Bitter Betty goes criminally uppity

Karma is a bitch. Photo credit: Kevin Dooley

Yin and Yang. The good and the bad. Gorgeous Brazilian men and ….well, I shall begin from the very beginning.

 

Once upon a time, a love-starved young girl came to London’s shores. Stars in her eyes, she jaywalked London’s pathways, narrowly avoiding collisions bolstered by the faith that she would definitely find love around the corner a la Julia Roberts in Notting Hill. This was the city of dreams, where Love Actually would sweep her off her feet.

A few short weeks later, this girl had morphed into Bitter Betty, i.e. me. A marvellous combination of bad luck and a mysterious disappearance of single straight men in the city fed into my bitterness. The city gave much, except for that one thing that had had me jettison across the seas (or at least one of the factors being finding love in London).

As I began, this time I am contemplating the rule of opposites. If the city’s energies made me meet a gorgeous Brazilian, this excess had to be redressed somewhere else. After what happened to me today, I feel the universe owes me now, a BIG one.

Hands down south

It began as a journalistic victory for me and my friend, as we had managed to net a real criminal (gasp!) for our publication. The young boy looked smoked up as he sat next to us in one of the courts in Westminster, awaiting his turn. “Go on, ask him what he is here for,” I nudged my friend. She did, and there was no stopping him.

He seemed delighted that we were journalists. “But you’re not BBC right?” he drawled. “You gonna put my picture up on a website? Cool! Send the link to my momma, she will be real proud.”

I almost pitied him and asked him incredulously if his mother would be actually happy, but instead of answering, he shoved his hands right down his trousers.

I am not uppity: I do have discerning tastes, but I am not uppity. But how is one to react when an ex-criminal shoves his hand down the front of his trousers while you are trying to interview him? My guess it isn’t just me who would have flipped.

It was as if he was doing it inadvertently, like a restless mind seeks to meditate with worry beads. I gawped and choked, too flustered to know what to do. My street-smart friend took over and executed a perfect damage control, asking him why he was at the court in the first place.

“Aahh… Me gal threw me out and I have an electronic tag around my ankles,” he said. “I need to make sure the system records that I am getting back home by 8 in the night… Gotta change the registered address to me dad’s one now… You gals going to Afghanistan soon now?”

I stared, but looked away when his hands began travelling southwards again.

“Not all journalists go to Afghanistan,” my friend guffawed.

“Yeah, but all the big ones do,” the wise man spoke. Amen.

Criminal straightforwardness

We later found out that he was under curfew for having bashed up a person in a fight. Also, that he was a trained chef and worked in Covent Garden.

He turned on us again, asking me about my friend: “She is pretty, eh? Is she single?”

“No,” I replied tersely.

“Are you single?”

I could have given a smooth answer and saved the day, but the Heavens were conspiring against me. All powers of rhetoric and speech abandoned me at that precise moment and I was left mumbling lamely: “I have to pay attention to the court proceedings so don’t talk now.”

It was nothing short of divine retribution for some heinous crime I must have committed in my past life. What else could have merited this day? A zoned-out fellow leering at me and demanding to know my love life’s status, and then looking smug about making me turn all shades of purple and mutter incoherently, all the while his hand made regular trips to the South Pole!

As I said, yin and yang, the good and the bad, a gorgeous Brazilian and a jaunty handed ex-offender.