Nocturne, the blonde

Last night, at 3:30am, a Samuel Beckett play was staged on the street underneath my window. I was lucky enough to be awakened by it or I would probably have slept all night and missed out on this entertaining experience.

A group of perhaps a dozen youths on two-wheelers had come back from a night on the town. Exactly at my house, one of the young ladies had managed, as a lark, to kick off the chain of the bicycle of one of her female comrades. This caused the victim in question to undergo a fit of uncontrollable laughter in a deep hysteric voice as she went over the street on all fours to regain as much as she could of the content of her handbag, with which she had been parted with in her inevitable fall.

‘Hu… huuu… no dude, no… dude, but listen… li-i-i-sten… lis-huuu… I got to, like, huuu huu, my bag is, like… C’me help me now, you bitch. Listen! Huuu. I’ve got to...’ And so on and so forth. Other members of the party had, perhaps unknowingly, slowly removed themselves from the epicentre of the action, but were called on in booming voices to come back and help with the reconstruction of the disintegrated means of transport. ‘Oi, Pete, Pete… Oi, Pete… Pete… Pete… Pete… wait up! Pete… Pete…’ a voice cried out to a distend acquaintance. ‘Pete, Pete… Pete… come and ’elp with the bloody chain, man. No, Pete, don’t be such an...’ But Pete was such an. For the moment being at least. Some members of the company had decided that continuing their journey on foot was the best answer to their predicament, but the loudest, shrillest voice decided against it because of her hunger. ‘I’m not walking… I’m hungry! I’m nót walking… no, I’m hungry! Not walking. I am hungry.’ And she added to that: ‘Hungry.’

In the course of benevolent time–space, Pete, who had come back, repaired the bike and the actors scattered in the night to make merriment elsewhere.