After escaping the clinic where I wheezed through a pre-employment medical (push-ups, sit-ups and planks, oh my!), I hop on the number 471 bus at the ditch opposite the BP truck stop on Little Boundary Road. I’m glad to leave behind the smell of tar-seal and chicken salt from the scrunched up chip packets in the dry overgrown grass.
The bus tears away from the stop before the door shuts (perhaps the driver has somewhere more important to be) and to avoid tumbling I dump myself in the first available seat.
Across the aisle from me sits a diminutive Caucasian woman buffed with too much bronzer, gazing out the window next to her. She shines ghastly in the sunlight and the bones in her face graze her skin as if she’s a newborn animal. She jerks her head and stares at me from underneath brows caked with black makeup as if she mashed pastels on her face. Her dry lips crack apart and I turn away and slip on my headphones to deflect her hex.
Bic Runga sings her version of ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ in my ear and I’m living for it – partly because I appreciate the arrangement but mostly because as a New Zealander trudging through the bog of Australian bureaucracy, I’ve morphed into a patriot.
As if I’d just announced my allegiance to the entire bus, the driver clips the island in the centre of the roundabout and I drop my phone. I lean down to pick it up and the woman mutters something. No sudden movements. Blood pulsing in my head, I lift my arm slowly as if winching my phone up from the sea floor. She mutters again and two round women, squeezed into their seats a couple of rows in front of her, clamping their plastic shopping bags to their bodies, stop yakking about their cholesterol levels and glare at her. She trails off, her lip quivering and the women pick at their pilly polar fleeces, sighing heavily before throwing themselves back into their vociferous blabbering.
Someone sniggers. Behind me, slumped over two seats near the back of the bus is a young Indian guy in a matching two-piece tracksuit. His slicked back hair shines like seal skin. He rakes his hand through it and blows me a kiss; I can almost smell the hair gel from my seat.
The bronze woman shakes her head and starts firing shots at her husband.
‘I know you’ve been busy entertaining my clone,’ she spits.
Unless her husband is the window she’s squashed her face against, he’s not on the bus. Guess he’s at home showing the clone a good time.
One of the round women rolls her eyes and the other one laughs; she sounds like a kazoo.
The bronze woman peels her face off the window – miraculously without leaving an imprint of it behind – and goes silent. She glowers at the other women, shaking as if enraged, her body sinking into the seat as if that rage is burning a hole through it. The eyes, unblinking and watery say it all: memories of the injustices done to her are swirling around her brain. Perhaps ‘clone’ is a pejorative term for her sister, or a close friend – not that these three dicks on the bus care who it is.
The bus shudders to a halt. We’ve pulled into the bus interchange outside the train station. These dicks have even less reason to care now.
‘Hello Sunshine,’ one of the round women blurts out, delivering the play-on-words with the pizazz of a high school drama teacher. Both women shuffle off the bus to the rustle of their shopping bags and waddle away, scuffing the concrete of the carpark with their rubber sandals.
Outside, I shield my eyes from the winter sun radiating off the cracked savannah of the empty carpark. Something brushes past me and I get a whiff of antiperspirant and hair gel. The young Indian guy struts off across the carpark towards the station, accompanied by the fricative swish of his polyester tracksuit.
After waiting in vain for him to catch fire, I search for the bronze woman. She’s behind me, schlepping towards the line of shops at the edge of the carpark, bowing under the weight of her bulging backpack. Hopefully it’s full of the rocks she’s going to chuck through the windows of her house when she catches her husband in the act. I’d offer to help but all I have is Bic Runga and she’ll break this woman’s heart all over again. The bronze woman is teetering like a tower of cards and the round women, stopping to peer into shop windows, are in her orbit again and my gut twists. Honestly, can she win once today? I notice the gleaming pair of pristine sports shoes on her feet. Probably new. Good for her, she deserves something nice. And then I realise I hate her husband too.