Adventures On A Sydney Bus

The bus that takes me into the city is a very quirky bus.  It has a meandering route that traverses narrow streets built in the Victorian era. It cuts directly through the inner city badlands where you can see people drinking beer on their front porches at 9AM or brazenly dropping a bagful of garbage onto the street.

Women who get on at the badlands bus stop are all named Britney or Tiffani, sometimes Shontelle. They all wear Adidas tracksuits with gold chains and really tight ponytails. Their silver eyeshadow makes them look like drag queens. Often they have a child or two in tow, eating hot chips for breakfast. The children have names you would expect from the children of Rappers or American basketball players – Aaliyah, Amber Rae, D’Shona. They constantly open and close the windows or jump on the seats. The busdriver gives the silver-eyeshadowed mothers warnings which are ignored. The other passengers avert their eyes and tightly clutch their handbags.

The silver-eyeshadowed crew always get off at Broadway – destination K-Mart. The other passengers collectively exhale but flinch as a large group of Asian university students get on, brandishing their iPhones. The tap tap tap of their texting is like water dripping into a sink at midnight – it seems like it will never end. Their ringtones are designed for hipness – Justin Bieber, Ke$ha, a police alarm. They giggle like schoolchildren whenever their phone rings.

I am exhausted by the amount of texts they send in fifteen minutes, the number of calls they take. I cannot imagine knowing that many people who want to contact me all at once. I feel the weight of my mobile phone in my bag – a model from the Mesozoic era. I am the dorkiest girl in the class – the only one who cannot afford Converse high tops. I pray my phone doesn’t ring. The sheen of the hundred iPhones would cause it to disintegrate in my hands.

A family of Chinese tourists clutching bags that say I ♥ Sydney ask me where a street in Chinatown is. It is inevitable they should ask because I get asked for directions wherever I go. I must look like I know where I’m going. I know the street but don’t think they understand my directions of First on the left, second on the right. They want me to draw a map but there isn’t time. I see them stumble off into Haymarket like four year olds lost in a supermarket. I feel briefly responsible for their fate.

A bag lady gets on. She smells like wet doorways. She is wearing a green cardigan with holes in it. She catches me looking. Moths, she says.

She starts to sing. Camptown Races. It surprises me that she can carry a tune. She taps her feet at the doo dah, doo dah. People change seats or stand at the back of the bus.

A little boy claps when she has finished. I was a choir girl, she says.

I liked your song, I say.

I get off at Martin Place and watch as the bus pulls out from the kerb. The bag lady has her face pressed right up to the window, waving at me like I am a long lost friend.

Another narrow escape.

Riding the buses in Sydney is quite the adventure.

Night Lights

I have always liked lights at night.

City lights. Street lights. Headlights. Shop signs.

Soft yellow edged with orange red.

My sister slept with a nightlight until she was fifteen. I don’t like the dark, she said.

As was often the case with my sister and me I was the opposite.

I liked the dark.

I would walk into the garden at night and just look. My mother thought I was touched. You know – a little funny in the head.

In truth I was looking at Mrs. Hutchinson’s lamp that you could see at night from her living room window. It had velvet stripes on the shade so that the light was cast in vertical blocks. It lit up the rhododendron bushes and part of the back steps. I would pretend I was an actor in the theatre moving in and out of scene.

At night in bed I would sleep with my curtains only partly drawn so I could see the car headlights that pulled in and out of the street play shadow puppets on the old oak tree beside my window. Sometimes I could see starlight or moonlight or the hazy gleam from the streetlight as it was split by rain or wind.

Lying in a darkened room and catching sight of infrequent splashes of light makes you realise that the city never sleeps, that someone, somewhere is always doing something. There are so many stories in the process of being told and paths being followed.

My dream house would be right on the bay with windows 12 feet high. I would put my bed far back against the wall so that if I couldn’t sleep I would watch the play of lights on the water, cataloguing patterns and colours.

Night would come and the lights would come, filling up the windows like a jar full of sweets.

And comfort would come. And a sense of belonging. And eventually, as the light pooled at my feet, slumber.

The Scent Of Water

This story is dedicated to my dearest friend, Miss M, who recently pulled me out of the shadows…..

Dark days the colour of rainy roads and worn out shoes filled Aletha’s head. Too many nights were filled with staring at the swirls of light on the ceiling cast by cars and streetlights. Too many mornings were filled with the impossible like washing her hair or choking down breakfast. She longed for sunlight. To feel it, to actually see it, but the sky from her perspective was sombre.

She grew afraid when she saw the moon at daylight, hanging like an apple, peeled and whole. She hadn’t thought it could happen – that the moon could still be there when morning struck. She panicked, thinking the night would never leave her, that it was tracking her, that she was a target. She opened all the windows in the house, pinning back the curtains with alligator clips, flinging wide every door, inviting in the clear, warm light of the sun.

She was alone. She knew it. It was all her own doing. Knowing that didn’t make it hurt any less. She had done it for the right reasons – to free those she loved from floors covered in dust, from the thick silence – but sometimes doing the right thing felt so wrong.

Weeks ago Aletha had cleaned out the house – throwing away clothes that had sat in the closet for two years or more, old books, mascara that was flaking in the tube – thinking that less clutter would mean more light, more air. She didn’t realise till afterwards that she had thrown away one of her most prized possessions – the box of rocks she had gathered from rivers and the seabed. Good rocks, lucky rocks, possibly even magic rocks. She hadn’t meant to, but they were gone.

She thought about the rocks all the time – the colours of Mother Earth – who was not just earth but also water and light. The river rocks were smooth from all the running water brushing over them. The sea rocks were pocked from sand and waves. Even when dry the rocks smelled of water, a clean scent like breath on glass, unblemished and pure.

Aletha missed the scent, the pleasure obtained from opening the box and breathing in the story of every rock. How did it feel to be such an intrinsic part of the earth? How did it feel to be the earth? It was a power like no other.

It was the earth that stopped her from running forever. Away from every single thing she knew. She liked to stand in the garden and feel the earth soaking up the sun, feel herself gaining a kind of equilibrium as the wind and light swirled around her feet. The earth offered steady steps and a path to somewhere. She just had to be brave enough to walk.

The rocks sang to her in dreams, urging her to find them. Deep in Aletha’s heart she knew the rocks belonged to her just as she belonged to them. And without them she had no chance of catching the scent of water on the breeze.

It was hard to leave the house. There, she’d said it. She wondered if that meant she was beyond help. She’d heard of people being locked away for less.

I could use somebody, she thought. Right about now. Someone I know. Someone I knew before my mind went on a tangent it can’t return from. Somebody to say you can do this.

To think of days gone by is sometimes the hardest thing in the world. To think of who you used to be is worse. A war waged against yourself seems unwinnable most of the time. Sometimes becoming who you need to be takes all your strength over and over again until you are a shell staggering through the streets; not even tortoiseshell, not even mother of pearl. You are a shell made of nothing.

The phone rang. Aletha wanted it to go to voicemail but forced herself to answer it. It was a voice from the past. Carrying her backwards, her thoughts changing course, clearing away the vines that lined the tracks she had to walk.

It was a kindness unforetold. Unexpected. Unalterable in its goodness.

Aletha opened the door. The colours in the garden were vivid. Resplendent, she muttered to herself. It was one of her favourite words – joy, beauty and celebration all at the same time.

She walked, holding her breath, counting the steps, feeling the blood flow in her tired limbs out of the gate, down the street and across the road to the park.

It was low tide. Motes of sunlight had been dropped on the water, gleaming, pale amber streaks that swam on the surface, poised like transparent sea creatures before diving, low and deep below the rocks.

Aletha filled her pockets with the stones of the earth that would sustain her if she let them. Browns, grays, reds, blacks, whites. Watermarked, sun-smeared, besmirched with sand and reeds. Her pockets grew heavy, out of shape, but she didn’t care, she could smell the water.

Across the estuary she could see her friend, the one who had called her, standing under a fig tree, her face framed by leaves and branches like cupped hands. In her darker days Aletha believed her friend was visible only at a distance, like a faraway image in a photograph, but now she knew it was possible to see her up close.

Aletha jumped, a child again, wide and high across the estuary, splashing the edges of her coat with briny water. Her friend laughed, remembering how it used to be, glad for this moment that seemed the same. Together they walked, parading in the sunlight, the rocks and stones in Aletha’s pockets casting the scent of water up into the air. And when Aletha looked up to the sky, the moon was gone.

*Image by PandyP at Deviant Art.