London by Bus: 2
Route 2: Marylebone—West Norwood
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Is there a better place to observe London than from within its ubiquitous red buses? In this series, ‘London by Bus’, I am venturing to take all London Buses journeys from start to end, from 1 to I’m not going to look, until I either finish or am arraigned by Transport for London for outstanding rent payments.
Previously completed: Route 1
LONDON — The northern terminus of the London 2 bus route begins from steps in front of the grand entrance to Marylebone Station, which is the centrepiece of a small movie set-like district in central London a hair to the west of Baker Street and just above Marylebone Road, that, with great fortune, has been forgotten by time and its unfortunate habit of destruction. For, if everyone only dressed up for a moment, and if only the foggy sort of clouds that propagate with such mechanical spontaneity in London came overhead now, and if only the not-quite-rain, rain that so often bathes London like a wet dog splashing through a damp meadow started now, and if the sun suddenly set, and cameras and a directors chair and young adults holding clipboards appeared, then we could easily be on the set of a pre-war or neo-noir film. Instead, it is bright and sunny, and most everyone is dressed terribly, aside from the man in a pressed suit who hastily exits a cab, and, clutching his leather briefcase dearly, makes a run for the first-class carriage that he will soon find doesn’t exist, as, for trains that originate and terminate at Marylebone Station, first-class is second-class with an extra headrest cover that says first-class, and likewise, although we have been given the gift of a lasting jewel of a metropolis station, Marylebone Station is covered in flimsy franchises and offers coffee only at either Pret a Manger or Upper Crust, though the latter doesn’t even serve coffee but if you order their black tea you can’t tell anyway.
I board the bus, and before I am halfway up the steps to the upper deck we have set off onto the Marylebone Road. Soon after, we make another quick turn south onto Baker Street along with what seems like every other bus in the general vicinity. I am seated in my familiar perch, which is above the driver in the first row of the second level, though this particular model of bus offers some extra protection to the front right seat in the form of random additions of metal and plastic that sort of box me into my corner. A proper perch, then.
The man seated across from me carries a green plastic Marks & Spencer bag that has been used no less than 150 times — only a faint M remains and the other lettering has faded off completely. He is wearing a red and white polka dot mask, for style, or an attempt at style, as he is frequent to reach under the mask so as to pick his nose without impediment and after some time leaves the mask to permanently rest over his chin. He has in his possession a plastic white Tesco bag as well, which, in being littered with holes, is somehow in worse condition than the M&S bag. He is flipping through daily newspapers that he hangs from the railing in front of him which will without doubt be put to permanent use as mattress stuffing. This re-use of trash and cheap material that is on its surface meant as an environmental welfare is a familiar habit to many of us that represents something very wrong with our society. For, underlying this seemingly innocent practice is a tangible aesthetic disaster that results from having to handle plastic more than we ever should. I have no issue in recycling objects, in not being wasteful, in not succumbing to single-use consumerism, but I am against taking something designed to be single use, and then using it past the point of exhaustion so that the effect is that this man, and too many of us, cherish plastic and cheapness, and become so familiar with terrible materials that we have find no objection to building our cities out of them. False environmentalism is not saying plastic shouldn’t exist, but instead saying that it should exist forever, or since it does already exist forever, because it can’t biodegrade in a landfill, that it should instead biodegrade in our hands.
We pick up a number passengers at Portman Square, and it is soon after announced that the bus is on diversion — from what I don’t know, to where I don’t know, and involving what difference I don’t know either. Nobody seems to mind too terribly, which is a mark of experience. I think the first time I ever heard the announcement of a bus diversion, I treated it like hearing a fire alarm and sprinted off the bus. What you soon learn is that when you are on a London bus you are on diversion anyway, no matter if it is announced or not, and it is only a question of whether it is detrimental or not. And by not detrimental I mean the bus doesn’t suddenly go the opposite direction, or you aren’t forced to get off the bus in the wake of some inexplicable wait, to then see the same bus zoom past you as soon as you’ve left it, as if you were the extra weight it was needing to drop and you could have stayed there 2, 5, or 12 hours, it wasn’t moving until one second after you got off.
Something nice about being on a bus is that after you decide which one to be on it makes all decisions henceforth. You are a passenger in all senses of the word, that is, you have no agency into the fate of the bus or the complications of its route. You can resign yourself to this bus, its driver, who has also resigned himself to some predetermined route or destination (don’t mind the diversions for now), and you can do so until you decide to get off at which point your life is your own again, and if you mean to go anywhere it is by your own step. We turn onto Oxford Street and down to Park Lane, and now pass the skeleton corpse of the Marble Arch Hill, that an architecture firm was paid £6 million to build something to attract people to the already busiest street in London, and which is now being dismantled (Next U2 album: How to Dismantle the Marble Arch Hill). We make our first stop after a relatively long interval, and I surmise that we have found our usual route again. As such, the diversion is over to some, though to others it never began. Park Lane is a bit of a scar through London, though a necessary scar that has protected the West End from greater surgery. Great mansions used to line the street looking onto Hyde Park, until the park was moved back to create this parkway and all the mansions were taken down except one now owned by a Saudi Prince, and so empty of people in it might not be there at all.
Here also is the starting gate of London’s unofficial race track — there is a way to go in continuous circles up and down Park Lane all day and many do. They would be foolish to be driving here now, however, as it’s 3:30pm and I wish I started this journey earlier, as there is a surge of cars on approach to Hyde Park Corner, which we soon enough wind around in one of four indeterminate lanes to reach Grosvenor Place, a road that leads to Victoria Station and follows the outside edge of Buckingham Palace. If the area around Marylebone was an enclave to a lost time, most of the surroundings of Victoria Station could not be in the same movie.
The suns warmth seeps through the glass and the shade is not only a visual sensation. As soon as the peace of the oscillating shadows settles in and I feel myself seeping into the seat, things start to get interesting. A man, seemingly not his mind, who I can’t see because he is in the back of the bus and turning around in a London bus is like volunteering to measure the radioactivity of Chernoybl in 1987, now screams, perhaps coming out of some reverie, which causes everyone to do that thing where they very much notice something but control every muscle in their body to pretend they don’t. “That is life!” Now quietly surveilling the effect of his outburst, and perhaps seeing no one has offered any reaction, he now demands, in a loud and forceful tone, to be left alone. It is not a request he need wish for, and I don’t think he’ll be going anywhere. I expect this man will feature in much of the trip’s soundtrack.
He continues in a crazed rant though for now I can only make out one third of his words. When you are around London enough his presence is completely unsurprising. There are many lost minds in this city, or many minds and bodies on diversion, to stay on the theme. So while they may not exactly be lost (are any of our destinations different), they certainly seem to be for the time being. And I can’t admit to taking a sympathetic view, especially initially. You are sitting down one moment and you are being screamed at the next. This man is a preacher of drunkenness, and I think, this is a failure of the state, this is the the duality of outcome it allows, that the King of fucking England walks amongst absolute lunatics and you wonder if there were no Kings if there would be fewer lunatics or more.
The bus is filled to the brim now and the man continues to speak on an unfamiliar wavelength. I’m starting to get acclimatized to his tone and can make out some sentences. “We are all looking for something.” He speaks but no one listens, though in hearing him he creates more silent understanding than most others could, as, for a moment, all within earshot are thinking the same thing. There is something about when a bus is filled to a certain level that it is effectively emptied, because now there are too many people for someone to be speaking to anyone in particular, and there are too many people for anyone to feel the responsibility of being addressed.
We stream down Vauxhall Bridge Road toward Pimlico, and the polka dot mask man is doing crosswords and you can tell why he was previously so undisturbed to hear of the diversion because he had clearly not been planning to go anywhere anytime soon. “I am a superstar,” and with this proclomation he stumbles forward now, and now stands near the top of the steps as if he were guarding them. “We are all looking for peace. We are all looking for God.” I follow the theologians every word now, as we are nearly back-to-back. “No races, we are all brothers,” he declares. “I am a superstar, do you believe I am a superstar?” I don’t, but perhaps I am too quick to judge.
“I am a millionaire, I have everything, I do not like to see nobody upset, that’s the only thing that bothers me, that’s the only thing.” I feel terrible thinking him insane. Why is he insane, because he speaks? Because he speaks when the rest of us are silent, that he should be so daring as to say what is on his mind? Is that what passes for insanity now?
I understand all of his words even if he doesn’t know what he is saying. “Don’t go to the hard way, go to the beautiful way.” Now, more than ever, this is London, this is London—this—is—London—this sermon that is being given by a man on the 2 bus as it crosses Vauxhall Bridge to 40 unwilling spectators who were a few minutes ago simply passengers and he is really preaching now, and he has slowed down so that his words are not just droning noise, but sharp sentences. Suddenly, he stops, as if getting to the part that he wants everyone to take in, that he has reached the crux of everything he is meaning to say. “I’m talking about education.”
He pronounces each syllable of e-du-ca-tion distinctly, and the word seems to strikes a different tone within him than others do. The syllables are not mere sounds. “Education. That’s all, nothing more.”
“Listen to me, you will go to university, no easy, no easy, me speaking to you, no way, go college that is fine, do college that is fine, but when we are talking about university that is different.” He thinks no one is listening to him, and, with apparent concern, increases his intensity of speaking. “I am very poor, why? My teachers in university, they want to know if I’m intelligent, when you are in the last year of university you are capable. But capable of nothing.”
In my transcribing I have lost track of our surroundings, but now pass Vauxhall Park, which appears as some silent and well-paved, well-groomed, shade.
“I have everything.” He drifts back and forth between the real and the imagined, and the duality of outcomes I referred to previously seems to be wholly within him. He struggles in English but he has an excellent vocabulary. I sneak a glance, and I see a man that looks much older than he is with curly gray hair and a particular countenance and sort of unmarked dark clothing that could allow him to exist at any time in the past 150 years. He has a plastic bag too. His plastic bag is blue, and there is a single can in it, though I can’t tell if it is full or empty.
“This is the assignment. The teachers are there to help you understand the question, but there are no easy questions. Nouns, adjectives, sorry teacher you are here to make me understand the question.” So according to this man, he has not understood the question the teacher has asked, but has come up with another problem entirely. “You have to understand the question. I will make you understand the question.” He has not understood the question, he never will, but he has. And is he wrong? He has answered his question correctly. He has understood the question. He understood that he couldn’t understand the question, that the question was never meant for him, it was all a setup because he couldn’t understand the question. He understood the question but not the answer that was being looked for, and journey coming up with his own answer has ended up here, on the top steps of the 2 London bus on a March afternoon.
“I am a final year degree student. My specialty is information systems.” It is clear now he has never graduated because he has never understood the question, and that this particular question was not only a question but an obstacle, and an obstacle, in failing to overcome it, that has set the course for the rest of his life. “I will finish my degree in October, I will be specialized as an information system expert. Is that good enough for you William?” There is no indication of what year this October was, but I would guess it was not this century. And there is no indication of who William is either.
“Are you understanding me? To be qualified as information systems I had to understand the question and my teacher tried to make me understand the question! If you are not able to deal with the circumstances of university, and the problems, don’t go down there, it is a high level. I spoke to my teachers, sorry, this is a subject it is hard, teacher, please, are you failing me? Did I fail? I haven’t understood the question!” Perhaps the question he refers to is not one question in particular, but perhaps all of them, all of the questions he has ever been asked, collectively. He has failed at something he never understood.
When he says the word ‘fail’ he becomes audibly angry, though this anger is not new. No, the anger that the word ‘fail’ incites is well-practiced and almost worn out, like how a baby would cry for its mother after it had already been crying for hours. It sounds as if the failure can not be said to be his own. “I am qualified, I never copy nobody, I never copy nobody.” So, he should have copied. Many have, many, and they have all succeeded. If he were to copy, to copy someone else’s answer to the question, he would have been qualified. Even if he found the answer, he wouldn’t have provided it, like others have and others still do. He didn’t understand, but because he only wished to understand himself, he refused to understand what he had not understood. And now he is here.
“We are talking principles and methodologies. When you know, ‘you know’, but in reality there is no help, I say to all of you, thank you everyone and everything, I cry, I am not doing a masters, not doing a masters, my g-g-g-grade,” he struggles to release this word, “I am not a master, I cried, I was not expecting to fail. I was an information specialist, I am the top of all students in my university, and I failed.” So he went to university to study information systems and he failed, or, was told he had failed, and now he is here.
“I’m okay. My family, they are rich. I’m okay.” And we are back in this alternate reality that I finally comprehend, where he has understood the question and answered the assignment and received the passing grade, and earned a diploma, and secured a job, and won a life for himself and his family and become rich, a millionaire even, a superstar perhaps. But he never understood the question so none of that has happened. And a part of his mind lives at the precipice of when this was all still possible, and a part of his soul exists as if it did, before his unwanted diversion began.
I don’t know where we are anymore we have kept going south and there is a skatepark and council buildings and newly built prisons constantly being created. It is Stockwell Road, but unrecognizable, could be anywhere in this country. Though it doesn’t seem important.
At Stockwell Station, half of the passengers ready to alight. In having to go by the preacher to get off the bus, it is the first time that most are forced to acknowledge his physical presence. He is thrown off by this; his journey between the past and present, the real and the fake, his dreams and his reality, being interrupted by a steam of people. A man says thanks to him after he moves even more to let him pass and is now quickly pursued off the bus by him, thusly ending the preaching, at least in this location. “Excuse me, where are you from?” he says to the man that thanked him. The bus speeds away.
Silence descends upon the thankless bus, and we approach Brixton Station, teeming with people holding plastic shopping bags. Polka dot man approaches collects his things, ready to join his loyal denomination. We exit from Brixton Hill at St. Matthew’s Church, where grand, backset Victorian townhomes wall the street and the sun passes through the bare trees to make them a wall of light. The aesthetic reprieve is over and we once again enter bulldozed lands that once carried greater beauty. Maybe this land is simply on diversion too. There are no uglier buildings in London than the ones that Sainsbury’s seems to build seemingly anywhere they want; factory grocery stores for the produce of their factory farms. A magpie can’t find anywhere to land, and now the magpie is on diversion too.
We pass under one of the most beautiful trees I’ve seen which overhangs the street and is frozen in its static beauty by being continually sawed by the passing busses that counter its effort to reclaim the land, trimmed as it tries to grow. We have now climbed Tulse Hill, found nothing, not even a single view, and descend again. I look around for something worth mentioning and find little. We are in between, though what we are in between of, I can’t say. A Southern rail train passes on a bridge that has just come into view, and we make another southward turn off of Tulse Hill, onto Norwood Road.
Norwood Road — my long-awaited exit awaits. A nice thing about London streets is that they don’t last for long, and if you are on a street that contains the name of your destination in some way, you are likely quite close. The train tracks pass in all directions now, and whatever this place was is fractured beyond repair. It is hard to have a neighbourhood when it is trisected by tracks going in all directions, as those in South London know. We reach Tulse Hill Station and return into the single-file procession of traffic as we enter into a handsome high street. London has a funny way of doing this; producing something out of nothing. Just when you expect that nothing could be in between places of ugliness there is actually beauty. This street is called Broadway, and has the traffic to match its New York namesake. The next bus stop is closed but passengers leave anyway because we are stopped on account of the traffic and it doesn’t matter.
And here is London, too, for a church towers at the end of the high street, high on a mound and beyond well proportioned steps that lead up to it. Now it all seems quite charming indeed: the road splits around the church, and there are bakeries, a library, a floral hall, the grass in front of the church is manicured, and they are manicuring it now. A firehouse’s years of conception reads 1881. We pass West Norwood station where I will likely be coming back to, but it is not the end of the bus route, and that’s the rule. I might even wish to walk around for a minute, which I did not think was possible but 15 minutes ago. The next stop—the last—is the bus garage and I exit into the backstreet, stepping out of the bus with less urgency than I had expected. We have found beauty on the other side of a blunt diversion from it, through the unknown and unknowable in between, and I wish the same for our so-named Superstar.
