Is it just me? Or do you want some company?
There was a man on the bus… (You’ll probably find that most of my stories start on public transport. Until I buy a car…) There was a man on the bus, let’s call him Charlie – he looked very much like a Charlie.
Charlie stepped onto the bus at 11.03pm, swaying gently, as he re-gained his balance after the sudden change in level. His head rocked forward, as he put his ticket into the validator, focusing on the machine as if he was trying to will the ticket to come out. When his mind trick succeeded, the machine beeped and his ticket was back in his hand. With on fluid motion he turned from the shoulder to face the rest of the bus, his glass brown eyes trying to find the best possible seat. He walked forward in a rocking motion, trying his best to stay on his feet with the violent movement of the bus. He sat mid-carriage, back to the window, in an eisle seat before realising, shortly after he sat down, that the seat he chose wasn’t the best. With surprising agility he leaped up the stairs ,and sat down again on an eisle seat across from me and looked straight ahead.
Charlie was a tired looking man, bald, with a ring of coarse, grey hair that surrounded the back of his head and mutated into uneven sideburns that looked like the cheek-guard of a Roman’s helmet. Bushy, black eyebrows sat atop his sunken eyes, his nose was long and thin and in complete vertical contrast to his equally long and thin lips, which looked like the start-line for his ski-jump jaw. He wore a beige cardigan, with protruding rectangles of equally dull colour, that complemented his brown, leather-coated buttons. His pants? What else but grey? They matched his sideburns, although you would catch no Roman soldier wearing them. Shoes? Moccasins… a shoe by any other name would look as complete.
Although he swayed when he stood, when he sat down Charlie was perfectly still. Except for his eyebrows. They blinked. Up and down form one extreme to the next, Charlie went from looking very confused to suddenly surprised. If one were to separate his eyebrows from his face it would have looked as if a small bird was trying gain lift and fly for the first time. His thin lips danced out and in, in-time with the birds. It was if he was exploring every muscle in his face in time to some unheard tune.
I was woken out of my face-dance-trance by the sharp sound of the bell, indicating the bus to stop. Charlie was getting off… so was I. As I was readying myself to depart, a strange thought entered my head – What if Charlie was angry that I was getting off at his stop? I don’t know why I thought that. Perhaps it was because to me, he looked like a man who had lived a solitary and independent life, a man not used to sharing anything. Not even a bus-stop. As the bus slowed, Charlie stood swaying in front of the door, both arms holding onto poles, like a child that refused to leave. However when the doors opened, he stepped off the bus, one leg at a time before once again steadying himself and walking across the grass to the footpath. As I got off the bus and the doors closed behind me, Charlie turned around, from the shoulder, to watch the bus leave. I got the feeling that this is what he always did because when he saw me standing in front of the departing bus his brow sat high for an unusually long time. His beady eyes… shining at me… with darkness?
I crossed the road to begin my journey home, but I couldn’t help but look over my shoulder to see the man who had so deeply been etched in my mind. Charlie was walking back the way the bus had came, his eyebrows fluttering up and down with each step. We couldn’t have come more than two stops than when he got on the bus. Yet he was walking back the way he came.
Back to catch the next one.
