The top deck is sparsely populated. I sit behind some woman with long, shiny black hair. She pulls out her iPhone, unlocks it and begins typing. Her screen is brightly lit and she is holding her phone at face height, so it’s impossible for me not to view the following message posted by someone, presumably a friend, in a group chat:
-guys I’m failing uni rn
The woman replies immediately with:
-that’s okay I’m failing now too
-i can’t suck my way through like first year
-because they’re all WOMEN
She then taps a button on the side and the phone falls asleep in her hands, awaiting a response.
Did I read that right, I thought. Suck? I went through the implications in my head. The only way she passed first year is by performing acts on guys (Which guys? The brightest students? Lecturers?) in exchange for good marks, or completed essays, or something? And now she can’t because ‘they’re all WOMEN’, inferring that she’s not attractive, or attracted, to said women, so her first year ploy no longer works?
I looked at her hands. Her slim fingers bore protruding, clubbed fingernails and she had a silver ring on her thumb. Hang on…
I re-evaluated. Maybe this is a guy, then he’d be gay and that would explain why it’s a problem that ‘they’ are ‘WOMEN’? I don’t know. I quickly lost interest.
She, or he, now began to run these fingers through her, or his, shiny black hair, pinching the split ends and repeating the process again and again. My face is only a few inches from this, as I’m too tired to remove my backpack and sit properly with my back on the backrest. Instead, somewhat contradictorily, I summon the energy to get up and slide in the seats a row behind, so now I’m two rows behind the Sucker.
As I sit down, two Somali roadmen sit behind me having just got on.
‘Wrong bus bro, we need the 341’
‘Oh’
The top deck now smells very faintly of weed. They get off at the next stop from the back stairs, just as two Somali men in their forties climb the front stairs and sit between the Sucker and I.
The taller one, whose lips hold a toothpick loosely between them, says something in an incredulous tone to his friend in Somali, of which I could only make out the word ‘hashish’. He then half heartedly turns his head over his right shoulder as if to inspect me, but his eyes don’t get far enough and he gives up. I feel like assuring them it wasn’t me, but can’t be bothered.
Over toothpick man’s left shoulder, I can just about make out, through the reflection in the window, the Sucker’s phone screen, scrolling through pictures of burgers on Just Eat.
It’s my stop next. I glance up from the Tesco Ashbeck Mineral water bottle label I’m reading to see that the Sucker is getting up. As the bus jolts to a stop, I follow the Sucker downstairs, but don’t manage to get a look at their face as we alight into the dark.
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A Series Of Pointless Conversations 