Stranger on a Bus

Thomas fought his way up the harbour steps and was blown across the green to the small black door.

I had stopped playing Solitaire and talking to the Samaritans long enough to answer the bell.

I was lonely then.

One night, full of pints, playing the Manic Street Preachers so loud the speaker crashed off the wall, I dialled the freephone number that appealed to me as I idly flicked through the phone book which passed for our amusement then.

Bored, lonely, depressed, give us a call.

No better Cailin, I thought and picked up the grey eircom phone.

The  man who answered was from Wah –ther ford and I made him laugh, a lot. I accused him of drinking large bottles of cider off the shelf, pint glass with ice, of eating  red lead on a blah, and of  calling  people Montawks. 

 A number of times he had to stop to get his breath.  

I played down the enormity of coming to terms with the self.  Nothing intensifies ones innermost  feelings of angst and self pity quite like  a giant  desolate mock Tudor house  in the depths of winter, in an insular village that slags mental townies - and so  I wandered the windy cliffs  like a tortured extra from Wuthering Heights, who has not heard the director shout  that’s a wrap.  I was not as comfortable with Michelle then as I have learned to become.

Then, I made her do handstands and backflips and play to the gallery, so that even a cry for help became stand up.  

The Deise man was intrigued. 

I heard the tell tale puff of an inhaler once or twice and he begged me to call again as I hung up.

 Maybe I will says  I.

 Go on girl, ah go on, says he.

I should have known he was hooked when HE started calling me.

Night, noon and morning, I would barely get the An Oige bit out before he would say, Well, girl.

What will your bosses say when they get the phone bill says I one night as he told me his life story. 

I was absentmindedly beating my own high score at Solitaire on an old white  gateway computer as big as a wardrobe, that had only 2 functions, while also watching the trailer for the midweek movie on mute. 

 He asked me again what I looked like and I told him I looked like a movie star.  

Do you know Angeline Ball  – says I - (It was the 90’s) and he sounded delirious. 

Well, I’m nothing like her - I’m  a bit more like Danny de Vito. 

He thought I was joking.

The bell rang at the desk and I escaped.

Thomas was wearing a faded blue lumberjack shirt and jeans and had a small bag at his feet. He looked out at me through a cloud of tangled grey hair, ravaged.  

“Yo, you have a plaish for dish night” he asked.

I told him that yes, indeed, I had a plaish, as many as he liked, and watched as he signed in, his nicotine stained  fingers, his shaking hand as he passed me his membership card. 

One of my favourite things to do is watch people , and this is what I told a man who excused himself at dinner one night . When 15 minutes had elapsed I called tentatively up the hall, then followed the light of the open bathroom door. 

He was injecting a blood filled syringe into his foot.   

We stared at each other and I closed the door quietly behind me.  

In the morning he cycled away to Santiago di Compostella with a guitar on his back.

Thomas picked the first bed inside the male dormitory and unlike every other person in the world ever, did not lay out his wet towels and manky boots on the other bunk, but curled up in his clothes, clutching his bag and lay watching the men around him, feeling his way into a new life. At some point in the night he got up to smoke outside and I found him there in the morning, asleep with his head curled into his arms, on a picnic table, amid the hundreds of silver bikes.

Between answering calls from lovelorn Samaritans and getting the house ready for a tour of hysterical  Italian teenagers,  I did not have much time to ponder Thomas that day. 

I was wearing a marigold plucking a hair ball that could have been used in the premiership out of a shower stall. 

My cleaner was on the drink again, and fighting with her boyfriend. One night, in a temper at her supposed infidelities, he hurled a brick through MY bedroom window, as if by paying her I was both enabling and complicit in her behaviour, and I awoke in a shower of glass and curses. He liked to strip himself of all his  clothing when he was hungover, as he said they were strangling him  - and so perpetually fried  pork chops wearing  only giant  boxers - while I stared at his backfat and  hairy shoulders with  genuine curiosity coupled with mild disgust.

When reception opened that evening Thomas was back.

“Yo, you have a plaish for dish night?”

I was in two minds.

Although I inhabit a strange nether world, out at the edges where the lines blur, where I am neither fish nor fowl, and where I judge not, lest I be judged, I did not want a certifiable lunatic to take up residence on a permanent basis.

I explained it was a tourist hostel, that there was a mens shelter in town, that this was not a doss house.

 He looked vague.

 The only Dutch I know is ashta bleef so I just let him sign in again, and tried to tell the 2 coach loads of hormonal  girls to please desist with flushing the same toilet repeatedly  as the cistern was dripping down the walls onto the till.

On the third night when he rocked up and said “Yo, you have a plaish for  dish  night?” I realised it was futile and that the Universe was presenting me with this man again and again. The first thing I did was stop charging him, the second was hand him a sweeping brush. The third was pantomime the instructions to remove the blue lumberjack shirt to wash it in the name of all that was good  and holy . 

I handed him every t-shirt and jumper that was ever left crucified stiff on the clothes line as the ship sailed for France.

You could make soup on this I told him and he stared blankly back at me in his Nirvana sweatshirt. 

He smoked from the minute his baby blues opened, till they closed again at some juncture during the night briefly. He walked the halls and silent rooms, quietly observing the comings and goings, the hordes of tourists, the taxi with the boys from town looking for a session, the diesel engine idling loudly across the early morning green. He watched me fix the boiler and light the fire, drag driftwood up the cliff, the dogs dancing behind me, our damp footprints being erased by the ever changing  sea. 

He became my shadow.

I would fling open the living room door and scream as I nearly brained him.

Christ on a crutch, I would shout. I nearly had your eye out.  Stop standing there like a creeping Jesus, you’ve the heart crossways in me.

Meanwhile, back on the ranch, the Samaritan was holding forth at length about life, the universe and everything. I was gaining a reputation as a party girl, a hardcore chick, and the only wiseass in the village. I drank with bearded bikers and buskers, hairy arsed hippies, barefoot and legless. 

Thomas was my witness behind the door.

 He blended and moulded into the fabric of the building, his faded blue shirt mingling with the summer sky over the ball alley, where the locals terrorised the Spanish students, lashing the ball repeatedly into the courtyard, staring at them as they barbecued, heckling each other for the shift.

I built a wall without a screed of permission and Thomas watched as the Council Engineer paced up and down  scratching his head.

You may take it down says he.

YOU may take it down, says I. I hardly know how it went up.

It is still there.

I spent the summer juggling his bed, telling the women to move him to such a place, or such a place, as I tried to jigsaw the tours of  earnest  hill walkers who looked like carbon copies of Baden-Powell, Thin Lizzy Tribute bands, Ozzies, Kiwis, Yanks and an alcoholic bus driver named  Herbie  - who would spend half the night clicking around the kitchen on his tipped shoes, the flouresecent light buzzing overhead, staring at his face in the small windows and  finally locating his glasses on top of his head, boiling the kettle and forgetting, pretending to be sober, and asking me for the hundredth time to set the alarm on his phone for the 7.15 for Cork, which he was driving. He  left gingerly every morning, his coat pressed perfectly, the tiniest tinge of trembling to his gait. 

The only words Thomas had spoken to me in 7 months were yo, you haf a plaish for dish night, and so I almost collapsed when he knocked the reception hatch one evening as I was counting the cash.

“Yo, tomorrow I go to Kill Army”

Wha?  You’re joining the army?

(Now, I am thinking he is a deserter from conscription in Holland, or freaked out from the Falklands)

NO – I go to KILL – army.

Oh, Killarney, I said.

Yesh says he.

I was lower than a snakes belly. 

With him gone there would only be a pack of hair brained dogs to witness as I ran amok, and even one of them had moved up the road to a farm. A skittish collie, Zubie  did not come home after a beach walk, I thought she had BOUGHT the farm, not moved into one. The farmer’s wife came to tell me she was great with the sheep so I left her in her rural idyll. 

With a heavy heart I booted up the old Gateway to book him a bed in the hostel there. 

 John assured me he would be treated like a Prince.

 Handle him aisy, he’s had it tough, I said as I put down the phone.  

  I caught the bus to buy coffee cake in Kelly’s bakery and 2 big pouches of Golden Virginia in Louis Finnegans. I used a  newfangled contraption called a MOBILE  - about the size of a peat  briquette -  and only marginally more useful  - to tell the women to come for tay.

 Almost as much as he loved smoking, Thomas loved good coffee and cake, and we had a party in his honour. Because he was mostly mute, I thought up back stories for him.

1.       He had become addicted to the demon weed while watching the ladies in the windows and was sacked as the Dutch Minister for Tourism.

2.       He had a midlife crisis early and never got over the pointlessness of the whole endeavour, thinking it’s only life after all, and we won’t get out alive.

3.       He had a breakdown and complete nervous collapse after his depressed wife drove a VW camper van off a pier with his 2 small children shouting Vati Vati until the bubbles ceased.

He left early on Herbies’ bus.

I stood at my bedroom window, the muslin curtain in my hand only half pulled and watched the solitary figure walk diagonally across the green , the small pack on his back, the faded blue shirt, and in a moment of synchronicity you could not script, the naked man in the bed behind me leaned over and flicked the radio and his lighter simultaneously and the voice of Joan Osbourne filled the room like cigarette smoke.

What if God was one of us,

Just a slob like one of us,

Just a stranger on the bus,

Tryin’ to make his way home.

Wassup with you NOW eh?  Says the man in the bed as I leaned against the glass.

I was too busy checking people out and in to be too traumatised that morning, the seasick passengers from the Vomit Comet lying around in the courtyard  on their luggage, begging to be allowed to get into beds,   beds that were not only not yet  made, but still warm. In the afternoon, I was on the bus again, heading to town to get visa receipts.  As we passed Culletons of Kilrane, I saw the blue lumberjack shirt, the small bag on the picnic table, the cloud of smoke and my mouth made a perfect O of surprise as my eyes widened.

He didn’t see me.

-Well, your man is only lying off outside the pub in the village says I to the incredulous women when I got back.

At 7pm the small bell tinkled and I opened the door and saw him standing by the desk.

-Yo, you haf a plaish for dish night he asked without a trace of irony or humour.

In his mind Thomas HAD been to Killarney. 

It wasn’t his fault that it was a small village 3 minutes up the road instead of a bustling County filled with Quiet men, horse and traps and  big Americans in checked trousers drinking glasses of stout in Dirty Nellies.

If he was disappointed he didn’t show it, and he certainly didn’t talk about it.

 I met the Samaritan for a drink in the Hotel one Winters night.  Packo and the lads were weak with laughing and clung to each other in the back bar,  he tried  hard to keep the smirk off his face as he asked me what would I have. The Samaritan wore a Mullet,  a gold crucifix, a sleeper in one ear, and  a Waterford Jersey on his blind date. What finished the beautiful romance before it  even started though was not any or all of the above, it was the bunch of keys on his hip.

In the years that I ran that hostel many thousands of people from all over the planet presented at the little black door, Christmas and Easter, day and  night, yet it is a quiet Dutch man and the memory of his presence, his silence, and his being that has stayed with me still. 

He taught me more than he could ever know. 

MDM Dec 8th 2013