On the road out of town

Elsewhere, a woman drives a bus, but she does so as if she had just stepped in for the day, as though, really, she has an ocean -- or a prison -- to go back to. Something about the way she waits and listens, as though faintly bemused by even the idea of conversation. As though every question I could ask must make no sense. At the same time, by way of compensation (an uncalled for, undeserved, somehow blissful compensation) she has been infused today with a deep, humanising languor, an absolute commitment to the “us” of this world. Her time here – time which seems generously folded, plait upon lazy plait of it, like a hot summer among the cushions – has been secured by an equal and opposite contract guaranteeing her release; she is infused, permeated, tranquilly at one with the unblinking temporality of her involvement here.

But as I mount the bus, it is too late already; I have already missed whatever it is – the life – that I need to hold in order to be here, and the fact I’ve actually grabbed a hand rail, knocked upon a folding door, this is simply hearsay; this is simply proof of something else inapplicable.

She doesn’t ask me where I want to go; she doesn’t ask me anything. The other passengers are nodding there, somnolent, half-born, a vague collision of discarded hats, broomsticks and pieces of dry clay.

In the silence: “It’s RBS,” I say at last. I speak out of sheer desperation; I know it *isn’t* RBS; this isn’t where I want to go; I don’t even know if there’s an RBS here. I’m waiting for her to refute me, to correct me, to help me out in some way. But she says nothing, as though already aware that I have only begun, as though only I have ownership of my words, and only I am bound by them and answerable to them.

“It’s the place you send things away to,” I try again: “the Corporate centre.” But I know this isn’t true, either. Now I’m just trying to convince us both that I’m not all bad, that, in brief, I can put two ideas together rationally, and therefore she does not need to be afraid of me. “There is an RBS somewhere,” I’m suggesting. “And there’s a Corporate centre, too. RBS has a Corporate centre. It’s just that, neither of these places is the place I actually want to go to.”

Still the woman waits, in silence.

“Please don’t hurry me,” I say softly, realising I have no choice but to appeal to her humanity: “I can’t say things when I have to think about things, when I get stressed. I just can’t do things.” And, involuntarily, I wonder with grim resignation: “So, we’ve finally come to this. And this won’t be the last time, either; I’ve denied for years what was going on.”

“I’m not going to hurry you,” she says neutrally, as if this is something she has learned to say without thinking. At the same time, she pauses – pauses in the middle of nothing in particular, but pauses nevertheless, as though, in answering me, she has to make amends for the silence she has broken. She rests her bare elbows on the large, almost flat steering wheel, and looks toward my feet.

Now the bus has pulled away, and I am still clinging there, up at the pole, clinging like a spendthrift to a rattlestick. Almost without a murmur, the bus passes among different coloured lights, circling and re-circling the fretwork of the streets, closed as they are, half-filled or closed, half-closed or filled with people. And every few moments I have to ask again that she let me know when we are there; and then, every few moments, again, I find myself apologising, since somehow I forget everything she says. And each time she glances slightly aside, deducing nothing, concealing nothing, allowing me -- allowing me whatever it is, whether life or knowledge or something else, that one can only be allowed by way of suspension, -- as she repeats gently: “It’s on the road out of town -– it’s on the road out of town.”