Minicab Elsewhere Evelina Anissimova Evelina Anissimova is a multicultural playwright, poet, polyglot & writer. Her play ‘Body Odours’ has premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this year. One of her favourite themes is cultural difference.
I had never unpacked my bags, never dared to see it as home, your roomful of sweet air that swelled and beat whenever I came and hung like an old man's skin when I closed the door. Today you helped me lift my bags into the trunk of a minicab. The driver stood by as we ran up and down the stairs. He drove, his eyes dripping questions. I asked to stop a mile up the road. The landlord wanted a cash deposit, as if cash can't be torn, can't be burned, faked, bummed, smeared with sweat or blown away under the London winds. I had come that summer from a country with an ATM around each corner, vomiting, vomiting money and here it just spat out my card. A man sat under the dispenser. I thought he was resting his legs but then I saw the habit in his eyes, and then the hunger. When I was away, you later told me, he spoke. How we met, he wondered, and where. Why we came here. How long we’d been ‘us’, he wondered, and how long we’d stay. But when I sat back down he drove silently on. We pulled up before a box of brick and I rang the bell. The room had four walls, nude like a whore’s skin but in the mould by the bed I could make out a bulldozer or the Eiffel Tower if I squinted and believed.
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