. . . on a stranger on the bus
I NOTICED HER IN the queue before we got on. A tall woman, wearing a fawn-coloured full-length coat with a fur lined hood, which covered her head, so you could hardly see her face. The hood made her look as though she was off on an Arctic expedition. Dressed with glamour and comfort in mind, she stood out from the crowd. A true character, with that touch of old school elegance. I wondered whether that was a real silk Burberry scarf around her neck or something hooky picked up in a market in London? Her sensible shoes were trimmed with a jazzy bit of material that sparkled as she moved. The bag was red crocodile skin, or what looked like crocodile. It might have been alligator.
On long journeys I always head for the back of the bus. Because people have a thing about the back of the bus, they seem to avoid it because of an aversion to the rumble of the engine, and so they are usually the last seats to fill up. This is lucky for those of us who don’t mind the rumble of the engine, and sit there remembering school trips of yore when the back of the bus was the only place to be.
When I reached the back, the middle part was free, with both window seats taken up. A sleepy young man with earphones and an ancient mobile phone was on one side. I arranged my bags around me, filled with magazines I knew I would not read. I like to take too many magazines on long bus journeys in case the bus breaks down and I am left at the side of the motorway. I will never be stuck for something to read when that happens.
A chocolate bar dropped out of one bag and before I could get to it the young man reached down to pick it up. As I made myself comfortable I saw that the person on the other side of me was the woman in the queue. She had a copy of Woman’s Way on her lap and reading glasses resting on her nose. I spread myself out the way you can when the seats either side of you are free. By the time we reached the airport the man who picks up confectionary and the glamorous lady were both asleep. Only one of them was snoring.
The Glamorous Lady was snoring. Gentle, elegant emissions. One arm is entwined in the strap of her handbag, the other cradled her reading glasses and rested on a page of a magazine with a headline “The TV stars who didn’t come clean”. Her head was leaning back on the rest, her mouth open slightly, Arctic hood down.
There is something intimate about watching a stranger snore. It’s usually something you experience from a person lying in bed beside you. There is a beautiful vulnerability, especially in those moments when the gentle snore grows in volume and the snorer rouses suddenly, jerking their head, realising that they might be snoring, wondering if anybody around noticed. Then sleep takes them again before embarrassment can set in. I sat there watching her, wondering about her life – was she a dance instructor at some point, did she have a vast collection of classical music – invading her privacy without seeming to do anything at all.
I gave a talk at a school recently. At one point I told the students how one of my favourite things to do was eavesdrop on conversations and observe people in cafes. When I finished the talk, I asked if anybody had any questions. A girl put up her hand. “No offence, but can you tell me what cafes you go to so I can make sure I don’t go there?”
I took her point. The watcher has an advantage over the person being watched. The balance of power is unfair. As I thought about this, I put myself in the glamorous lady’s sensible jazzy shoes. I thought about what she might see if she was watching me. She would see a generously proportioned (as well as being chic, I fancied she was kind) woman with messy hair and a mini-rucksack in the place of a handbag. A woman who kept writing things down in a notebook. Who couldn’t seem to get comfortable on the seat. Who couldn’t get comfortable in her skin. Who was clumsy with confectionary.
This exercise, the watcher becoming the watched, if only for a moment, restored the power balance. Eventually the woman woke up. She stretched her legs at Monaghan. And later, just as I collected my paper bag bursting with too many magazines, she spoke to me.
Was I getting off the bus soon? Because she’d been wanting to say something to me. It’s just she had been wondering something since I got on. Did I write that column? I told her I did. And we spoke quickly, in the manner of friends who only have a few minutes to catch up on months of gossip, and I felt a bit guilty, so I said that I’d been jotting down notes about her as we travelled.
“Not about my snoring . . .?” she said and I confessed that yes, her snoring had come into it.
It was nearly my stop. Was that a real Burberry scarf? “Yes,” smiled my new stranger-turned- acquaintance. “I am a bit of a posey Rosie.”
Her name is Una MacCafferty, and she is a music teacher who used to be an opera singer and runs a school in Derry.
I got off the bus and made sure to take a left so that I passed by the back of the bus where we both grinned and waved at each other through the window.
In other news . . . If there is someone in your life who enjoys raucous tales of creaky sea vessels and bawdy sailors, or if you are such a person yourself, you won’t find a finer example than Seaspray and Whiskey, by Norman Freeman, a novel based on this talented Irish writer’s experiences at sea