One.Four.Nine.

by Emma Ward

This is London Bridge and I am out of context. I do not do this. I do not sit on the top of double-decker buses and watch. I do not loop the loop for hours around this city’s darkness. I do not refuse forceful inner voices: “It’s late. Go home.” I do not ignore. I obey. I get on the bus. I go to work. I get on the bus. I go home. I do not wait. I just go home. Home to yesterday and tomorrow. Home to dead mice and baby tears.

Yet, I want to ride this big red London bus all night long.

This is Bank Station and I want the best seat in the house—top deck, front left. I want that wide windscreen to the gloom to take away the tightness in my chest. I want my reflection to look at me gently across Threadneedle Street and smile. I want to read with my feet up and prowl every row, road, circus in the city.

Yes, I want to ride this big red London bus all night long.

This is Liverpool Street and I want someone else’s hand to fall in the unidentifiable mucus on the handrail. I want to giggle as a girl sneezes under strip lighting at the stench of her own perfume. I want to quiet the suited man outside, who twists his fingers round his ears and screams “You mental cunt of a bitch!” in his bewildered girlfriend’s face, as we drive past. I want his girl to turn and walk her shadow away into the reductive safety of streetlamp light.

This is Shoreditch High Street and I want to eat a crisp from another passenger’s packet. I want to wink through the window at Hoxton lesbians to see their smoking girlfriends get angry and proud outside dimly-lit pubs. I want big- pupiled students to mosey out of closing clubs and chat shit in the seat behind me. I want to smirk across the aisle at the slurs of city workers who tell their wives that they are not drunk down futuristic telephones.

I want to think. I want to look.

This is Hackney Road and I want Mahler and glitch techno to pursue my ears through the mild May witching hour’s open estate windows. I want to dream of smoking pot on a beach with a mad Polish Iron Maiden fan. I want to regret jilting that girl who was so kind to me. I want to regret jilting that boy who offered only love. I want to regret not feeling, and feel. I want the solidity of life to fizz an effervescent dissolution in the liquidity of my spirit. I want to wonder how these hours could ever be described as small.

I want my bus to drive on.

This is Kingsland Road and I want to look away as a night owl skinhead projects hawked brown phlegm out of an openmouthed cough. I want to swallow hard at the sight of two policemen who scare from a metre away, who wait for nastiness nasty enough, then depart, benign tumors in uniform. I want to raise my eyebrows at a cyclist’s red light cut fine. I want to cheer inwardly at a joyrider’s red light jumped. I want to ring the bus bell into the empty street. Five times. Ten times. I want chewing gum circles to join forces on the floor.

This is Dalston Junction and I want to smell damp marijuana sighs from the cheap polyester jackets of a teenage gang who say I am racist and threaten to rape me. I want to shiver from my quadriceps to my crown, in freedom and relief, when these night terrors get off at the next stop. I want my stern fearfulness to stop its mantra, “It’s late. Go home.”

This is Shacklewell Lane and I want to hear an MC’d prayer from a crackhead clinging onto God. I want to know if his nocturne’s Lord God in tha name o’ Jesus Christ is up there. I want life to sooteh my hangover, bring hope to my heart and ever-freeing acceptance of despair to my head. I want this wonderful tantrum to go on forever. I want to feel anything but nothing.

I want to drive on.

I will not go back.

I will hold “right this second” in my left hand and “just one minute” in my right, and keep vigil on the “One.Four.Nine to . . .”