Dancing Bears by Antonia Lloyd-Jones & Witold Szablowski

Author:Antonia Lloyd-Jones & Witold Szablowski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-03-06T00:00:00+00:00

The Lady’s kingdom

Long, long ago, the Lady lived in an old cottage outside Pabianice, a town in central Poland, and her only knowledge of large train stations and foreign capital cities came from the newspapers. She would cut out the more interesting articles and pictures, and keep them as souvenirs. In those days her name was Alicja, just as it says on her ID card.

She still has the clippings to this day. For instance, there’s one about the time the controversial, anti-EU politician Andrzej Lepper met Pope John Paul II. And there’s one about the London bus that was ripped apart by a terrorist bomb. When she cut them out, she can’t possibly have imagined that in the near future buses just like that one would be waking her up at night. Or that she herself would be accused of terrorism.

In the days when she cut out the Lepper clipping, she was still living in the Polish countryside. She never made it to the traveling store in time. Everything had always been bought up before she could drag herself all the way there.

She cut out the article about the bus when she was living at the station in Koluszki, where there’s a major railroad junction. But even then she had no idea how nicely it would all turn out.

These days her estate is a rectangle two hundred by fifty yards in size—two acres. “Over there’s Victoria, here’s Coach, and there’s Green Line too, the one you arrive at from Poland,” she says, pointing, as if showing which type of crop grows where.

Victoria is a large railroad station. Coach and Green Line are bus stations. For five months, she has been lady of the manor here. She has no roof over her head, so the rectangle between the stations is her home. She has no refrigerator, so the station supermarkets are her cold store. She has no money, but she takes handouts.

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