On Tour Buses and Damaged Seats


So back in 1989, whilst in Standard Six (Grade 8 now, I believe) and travelling to a neighbouring school for an athletics meeting, I had to stand for the duration of the trip as all the seats had already been taken.
Standing in the aisle, I had one hand on those handle jobbies that hang from the ceiling, and bracing myself against the turns and the stops and the starts with the other hand on the back of the seat next to me.
Most of these buses were not in a great condition. Sure, they ran well enough and I don’t recall ever having a breakdown en route to a sporting event, but the interior was (mostly) not well maintained. They weren’t dirty, per se, but the plastic of the seats were often cracked or broken, and most of the wooden seat backs were scratched into as years of travelling pupils added their story to the cornucopia of graffiti already etched into them. Food wrappers were kicked aside, tin cans rattled around as the bus took a turn, even the windows were not immune to Magic Marker Art. Sometimes there was a gem to read, but for the most part it was the usual “Suzie is a bitch” or “For a good time call…” or smiling penis pictures.
So on this particular trip, probably in the first half of my high school career, I was messing with just such a maintenance problem. While standing with my hand on the back of the seat, I was thinking all manner of absentminded thoughts while playing with a piece of foam that was sticking out of the damaged plastic. I would squeeze it gently, roll it a little between my fingers, just enjoying the texture and the firm-yet-yielding nature of the foam. I recall it being very cathartic. I was losing myself in the sights and sounds of the trip, almost dreamy eyed and unfocused as I would sometimes press my whole hand into the warmth of the foam, or sometimes just press with one finger, tracing little circles or drawing little shapes.
As we neared the end of our trip and it was announced, I started to wake from my lethargy. One piece of the foam was a little less yielding and for some reason I decided to just pull it out of the back of the seat. I looked down at the foam I had been playing with and found a smooth, human hand instead.
A little frozen now, I turned my glance to the wide-eyed, paralysed face of a girl, sitting in the chair next to me and whose hand had been on the back of the seat in front of her.
The same hand that I had been playing with, caressing and massaging, for twenty minutes.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On burning boxes

(note to the reader: I don’t know what this is. It may be a chapter of something bigger or just left alone as an experiment in massively overdoing descriptive language. Who knows? I’m seldom in control of these sorts of things). The key was right where he said it would be. The lock clicked, door swinging silently inwards on well-maintained and freshly oiled hinges. I stepped into the narrow hallway, ivory-pine tinted wooden flooring, a small and old-fashioned telephone table to the right of the door. I smiled, running my hand over the surface of the table, remembering similar ones from other-nether worlds, rotary-dial telephone still plugged into the wall. A blue notepad and pencil lay neatly next to the telephone. I lifted it and turned the first few pages. Nothing but slight indents: a firm handwriting. Beneath the table a closed telephone book, on a wooden slatted shelf. I knelt down and ran my hand over the spine. Cracked, well used, some dog-eared pages, perhaps turned in as b
Read more

On Cooking

Sometime in the region of 1995 or so, give or take a year, myself and my friend Hoover decided to get a place together. It wasn't much. Neither were our salaries, on the odd occasion that we actually managed to get our acts together long enough to earn one. Within a week of moving in, and now getting hungry and increasingly unwilling to keep hitting our folks up for food, we knew that we had to attempt cooking. We knew whiskey. We didn't know cooking. This was going to be a whole new kettle of fish. In retrospect, the first meal should have set the scene, should have given us an indication that cooking was not for us and was best avoided. We'd gone out to do a little shopping, and included in that shopping was a pack of twenty-four uncooked mini-pies. You know the kind: you get your chicken, your mince, your spinach and feta, and whatever else. We also bought a baking tray, because this sounded smart and oh-so cosmopolitan, and a tin of Spray and Cook. We'd both see
Read more

On the outskirts of Vereeniging

When I was in high school, I would spend some of my school holidays working at a dog kennels and cattery in Vereeniging. Only 60kms from my home in Johannesburg, the dog kennels were in the rural outskirts of the city. Nothing much grew in that part of Vereeniging. This was not the agricultural centre of the city. Any greenery or plant life was the sole reserve of the residence or business itself, fed mostly from boreholes. No rivers ran close enough for irrigation purposes. The dog kennels were owned and run by Aunty Jean Aucamp, an old family friend. She had taken her retirement savings and invested in this business. Sometimes, I used to think, she bought it as a place to keep her cats and whatever money came along as a result was a bonus. She was one of very few people I have met that I can truly call a saint. The house itself was very old. Creaky wooden floors, huge rooms, ornate cornicing and carved ceilings. Wrought iron light fixtures festooned most rooms, and the kitchen
Read more