Bicycle

At a quarter past four in the afternoon J. began undressing. It was time to go home. Looking down at his khaki trousers he noticed an oil stain down by the frayed turn-up of his right leg. The trousers stuck to his bum, had wormed themselves into the cleavage of his buttocks. Always sweaty. He shook his right leg sideways to remove the bunched up cotton folds from his bum and started undoing the buttons of his new wine-red short-sleeved shirt. This was his uniform really. His students had tried to make him change, but he wouldn’t have it. The rough, colourless, dark carpet had also been stained by oil. You hardly noticed it. He sniffed and pulled at the hairs in his nostrils. He would have to cut them soon. The shirt collapsed under its own weight as it slid down onto the carpet behind J.’s desk. He did not much like the desk. He would have liked the desk if it weren’t always so dusty. But then everything became dusty here. Having put on a dark-blue T-shirt with a small conservative logo placed right over the left nipple, something about the American International School of Kingston, he dropped his trousers, making sure the cleaning lady, Miss Jones, was nowhere to be seen. Looking through the windows to the outer office and again through the windows looking out over the gallery, where the students would pass, walking lazily and talking frantically, J. assured himself he was alone. He removed his underpants, bent over, noticed with some vanity the ripple of his thigh-muscles and quickly stepped into his shorts. The skin on his thighs was pale, almost translucent. The black shiny hairs punctured it like a chesterfield sofa made of human skin. A pale translucent chesterfield with blue veins and little scars. He took off his black socks. He had nice feet. Long, tendons and bones pushing the skin into a well-defined topography. The middle toe was longer than the big toe. He had bumped it often. The nail was thick and crusty. He slipped on a pair of smart stretchy white sport socks and pulled them well up. Paul Moses, one of his best students had reprimanded him for this. “Pull those socks down, it don’t look right” He had said. J. slipped on his running shoes, closed his rucksack, which was heavy with a portable computer, getting older, the crumpled up clothes he had taken off and a few books. He took his bike, eighteen gears, and cycled through the office into the outer office, out of the door, along the gallery to the staircase, jumped off, carried the bike down the concrete stairs and cycled off.