From a Night Bus 1

But it's back on another bus for me, another nightbus, where I seem to spend my life...
There comes a point on a south-bound dusk bus where one can no longer even sleep, but has to gaze, stupefied, out of the window. All significant loves, hopes, terrors, epiphanies, have happened to me on lonely buses, commuter buses, bridge-crossing buses...
Into the city of melancholy crags, the acropolis enshadowed already, over the steel bridge with the dark water below, and what if the suspension breaks and the bus plummets far below into the sea...
This being a congested commuter link, we get in late into the Metropolis bus station, night it seems is falling.
I'm sitting down near the front. I've struck up a conversation with the girl in front, who I vaguely know. As we get to the bus-station she turns around, asking if I'll be staying the night, smiling politely. A small, plain, blonde girl, common and with a coarse, insipid face, tending to ingratiate. Large anaemic blue eyes. I'm taciturn and awkward- "No, I'll be going back over".
For I have to make two trips. Tedious. So I can't spend long in the city, it's already getting dark. No place to stay anyway as night deepens, except the sister's, who has a warm, welcoming flat in a peripheral suburb.
But at the bus station as I roam over the floor of the huge entrance foyer the blonde girl sidles up alongside me and forces her warm little hand into mine, keeping pace and starting up a bright, breezy chat. Sounds of departure, shuffling feet, dust on pillars and abandoned doorways, buzzing electric light... Shadows.
She wants to go record shopping. But it's closing time. We walk down the long dark street that leads eastwards out of the city, partially gentrified now but once grim and rough, and still containing endless Asian foodstores and halal shops, Greek butchers, Chinese laundries, shops where Turkish cassettes are sold, windows festooned with Bollywood stars in green and red, near tattoo parlours and the smell of Indian meals.
This street is exposed to winds, and on the other side is a closing-down video store, a discreet sex shop, a glass-fronted beauty parlour. A city clock, a traffic island, a dingy basement newsagent where an Asian man stands behind a counter, a picture of the Kaaba pinned up behind him. This street is long and dark. Worries about bus times, I look at the glowing digits on my fat-faced watch. 17:45.
The girl has put up the hood of her sweatshirt but still grasps my hand, leading me onwards determinedly. She halts at an esoteric music store, even though it's closing: The steel shutter is already half-pulled down. She peeps under it and exchanges a few words with the man cleaning up behind the counter, a portly bearded man in white, he smiles slyly, says "Salaam".