It was the tiny piece of jewellery in her nose. I had seen nose rings before. Hundreds. Maybe thousands. None had ever made me reconsider the direction of my day. This one somehow belonged exactly where it was. It caught the weak morning light when she moved her face, and the effect was ridiculous: a small ornament turning an otherwise ordinary stranger into someone I suddenly felt I would regret not speaking to.

She had earphones in.

This should have been my exit.

Instead, I heard myself say, “Hi, miss. My name is Ayanda. Do you have two minutes to spare?”

Nothing.

I tried again.

“If you do, may I have sixty seconds of those one hundred and twenty seconds to know you?”

Still nothing.

My confidence began collaps…