It was snowing
It was snowing hard in the city. I was on my way home with some friends. We found there were no trains. The buses were full. I saw a bus parked in the road. Get in, I shouted and hopped into the driver’s cab. I drove the way I usually walked home, however, and found myself following a footpath between terrace house gardens, where I walked almost every day. I tried to back the bus out, but we were backing onto a heap of shovelled snow. The bus was rocking. I felt confident I could get us out of this, but the voice of my husband shouted, ‘No you’re better off going down the footpath now that you’ve started!’
I disagreed with his voice, and began backing further over the piled snow before heading between a bollard and a wall, partly over the footpath. The bus halted in the snow but I drove on. It tipped forward and fell onto its front. I thought how marvellous tipped-over buses look, and stepped out of the cab to see. Indeed it looked like a baby rollercoaster.
‘Shit’ said my friends. We decided to leave it and say nothing. We walked on. We came to a cold castle where the snow was on the inside and tunnels plummeted down into dark earth. Yet there was an over-riding force in there which organised us. We kept together because of the cold, held each other through fear that one of us would be segregated from our group. There were people walking, like us, as if to the warmth of a grave. But then a bus came. I wondered if anyone had witnessed my crash.
It was the husband of one of my friends. This friend wore a basque-style body stocking and stockings. In fact she was wearing all stockings. She looked beautiful. We got on board and the bus took us to a warm room, a hotel where there was one bed. We climbed in and found there was a woman friend, older than me, in the bed. We were entering her space, caressing her, kissing her, playing with her body, making her come. She was embarrassed but she succumbed to the pleasure. So did we. We made love to each other, as well as to the older woman. I knew her, and found it quite lovely to know her more intimately like this. I only wanted to please her and make her feel acceptance.
Stocking friend’s husband came and joined us. I felt ill at ease. I had crossed a boundary I did not want to cross. I had become a prostitute for a bus ride. I did not enjoy him. It was like making love to a pig. After he had taken his pleasure we went to the bus. Stockings’s husband would not let us on. We had to walk. I protested. Stockings shouted, ‘I thought we were going to get down to some fucking, and then maybe something a bit harder!’ She was leaning with her arms behind her onto a dirty wall, her voluptuous body offered up to her husband. I hadn’t realised she was so hardcore.
‘No,’ he said, ‘You’re walking.’
So here I was, a whore who didn’t get a ride. I went to get my belongings from the bus. MY husband was in there. He was listening to Stockings’s husband telling us where we all had to walk to next, our next appointment, next bed. He knew what we were doing. Stockings’s husband saw him scowling and addressed him roughly, ‘So what’s your life like then, eh?’ He gestured to one of my friends to kiss him. She did. He enjoyed it. I felt glad he had accepted my new job, though I didn’t want to picture me and my friends making love to him. Perhaps he would be like a pig too. I smiled, as he joined me on my walk with my friends. The grass was high, no path, a rough terrain. He took me aside, ‘What the fuck are you doing? This is going to help us progress.’ I felt angry with myself. I saw the bus with my stockinged friend’s husband and his clients in it, and threw my necklace at it. It hit the window with the clank of a bike chain but didn’t even dent it.
F. 50