Diary of a Christchurch bus passenger

VICKIANDERSONon commuting.

I am the passenger and I ride and I ride. I stay under Metro Bus Service glass. I look through my window so bright and I see the city’s ripped backsides, I see the bright and hollowsky . . .

March 30:

Central Station, Lichfield St, 6.45pm

Headphones in, my mind elsewhere, I don’t see the young Polynesian man carrying the nearly empty bottle of vodka until he is practically sitting on me. I rip my headphones out as his thighs hit mine. The strains of a Chet Faker song spills from my headphones. ‘‘Hey lady,’’ he says. I shuffle to the left so our thighs are no longer in contact.

A bitter wind whistles through the temporary bus shelter. He begins to cry. It’s ugly crying. He hiccups and snorts. Snot dribbles down his face and he tries to wipe it away on a bare arm. Slurringly he tells me that hismumhas died. A few hundred metres away a man is in the sky, looking down on us, as he pilots a crane.

I offer a tissue and ask if he needs me to call a family member or friend to come pick him up. His bloodshot eyes scan my face. ‘‘F..k you bitch,’’ he shouts. Placing the vodka bottle beside him, he lurches to his feet and sways from side to side, mirroring the load on the crane in front of us, before sitting down again.

Smacking his hands together loudly he turns to face me, and places an arm around my shoulders. ‘‘Smack,’’ he repeats. ‘‘I killed her with the car.’’ A security guard appears and the drunk man gathers up his vodka and moves on.

‘‘It’s only Monday night,’’ the guard sighs. Another man mimes what looks to be some sort of sexual act in front of me before, at 7.30pm, my bus finally arrives. I get off the bus at the Riccarton Mall stop. At 8.20pm my final bus, the 140, arrives. I get home at 8.40pm.

A two-hour trip to get home is often the case since the changes to the timetable were introduced last December and the buses became colour-coded, like the Wiggles, into Yellow, Blue, Purple etc. Every fellow passenger I’ve spoken to in recent months has been greatly inconvenienced by these changes.

April 6:

Early evening and the sun is setting over Hagley Park

He is 12 or 13, travelling with his grandmother who doesn’t speak English. At the stop near Christchurch Hospital he helps his gran onto the bus with one hand under her elbow and places $10 down.

‘‘Whaddya want me to do with that?’’ the driver barks. ‘‘I would like a fare to Riccarton for myself and my grandmother,’’ the boy says politely and clearly. The driver sighs. ‘‘What did you say?’’ he asks. The boy repeats himself. The grandmother gestures and appears confused. The driver replies exaggeratedly slowly: ‘‘Can you speak English?’’

The boy begins to blush and shuffles his squash racquet from one hand to another. The grandmother waves her hands around and speaks in her native language to the boy, who pats her arm gently with reassurance. The boy repeats that he would like a fare for himself and his grandmother. The driver looks down the bus at us, the other two passengers onboard, and says: ‘‘I’m sorry for the hold-up everyone, this boy can’t speak English and I don’t know what he wants.’’

I call to the driver: ‘‘He told you in perfect English that he wants to get on the bus with his grandmother, and he gave you the money to do so, can’t you do your job?’’ The driver mutters but hands the boy and his grandmother their tickets. Partway through the journey there’s a driver change over. The driver tells the newcomer that he’s sorry he’s late but had trouble with ‘‘difficult foreigners’’. When I get off the bus the boy catches my eye and gives me a small, thin, smile.

May 7:

5.20pm, Riccarton Rd on the Yellow Line bus (horror, oh the horror)

All of the seats are full, people are standing in the aisle nearly to the back of the bus, but one man has greedily kept two seats to himself. A passenger taps his shoulder and indicates that he should give up this seat to a woman standing beside him. The man shrugs and does not move or offer the seat.

The rest of us, the huddled, steaming mass of humanity and smells and shopping and briefcases and small children wanting juice ‘‘right now’’ standing in the aisle, stuck in bumper-to-bumper peak hour traffic, exchange shocked glances at his rudeness.

When my headphones break, a cool 20-something bloke with piercings and a strange underwear to trouser ratio (how long will this underwear outside the pants thing last?) hands me his left earbud. On it I listen to Drake. We become Facebook friends.

It’s this sense of community among bus users that I enjoy. Generally we are not on the ‘‘loser cruiser’’ because we want to be. Mostly we are (a) too young to drive, (b) too old to drive, c) can’t afford to drive or (d) have a health problem that prevents us from driving. We are the inconvenienced ones who stand in the cold together in solidarity for hours waiting to travel badly.

That said, there are positives. It’s a relatively cheap way to travel; in the mornings the bus smells like a parfumerie of freshly showered delights; It’s great to leave traffic navigation up to someone else and sit back and observe and contemplate the city and people-watch behind glass.

May 20:

9.05am As the 140 bus pulls up to the stop, I realise I don’t have any coins. All I have is my last $20. I hand it to the driver. I apologise for not having the correct change. He looks up at me angrily. He makes a growling sound. It is a weird noise that makes me uncomfortable.

He thumps the $20 into his tin and says ‘‘this isn’t good enough’’. He growls again. I notice that he has really long yellow fingernails. A passenger seated behind the driver raises his eyebrows and smiles sympathetically. The driver growls again and dramatically produces three $5 notes and change. He throws the $5 notes towards the change receptacle but the door is open so they blow onto the floor and I have to scrabble around to pick them up before they blow away.

As he accelerates from the stop I tumble into my seat, bumping my knee on a metal bar. The man sitting in front of me smells like metallic cabbage. It makes me gag. I cover my nose with my sleeve. The shopping bag of the woman beside me spills onto my lap but she doesn’t move it. I edge closer to the window.

In the short journey to Riccarton Mall, the driver angrily rides the accelerator, at one point driving over the top of a traffic island. Whenever he brakes suddenly we all lurch forward.

Talkback radio loudly blares on the bus stereo. The soundtrack to the driver’s manic road skills is a woman telling the radio announcer that ‘‘God owns our bodies’’. Piously she recites psalm after psalm as our driver becomes more erratic.

It feels like a movie scene. A movie that would star Samuel L. Jackson. Breaking convention of some decades, I don’t say ‘‘thank you’’ to the driver at the end of the trip.

May 25:

Along, long, time ago, in a city centre that seems far, far, away from completion

In The Press and on breakfast TV, a bloke from the CCDU comments on the opening of the new $53 million bus interchange. It opens a week later than planned after ‘‘technical difficulties’’ but the occasion is described as the ‘‘delivery of a major anchor project’’. The second part of the building will not open for more than two months.

On social media bus users likened the building design to something from science fiction, saying: ‘‘Thunderbird 2 could take off from that roof.’’ Another commuter notes: ‘‘There’s no sign of roofing yet . . . half a bus stop out of 17 anchor projects?’’

When I visit the new building and ask fellow passengers for their thoughts, the most common response was the underwhelming: ‘‘At least it’s warm.’’

But, as Iggy Pop sang on The Passenger, ‘‘everything was made for you and me, so let’s take a ride and see what’s mine’’. Please have the correct change.

The man shrugs and does not offer the seat.