Susan catches the bus into town at ten-thirty a.m. She sits on the back seat. She looks at
the man in front's head and thinks how his fat wrinkled neck is like a large carrot
sticking out from the collar of his shirt. She adds up the numbers on her bus ticket to
see if they make twenty-one, but they don't. Maybe she shouldn't bother going to school at
all, then. Her friends will be in the yard with their arms folded on their chests,
shielding their breasts to try and make them look bigger, whilst the boys will be too busy
playing football to notice. The bus is waiting on the High Street when suddenly it begins
to rain torrentially and it sounds like someone has emptied about a million packets of
dried peas on top of the roof of the bus. 'What if it just keeps raining,' she
thinks to herself, 'and it was just like being in an aquarium except it was all the
shoppers and office-workers that were floating passed the window instead of fish?'
She's still thinking about this when the bus goes passed Caroline Lee's house where there
was a party last week. There were some German exchange students there who were very
mature; they all ended up jumping out of the bedroom window. One of them tried to get her
to kiss him on the stairs, so she kicked him. Later she was sick because she drunk too
much cider. Caroline was drunk as well; she was pretending she was married to a tall boy
in glasses, and she had to wear a polo-neck for three days afterwards to cover up the
love-bite on her neck. By now the bus is going passed the market. Outside is a man who
spends all day forcing felt-tip pens into people's hands and then trying to make them pay
for them. She used to work in the pet shop, but she got sacked for talking to boys when
she was supposed to be working. She wasn't too bothered though, she hated the smell of the
rabbits anyway. 'Maybe this bus won't stop,' she thinks, 'and I'll stay on
it until I'm old enough to go into pubs on my own. Or it could drive me to a town where
people with black hair drink Special Brew and I can make lots of money by charging fat old
men five pounds a time to look up my skirt. Oh, they'll be queuing up to take me out to
dinner...' I suppose you think she's just a silly girl with stupid ideas, but I
remember her in those days. They talk about people with a fire within and all that stuff,
well, she had that alright. It's just that no-one dared to jump into her fire; they would
have been consumed. Instead, they put her in a corner and let her heat up the room,
warming their hands and backsides in front of her, and then slagging her off around town.
No-one ever really got inside Susan, and, and, she always ended up getting off the bus at
the terminus and then walking home.