. . . . on keeping it real
AS YOU KNOW, I’m an important and powerful business woman. It was in that capacity that I boarded the bus to Dublin airport last week. I like to keep it real, see? Public transport, incredibly early morning flights, packing my own lunch – all of this helps me to feel like one of the people. I behave like I’m on the TV show The Secret Millionaire, where the protagonist pretends to be poor, mixes it up with a bunch of have-nots, then at the end says “Gotcha! I’m actually mega-rich! Here’s a fiver for your troubles. Byeeee!” Except that I actually have no money and even if I did, I wouldn’t give it to some community centre in the bloody Midlands. I’d get a taxi to the airport, plonk myself on a high stool at that odd little seafood bar and eat thousands of oysters and lobsters. Then I’d pay an old woman to lift me to my gate.
I did have some money that morning. Fifty big ones, on one note – you know the one, the mustard-coloured bit of paper we used to get loads of before. Anyway, I handed it to the driver and said: “single, please”. That wasn’t a question about his relationship status, it was just the type of ticket I needed. He took my €50, gawked at it for a while, then buried his head in his hands and told me I’d wipe him out and he’d have no change all day because of me. I felt he was being melodramatic but I’m a good girl, so I agreed to go and get change in the shop. He said fine, he wasn’t due to leave for another five minutes. Not quite as appreciative as he should have been, but I let that slide, because, like I said, I’m a great girl.
Next thing you know, I’m back, change in hand, ready to give our relationship another go. I presented my money and sang out “Here you go, exactly!”
The driver said: “I won’t be leaving for 20 minutes, love.” He’d grown fonder of me than I could have hoped in the five minutes I was gone but I wondered about the delay. I looked at him closely, and realised he was a different driver, just with an identical uniform and bus.
I looked out the door and saw the originals driving away, happy out. Fury filled me, head to toe. Words like “betrayal”, “the cheek of” and “missed flight” swirled around my mind. My body took over. My eyes spotted the back-stabbing bus stalled at a red light, my heart jumped and my legs took immediate action. I leapt from the second bus and absolutely bolted toward the first. Plyometrically speaking, it was something else altogether. I sprinted across two Luas lines and through a little traffic island, leaping over foliage as I went. I nipped in front of a car and knocked twice on the door of the bus, just as the lights went green.
An urban sophisticat like me knows full well that you’re not allowed to get on a bus in traffic, but at this point, the rulebook was out the window. The driver turned in his seat, his eyes wide. He was shocked. I was back, and mad as hell. I’m sure I saw his hand shaking as he pressed the door button.
“Well, well, well,” I said – calm, focused. “I . . . I . . . was looking for you,” he stuttered. “You clearly didn’t check the bridal magazine section of the newsagents,” I said, trying to secretly catch my breath. His muttered defence? “I couldn’t leave the bus.”
“Ha!” I said, “the bus is a big boy.” Looking back, my saying this kind of doesn’t make sense, he didn’t mean the bus gets nervous when it’s alone, it’s probably more an insurance thing, but that doesn’t even matter because I said it with such cool menace. I followed with: “Here’s your money . . . no change required.” I was tempted to tuck it into his jumper to make him feel cheap, but he was cowering so much already that I just pressed the €6 into his hand, folded his fingers over it and left it at that.
I settled into my seat (directly behind the mirror, so I could frown at the driver if he took his eyes of the road) and relived my triumph: the intelligence and quick thinking I’d shown in figuring out what to do, the courage to run straight into traffic, the sheer physical prowess I’d demonstrated. The magnificence of me altogether. I wished that there had been more witnesses than just that one stunned motorist in the Yaris. There was only one other passenger on the bus, and he didn’t seem interested in congratulating me, despite my looking at him a number of times and doing a “can you believe me?” face at him.
It’s a sad truth of my life that many of my victorious moments go unnoticed by others. I thought about that as I sat in the airport eating my cheese sandwich, almost three hours early for my flight.
Róisín Ingle is away
In other news . . . I’m excited to be an audience member at the Vodafone Comedy Festival at Iveagh Gardens, especially to see Kumail Nanjiani, he’s hilarious. July 26th-29th vodafonecomedy.com