Taking the bus to Bradford

The bus terminal in Newmarket is tiny, and on a day that had turned grey, gusty and unexpectedly cold, nobody seemed very happy.

A man who looked to be in his late 60’s, but was probably younger, sat with a woman. His face was leathery, dark and worn, but he boasted a full head of hair that had likely not changed since 1958. The woman beside him was wearing a jean jacket and was completely bent over in her seat, her colourless hair spilling down past her knees.  Gently, quietly, this man rubbed her back. I imagined some sort of sickness or grief descending on their lives, and now on a crappy day they had to travel somewhere they did not want to be, a place where lives change forever and then quietly begin to fall apart.

Outside by the line-up for the bus sat a clutch of about a half-dozen teens. Too young to really know what it meant, they were dressed for trouble. Posturing, they were dead-eyed gangsters peeling free of school. Listless and bored, they were looking for something to do, for something to change. A girl, probably about 17, had tattoos directly under her chin that led all the way down her throat. She was pale and coughing, like her three-year old son who careened nearby, and she was excitedly telling her friends about a place she knew in Toronto.

“It’s fucking awesome. On Queen Street. You can get a tattoo on one side of the place and then go get completely wasted on the other side. It’s all over Facebook!”

The crew nodded limply. They were deciding what to do and the only idea that was emerging from their collective cloud of thought was to travel to a nearby field to get high. One boy, who was smarter than he looked, refused, saying it was going to be too cold, that the wind was brutal there. He looked to me for support, and in his face I saw his youth and doomed intelligence, and I thought of the first one killed landing on the beach during some military invasion.

As the bus approached the town of Bradford the man who had earlier been attending the woman in the Newmarket terminal, got up to leave. He wanted off at the Bradford Inn, a narrow strip of possibility in front of which sat a woman smoking on a curb, her winter thighs pale and exposed beneath her skirt. To the side, a blue dumpster overflowed with garbage and a black cat floated along a railing. As the man got off the bus, he shouted back at the woman he was with, “Give me a call when you get there!” The woman he was leaving was utterly hammered. She gurgled to herself, her near-words rising like bubbles around her slack face. She waved a sleepy, drugged hand over herself in response to the man, who by that time had hit the street and was striding toward the other woman, who was now rising and flicking her cigarette butt away.