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On the Bus
Mick Ransford
‘Should the 3 million Irish living abroad go back to where they came from? asked an ad for the Irish Times that was tacked up in a little silver poster board behind the bus driver’s seat.
‘Probably,’ Jonah scribbled at the bottom with a black marker he took out of his school bag. The week before his friend Séan had scribbled ‘No!’ under another ad that asked, ‘Should the Catholic Church receive absolution?’
‘The cheek of ‘im,’ muttered a woman on the seat opposite the two boys. She looked to be in her middle fifties. She had dyed ginger hair and a hatchety sort of face. ‘If you don’t like this country,’ the man sitting beside her said to Jonah, ‘you know where the airport is.’ The man was almost bald. Long moist-looking strands of black hair had been combed across the crown of his head. He was also very fat.
‘Mind your own business,’ Jonah’s friend Séan told him. ‘Hey!’ A young man nearer the rear of the bus straightened up in his seat. He looked like he’d just woken up. He wore a grey baseball cap. His clothes and his face and hands were covered in fine white dust.
The fat man sitting beside the ginger haired woman wagged an admonishing finger at Jonah and Séan. ‘Stook,’ Séan said under his breath. He glanced at Jonah. They smirked and then they started giggling. Their faces reddened and they squirmed about on their seat, trying to hold it in.
