FROM THE TOP DECK OF THE 33

I’m really tired after yesterday’s travelling. After work last night, I found myself in town, looking for somewhere to eat. Sammy had taken her sister to the spa. I was hitting a night on the town, on my own.

In the end I got dumped in the corner of a burger bar that was depressingly American. Don’t misunderstand me; I mean that I was alone listening to loud country music about pickup trucks and ‘the man upstairs’, on a cold, wet, November night in England. In a party of plaid-wearing cowboys, laughing under their Stetsons and guzzling a few Buds with their burgers, that would have been a mighty fine atmosphere. But it wasn’t, so it wasn’t. It was the Englishness of it that was depressing, not the Americanness.

Ah well. Never mind. I caught the bus back, still feeling barbecue sauce and cheese on my belly. The 33 rattled and rumbled past bright-coloured shops and glistening puddles. I watched from the top deck.

I used to catch the 33 when I was a kid. It was the best way back from town. The route has not changed, even though the buses have. In fact, I even had a curious desire to get off by the park, run up the road, and burst in through the front door of our old house. Muscle memory, older than old, had kicked in, and I suddenly had to resist the childhood feeling, and stay on the bus.

Most people, I reasoned up there, leave their hometown and put roots down somewhere else. I have not done that. And so sometimes it grabs me. Look, there’s what’s left of my old school - a car park and a sixth-form block, now dwarfed by unfamiliar buildings! Look! That’s where I used to go to cub scouts - the warm hall and the flaking paint. And there! I had piano lessons there for a while. I guess I was seeing things from a different angle. Time has changed everything.

The burger place had been so bleak. A waitress had scraped a chair across the wooden floor and had started stringing Christmas decorations over the beams. I could tell that she, like me, would rather have been somewhere, perhaps anywhere else. 

An automated voice sang along the top deck. I pushed the button and heard it ping. Then I wobbled my way down the stairs as the bus pulled round the corner, before finally throwing my work bag over both shoulders and leaving the bus for the cold, starlit night air.

I probably don’t know what home is, deep down. We’ve only got memories of a reflection, a sort of vague longing for something deep and warm and wonderful. I pushed two cold hands into my pockets and looked up at the twinkling stars over my town. They get it.