It was a 29 bus. I was going into the West End. I took a seat next to a woman – an old woman. Actually, she was probably my age now. The bus took ages, is all I remember. I was reading.
It was the days before everyone fiddled with phones or talked into space through their headsets. Some of us had newspapers, some stared out the window, some even talked to each other.
When we got to Tottenham Court Road, the conductor announced that the bus was going to terminate. Big sighs. The woman next to me had nodded off.
“Give her a nudge, love,” said the conductor.
“We have to get off now,” I said to the sleeping stranger.
She did not respond.
“Wake her up!” said the conductor, as though she was something to do with me.
It felt strangely intimate to shake someone older than me awake. Gingerly I tried. She would not wake up.
The conductor was starting to get annoyed at me.
“Come on, love, I want you off this bus.”
“There is something wrong.”
I wanted to go myself, go and meet my friends to say goodbye to them as I was going to live in America the next day. Somehow now I was attached to this unconscious woman.
“Get an ambulance. I think we might need an ambulance.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” said the conductor.
The ambulance came and they pulled her on to the floor and started CPR. The banging and pumping. It can really be quite violent.
I felt so sorry for her. It was so undignified. They tried for a long time, a good 15 minutes, and then said that was it.
This was the first dead body I’d ever seen and I felt responsible for it.
They started questioning me. “I don’t know her! I just sat next to her,” I said.
Was she dead when I sat down, or did she die next to me? If she had died next to me, how did I not notice?
I did not know or understand these things. I wanted somehow to tell her loved ones that there could have been no suffering, but no one knew her name. There was no ID and I was already late to my goodbye do.
I like to think now I would have behaved differently. Then, I was young and had more important stuff on my mind.
A dead body looks the same as a living body, it turns out. Only not asleep but irreversibly elsewhere. Now I knew this, but I did not feel sad – just strangely flat.
I walked into the bar.
“You are late.”
“Yeah, a woman on the bus died next to me.”
“You and your excuses,” they all laughed.
I wondered if I should cry but no tears came. I wanted to say profound things about life and death, but I couldn’t. I still can’t. Except that you really don’t want to die on public transport if you can help it.
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