Men Talk: Two skeletons in love

Then mass was over and they took him off to Langata cemetery and buried the body. And all would have been fine and well if, 16 Sundays after the funeral, Solomon Kabalagala, already a skeleton, had not dug his way out of his grave – scintillating sunlight from the water puddle sitting on cold hard black mud on the day of his burial - and decided to explore what treasures Sunday, the first of July, 2018, had to offer.

The first thing skeleton Solomon Kabalagala did was find a female skeleton, a Lady of Bones - she called herself Yulia - and ask for directions. “Where do you wish to go?”

“Heaven?” He had meant it to come out as word, but it came out as a question. Yulia was seated on a green park bench and reached out for a tablet beside her femur with long, graceful phalanges. Peering through its touch-screen glass, she said: “Heaven is 3,300 miles away from here.” 5,500 kilometers. Solomon Kabalagala worked it out in the cranium section of his skull. “And where is here, exactly, Miss Yulia?”

“Salisbury, Market Walk,” she said. She had a slight Russian accent, and the Rs rolled out of her mandibles: M’rrr’ kiet woke … “You know,” she added thoughtfully. “Heaven is just concrete skateboard and graffiti park, off Main and Morgan streets in Connecticut, USA.”

“Just like here,” Solomon said, staring with wide empty sockets at the barbershop and locksmith’s and shoe shop and a restaurant called Bill’s and a Pizza Hut and a confectionery called Mr Simm’s across Minister Street on the Blue Boar Row of Salisbury. “Sans graffiti.”

“Plenty of graffiti in cemetery where they buried me,” Yulia said darkly, “and on the tombstones, too, as if death is a joke.”

“It is, to the teenage yobs who go to drink beer there Saturday nights and spray paint that shit, I suppose. Where did they bury ye?”

“Zero point three miles south of here, at the London Road cemetery.”

“Half a kilometre down the road,’ Solomon said enviously, “a short walk up for you.”

“Why?” asked Yulia. “Did they bury you far from here?”

“LA!”

“Los Angeles?” said Yulia. “I always dream of going to LA when little teenager in Russia. But the UK give my papa asylum here.” Arse-sigh-lam. Like a sad badass on the run. A lamister from the Long Arm of the Law.

Solomon began to tell Yulia that he was actually from Africa, then changed his mind. After all, after death, we are all white, after a while, and Kabalagala wanted to enjoy the privilege that comes with not being judged by the colour of his skin. Because I got no skin now. Yulia was all grinning teeth, and no lips, delighted to know someone, or something, from the City of Angels. “Underneath these lights, down at Hollywood on the boulevard, the Dead come back to life …”

“Who’s that?”

“Guth Shally Hot,” she said, and it took Solomon a second to realise she’d said Good Charlotte. “I’m hungry,” he said. “I haven’t eaten for months. You want Indian? Chinese? French fries?”

Yulia was thinking of a good brasserie to have Sunday lunch at – grilled squid with sweet peppers, green tomatoes and garlic for starters; a lobster pasta, bisque and chilli with rosti on the side; a delice of dark chocolate for dessert, and afterwards an Americano or lapsang souchong, depending on if she was feeling like coffee or one of the selections of Higgins’ teas at… But Solomon had taken her left metacarpals in his right ones, and she was rising off the park bench to her metatarsals, and they were walking, ulna to radius, a few feet south to the restaurant called ‘Giggling Squid.’

He ordered the ten quid ‘Starving Squid’ for himself, and “two Giggling Squids’ for Yulia from the waitress, a skeleton in high heels (and lipstick on the skeleton teeth) and with her pelvic bone, sacrum and coccyx demurely covered by a sea blue apron that said “Giggling Squids.” She peered through the plexi glass menu cover, as if their orders had lit up in there somehow, then disappeared, only to reappear with Solomon’s order – red curry chicken, Thai Pork dumplings and spring rolls, and Jasmine rice. Solomon the Skeleton, to be polite, decided not to eat until they had brought Yulia’s food to table too.