Tales From A Bus by jwilson136 (finding audrey TXT) 📕

so ever in his life and the idea that he may soon have something to tell the wife when he got home was getting him just a little wound up. Perhaps he could blow up his own involvement in the whole thing so that he’d get maybe a few extra minutes entertainment over the breakfast table. Sad bastard.
So, as waiting for any of the rest of them to speak up was proving to be a pointless I told my story.

“Yeah, I’ve got a tale.” I said. They all turned there attention to me. Their faces combined looking like a mixture between a kid waiting for Christmas right up to a guy waiting to see his first naked woman. I now had the floor and their undivided attention so I could now go on.
“This all happened maybe three years ago, give or take a couple of months. I don’t normally take the bus. I drive where ever I want to go but this particular time I’d been forced into leaving the car at the pub we’d been at before we headed into town. I’ve never had a problem with having a couple of drinks and then driving, like it’s not as if I don’t know when I too pissed to drive. I’ve seen people who could hardly stand and yet still insisting on driving on to a club. But not me, as I’ve said I know when I’ve had enough and the idea that some wanker in Government can say ‘Yvonnne Kennedy you can not drive after X units of drink ’ is ridiculous. I’m a grown woman, I make million pound decisions every day, people are hired and fired at my whim. I’m well able to decide when I’ve had enough to drink. But anyway, I digress.
This particular time I was out with some guy I’d been seeing. A total waster if memory serves me correct but he drove a Porsche so that was that. The night in question we’d met up in some wine bar and had more than a couple of drinks. Around closing time, (as per fucking usual), he suggests that we go on out to a night-club. Apparently a friend of his was “Well in at Lilies” and that was the proposed venue. As if this was supposed to impress me or something? I mean for fuck sake, it’s not as if I hadn’t been a regular at that dive for the three years previous. But as I’ve said he drove a Porsche and was OK in bed so that made my mind up for me more than his ‘well in’ friend. (If he’d been ‘well hung’ rather than ‘well in’ well that would have been a different matter entirely wouldn’t it ?) Well I digress again.
The two of us staggered out to the car park, he staggered far more than I did truth be told and I think now that I even recalling him having a bit of a fall. When I reach my car he says “There’s no way I can let you drive Yvonne, your far too drunk.” The fucking cheek of him and boy did I let him know that I wasn’t pleased with his attitude. I’m not one of these weak womanly type women and I’ve never shied away from saying what I think in my life. I had no intention of starting that particular moment, with that particular wanker. But anyway as I’ve said before he drove a Porsche and was good in bed and had a bit of money to back him up and I was feeling like a large dose of sexual satisfaction that night so I allowed him to beg me into getting a taxi. The night-club was as Lilies always was and always will be. Posers walking around just hoping that you’ll notice them. I spent my time in the members bar drinking myself to oblivion. I don’t know what time we left at but it was late and certainly past the last legal hour of serving drink. Lillies, while lacking in many aspects did always deliver in the after hours drinking department. We went back to his yuppie apartment and enjoyed a good bout of sex.
The next morning when I awoke I found a love note on the pillow beside me along with a rose. The both of which I promptly dumped and prepared to make my way home. I rang the local cab company to book a taxi but was greeted by an answering machine that duly informed me that due to some government wanker (actually I know that there’ll wankers but this guy took the biscuit) issuing three-hundred new taxi plates all the Dublin taxi men had taken it upon themselves to call a one day ‘lighting strike’. I was asked at the end of the recording if I wanted to leave a message of support? After the ‘beep’ I left a message all right but I can tell you know it wasn’t one of support. And I made a mental note to spend some time in the future to work on a plan to eliminate all taxi-men or politicians or both.
I was near enough to the city centre to warrant a walk and from there I knew that I would be able to pick up a bus easily enough to get to my abandoned car just near the airport. Needless to say that I never again saw that particular wanker again. Forcing me into leaving my car behind, reducing me to public transport and not to mention that cheap rose and love note far outweighed the Porsche, his money and sexual organ. And if the truth is to be told the sex part wasn’t really all that impressive and the Porsche was at the very least two years old.
Twenty minutes later I found myself looking at a long queue of people waiting for the bus that I just had to be on. I was left pondering on my queuing scheme when the bus pulled up and in and all semblance of order was thrown out the window. People pushed and pulled from every corner and a mini-riot nearly broke out. I was thrown back to the side of the queue (I say ‘queue’ in the loosest possible sense) as students with those stupid bus cards elbowed me to the side. But I am built of fairly solid stuff and using those muscles I spent long hours in the gym building and toning up I managed to somehow pull myself onto the bus before that doors swung shut with a ‘hiss’ on the last of those waiting outside, those not strong enough to make it. As is always the way with nature the strong survive and the weak suffer. The weak ones walked away to wait for the next bus. I spotted an empty seat down near the back and after quickly making up my mind not to risk checking upstairs moved rapidly towards it.
It ended up that I was seated next to a vastly overweight man who took up to more than his fair share of the seat and I had to settle on looking at the cars going past in the little space of the window that his vast bulk did not cover up. It was an uncomfortably warm day and while it would have been nice to have the window open the very prospect of striking up a conversation with the fat man beside me to get him to open the window made my already upset stomach turn somersaults. So for once in my life I held my tongue and tried to breath to the side so as not to inhale too much of the smell of sweat that was rolling off my fat friend in frequent and large waves. The noise of the engine sent constant vibration up through the floor that made my seat rock slowly back and forward. I was feeling unwell at best and my night’s drinking was beginning to come back to haunt me but with the fucking’ taxis on strike I had little option but to carry on.
I hadn’t really looked around the bus at my fellow passengers, having already smelt ‘fat-bastard’ beside me I figured that if he was an example of what the average was than it just wasn’t worth the risk. But when a young baby started to cry (I say cry but I really mean scream) I turned my head to look around.
On the seat to my left sat a middle aged woman, who was carrying quite a bit extra weight on her person, also was also carrying a young child on her lap. The kid had all the features of his mother, fat arms, fat body and a fat face. He was screaming and struggling to break free of his mother’s tight grip. For all she tried to calm him he seemed to cry all the louder. I cursed to myself at the prospect of spending the next half hour trapped on this bus, with a smelly fat bastard to my right, a screaming kid to the my left, the constant vibration of the engine all around me and the temperature continuing to rise. I cursed the Gods again and left it at that.
The bus moved well for the first ten minutes and I raised my hopes into thinking that maybe I just might reach my destination ahead of the schedule that I’d planned out in my mind. Then we hit traffic and the bus might as well of stopped.
The bus crawled and the temperature rose. The bus was now becoming uncomfortably hot and the kid still cried. I was perhaps fifteen minutes into my trip when I noticed the man in the long trench coat that was sitting opposite the woman.
It struck me as strange that he chose to wear a long coat out on a day as warm as it was but what was perhaps even stranger was that he had not yet taken the coat off. And as I’ve said already it was hot on the bus and this guy was sweating. For some reason (more than likely to pass the time and nothing more) I watched the man in the trench coat for awhile. He looked very plain. Maybe a little under average height but he was not skinny or anything. If fact he had wide shoulders but he was sitting in a way that they looked smaller than they were. A little thin on top regarding hair but what hair he did have was dark in colour and very neatly cut. His face was non-exceptional bar his nose that was perhaps a little crooked, more than likely from a break that had not set straight. It was difficult to guess his exact age but I put him at around forty to forty-five. What did strike me as strange about the man was that he seemed to be having trouble breathing.
Every so often he’d reach his hand into his jacket and close his eyes and suck in air quickly through his teeth, the way you do when you stub you toe and don’t what to roar out a curse. Not because you’ve a problem with bad language but rather because that if you curse than it’s like admitting that you’ve been careless enough to inflict pain on yourself. He was spending his time between looking behind him to staring at the screaming kid with a look of complete hatred on his face. I guessed that he had a headache and a case of indigestion and was not in the mood for a brat of a child screaming two foot from where he sat.
The bus crawled on into the traffic averaging I’d guess at best two and a third miles an hour. It was so slow, and hot (not