Bus Stop
A Quiet Portrait of Modernity
I would walk slowly past the bus stop on my way back from the retirement village every evening.
The orange, dusky ones when the railside gardens are lit up in wild hues of the various greens of weeds and ivy. The dark winter ones where the drizzle paints the graffitied footbridges with a glossy, sheen and sends aches into my ageing, tired joints. The nicest are always the late autumn ones, in the cool but invigorating breeze, when the last golden orange leaves on the elms in Westhill Park finally float peacefully to the ground to eventually turn to dust in the footprints of passers-by.
Presshill Avenue was always a lonely, unnerving place. Narrow, strewn with the crushed twigs from the poplars that grew along the railway line in an uncouth and disheveled manner. The dark corners behind the palisade fences of the tennis club flickered with menace. Even the cracking concrete on the drain covers made me look twice. I always thought I saw faces in the cracks.
Lonely, blue-grey concrete faces.
Barker Road was too noisy, with the endless stream of middle class professionals driving their SUVs aggressively home to their unsatisfactory domestic lives and demanding, volatile children.
But the bus stop at Corrine Street was always more welcoming. It was quieter there and the street-lighting was brighter. Safer. I could slow my pace, and therefore the strain on my old hips, and watch the menagerie of desperate and disillusioned trawl through their phones, toke on crumpled cigarettes and gaze at the clouds, waiting for the 672 in it’s fading red livery to slink along Corrine Street to take them back to the relative comfort of their rented granny flats, rendered brick townhouses and weatherboard fortresses. Their own atomized little universes where their private vices and eccentricities could awaken and wreak havoc without the inconvenience of the greater society watching and holding them accountable to their oddness and social criminality.
The priest was a regular. Of course he wasn’t a real priest, but the way the old fellow sat, upright in his seat, back straight, so disciplined, and always well dressed in an ornate long jacket, reminded me of someone with authority and religious conviction. Sometimes he would be reading, flipping through the pages of a book you would half have expected he found in the Great Library of Alexandria. Always a small, blank, leather cover. Like his seating posture, he read with conviction and distinction. He had a tendency of standing up first as the bus arrived, leaning heavily on his cane, but always ending up last to get on the bus. Perhaps a politeness to let others on first. Perhaps it was simply a hip replacement that never really held up the way the surgeons had promised.
The priest never seemed sad, however the fact that in 2 years I had never seen him answer his phone maybe indicated a hidden loneliness, not uncommon for poor old fellows like him. I knew he did actually have a phone, a decades old flip phone his grandchildren must have taught him how to use when they had time for the elderly in their family before their own career opportunities and class aspirations got in the way of the people who nurtured them in their formative years. He would always keep his eye on the attendees of the bus stop, periodically peering out of the corner of his eye, seeing which of his regular acquaintances were absent. And would visibly try to hide his subtle disheartening when one or two were not present.
The priest was a reliable attendant of the bus stop. An unspoken authority. the centerpiece of the ragtag community unaware of their shared camaraderie.
The Delinquent was there most days. Dark hooded jumper, unmistakable, despite his clear desire to be as invisible as possible. Unmistakable like his crippling hunch, which helped him as he sought to pull the hood over his face to hide his unshaven features. Sharp cheekbones, browning stained teeth that had not been seen by a dentist since he left home many years ago. Although he looked the part of a delinquent, his behaviour was never outwardly antagonistic, save for spitting on the ground when it rained and a general disregard for commentary directed at his person. He gave up his seat for older people and pregnant women, and he would hurl curses at passing hooligans catcalling the weekend party girls from the local university campus, in their short dresses and painted faces. He avoided the other residents of the bus stop less out of a misanthropic revulsion to them, but more of a respectful distance to keep them from his unwashed features. The Delinquent rarely looked up from anything above the pavement. He rarely spoke to anyone. His apparently distanced nature appeared more as a way for him to keep his own stained person from tarnishing others.
I always saw The Delinquent as a hero, a truer gentleman than them all, insisting on the purity of others experience, untarnished from the withering and diseased vine of his creeping life.
The Choirgirl was not nearly as reliable as The Priest or The Delinquent. However her presence was unmistakable, both in it’s adolescent attractiveness, as her gentle swagger. She was there every Monday and Wednesday, but would often be present other days. I liked seeing The Choirgirl, always with fluorescent dyed hair, extravagant gold earrings, bangles and jewellery. Sometimes one of those neck chokers popular with the youth. Most young folk like her slunk around in the shadows, head down, avoiding any possibility of making eye contact. I guess The Choirgirl was not much different, however on a number of occasions, sometimes when the bus stop was quieter, she approached me. Typically asking for spare change for the bus ticket. it was in these moments she exposed her vulnerability. Up close, her eyes were a stunning golden brown, and emitted an aura of quiet but weary trust, the charming gaze of a girl somewhere, somehow, forced to grow into a woman far earlier than any child should ever be asked to. She was polite, and her requests came from a stark reluctance to seek assistance. A strong-headed youth too proud to beg.
But too poor to not.
One time she asked to borrow my phone to call her parents. ‘Just to say I’ll be home late’, only to then spend 15 minutes pleading on the phone with her mother to let her older brother stay another night. ‘I know he’ll just use again, but he won’t last at Dads, he won’t come home. Please mum, he wont come home again alive’.
That was the only time I saw her cry, tears turning mascara into an intricate artwork of anguish across her unblemished skin. Dagger-like patterns of glossy black that exposed the beauty of a face that longed to scowl less and smile more, but in searching for reasons to do so only found silvery pools of her own melancholy. I called her The Choirgirl because on a number of occasions, when she was the only one there, unaware of my presence she would sing quietly to herself. Soft, dulcet and tuneful songs, not any I would recognize. But her voice carried a gentleness that always moved me, a soft resignation to the inescapable follies of youth. She would never see my pace slow whenever she was singing. She never even looked up. She would just sit and sing to the stray leaves, lozenge wrappers and the sparrows that darted around her feet.
The birds, dancing to the melodies of a lonely adolescent with nobody else to sing to.
The Lawyer was something of an outlier. Black suit, navy blue tie and immaculately ironed shirts, from the budget section of the local department store. Always with a golf umbrella, emblazoned with vulgar corporate logos. The Lawyer would always behave as innocuously as possible, trying harder than the others to blend into the cracked glass and stainless steel. Always standing, always staring at the park across the road. Barely even blinking. Little did he know that he always forgot to hide the details. The hickey, semi hidden by a tight collar. The lock on his satchel that had clearly been picked open on multiple occasions. The bruised knuckles, a signature of his apparent loving affection for his wife at home. The constant phone calls buzzing from his pocket, always unanswered. Perhaps an apologetic wife, or children threatening him that if he ever did it again they would take legal action. Legal action they knew they would lose. The Lawyer has spoken to me on a number of occasions. Asking if the roadworks on Kendall Avenue will affect the bus timetable. Asking if the nursing home I am always returning home from visiting is suitable for his ageing mother.
‘Yes’ I said. ‘My husband Reg has been in care for in the last 2 years there. The facilities are good and the staff are friendly’.
Of course there are things I don’t tell him. That despite the good facilities, Reg should have been home with me, as he had been since we were in our 20's. And that in that wretched home of the dead alive, he will know a loneliness like he could never have imagined, had his imagination been capable of conceptualizing it.
‘No, Mr. Lawyer, don’t send your mother there. Take her home with you. Care for her as a son should. Take time off work. Devote a slice of your busy schedule to her. Perhaps then you will learn to love and not to hate, to control, to break. Perhaps you will learn that the veiled threats and swinging fists leave deeper marks than just black eyes and manic tears. Perhaps you might learn the subtle importance of patiently loving someone as they fade away. Along with their love. That every soft smile, every semi contented sigh, becomes more emotively powerful the physically weaker they become. That holding her wrinkled, delicate hand in yours for the last time might make the fierce walls you have built out of maniacal desperation, crumble to dust, like the great walls of Pompeii in the fires of Mount Vesuvius’.
I also wouldn’t tell him that Reg passed away 2 months ago.
But the more I stare at the tired faces of those in the bus stop, the more they look like my Reg.
Somehow, in the darkening, dust filled suburban wildlands, perhaps I learnt something from every leathery book, every browned tooth and every mascara stain. I have begun to see the Corrine Street bus stop as a church, a place of worship to the suburban gods, the deities of wide empty streets, overgrown nature strips and lonely kitchens. A place where without a word spoken, more is shared between people than any high school reunion, academic council or United Nations summit combined.
The Corrine Street bus stop, in all it’s graffitied, rusting dishevelment, tells a greater tale of the afflictions of modernity than could ever be told by the weary creatures that inhabit it.
Perhaps that’s why on those orange, dusky evenings, with no-one to visit at the retirement home, I still stroll by.
