On weekdays I take the bus to work. Each day the same people get on and sit in their usual places, and I feel a shared sense of something, as though the journey and the inertia that attends it raise us to a common level. In this place, we may not be friends, but we are not strangers, either; we are travelling together, and because of this it is only right we feel equal measures of disinterest, sympathy, and even envy toward one another.

I look at the girl who always stands up at the front, with her black cloak and pale blue scarf; I remember the first day she mounted the steps with the wrong change in her hand, and the driver’s weary admonition. Next day she had the wrong change again, and the same scarf, and she stood in the same place as before, and the driver said much as he had said before. In fact she never has the right change – or else this is some private joke between her and the driver. The wrong change, but always the same blue scarf, and always up there, at the front. And it isn’t about money either, if that’s what you’re thinking; once she even trotted out a ten pound note, though in her unfamiliar hands it looked more like something from a children’s tea set.

“No, you’re not a child,” I think: “But what are you?” Too tall, too hollow-breasted, too open, too shy, with shoulders and cheeks made up of the bones left over when you take something else away. For no reason – for some reason that has nothing to do with anything - I keep wanting to catch her eye, and then trying not to catch her eye, and then wondering about her home, until, looking at her, I seem to see not her but the older person who chose that cloak and tied that scarf, and I sense a general, disembodied ambition holding her at the head of the bus, so that she must always be the first to ascend and descend, whether she wants to or not. This is not the sort of town to wear a scarf like that; she must be making headway, I think idly, though headway against what? What exactly is it that opposes such a scarf, except that it either hopes for or promises too much? And maybe she knows this, too; maybe she knows she is only remarkable when she assumes obligations she fails to meet; maybe she even stands apart to acknowledge as much.

Another girl starts to mount the bus with her, and the two of them stand up together at the front. The girl with the scarf chews her nails as she glances vacantly down the bus; she turns with a smile to her companion, and says something in a low voice. The other girl digs her with an elbow; now she is looking studiedly out the window, as if she had forgotten we were there. Then, without warning, the girl with the scarf doubles up in silent laughter. Abruptly I realise that the two of them are saying the filthiest things about us, the coarsest they can imagine, and that this is the real reason they stand at the head of the bus each day. Feeling the way their gazes condemn us to our seats, as though we had no existence outside of them, half of me wants to say: “What right have you to be the difference between us, and make us know it so powerlessly?” And half of me reflects again: “No bus, or not the bus you expect, passes along that broken-backed alley you will call your lives. It will neither run to time, nor drop you where you choose.” Then, as my anger subsides, I realise that this also is a lie. Nothing has been determined, and even if it has, nothing has been finally determined, and the only way to affirm this is not to begin but to continue – in other words, to say it the same way all the rest of us are already saying it, by sitting still.