Chapter 1
His coat rustles as he ungracefully drops himself into the seat next to me, knocking my arm and disrupting the flow of the text I'm sending. He smells musty and is breathing heavily and irregularly. I give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he had to hurry for the bus.
After five years of catching the bus to work you may think I have become immune to that old clichéd irritation of fellow commuters music being fully audible despite them listening through headphones. But no, I imagine the person in front being violently bludgeoned in new and original ways, with my phone, a lady's handbag – my favourite is rolling up the Metro and causing obscene amounts of gore, shocking the rest of the bus into silence and proclaiming as I sit back in my seat having dealt with the minor irritation that one would be surprised what one could do with a newspaper, the use of the word 'one' making my unhinged violence all the more shocking due to the care I put into the structuring of my sentences even at such a violent moment as that. The truth is however, the man in front has a neck thicker than my thigh and even if he was a weed, I still wouldn't say anything because I dislike confrontation. The most extreme show of displeasure I may engage in would probably be to make eye contact with another irritated commuter and raise my eyebrows a bit as if to say 'fucking people on the bus with their headphones, if only we could have the monastic silence on the way to work that we crave.' They would respond with a flicker of their eyebrow which would say: 'I totally agree, can you believe these wankers? Me and you should go out on a date some time and talk all night about the irritating idiosyncrasies of public transport and probably end the night by having sex. Do you want my number? We don't have to bother with the talking actually. We should just have sex.'
The musty man is still breathing heavily and he coughs into the atmosphere which leads me to hold my breath long enough for me to still be able to breathe out in a controlled and unnoticeable rhythm. I can sense him next to me turning his head, but I can't tell in which direction and I dare not turn my head to see if he is staring at me as this would lead to eye contact with our faces horrendously close together. Whichever way he turned his head, he hasn't turned it back yet. I can feel his eyes touching my cheek. Above the sound of the bus engine and the prick in fronts music I hear a tinny sound of – what is that? – it sounds like somebody having an orgasm. I give in and turn my head, and there he is, a big meaty face, not grinning, but he does have excited eyes. His hair is sticking up and there are bags around his eyes. By impulse I look down to where I can hear a woman moaning. He is holding a phone angled towards me and on the phone is a video of two men having sex with a woman, one working the front the other the back. I look back up at his face and see the cracks of a grin forming in the corner of his crusty lips. He dips his head searching for eye contact with me, which for a moment I unwillingly give him. He has involved me. He has made me, a stranger, who he will probably never meet again, complicit in fulfilling a sexual need of his. He rings the bell, I look away and focus intently on that text message I was sending and don't look up when he leaves.
I'm sat next to Jason telling him about my bus journey. I work at a call centre, cold calling people trying to sell them things they don't need. The room we're in is one enormous office spanning the length of the building, row upon rows of long desks ergonomically placed to fit as many people in one room as possible, all equipped with a computer and a phone, the occasional one decorated with pictures of children or celebrities.
'I saw him stood at the bus stop from my window and I knew from then there was something weird about him. So he sits next to me and he stinks of piss and is breathing down my neck, all the while I'm on the cusp of going nuts at the guy in front for having his shitty RnB music that nobody wants to hear, blaring out of his headphones.' I don't know why I speak like this to Jason. 'So I'm trying to send this text to a girl I'm trying to get in bed and I start to hear this sound, like a woman having sex. I turn my head and look at this guy and he winks at me and inclines his head towards his phone, so I look down and he's showing me a video of these two blokes spit-roasting this girl.' Jason shakes his head disbelievingly at the right moment, he is a good listener. 'So I look back up at him and give him a look like – what the fuck are you doing? – and he just goes red and rings the bell for the next stop.'
Jason slaps the desk with pleasure and laughs. 'You made his day then.'
'What do you mean?'
'I bet he's at home now wanking over the look on your face when he saw you watching his porn.'
'Why would he do that?'
'If it was about porn for him, he would have stayed at home and watched it on his computer. It wasn't the porn that excited him, it was that he shared it with you. You were the object of his fantasy.'
I want to tell Jason he's wrong, but I can't think of an intelligent rebuttal. 'Fuck off,' I say, and call my next customer.