Rat Bites2

Some people thing that a fontanel fuses over time into a skull. I wasn’t so sure. Vodka does that, beats me up from the inside, makes the bones in my skull scream so that I can hear the tympanic beat of monkey screeching in my ear. It’s like tinnitus, with the tectonic plates of my skull unweaving, coming apart like fingers in a steeple of prayer, only with teeth grinding attitude, and a few casual punches to the eye sockets. Walking sometimes helps, but not very often. I tried to walk quicker over the Kingston Bridge, but the frost had teeth, and my shoes weren’t at their festive best. The 46 bus home is always a bit of a fuck-up. It is always jam-packed with people trying to get home from work. The driver isn’t for stopping because there is no more room, but there is always a bag- person. That’s a kind of short-hand. Sometimes men, more often women, with the expensive bag made out of kid- leather, or the newspaper, or the carefully-folded so-so jacket taking up a seat, whilst people stand in the aisles and avoid looking at the empty, but occupied seat. I always barrel in. And it’s always the same thing. It doesn’t matter if it’s a man or a woman. The seat stealer always has that condescending way of looking up at you and saying ‘Pardon.’ ‘Pardon,’ and blinking rapidly, as if there is a language barrier and I don’t really understand, but I don’t magically disappear. Pardon or no Pardon I’ll sit or shit on their lap, but I’m getting that seat.

School kids shouldn’t really bother me. There’s that old line: I was young myself once. But let’s face it; they are a pain. The posh kids from private schools, like Hyndland Academy with their green and gold blazers, with some kind of Latin motto on it that says ‘goin' fuck yourself dafties,’ are somehow always the worst. They are always aping about, swinging from poles, or each other, larking about, showing off, seeing who can be the loudest, or laugh the longest.

Bus drivers just look in his rear-view mirrors at the traffic. Some of them are arseholes, speeding by some poor old woman at the bus stop, or moaning for the sake of moaning about somebody’s pass, or taking too long, or any number of things they can be unpleasant and petty about. But most of them are ok. You get on the bus and what happens after that doesn’t really concern them. I’m much the same. I just want to get home.

I usually have a Metro in my jacket pocket. I keep it to read coming home. Sometimes I look up from the Sport section, and the poorer sorts of shops outside the city-centre peddling their wares in the street, wink at me, and the bus is in Yoker. Sometimes I’ve read the paper, flipped it over to start again and the 46 bus is moving at the speed of a hobbled camel train and hasn’t even reached Knightswood Cross. I look out the window and wonder if I’d be quicker walking and I start calculating. From the high flats to Dalmuir is about two miles. I could walk it in about twenty-five minutes. But then if the bus passed me when I was walking and I’d paid for a ticket that would be a waste. I hate waste. That’s what I tell myself anyway.

There’s quite a big immigrant community in the high-flats. The bus was moving that slowly, one of the young coloured guys walked past the 46 and got on at the next stop. I didn’t really pay him much attention. I was sitting near the back of the bus. The three school girls sitting diagonally, in their green and gold uniforms, two seats in front of mine obviously did.

‘I wonder if he’s got a big cock.’

I tried not to make it obvious I was looking. You just don’t look at girls of twelve or thirteen, but one girl, in particular, was megaphoning her desire to be noticed. She had long black hair. In an older woman I’d have thought hair extensions, but in one so young, when three feet of hair can be loped off and grow again the next day that seemed unlikely. It was swept back from her face in a natural wave by about three tins of hair spray. She wore no make-up, although her eye-lashes looked unnaturally long, they were probably her own. She had a way of holding her head like a question mark. Her skin, like her companions, was smooth butter-milk. There was no whispered shame in what she said. It was an aisle announcement for the attention of seven or eight rows of seats in front of her and the three or four behind. She shook her hair, and her head moved too, as she watched the young guy shuffling forward at the bus-stop to get on the 46 bus.

One of the other girls shrieked. ‘It will probably not be a big enough cock for me to take. I can take twelve inches.’

She emphasised the word ‘cock’ so that there could be no equivocation about what she was talking about. Her blonde hair slashed across her forehead in a similar no nonsense way. The girl sitting tight-kneed into the seat next to her could have been her sister, except her face was pudgy with puppy-fat and not yet able to settle into the same cold- lipped hardness of expression.

The bus jerked forward and the young man moved up the aisle, his head moving from right to left, as he searched for a seat. The girls cackled like radio static. The blonde nudged her companion and nodded her head to indicate that the young man was coming in their direction. Cardboard hair rolled her shoulders, smaned and when she swung round to face him, she dampened down the material of her school shirt to show the outline of her breasts and cupped them, pushing them upwards, as if they were 44DD, and to the shrieks of her friends squeezed her body up against the window leaving the empty seat open like a dare.

The young man was clean-shaved, thin, Asian looking, and his expression did not change. He slipped into the only available seat and sat, like a book that had been opened and the page creased, with a straight back, his legs square and looked straight ahead.

‘What do you think I’m wearing under my skirt?’ Cardboard hair was playing at the femme-fatale her shoulders drooping and dropping down and wiggling and waggling as if she had sequins and a boa around her neck, squeezing her tiny frame up against the young man’s thigh and ever- press grey trouser

‘Oh. My. God.’ The blonde girl’s pudgy sister separated each word with a shriek and canned- laughter.

‘Panties, or no panties?’ Cardboard hair pulled her skirt up an inch and then another. ‘Panties, or no panties?’ Up and down she pulled her skirt.

‘Panties would be a waste on you. You’ve never got your legs shut long enough,’ squealed the blonde girl.

The young man sat, looking neither right nor left as if he was sitting in alone in a long dark tunnel.

‘Shaved pussy or not?’ Cardboard hair’s voice had a shrill tone. She did not like being ignored and pulled her skirt up to her waist and left it bunched there for a few seconds, but seemed much longer. ‘What would you like to do to that?’

‘Excuse me.’ The young man spoke politely, apologetically, with a slight head nod towards the girls, as he got up to get off at my stop

‘He’s probably gay anyway,’ the blonde girl cried.

‘Pakis aren’t allowed to be gay.’ The pudgy girl elbowed her companion.

I followed the young man as he got off and looked back at the girls. The driver had his hand on the wheel ready to spin the bus out and into the flow of traffic. ‘You should do something about them.’

The driver shook his head at me. ‘What am ah meant to dae?’

I walked back toward The Dropp Inn for a pint, for a curer. The young man stood patiently waiting at the bus stop for the next bus.