Bus crash

But it's back to Glasgow for me. Busses are my preferred mode of travel, much more so than trains, and for this reason; you travel in proximity with more interesting people. Now some neds traipse on and sit in front of me, drawling wideboys on their way to a party somewhere, I see the shorn backs of their necks, their baseball caps.
Endless bus travel, listening to the dramas of neds or the stories of old ladies, in fact, no choice but to listen. You can feign sleep and envisage a stage, on which the conversations around you are enacted, a grand narrative of the pettiness of their lives. The bus is the most democratic mode of transport, and its passage is like the passage of life. But a peculiarity left over from childhood: Whenever I cross a bridge in a bus I always imagine the bridge collapsing and the bus plummeting into the water. What if the driver suffers a heart attack or a stroke or a fit or is drunk and passes out at the wheel. What if you suddenly veer from the motorway and over the crash barrier down a steep grass verge, strewn with daisies or heather or rocky crags, and the neds in front stop babbling panic for a moment to hear me say one word as I'm tossed and jolted about: "Shit", and your stomach hits your ribs like in a rollercoaster as you plummet down the slope to a road running parallel to the river and then carry on straight into the deep water of the midnight river.
Like the quiet scenic Tay or the dark Clyde. Too many disaster movies, linked to fears and childhood bus migrations. What happens to the bus underwater? Kick the windows or skylight as hard as you can, maybe one survivor will make it to the surface.
Thereafter try n get help. You run onto the nearby road and try to flag down a car, but it's late and the few cars passing ignore you, a drenched, weeping, bruised maniac. One car, full of young guys, slows to a stop but as you approach pulls away and then stops again. This is repeated a few times until it finally accelerates away, its bright yellow tail-lights disappearing over the scrubby back-road, the sound of arrogant, cruel young laughter, strangely mirthless and hard, just audible over the booming music.
So you travel on into the city, getting closer to its commercial centre. It's Friday night and you can see activity outside clubs, people milling drunkenly around. The cops in their luminescent yellow jackets are out in force, there to intervene in drunken conflicts, hostilities between doormen and impulsive punters, maybe even arbitrate the rivalries of screeching girls, spilling out into the vacant, echoing wilderness of the post-club streets and plazas.
I've seen girls rolling about on the floor, on cold concrete floors, girls with hot, flushed faces wretching up the contents of their stomachs, all dignity lost, empty hedonism, binge-drinking, another concern for the Daily Mail writers and conservative politicians, in their obsessive search for moral outrage.
You think of approaching the cops but they all seem uninterested, louche, insolent, swaggering around, armed with their yellow jackets and huge walkie-talkies worn like badges of honour. They stand and crack jokes at streetcorners for all the world like common schoolboys. This is a busy time for them, and they are the kings of this godless nocturnal terrain, seen coldly on CCTV footage. A mere glance at them reveals their ruthless, opportunistic cynicism.
In a far-off lamp-lit street you see a female cop push a drunk in a sweaty shirt against a wall. A wide, wind-swept, empty street. She's searching him or handcuffing him, forcing his hands behind him, but in a grim, official way, preoccupied and businesslike. And, dripping wet, scared and scarred, looking for help, you think: She looks like a girl I know.

No Doubt Part 2

I find in myself a flame,
A flame of persistent light,
That steadily burns in your name,
And never is quenched outright;
And I do not know, and I do not care,
Whether sacred or profane
Is the source of this passion rare,
Whose flickerings never wane.
But that it will burn on endlessly,
And that it will never go out,
In this world and the world to come,
Of that I have no doubt.