I have a story to tell about a crazy woman, who is not me. This makes a pleasant change, because normally I am the nutter that I'm talking about. But not this time! This time I'm the sane one in the narrative.
I was getting the bus to work this morning, as I always do. The bus was jam-packed and I was listening to my mp3 player* (not too loud) to drown out the sounds of other people's music and their snuffling and coughing. (I hate travelling by bus from October to April - it's like Russian Roulette with the bugs, viruses and diseases that everyone spews around them.)
After a while I became aware that the girl with long blonde plaited pig-tails sitting in front of me was, in fact, a sixty-year old woman, with dyed hair. "Odd," I thought. "She's obviously desperately clinging to her youth. Or maybe she's like the woman with the big purple hat in the poem." She was wearing a walkman and a song she liked must have started playing because she started to dance in her seat. At first I thought that she had some sort of bladder control issues; she was bouncing up and down in her seat, bobbing her head and shoulder shimmying from left to right and back again. Then the humming began.
At this point I took my own earphones out and I watched and listened in utter amazement. My mouth hung open in soundless shock. The poor unfortunate, whom she had chosen to sit beside, was trying to cram his well-built frame into the corner of the seat and occupy as little space as possible. She only took advantage of the wider dance-floor and actually started to gyrate a little. I made eye-contact with the guy and then it was nearly all over. He looked so terrified and pathetic that I nearly started to laugh out loud. I had to look away. To be honest, it really wasn't funny at all.
Two minutes later, he'd obviously had enough and made good his escape. There were no other free seats on the bus but he got up anyway and went downstairs. (He only got off the bus about twenty minutes later.) Some other poor sucker that had been standing downstairs leapt at the chance of a seat and came upstairs to take the vacant seat. He didn't stop to wonder. He should have.
In the meantime, crazy-plait-dancing-humming-lady had spread herself and her belongings along the two seats. There was an incredibly bad smell emanating from her; like when you light a cigarette, smoke half of it, put it out and place it back in the pack - that old, stale and dying stink of half-smoked cigarettes and full ashtrays.
Sucker-man came upstairs and approached the "vacant" seat. Crazy-plait-dancing-humming-lady ignored him. Sucker-man said "Sorry..." (which is Irish for "Would you move your stuff, you mad old bat?"). Crazy-plait-dancing-humming-lady ignored him. Sucker-man made to sit down anyway. Crazy-plait-dancing-humming-lady smelled. Sucker-man smelt the crazy-plait-dancing-humming-lady smell. He went back downstairs.
I spent the rest of the journey with my earphones firmly in, breathing through my mouth, every breath filtered through my double wrapped woollen scarf. Crazy-plait-dancing-humming-lady finally got off the bus in town. There was another twenty minutes left till my stop. I could smell her for every second. Uggghhhhh!
* A special thank-you to Conor, who fixed my mp3 player for me the other night, after I'd broken it by shutting a door on it - I'm sooooo clever, you know
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
1 comment:
Sinead, Sinead, Sinead
you keep missing out on the important details. The stuff everyone is really asking about. The kind of little thing that means the difference between that Pulitzer prize winning Blog and something, well that might appear on my one.
Just what music were you listening to on your MP3 player? And what kind of MP3 player is it (we want tech specs here)? And more importantly, what colour is it? Does it match you hair? What kind of shoes were you wearing? Did they match the MP3 player?
And what about those Redsox?
Post a Comment