Thursday 28 January 2010

The Bottle

Perfume boxes towering inside the shop. One on top of another. Two tone turquoise gold and blue-silver. Metalic sheen in the textured fold of individual boxes. Delicately coursing skywards, spread wide and seperated out at the base where length-wise other boxes straddle them and as the placement continues, further and further they become taller and narrower. The final two or three of them stand uppermost nearly
at the top end of the window- singular.

Past the window there's a counter behind of which are rows and rows of these coloured sheen surfaces. Panels that stretch for some distance then give way to other panels. The Purples, the greens, turquise and reds. Even some pinks that blink on-off between their colour and another. There's an orange section at the far corner deeply engrained with brown inscription on each compartmentalised block, lying head to head.

A man takes down a box, places it on the counter and with the other hand lifts up the lid. He slips out the glass bottle, holds up the pale liquid above his head to the window, then swivels and brings it down very lightly into the hand of the woman standing on the other side. He goes round to join her. She takes the bottle in her hand, presses her finger down on the white spray button so that the fine mesh of particles reach across the revealed vein of her extended wrist. She brings the wrist up to her neck, turns her head slightly to reveal brown hair that precludes her face, and smells.

The man stands back, composed and still. His lips never move. He does not so much watch the woman as trace the vapour as if listening to its widening exposure. When at last the woman hands back the bottle to the man, before he puts it back into it's box he does something. He sprays it infront and around of his face several times. His arms are fleshy and full- white with a propensity of dark hair just below the rolled up shirt sleeves. The woman is half turned away when he does this but her head adjusts moments before the bottle is put back into that box. The lid flap is tucked under. The man now has his hand lightly on the top of the box as if the box and not the counter supported him. He is talking to the woman. With both hands he now lifts the box up infront of his chest placing it carefully up there, in that vacuum that was first left when he took the box down from the shelf. The woman watches. It happens over some time.

Over to the other side of the shop and all the way through the back of the shop there are rows and rows of bottles up upon the shelves, boxes of cigarettes below. Sweets and confectionary extend from a rack out front. To one side there is another rack extending from the floor with a selection of salted crisps. The man behind the counter is swaddled in his merchandise. Customers; hard men over from the betting shop or younger men with some money buying in bulk, come over in ones and twos to buy the merchandise.
To make a bit of extra cash the shop-keeper leases out a counter that he doesn't have to use and the two arching windows.

The other window is taken up with a trader who sells small digital devices; watches, clocks, mobiles, batteries, computer gadjects, that kind of stuff. He prefers to work outside directly in front of the window which has been adapted, the elaborate bay glass window flattended to provide him with a small protected enclave off from the main street. The window that he now occupies is the twin to the other with the perfume merchandise. The doorway is an indentation that runs between the two.

Wednesday 27 January 2010

Schedule

There is a van. It is parked outside of a building, right in the middle of that building at it's centre. The building extends both ways just behind the van as if growing out of that white van, bothways. It has unravelled into what it has become, a wide squat square building several floors high made out of red brick with square window-frames and balconies.   It runs the entire length of the pond in front of it. It has been there for some time. Maybe sixty years. It arrived after the war. After the bombing. Before the van ever got there.

The van is parked outside the doorway and every time I go by on the bus there it stands. It is hardly a van anymore. It is all fixed up and not going anywhere. Wires extend out of the windows and the back end and have made their way or been directed into the broken wire enforced windows of the twin doors that are always closed at the top of the white and peeling steps. That is the entrance to the building. No one goes in.

Inside the van I can usually see the head of a man at the wheel. He just sits there. He is not doing anything. Then I realise that no, that is wrong. He is doing something, though it is hard to tell from the bus because the building is set far back, past the drained pond in the middle of the common. He is watching television from a screen that has been hooked up above on an upturned wooden crate directly infront of the closed doors.
I expect the power is coming from the van which must be switched on and running on low energy. It is enough for the flickering picture which can not always be seen in the rain or dappled sunlight, the foliage of large fully mature trees arching over the double-decker buses, or the lingering falling of leaves later in the year. There is also the hubub of people getting on, moving through, getting off. The conversations and inconveniences of that journey on that day. Horns. Wheels. A siren blasting- deafening- that causes heads to swing around towards the road. A road that can be a death trap if you do not have your wits about you.

It is uncertain how many times I have passed that building before noticing that the man who barely moves his head is watching T.V. There is a bottle of  pink fizzy drink on another crate sometimes and some other bits and pieces that I cannot make out because they are always changing.

Even at night the building is dark. Apart from the T.V flickering and a single bulb always on, attached above the entrance. Windows are punched out. Blue board covers some of the doors. Ripped curtains fly in the wind escaping the holes of the lost window frames. The building is condemmed. Nobody knows when something is going to happen.

The building next to it is used for religious prayer. A van pulls up. A man gets out. He opens the back of the van and takes out a two litre plastic container of milk. He goes towards the building carrying the milk, soft curls to either side of his shaved and coupled head on a large frame.  He used to collect the kids down at the Special School and was always there ferrying them back and forth. He's a gentle priest.

Doors

I am carrying a rolled up blue mattress under my arm. It is tied up with a belt. When the belt is exactly half-way along the lengthwise of the mattress I can use the belt as a handle and hook my fingers under the rim of it, the smooth leather on the outside, the rougher leather on the inside where I pull it away from its contact with the blue material. The mattress for a while is perfectly balanced, wavering and tipping in the breeze but never falling so completely into one end or the other so as to pull into gravity. The baggage is a rolled up version of itself, the inner and outer ranging between the first roll and the last tuck caught and secured by the pull of the belt. It is a suitcase to be navigated along the narrow lane. Past the prison walls and housing clusters designed to detract from the stark fact of that gate that only opens and locks. Traffic is on the road. Well that is nothing new. I wait for the pockets of space between each engine blast. It's in the pockets that I nearly reel over no longer enfolded in the buffering of sound and fume. The bundle tilts haphazardly. I dare to go. I dare the traffic. In the slithers of vacancy, reeling from momentum, I stop/start with the bundle under my arm like moving up a hill and falling down again between the vehichles.

At the door, I open it, go inside have a look around. Leaflets scattered on the counter a bit of a mess.
The thud of base and rattle of snares comes up the narrow staircase or is it through the walls? It seeps through the space. The office door is closed. No one leaves their desk. Well one person does cross the corridor that I am going down but they seem not to notice or maybe they are not bothered. Am I an intruder or a guest? I can't tell. I don't feel like either. I am running dangerously close to the stair-well. To that sound of drum and base. I could easily be pulled down the stairs but hesitate and veer into the coloured mass beyond the open door to the left. It is startling and arresting. It is the studio. There are kings and queens on the walls made up of tiny blots of colour that establish themselves and are the reason for each addititive in an extreme hue far from their range. Far from their place of origin. This proximity of difference collected within the confines of king and queen creates a reckless order. I look up into the bare bones of this desanctified castle or is it a church?. Cold walls. Soft plaster. I leave. Go into the cafe,  pass someone on the way through who nods and passes beyond the door into the office. I am left alone. There is a piano by the side. I open it. There is so much delay between the hitting of a note and the sound that finally rises up or does not, that it is hard to draw a conclusion about cause and affect. What act has made what thing to occur. There are tables and chairs everywhere and more pictures on the wall. I place my mattress on a table lengthwise its ends potruding off either side. I go into the heart of the room.  There are pictures of children with large faces painted by children. There are these spiral maps too like snail shells that are portioned off into little captioned squares that get smaller and smaller the more into the centre you go.

I go over to the counter. Used cups line the surface. There is a small transparent glass display area. The lights are shining on two Kit-Kats, four Mini Twix bars and two Flap-Jacks. There are some small chocolate cup cakes in a seperate white dish. There's  a coffee flask which has perculated coffee in its round bowl by the basin past the counter. It's quarter full. Two coffee mugs are by its side. I look at the coffee, look back into the room, walk around the wall display in between the assorted seating and tables. Stop. Look around. Face towards the office door. Stop. Move towards the table where my blue mattress is. Veer around. Walk back over to the counter. Stop. Look at the counter displays. Half-turn back out. Walk into the middle of the cafe. Stop. Turn back towards the counter. Look at the transparent glass bowl of coffee by the basin. Walk through the small gap between the  outside counter and the back of the wall towards the coffee. Select a mug from the wash-stand by the side of the basin. Pour a measured quarter cup of this light brown almost transluceint liquid. Move back around to the front of the counter. Look for milk on the counter. Do not find milk. Walk back over to a table and sit down facing the window with my back to the office door. Put my hands around the cup. Drink.

Then I do something else. I get up and walk back over to the counter, I put my hand around to the back of the counter and into the display area pull out one single Mini Twix. I enfold it into the palm of my hand, feel the celophane wraper snug against my centre-palm and I walk back over to the table where my coffee is.  Half way though drinking my coffee and eating my twix I hear the door to the office opening. As the door opens I stand up gradually and look into the spiral drawing over my head. The little figures in the compartments of the spiral are standing up, sitting down, moving to and fro. Then for the next few squares nothing much seems to happen and the box is empty or just has a simple grid of lots of dots and lines.
But maye I am wrong. Maybe something is happening here but I just can`t read it. Other figures soon emerge. Then drift back through into the dots and lines. As I look from picture to picture I see that they are all done in this way, some in elaborate colour, some in black and white. Simple and complex yet all done within the grid of these ever descending squares. Squares that spiral into the centre. It must have been the project on that day.

Footsteps end. Silence. A silence that extends into the space. Remaining. Footsteps lessening.
A door opens and closes.

Monday 25 January 2010

The road

The heavily varnished wooden table that I am seated at is reflecting the overhead lighting back at my face.
I am by the window, inches from the street. But the door rarely opens. To begin with I am the only one there.  Of course there are the men behind the counters. The waiters. Because I have placed my order at the counter all I need to do is wait. I begin to examine the rubber plant  in front of me. I`m tired not in a morose way that sometimes does come over me but in the ligaments through which my body is bit by bit pieced together or undone. It is altogether comprehenisve right now. That is why I am tired. Because the only way to make it so is to work it up in the use of these ligaments- to press them into substance somehow in every turn and against that which I fall, slump down, bounce back up, re-emerge. Isn't it exhausting for everyone? Of course it is though I never ask. But we all know it, the passers-by against the window-pane. It is cold outside. They hustle by with flesh backs covered in garments, pushing carriages, carrying things. Slow, and measured. Un-stopping.

I see an interuption of light as something presses across the inside of a glass window up across on the other side of the road. It is way up high above the shop windows in the small residential spaces up above where the unsigned tops of the buildings have not changed for a century as the traffic roars down below. Roars and stops, roars and stops at the junction of the lights that pre-selects and sorts the traffic into bundles that move on every so often. Red and green, the spread of the city.

I see the woman. Actually I do not see anyone at first. Something presses and is gone, presses and is gone, removing and letting back in light as it does so in this dabbing motion. It is a cloth that is doing the dabbing but of course it is an arm that is pushing the cloth into position each time. It is squashing the cloth up against the shere surface of the glass that does not budge so that the cloth crowds in on itself  fold after fold meshing between glass and hand- the palm of the hand directly against the cloth.

In the upper most frame of the sash window a small figure appears. She wears a pink dress that ends just below the knees. She must be standing on a chair or something in order to reach up so far. Her feet disapear below the frame of the window where I suppose the chair is. Now the cloth is not restricted anymore and freely she moves it so that the woman lends her full impetus to each manoevere. She is behind the cloth, swivelling and adjusting her entire frame, leaning into it, driving the motion from behind whilst also meshing into it through her body.  The cloth is raised and lowered rapidly never leaving the glass. Then it goes back and forth. Her arm lifts high above her head. It draws an arc. Then there is a fixation on a single point. It is is honed in on. The motion locks into a rapid up down, side to side motion that then blends into a circular movement.  It is beginning to widen back out. Then it finishes. The cloth comes away form the glass. The woman looks out onto the road. Then her frame blurs as she moves away from the glass.

TheTurkish pizza arrives. I thank the waiter.Then put a cube of sugar in the black tea. It disolves and sinks into a small indent at the bottom of the glass.The sugar can't be tasted. I take a spoon and scoop the granules up from the bottom and stirr them back into the moving liquid.

A man stands outside the restaurent facing the door speaking on a cell-phone. He is hunched from the cold.
I eat the pizza with my hands. Then I go to the market. I am amongst all these people. It is effortless. I have the shopping to do.

A small white lump of bread

Swans along the canal. White swans all piling in on top of one another. Diving and swooping into the litterd water. Necks jerking, thrusting deep into the water. Beaks tearing at the white piece of bread. Breaking off a piece, tossing the remainder into the air. Seagulls just above, just out of reach. Their caw caw calling, travelling over disant traffic. They are swooping and gliding on their own plane of circulation, just above the swans with their lower bodies submerged in the cold water.  Unseen webbed feet carry them here and there making use of the water and the resistant it gives to them. Swans butting into one another flapping, jostling, tearing at the one piece of bread which is being flipped between them. But one rushes to consume. The others wait, for an opportunity. They tear and butt at it when it falls their way. Rush to its place of landing even while it travels still in the air. Until the larger one arrives and they turn tail.  Their necks are dusty- dirt ingrained in the white close-knit plummage. Their breast bones, massive, the front of the ship steering and bolstering them against the counter-current of their own eratic food fueled movements.  The seagulls continue to turn, caw, cawing just above the small heads pinned on top of the outstretched  plummage which pay no attention to this circulation that never descends.

Behind the barrier a small girl holds the hand of her mother. They both are dressed identically in grey coats with black stockings. The child is a small version of her mother tidily standing beside her and has the same apprehensive and intelligent expression on her pale face. Her brown shiny hair, like her mother's, is tightly pulled back off her face. In her free hand she holds a transparent plastic bag and in the bag I glimpse a small white lump of bread.

Wednesday 20 January 2010

Acting on the memory of that path

Down by the lakes. Where the ice has melted. At the end of the bridge where a camera waits for a woman in black to run towards it. The thudding of the feet on the metal slat. Boats down below. The water did not freeze. I hear one of the camera men say "She is self-conscious". Many people filter by as the camera waits for the runner. The grass is sodden and squelches, the build up of ice having suddenly given way and seeped into the earth. All is moveable. Mud.

I let myself in through the gate and I am now sitting in the paddock seperated out by a waist-high woooden bar that is fixed for some distance, then cut, angled a little, fixed for some distance more and then cut until it describes a rough oblong inside of which are placed the remaining two black plastic tables with adjoining seating rivetted deep into the ground on concrete slabs. The third table has not been here for some time, burned to the ground. To get to my table I cross the pebble path that dips here and there into pools of mud water. I then veered off across the fields sinking ankle high into the mud on each step. I have eased myself into the seating, my knees under the table, my hands on the rough plastic surface which is built out of strats to resemble the wooden strats of its equivalent not put here purposely because of the changeable weather conditions and risk of fire.

There is water at my feet, the bottle tops and what-nots floating or sinking depending on consistancy. I pin my feet to either side of the puddle on the revealed concrete. Later with the sun directly absorbing on to the table surface and directly on my face too, I lean back, wedging my thighs against the inner moulding of the table so that my back is extended outwards and almost level with the table surface. My face is now far back. I push my fingers through the intervals of the strats gripping them from underneath. Then I let go. The pressure between the tops of my thighs and the moulding of the underside is incredibe. Flesh and plastic are jammed together. One slip and I`d be on my back. Right there in the mud.

I hear birds in the bushes, everything beginning to be up and running after the freeze. People are on the bridge streaming over it as the sun already begins to sink at three oclock in the afternoon on this Sunday.
I can hear the tap of the tennis ball, surge of laughter, group singing that swells and then dies, feet on the main path that runs alongside the canal awash with colour with dogs breaking free. Sounds are drawn out and linger in this wet perspiration that remains above and below ground and seeps ino the atmosphere, catches on the breath that only adds to it.

The marshes are a sponge through which people wade. A child lifts up her brown trouser legs and tiptoes deep into the mud with rubber boots to protect her. She is wearing a light pink quilted jacket that ends at the waist-line of her trousers. She is making slow progress, lagging behind from the adults up ahead and the dog with its large nose inches above the water. A couple slide under the bar and make it to the other table placed paralel but some distance away to the one which I occupy. He lies flat on his back over the length of the table top following the line of strats, his body at the far end bending over, feet unmoved, still in the mud.
The woman sits on the plastic bench her back to the table looking out into the long stretch of marshland, trains in the distance. Neither of them speaks or moves. Then they do. He is cradling her head in his hands his feet on the bench now either side of  her body. She leans far back and he peers over until they are kissing. They are a black silhouette, indiscernable apart, the sun in the background just above the trees over on the hill on the other side of the canal.

A pram pushes out through the foliage just past the man-made pond. It is running on uneven ground so it is pushed with a curt thrust until the body meets with the handle bars then again drives it forward cutting a groove deep into the clay. Sometimes there is a rolling back and forth to establish the level ground below the shifting muds so that the wheels become rotary diggers in order to build up momentum where the land slightly rises before dipping once again. That pram is pushed by a man suited in black. He wears a hat and a white shirt reveals itself beneath the black. He has a heavy set deep rich brown and full beard below a pale open face. He is a member of the Hassidic Jewish community well established in this area. Next to him but sometimes just behind is a woman who is holding a child loosely at her waist so that the body of the child swings freely against her loose and moveable arm and the outspread hand so that it is only at the hips that they are joined so tightly. She is struggling with heavy set black shoes below her stockinged ankles and a skirt wrapped and flapping over her knees. They manage to wade past the outer periphery of the fencing  that surrounds the tables and chairs. They are heading out beyond the place of the silhouetted couple, her head in his hands, where the ground opens up to marshland. Here there used to be a path and I think they are acting on the memory of that path even though it is no longer there since the big thaw after the ice.

He is pushing and jamming the pram over what is more and more like a constant river, not merely a puddle here and there. She has gone on ahead and is beginning to veer around the outline foliage where the ground is a little higher before it turns into impassable scrub avoiding the normal route of the path which is now underneath the water. Suddenly her black stockinged foot comes up, revealed as the shoe remains where she set her foot down in the mud. It is submerged in the the water that rushes in to fill the vacuum. She freezes with her leg in the air. Then she is laughing as the bearded man with the pram on the other side of the water looks on. By now I have turned around. I smile as well. Somehow they manage to continue and to disapear through the marshland between the scrub. The camera crew arrive and navigate the water and mud, hoisting the camera and its metal leg on to their shoulder to carry it over the breach. The woman in black who was the runner on the bridge has supermarket bags fasted to each shoe. They squelch and crinkle in the mud.
I cannot remember if they were there when she was on the bridge.

Some time later the Orthodox Jewish couple with the pram return the way they came. That probably means that further up there is no way of getting through.

Friday 15 January 2010

Balancing

I stop by the bus-stop. Nothing seems to be occuring. The ice is beginning to melt. I lost my gloves earlier. The skin on skin gone. Each time I bend my forefinger the wound reapears, a fleck of red burrowed in the flesh, cracks like ice. It hurts. I have just retreaved money from the cash-machine. Since then everything is done in slow motion. The ice makes you test out each step- go a little deeper- bear the weight down and ponder somewhat. Everything is contained into where it is, settling into the tiny grooves where even the dirt and rubbish and flecks of disruption suspended in the ice-pack become a possible foot-hold. All that free floating stuff kicking around on a usual day, locked in and untouchable, except by the total pressure of a body mass, lingering on the path, hovering between propulsion and fall. Warming the ground. So it is that we face one another, one after another, like a role of honour.

At the bus-stop I have purposely not run to catch the line-up of buses that one by one now pull away the door seals meeting with warm bodies pressed right up against the glass. Outside it is cold.  There's a Vietnamese restaurent that I have my back to. Inside there are rows and rows of rectangular tables each with cleanly laundered and starched white table-cloths that folds at the corners like origami. Between the tables from the door to the counter, there is a walk-way left uncluttered for the waiters. On each table is a vase with a single purple flower the shoot of which is suddenly magnified where the water begins. There is only one couple facing each other across the empty table-cloth amidst these rows of tables. The waiters are all clustered around the counter at the far side staring out into the dark street below the bottles and bottles of honey coloured liquid above them.

The door flaps open and closed. It never quite opens or closes, like an invitation where nothing is settled yet.
I take it as a good sign out there with my back to the restaurent even as I glance and manoevre at each new temporary settlement of the door acting on its restlessness. Suddenly the wavering sense of that motion ceases. The interval has gone as a man- a waiter- briefly fastens the door- creating a seamless line with the window glass to either side.

I look away. Affronted. That's when I notice the woman, actually a tall girl pushing the small boy who is balancing and tipping on and off this hair-line point of balance. He is on a high metal bar that extends through the ice out of the ground, loops into this high length of horizontal bar and then descends again some distance away back through the ice and into the ground.  It looks like one of those things for attaching bikes to. Only taller. The boy is laughing his hood up around his tiny pinched face the collar of a red sweater showing at the top of his jacket high around his neck. He is tilting this way and that, sticking his chest beyond his hips and then quickly tucking it back in line. His feet and legs swing freely, stuck right out or tucked right under the bar, pulling on and off in counter balance from his rocking torso. The girl is laughing ecstatically, using her back to stop at the verge of collapse, that fall from happening. They are working as one in this push-me, pull-you contraption. There is another boy dressed in greys at some distance with his back against the glass of a shop. He looks on somewhat removed but still associated. Later when the first boy lets himself fall off , the other boy pins himself up there, but does not really let himself go. The woman; woman-girl jokes with him too but there is a sense of remove, as if the joking had to travel too far and fell mid way in that passage of time which remained too empty. Only here too there is a kind of tenderness even in the tentative non-starter that it becomes.

A group of Japanese crowd around the door that the waiter earlier made close. A man lingers and suddenly doubles up, folding in half, dropping his head and then raising it as his back again straightens up to meet the eyes of a man he is facing. He is bowing. With his right hand he manoevres the door, turning the handle and cracking the rubber seal in doing so that had created a wind-lock against the outside. He pushes against the glasss whilst now using his entire arm and shoulder to keep the door in place. Files of men and women who are gathering and continually seem to be streaming into a mass out on the pavement now filter in, the men giving way to the women who are the first to enter the restaurent.

A man with a dodgy leg crosses the road lifting and placing the dead leg by shifting and tilting upwards his hip on the side where the dead leg is. He does this by softening into the ground with his other foot and just before he needs to lift the leg, lowering the hip on the side of the good leg. Between good and bad, through this circular motion, he walks. The displacement creates this undualtion that is repetitive but never the same. When he is beside me a song comes into my head and I start humming under my breath. Fragments escape without me knowing it at first.The man tilts his head towards me once or twice and that's when I know.

The bus comes and I get on. I am sitting at the back where the girl and the two young boys are sitting, all three squashed into two seats. They are speaking Spanish. The atmosphere is eruptive as if all the manoevres and practices that went on between them outside have to go on in words and the catapult eruption of those words denied any space becomes a force. They are grabbing one another, thrusting forward and backwards, shoving and holding. Laughing, almost in pain. People on the bus- in the rows of seats that stretch out before us from the very back of the bus to either side of the long central aisle are looking down into their laps or mobiles. However there is a constant though silent re-emphasis of bodies as patches of double seating suddenly becomes available and people single out from one another to occupy them. Somehow they know with very precise timing that the seats have becomes available. No matter how far away they are or how inconvenient it is to brush past, the moment is seized; a removal and re-insertion takes place. There is this shifting topography which is beautiful to watch.

Something white shifts. It catches my attention as if it were an animal running to hide. It is the scarf that the girl has on her lap and that falls to the floor as she violently leans forward in one of the motions that is going to make up the play between these three. There is a pause. It lies there where it dropped. She carries on. I glance at it then pick it up and hand it to her. She takes it, a black smooth hand against the wool scarf, encircling it. She nods. I see a strenuousness in her face-a sensitiviy that is aghast with itself but continuously is there. A seriousness. And the boy by her side; the one with the red collar; he has the same look- that pinched look not just from the cold- a smile leaping out and escaping those confines- something choking between where he is and where he expresses himself. He moves his hands back and forth in front of him, opening and closing, rhythmically manufacturing a practice of space out of the pace of his breath and the movement between his hands. But the words keep pouring out- smothering over everything, with the bodies jerking back and forth, balancing on that bar that is no longer there to give reason.

Then suddenly -two words- this time in English, that the boy delivers in a dead-pan East london drawl where there is a defacement of all concern, an absolute disownment of anything mattering and those two words act like a full stop. A momentum caught and dropped. A deep depression seems to sink on to the outer skins of these children like a thin dew that is wet and sticky and cannot be removed. The girl actually crumbles up folding her long limbs into her centre and burrowing her face onto the shoulder of the small boy.

There are two men opposite the Spanish group. All through this- through the jerks and thrusts and now this leaden silence -there have been these two men, the one with glasses and a receding hair-line the other with stick-out fair redddish hair and a placid face. They continue to talk talking about their lives and their living situations and the one with stick-out hair at one point; at the point where I happen to catch into the conversation says: "I like where I live because even through it is in the city it is a quiet residential street with plenty of trees where nothing much happens. Some people might call it boring or dull but I like this quiet residential street and the fact that nothing happens and it is always the same whether I am leaving or coming back.." Then they get off the bus and the Spanish group spread out, making use of the now empty seats.