Life on public transport can be frustrating, funny and fucking weird all at the same time. This is a piece about public transport and other stuff.
Life in the Bus Lane.
I’m sandwiched between a twitching women reading a book called ‘How to Be a People Person’ and a sleeping fat man who still has breakfast in his beard. Every rhythmic noise the train makes pushes the women further into the book, hands edging closer to her body excommunicating themselves from nearby passengers, mainly me and the sleeping giant.
The bearded man bulged as he breathed in but didn’t seem to deflate as he exhaled. I imagined him ever expanding, skin stretching, tearing, people scattering as the bulbous limp of flesh erupts across the cabin. His hand shot up and rubbed his face, the crumbs darted for safety. His eyes flashed open snapped awake by a bump. The new found state of alert caused the people person to grip harder on the book straining the spine as her knuckles whitened. Within seconds the giant’s head fell forwards and he was back asleep rocking like a giant baby.
I was caught pincer in an uncomfortable position but each attempt to move seemed to stir my sleeping travel buddy. In turn every twitch or R.E.M. movement triggered a further spasm from our people person. Inside I was laughing. There is silliness when people are around other people – the majority rules. The whole world was made up of people too tired to bother or too afraid to try. The wrongs of the world displayed a microcosm during my train journey. If only it were that simple.
Each of us began to relax into our surroundings and personal spaces until I sneezed which sounded alarm bells in the fat man who stood up and looking like he was sleeping walking began to charge down the train almost taking a fumbling nervous wreck with him leaving only a paper trail in his wake. The sleeping giant had transformed into a sweating behemoth of a man. He was right in the personal space of the train conductor but despite his size his face was that of the pleading child look. The conductor’s stone look of astonishment and disbelieve probably meant that he was asked to turn the train around. The fat man’s cheeks were red and sweat began to appear in all the wrong places. People across the cabin were staring, laughing behind hands, newspapers, the backs of chairs. He shuffled back to the nearest free chair passing each person with a “Please don’t sit next to me!” look on their faces. The sloth plonked himself down alone to the relief of his fellow passengers. The feeling of relaxation swept through the train. I wanted to skip down the isle handing out copies of ‘How to Be a People Person’ stopping to make people chant out relevant paragraphs to the hordes of travellers.
Familiar surroundings began to appear out of my window as my stop drew closer. The people around me began to shuffle in their seats and newspapers rustled, laptops closed. The motion of the train began to slow and the people swarmed to the door like a horde of zombies. The downtrodden once behemoth stood out above the masses head still hanging low, defeated. I’d lost sight of the people person in the mob and I let the masses carry me out of the train and into the open air.
The platform was awash with scattered bodies staggering forward dodging the slower paced and the survival challenged. All shapes and sizes headed for the stairs which lead up to the interchange. Everything seemed in slow motion as the bobbing heads ascended the steps, trapped behind someone not quite as enthusiastic and intense about stair climbing. As the stairs came to an end the space opened up and the bodies thinned out. I could finally walk a comfortable pace and breathe in fresh air rather than body odour and hairspray that had been clogging my lungs.
I saw a young couple holding hands leaning on a lamp post. He was forgettable in a grey hooded sweatshirt and tight black jeans and beat up pumps, his slick dyed black hair engulfing most of his face. The girl was shorter with piercing blue eyes that stole your breath away and forced me to stare for what was obviously an uncomfortable length of time as she turned away without a smile. She was wearing a red poncho with a white top underneath and had equally tight jeans on. I wondered if her boyfriend had borrowed some of hers. She was looking at her sandals and shuffling her feet as I looked away. They looked like the perfect pair for one of the many music videos flooding musical television at the moment, girl meets boy, girl falls in love, and boy chews gum and looks lovingly into girls eyes. She playfully punched him in the arm re-attracting my attention, I felt embarrassed like I was intruding, and my face began to burn so I upped pace and let them roll out of my field of vision.
I waited over a bridge and stopped momentarily to take in a snapshot of the rail tracks below. An intercity careered under the bridge sending a gush of cold but what felt dirty wind up into my face. I turned away and continued onward into the interchange. I wasn’t changing trains just passing through. A network of flesh and bone and steal and iron joining man and machine the mix of train and their passengers, tracks and the bridges across them. All this to help us spread like a web across the mass of land we have been given.
As I exited the train station I crossed a busy street blurs of blue and red rushing passed, horns honking, indistinguishable voices yelling. My bus was already at the stop a few minutes ahead of schedule. The bus driver was reading a red top spread over the steering wheel and nursing a flask of coffee in his free hand. Glass and steel peered down over me, even hunched the buildings towered high into the sky above. Birds appear as little dots darting across the open sky only to nip out of sight behind a concealing rooftop. I increased pace over the second half of the road and found myself at the bus door which was closed. I tapped the glass and the driver didn’t budge, eyes glued to the newspaper. I rapped my knuckles on the glass a little harder and his eyes quickly shot over to the door before returning to the paper. He didn’t even turn his head to look at me. I banged down on the glass harder still causing his head to flinch to the door and then back straight ahead, no longer reading but still ignoring my presence.
“Not due yet.” He said blandly. The eyes dropped to the red top. My face was burning hot, I’d started to break sweat and I hadn’t noticed that I’d clenched both fists and was griping so hard my knuckles began turning white. I turned away and a cold breeze washed over me chilling the beads of sweat, calming my smouldering temper. I’d shocked myself as to how quick I was boiling, temperament ready to snap. My hands were shaking lightly but I pocketed them to hide it from myself as much as anyone else. How to be a people person indeed!
As if mocking me the door opens and I spin around to meet eye to eye with a yellow toothed grinning bus driver who had previously oppressed me with a gossip paper and cup of coffee. I managed a feeble lifting of the corners of my mouth desperate to hide my annoyance. I flashed my pass and boarded.
The bus seat was awash with grime and chewing gum which actually helped to hold me in place as the rickety seat jumped and creaked at every motion of the bus. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine I was flying but an overpowering body odour drifting from the seat in front quickly shattered the dream and the harsh reality of grubby workmen, the stale smell of yesterday’s sweat, the unique fastening “Mechanism” on the seat destined to ruin my trousers brought me home. I was enveloped by a feeling of emptiness that made my stomach ache as though it were tied in knots. This was a daily routine and each and every attempt to drift away and escape the mundane boredom had failed. I could no longer even day dream in peace. The awfulness of the truth, the world through my eyes was a vast ocean of emptiness, a rut, a depressive factory line where all the pain, heartache and loneliness goes round and round like a driving cog. I know that sounds dramatic and clichéd but sometimes a little bit of drama is good for you. I just find it distracting.
I tried to disappear into the seat pushing myself into a wedge between iron and cushioning. I slouched as far as I could to escape the discomfort. I could hear spats of conversation jump from all directions. I heard remarks about our National football team’s recent spell of quality performances and ruthless opinions on the welfare of two baby twins belonging to a distressed mother who “Lost” her four year old daughter whilst sunning in a dusty European country. Talk of full English breakfasts made my stomach grumble but put a smile on my face momentarily. I cringed at a fat man in blue overalls entertaining on lookers loudly with tales of his sexual outings. It was hard to believe that anyone could find the lump sexually appealing and gob smacking to hear “It” describe what this “Women” actually did. I even consider myself open minded but was still shook to the foundations of taste and decency. An elderly woman in the seat to my left, across the isle, was a ghostly white colour it was hard to tell if it was old age or listening to the sex life of England’s finest. My gut told me she was suffering from the same ghastly visions that I was. Nobody else on the bus dared to speak. Everyone sat in jaw dropped silence, everything else paled into the background as the deviant’s words hypnotised the passengers. It reminded me of motorway pile ups, hoping nobody was hurt but knowing the slow moving traffic was as people crawled passed wreckage hoping to see a body, blood, something horrifying. Nobody wanted to hear but we all listened, all embraced that spark of perversion and the flame of something we shouldn’t enjoy but explore never the less.
The sweeping silence soon found its way to the front of the bus where the would be Dirk Diggler stood, now red faced, as the realisation hit him that we had all shared in his deepest and darkest sexual pleasures. My stop arrived not a moment too soon. I breezed of the bus with a rush of air as the doors closed behind me. To my surprise I was actually heated with embarrassment from my journey. A cooling breeze had followed the later morning and was welcomed with open arms after the stuffy bus ride.
Another man stepped of the bus before it pulled out. He shouted something obscene to the still embarrassed gentleman causing muffled laughs to echo down the bus. I could read several repressed smiles on the faces in the windows as the bus rolled on passed. He gave me a wink as he set off leaving me soaking up the smog from the bus exhaust.
