a boy on a bus.

This piece was written in 2008. It is a monologue, designed to be read aloud by a single performer. It's loosely set at a similar time to a previous story of mine, 'the fairytale is dead', but the subject matter is quite different.


A Boy on a Bus
A monologue



DAN is sitting on a chair. He’s wearing a hoodie and is holding a travel guide.

Dan: It smells here.

Like… lamb. Boiled lamb.

Boiled lamb and communism. This whole country smells like boiled lamb and communism. It gets right into your nostrils. Seeps into your skin. You feel…sluggish. Like you’re wading through the congealed jelly stuff you get on cooked sausages when you put them in the fridge. The air is thick with it, you sweat fat.

Beat

I thought a shower would help, no shower head, so I try the bath. The water is the same thick, like gravy. The whole place is a vegetarian’s nightmare. So here I am, this big hunk of sweaty lamb, lying in a bathtub full of thick gravy water, trying not to breathe in through my nose. And I’m trying to shake this hangover. I flew in last night. By the time I got here I’d sobered up and the memory of my last night in Madrid was hazy. I stank – even before the lamb – and every time I caught a whiff of my clothes, of the stale cigarette smoke and spilt beer, I wanted to be sick, so the bath, the gravy boat bath, was really a necessity if I was going to survive the next 24 hours.

After the cleaning, and after finding a t-shirt that didn’t smell like the apocalypse, and after dousing myself in enough generic Spanish deodorant to give myself a headspin, I decide to check out the bar, the ‘communal area’ the website said was a much loved feature of this charming home away from home. The bar turns out to be a fold-up table and two fold-up chairs, one of which is permanently occupied by a stuffed cat. For a second I consider going back to my dorm and getting high on the rest of my deodorant. But then I think – ‘No. Not today. Today, you’re going to do something’.

I have a beer to settle my stomach and, in the absence of any other English-speakers, I have a browse through one of the guide books that mum thrust into my hand back at the airport, when I was leaving Melbourne. I told her I didn’t need them, that I was just going to feel my way through the continent. I don’t need the help of some geriatric whose number one suggestion for entertainment in Madrid is a jazz bar called “Jazz Bar Madrid”. I would rely on secrets passed from one weary traveller to the next, whispered over a lager in dingy hostel bars. Except that hasn’t really happened yet.

There’s this bit at the back, “only staying for a short time? Try one of these fun-filled day trips!”

Beat

I could do that.

Beat

This is my second-to-last stop before I go home and I am determined to see something old. Engage with something old. According to this, there’s an old castle somewhere, of on top of a hill. It’s haunted, it’s only a couple of hours out of town, there’s a museum there. I need this, I need to be able to show my parents some photos from this trip. Because, I’m searching through my camera and it’s not pretty. It’s like someone pinched the fucker and took it on a Contiki tour through Europe. It’s just beer and bars and boobs and more beer, in a different bar, oh look there I am drunk in Spain, drunk in Paris, drunk in the Swiss Alps, have I even been to Switzerland? This isn’t a holiday, it’s a write-off.

“Built on a rocky outcrop in the early part of the 15th century, this once grand castle is now in disrepair. Local legend has it that it’s haunted by the ghosts of the town’s dead. But don’t let that put you off! Spend an afternoon taking in the gorgeous sights and sounds of this remote and oft forgotten gem. While rich with history and culture, don’t forget to take some time out for yourself – ladies, pick up some souvenirs from the many markets in town, and gents, you unwind in the old-style Croatian bar built out over the water.” Perfect. Two birds, one stone.

I get on the bus going to this castle, and I’m psyched. I’m not sure it’s the right bus but, I figure, how lost can I get? I’m a tourist, for god’s sake, we don’t get lost, we have experiences. The bus driver charges me 3 of whatever currency I’m using now. 3 units for an 80-year-old bus doing 150km/h. Bargain. I’ve got a little day-pack, some lunch, and my sunscreen and a hat and my iPod and a book. I don’t think I’ve ever been this resourceful in my life. Except there was one day in London where I woke– I think it was London. I woke up feeling a little worse for – No, I think it was Germany, actually, Berlin. Yep. I was a little worse for wear so I thought – no, you know what, it was Portugal, and we’d been drinking Grey Goose because when I had Maccas later that afternoon, I chucked in the toilets and I remember tasting vodka. So I don’t think I’ve ever been this resourceful, except for this time in Portugal where I woke up and was feeling a little worse for wear and went to have a bath, and there was no plug, but somehow I thought to use the lid of my jar of hair gel as a plug, and kind of suctioned it onto the drain and it just stuck there. That was pretty resourceful. Except then I vomited in the bath and I couldn’t get the lid off because it was stuck on too tight.

I sit by the window because I want to see out, I want to see what this country looks like. It looks a lot like the French countryside actually. And the Austrian countryside, and the German countryside. In an attempt to resist boredom, I stick on my headphones and flick my hoodie up … but before I know it I’ve fallen asleep.

I wake up about forty-five minutes later. I wake up because I can feel something rustling against my legs, and my first thought, before I even open my eyes, is to pull my bag close to my chest and say a small prayer. Not a prayer, as such, but something like a prayer, a sort of wish. Please, always ask nicely, please let this turn out well. When I open my eyes, expecting the worst – expecting a knife, or a twisted smile or, at the very least, a dude in a trench coat – it’s not that bad at all. I open my eyes and instead of a murderer or a pervert or a robber, its just this old guy, smiling. He’s probably about 65, Polish or something, has a heavy accent, a cleft palette and no teeth so I can’t really understand most of what he’s saying. He pulls out a little photo album and is talking at a million miles an hour and I just start nodding, and then he starts flicking through his photos. While I struggle to understand why this man I don’t know would wake me up to show me photos of other people I don’t know, he’s just rabbiting on and pointing at his pictures. He’s pointing at a picture of a house, and then of a tree, and then of a field, and a cow, and another cow, and another cow, and then of a barn, and then of that same barn on fire. He keeps flicking through the pictures and pointing and muttering something about each of them, and I keep nodding, and then he stops.

Pause, and then softer

He stops on a picture that looks a lot like most of the other pictures, just craggy countryside and broken buildings. But then I see the little black ball on the ground, the mangy little puppy dog sleeping on a rock with his little puppy eyes closed tight against the wind. The old man doesn’t say anything for a minute, just looks at the picture, and there’s silence between us.

I wait for him to speak.

He doesn’t.

His eyes are clear and bright. And then he turns the page and there’s another barn with its roof on fire.

He runs out of photos eventually. He doesn’t stop talking, though. He shows me a scar on his arm, an accident involving a goat. I think. I show him a scar on my eyebrow from when Lachlan Kibbell smacked me in the head with a Transformer when I was seven. He tells me about his daughter, she’s a vet. I tell him my sister’s a bitch. He points at my camera. I feel a little embarrassed clicking through my photos for him. He probably thinks I’m an idiot. Or an alcoholic. He grins at all the ones of me spreading my arms wide, pulling dumb faces in front of a big monument – “Dickhead in front of Eiffel Tower/Leaning Tower/Tower Bridge”. He laughs at me straddling a giant lion somewhere in Paris, and tells me a story about himself, cooking pasta on a camping oven in the Parisian metro in 1975 with a bunch of other lost souls. Yesterday’s McChicken suddenly repeats on me.

An hour later the old man gets off. We’ve been talking the whole time, and I didn’t even realise how far we’d gone. I’m almost at my stop, too. He stands up and pats me on the shoulder and insists I’m a good boy and he smiles at me once more before heading off down the aisle. I yell out to him and he comes back and I ask him if he wouldn’t mind doing me a favour.

I never get to the castle. Never get to see the museum. After my barn-loving friend leaves we head into the mountains. Windy little roads with paddocks on one side and cliff-faces on the other. We come over the top of a small rise and for a second I can see a sign, a ‘Welcome to…’ sort of sign. And then this old man runs in front of the bus. He’s being chased by a rabid dog, a mangy little thing with matted fur and grey whiskers, it chases him right in front of us. So we swerve, of course. We don’t want to hit him. Except we do hit him, and then we hit this tree. And then we go through the tree and through the metal road barrier, and the bus does this pathetic little tumble, kind of trips over the edge of the cliff and bumps its head on a rock, and then we roll. The woman in front of me dives on top of her kids, but as we roll, she kind of misses them, and they get lost amongst smoke and bags and other bodies. I’ve got my camera in my hand still, and what I’m scared of – what I’m scared¬ of, right now, is breaking it. I kind of fumble to shove it under my hoodie, but because I let go of the seat I get thrown head first into the wall, so I end up arse over head with a snapped neck. The windows all smash and there’s glass everywhere. There’s screaming, a lot of it. You can’t see for dust and smoke. The woman in front is waving her arms madly, still blindly reaching for her kids, but we’re all being tossed around like little chunks of meat, flesh ripping open, a veritable salad of bus crash victims. We keep rolling and when we finally hit the bottom, we land on a big old barn. We crash right through it’s roof and the whole bus bursts into flames.

The dog runs over to the edge of the cliff and he looks out at all this. The old man’s body is still on the side of the road, and the dog sniffs it once, twice. And then he does a little turn, wees on a patch of grass, and runs off in the direction of the hills.

When my remains and personal effects are delivered to mum and dad, it takes them a while to get to my photos. Marc’s the first one to suggest pulling the flash card out of my mangled camera and trying it on another. They flick through all the photos from the bars, with the beers and the boobs, and they have a bit of a giggle. Crazy kids and their crazy adventures. I’m sad there’s not one they can, y’know, frame. One where I’m not holding a drink or a cigarette. Dad takes the dogs for a walk. I’ve got like 600 photos or something, and my mum stays up into the night clicking through each one really slowly. Through Paris, through London, Scotland, Barcelona, Madrid. And then she gets to Croatia. To the last picture I ever took.

She looks at the photo. And then she starts laughing. Because it’s the first photo where I’m not pulling some face, where my eyes aren’t blurry, my arms aren’t pumped up about my head, I’m not posing.

It’s just … a couple of smiles.

She stops. She stops and it’s 4am. She turns the camera off, and pulls out the little flash card, this little blue chip, and she wraps it in my t-shirt, the one I was wearing when I died, and it’s all charred and dirty. She wraps it in the t-shirt, and slips it under her pillow. And then she goes to bed.