» Buses

Wrong Bus
(My first b3ta post- wahey!)

A certain incident prompted me to be very sure I was on the right bus. It was about three years ago (I would have been fourteen at the time) and I was doing my work experience at the University of Warwick. They kindly let me leave at three, which was an hour early. I left happily, stepping into the warm embrace of a sunny afternoon and hopped on a bus.

I can’t remember at what point I realised I was on the wrong bus. Whenever it was, it wasn’t a pleasant moment. As realisation dawned, I felt that awkward kind of fear that’s rather like when one gets a sharp, stabbing pain in one’s stomach, but, being in a group of people, one ignores it and hopes it goes away.

It didn’t. It worsened when I found myself staring gloomily out of the window onto the streets of Leamington, and seeing its dull, brutish architecture glaring back at me.

My phone was out of battery. I felt very alone and scared and embarrassed and I needed the toilet (I was a smorgasbord of negative emotions).

The bus plodded through an array of identical looking streets for what seemed like an eternity. I witnessed a medley of disgusting people; they got on the bus, they got off the bus, they sat beside me, they took measures not to sit next beside me and they highlighted the fact that I had been stuck on this demonic piece of transport all fucking afternoon.

Eventually I got out of my seat and asked the driver what time he thought he’d be getting back to Coventry. He told me was expecting to be back at about six. Six! I had been on the bus for almost three hours! I could have walked home and back from the University twice in that time.

I closed my eyes in a dejected, crestfallen way. What a day. The driver looked at me with sympathy, with a look that said ‘if I could magically transport this bus to your stop right now, I would’. I appreciated the look. By now I was the only person on the bus and I was feeling more anxious than ever.

Then the driver said something that cemented his place in the twisting, meandering forest that is my memory with a sentence that was at once both uplifting and depressing. He said, reassuringly:

“I think you’re on the wrong bus, mate.”
(Mon 29th Jun 2009, 1:44, More)