BUS RIDE
This bus must be 80 Years old!
The gear stick is two bits of roughly welded iron that disappear through a cavern in the floor to a place of crashings and grindings below. Mind you don't get your foot stuck down it while clambering between pressed bodies, to acquire a corner for half of one's bottom in the front seat (the front passenger door doesn't actually open, which is why one has to approach it that way).
On several occasions the Commissar gets off between stops and bangs bits of metal underneath. Is the wheel falling off, one wonders. But on the next occasion, its another series of bangings but on the other side of the bus; maybe it is either planned treatment for a variety of loose parts or a random approach to dealing with any and all undiagnosed rattlings. 1 even speculate that this could be purely prophylactic a kind of ongoing service or mobile M.O.T. which, after all, would be a fairly appropriate existential psychology for oriental bus drivers and their crew.
People peer out only mildly interested, so one can presume this is a routine and perfectly acceptable, even necessary, condition and prerequisite to going places, anywhere or way.
The lad (Commissar) who herds us snaps his fingers (the regular way money is collected for tickets) and one lass, her hair plaited in ornate patterns and apparently painted on like enamel onto her scalp, tosses her nose in the air and informs the lad
"I'm not paying"
He snaps his fingers again
"Fare please"
"I haven't got any money, I told you".
He glares and mutters, collects some other fares then returns to her, standing like a horse, resting one leg. She's quite buxom and maybe 6ft, pretty as they come. She watches him. Snap of the fingers. He then touches her arm
"Fare please"
"I don't have money, didn't I tell you”,
she scowls at him.
"Well, you can't get on the bus then!”
What an imbecile statement! She had got on the bus!
"I'm going to Giraif," she kindly explains.
"But you shouldn't get ON the bus to begin with if you haven't got the money".
He's getting quite annoyed by now.
She raises her voice completely unabashed and shouts:
"I'm travelling for nothing, can't you see".
"You can't".
Well, she had!
He retreats to the doorstep. At the next stop he shouts at her to get off. She doesn't move.
“Get out! Come on, you can’t stay on the bus without paying!”
She just looked at him with what seemed infinite scorn - or was it compassion! -
and it didn’t help his situation that she was a majestic and peerless hussy while he was such a diminutive, scrawny creature.
After a few more shouts she spared him by condescending to repeat loudly and clearly as if addressing a half-wit child
“ME, I’M GOING TO GIRAIF FOR FREE AND THAT’S THAT”.
She was too.
And did.
Nov1994