Dec 8, 2002
In the Queue
She has flakes of breakfast cereal stuck around her mouth, and her denim jacket is stained and encrusted on the lapel with what looks like soup or possibly vomit. I don’t want to know which.
Brushing her long mousy brown-and-grey streaked hair out of her face, she joins the queue behind me.
It’s windy out today, and she tells me this. I turn down Nirvana on my headphones to agree with her. She looks twitchy, shifting eyes and breathing shallowly. A cornflake drops off her chin, and she says “It’s ever so gusty, isn’t it?”
I say yes, and turn up the music again. Old and a bit talkative and strange, but not dangerous. But this morning I can’t do smalltalk with strangers.
The bus comes, eventually, and it’s packed. She pushes me from behind, tries to nudge past me, saying in an aggrieved way “Excuse me, there’s a queue.”
“Yes,” I say, “I know. You were behind me in it.”
She has already battled in front of me, elbowing me in the arm sharply as she went. She looks over her shoulder and gives me a dirty look, saying in an exasperated tone “What is this?”
I shrug and say “A very strange queuing system, apparently”
Another bus pulls up behind, empty, and I run for it, happy not to have to stand by the woman-about-to-snap on the short journey up the road.
A short asian woman gets on and says to me, sotto voce “Don’t worry, she’s always like that,” just before the woman she’s referring to gets on and shouts at the driver,
“Why didn’t you come first? The other bus is full!”
I have sat down already, and she walks over to me and announces that I’m in her seat.
No. Not now. Not now. I don’t want this in the morning. I don’t need someone ranting at me on a bus with fifteen empty seats that I’ve stolen theirs.
I turn up the music, focus on something beyond the window and ignore her frenzied yelling in my face. Her breath smells of old cheese.
After twenty seconds, she gets bored and sits heavily on the seat opposite me, rocking slightly, and staring.
I’m glad when the ride is over.
