The Bus in the Day Before the First Day of School

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At 8:30, Dick stands by the road. He has spent four days sleeping on the ground and cooking over a fire and breathing the air: simple pleasures impossible back in Beijing. He has been royally shafted: 30,000 tögrög for a lift from UB; 2,000 for a cold beer; 1,000 for Coca Cola water he despised drinking. He will return on the local bus like a local person.

In the queue are two ancient men carrying filthy shoeless children; three dogs (one stupidly friendly and wolf-like, the other two viscously growling and Labrador-like); some gruesome kids who shout 'Konitchiwa!' at him as he approaches; two adult females in black wooly tights and white shoes with authority over some of the unsavoury kids; and four tall girls who might be supermodels. In his pocket he has an apple, a Snickers bar and a copy of 'Shame' to read on the bus, if it ever comes.

Come it does, though quite full on arrival. No matter, it's a local bus for local people; they'll pop off and on all the way to UB, Dick assumes. He'll get a seat.

The fullness of the bus is enhanced by the quantity of luggage the occupants have brought. Many have big square wooden boxes. Most of the passengers are children. At every stop more get on but only one ever gets off.

Tomorrow, he would soon discover, is the first day of school. Dick counts 152 passengers though he must have missed some of the smaller ones. Rushdie remains unread. Two very old ladies in padded silk dressing gowns are awarded seats but immediately smothered in children and paraphernalia. Surely after 80-odd years they should know better than to take the bus on the day before the first day of school?

Dick does not eat his Snickers. The windows are closed against the dust but the atmosphere is insufferable nonetheless. The choking quality of the stagnant air is greatly enhanced by the bundles of raw sheepskins under most seats. Someone hollers, the bus stops and the skins are offered through the windows to a diffident peasantry malingering at the roadside. Skins are accepted, skins rejected. An old man at the front sings vociferously. Tinny music from kids' phones competes. Breast feeding is all around. Indiscrete vomiting takes place.

The bus stops and Dick is pushed out with the evacuating humanity. They flow into Kombis and evaporate into the grass. Dick stands by the bus, befuddled. The doors close and the bus ambles off, most of the passengers still aboard.

This was not, Dick deduced, UB. Alone, except for a wizened idiot chuckling on bench and one sad kid with his toy coffin, Dick examined the timetable pasted to a post, if two times can be called a table: 9:45 and 16:45. He looked at his watch. 9:55. He looked up and down the road. Nothing. Not even dust. Sheep safely grazed in the heat haze.

Was this, Dick wondered, a good time to eat his apple?

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