Happy People Live Here

by C. Sean McGee

9A

  The bus rocked a lot. It was really bouncy and squeaky and it kind of felt like the whole thing might just fall apart on any one of the little bumps in the road that was making it jump up and around and then all about. It was easy to see how some people could be irritated and find the bus so annoying.

  Linda loved it.

  It was terrific.

  She hadn’t ridden a bus in so long and had forgotten how much fun they could be. She was nervous at first, mainly on whether she had taken the right one or not. There was a bus stop on both sides of the avenue and they both went in opposite directions and if she did take the wrong one, she would probably end up a hundred thousand miles on the wrong side of where she wanted to be and it would take her forever just to get back to where she was supposed to be.

  Then again, if all buses were this much fun then maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing, getting lost like that and having to spend the entire day, or maybe even two days, or an entire year even, bouncing around on her wobbly seat, sniggering at every squeak and clinging with one hand to the loose hand rest whilst staring at the red button on the window and the low hanging cable that ran from one side of the bus to the other and thinking to herself, “Which one will be more fun to press?”

  Buses were so much fun, more fun than cars. Cars were good an all. And they were important too because people who drove cars were going places, and in control of their destiny, kind of like free will. They could decide where they wanted to go at any time, and nobody could stop them. Except of course that most of the time, people couldn’t think of anywhere to go and even though they dreamt of escape to some special and safe place, they didn’t really know where that place was and they didn’t have a map to tell them how to get there.

  Cars were important too because it showed that you had money and that you weren’t poor. Because only poor people or unfortunate people, like people who lived in other cities and traveled really far for work and who only had one car and had to leave that car at home, in case their babies had a fever, or if they had to travel really far and they fell asleep all the time, for no reason whatsoever and they didn’t want to cause an accident or get late for work, on account of that.

  Unfortunate people.

  And poor people.

  They were the kinds that used buses, either because they had to or because they had no choice. And they weren’t the kind of people that anybody ever admired. They weren’t the kind of people that made a lot of money and lived in rich apartment buildings and had maids and cleaners that didn’t leave smudges and knew how to cook more than one kind of meal.

  Those people, that kind, they were terrific.

  They were the kind of people that didn’t notice other people even though everybody noticed them. They were the kind of people that didn’t even care that everybody noticed them, even though they knew that they did and that that was what they wanted all along, for everyone to notice them and to act like it didn’t matter.

  Linda didn’t have the best car in the world, but she did have a car and that meant, although she was always busy watching other people passing by, eating their Caesar salads and getting little puppy paws painted on their beautiful nails, because she drove a car, there was definitely someone watching her.

  Graham drove a red car. It looked kind of like a tiger or a panther or something. Like a tiger or a panther crossed with an alien. Because the lights looked like alien’s eyes, not that Linda had ever seen an alien. But she believed they existed and she knew that if she ever saw one, she would know it, by the way, it looked at her. And it would probably have eyes like the lights on Graham’s car.

  And it might even have octopus’ arms too, in case it lived underwater, which would probably be a good place for an alien to live, cause people here could be kind of pushy and sometimes kind of rude too. And if you were different, like if you were an alien or something, most people would probably be pretty rude to you and really boring as well and they’d make you feel stupid and not at all fun, for not being anything like them.

  Linda had never sat in Graham’s car. She wanted to, all the time. She always asked, though, hoping Graham would change his mind. He’d always tell her though that her shoes would only scuff the upholstery or that he car had just been perfumed and “You can’t have two perfumes, Linda, it’ll make the car smell like a beggar’s vomit.”

  Every important person that Linda knew drove a car. And all those important people were so very smart. They always said things that make people nod their heads and agree and when Graham spoke, nobody ever said the opposite of what he was saying, even if that’s what they were thinking.

  Rich people were so smart.

  True.

  But as smart as they were, Linda had never listened to any of them talking about how much fun a bus ride could be. She’d heard them many times, whilst cleaning a probe or picking at her sandwich, talking about how fast their cars could go or how big their pecs had gotten or what they’d do to The Receptionist if they got her by herself. But she’d never heard any of them talk about how fun a bus ride could be.

  Linda sat on the bus, one hand gripping the loose hand rest and the other, a plastic bag with her change of clothes and the tape she had with her favorite songs that Graham let her get from her car before he made her hand over the keys.

  The bus was rocking around so much the seat wasn’t squeaking anymore, it was squealing. And she could see the ground below going by really fast, through the little bits of rust in the seat in front of her. It looked just like on the cartoons when they drew lots of lines behind the car to show that it was going really fast. The ground looked just like that. The road was rushing by and it looked like God or the bus driver or a policeman or something had drawn on the road, all these lines that were almost the same color as the road, but not really.

  Linda gripped the hand rest and with a wide and maddening grin on her face, she leaned upwards slightly to see if everyone else was having as much fun as she.

  The driver was bouncing up and down too. He had a big giant steering wheel, a lot bigger than the one she had, and so much bigger than Graham’s. His car had a tiny steering wheel. And it had tiny seats too. Rich people all had tiny things.

  The bus driver though had a wheel as big as a dinner table and his seat, it was just as big too and it was decorated in these wooden balls that didn’t at all look comfortable if you had to sit on them all day long.

  The other people, though, they didn’t look like they were having much fun. They were all scrunched up against each other, the ones who were standing in the aisles. And they all had their hands full, carrying big bags full of cheap things that they had bought downtown and were bringing home or maybe going to try and sell for a little bit more than what they had paid in the first place.

  Poor people never looked happy. They always had worried looks on their faces like if they had a smile or if they looked like they were having fun; their bank manager might come along and take that away from them too. Even on something as much fun as a bus ride, poor people couldn’t help but look poor and act poorly. Their faces looked as sad and wrinkled and as unimpressed as Linda’s old work shoes, the ones with the cracked leather that smelt really bad and she’d been meaning to throw away but that she hadn’t gotten round to doing just yet.

  Their faces all looked just like those shoes as if God had been using their faces to walk around in all the dirty and gravely parts of the world, in the places that it wasn’t a bother to scuff. And their faces were the kind of shoes that God would take off without using his hands and the hunches in their backs and the wrinkles on their faces and on their arms and knees, that was from the cupboard where God kicked them under when he didn’t need them anymore.

  Rich people, though, their faces were more like god’s slippers that he wore when he was in his rocking chair, in front of a fire, and having his supper prepared by Mrs. God or by one of Santa’s elves.

  Linda giggled profusely as the bus rattled and she jumped up and down on he
r seat. And one of the bumps was so big and so jumpy that she almost flew straight out of the seat and onto the person in front of her.

  “Yay,” she shouted, the only word that came to her mind that came close to expressing how she felt.

  Linda had never ridden a rollercoaster or a bumper car or even been on the ghost train, never. So she didn’t know what other people said when they were being thrown around and having this much fun.

  A little boy waved at Linda. He was maybe about the little girl’s age, the one who lived in 9A. The boy didn’t look as cute as she looked, not because he was ugly or anything, just because his mum and dad were poor and they didn’t really dress him in any color or anything. He looked like a picture of a rainbow that someone had printed in greyscale. And he probably didn’t go to a good school either.

  Still, aside from looking and being poor, he looked like he was having almost as much fun as Linda, almost, not completely. He was bouncing around too on his seat, sitting between his mum and his dad, and he had a smile on his face. It wasn’t a big smile, not like Linda’s. Probably he didn’t smile all that much, so he wasn’t really all that good at it.

  “This is so fun” Linda shouted to the boy, gripping the hand rest with both hands now as the big plastic bag flew up and down, hitting against her knee, with each bump and each rise and fall of her bum from the seat.

  “What’s your name?” she said.

  The boy’s mother moved the boy, so he was sitting between her and the window. He stopped smiling straight away and stared out of the window at all the shops zipping by. His mother slapped him across the back of his head twice and she said something into his ear and it mustn’t have been nice because he made a pouty face and he definitely wasn’t smiling anymore, his face was all scrunched up and it looked just like everyone else’s, just like the cracked leather on the shoe that Linda hadn’t gotten around to doing away with.

  The mother stared at Linda. She gave her the kind of look that said “How dare you tease him with something he can never have.” It was the kind of look that mothers gave to their children when they teased animals in the zoo with food that the animals would never be able to have. And that would make the animals really sad. And then that would make the mothers really mad. And she would give that kind of look. And then that would make the little kid really sad. And the mother would throw the ice-cream or the bubblegum in the bin. And then the little kid and the gorilla, they would both be really sad and they’d both want to go home.

  The boy’s father didn’t really seem to care all that much; by the smile on his son’s face or the fact that his wife had just wiped it clean, by the happy lady beside him being all weird and probably dangerous in public, or by the little bug that was crawling up the side of his neck, slowly making its way towards his ear. He just stared out through the front window as if nothing bothered him at all as if none of it mattered.

  The mother gave Linda another look, one that said, “You don’t belong here” and “I’m watching you.” She wrapped her arms around her son, kissing the top of his head, where she had slapped him, to get that stupid smile off his face. She whispered something into his ear again and it might have been something nice, it might have been her way of saying “I love you” and “I’m just trying to protect you” but the boy didn’t really change the way he looked. He still had the same broken leathered expression. It didn’t get any better and it didn’t get any worse. It kind of stayed the same, like his dad.

  Linda turned back to the seat in front of her and though she felt the scolding and unwelcome stare of everyone around her, she still couldn’t pull herself away from how much fun she was having and even if she wasn’t allowed to speak to another kid or even if she couldn’t shout “Yay” out really loud, that wasn’t going to stop her from having fun. She ignored the stupid boring poor people and their stupid boring disappointed frowns and instead, she gripped onto the hand rest and she bounced around and every time her plastic bag banged against her knee, she clenched her teeth and widened her mouth maddeningly, so as not to let her happiness escape, and she shouted “Yippee, hurray!” in her mind, so all the boring people wouldn’t give her that kind of look, and make her feel just as sad and disappointed as they did.

  When she arrived at her apartment, The Porter gave her a funny look. Linda pressed the bell and it made a ding a ling sound and she got real mad when The Porter answered and he said, “Yeah, what do you want?”

  “Don’t you know who I am, donkey?” she shouted.

  The Porter didn’t know who she was. In truth, he hadn’t even pulled away from his pornographic magazine. It was just how he responded to anyone that rang the bell, anyone that wasn’t a teenage girl that is. Linda didn’t know that that was just how he spoke to everyone and The Porter; he didn’t know that that was Linda.

  “It’s me you stupid donkey. Linda. Apartment 9B. Let me in now” she yelled.

  As if caught pissing in a fountain, The Porter jumped in his seat and his pornographic magazine fell on the ground. This would make him really mad later on, on account of how dirty the floor was and how it would end up dirtying his favorite dirty picture.

  “I’m sorry Mrs. Linda. I didn’t know it was you. You no drive car today? But I see you in car, this morning? Yes? No?”

  “It’s none of your business,” shouted Linda into the intercom.

  Linda hated his kind of people. They were so rude and so intrusive. They always wanted to know things that weren’t any of their business, so they could gossip about it in their lunch rooms and on their stupid busses, where nobody ever wanted to have any fun at all. Stupid donkeys. She hated his kind of people too because they were prejudice. And they were small minded and they were racist and they were all the same. They were stupid were stupid donkeys and they should all go back to where they’re from. She hated them so much, his kind.

  “Thank you,” she said smiling as the door clicked open.

  It was a really heavy door. Linda had never imagined that it was this heavy. She had driven past it every day, but she had never imagined what it was like to actually open and close it. Only servants and pizza delivery people ever opened or closed these kinds of doors. And they were probably used to it, on account of them being a lot like prison doors. Not that every poor person has been in prison but most probably have a relative or a father in prison and they probably visit them on their birthdays or at Christmas and the doors would be just as heavy for the visitors as they would for the prisoners themselves.

  The gate clanged as it closed and Linda flinched, feeling for the first time that her home was somewhere that she didn’t feel safe. As she walked along the stone path towards the front door, a path that she had never walked on before, not since it was laid three years ago and everyone from the building went down, just to step on it and see what it was like before they went back to using the service entrance.

  Beside her, sitting on the grass and crying kind of loud was a man in beige overalls. He was acting kind of strange, sticking his face into a jar of coffee and sniffing really long and loud, like someone with a blocked nose would, when they’re just trying to keep alive. Then, after he breathed in the coffee, he put his cupped hand up to his nose and he breathed in just as heavy. And he closed his eyes and he leaned his back as if that would make his breathe in deeper and heavier.

  And when he pulled his hand away, Linda could see that he was clenching his eyes real tight like she used to do when she imagined herself in Disney Land and Graham touched his willy. It looked like he was really trying to imagine something but the way his nose scrunched up and the way his face looked, it looked like whatever he wanted to imagine, he couldn’t. And he looked just the way Linda used to look when her eyes were shut real tight and while she was trying to imagine Mickey Mouse, Graham would touch her leg or call her his whore. She guessed that whatever he was thinking of, it wasn’t Mickey Mouse.

  The Gardner opened his eyes and his lips started to tremble and his face crinkle dup, like a littl
e boy who had just been told ‘no’. Then he buried his ace back into the jar of coffee and again into his cupped hand. And again, he closed his eyes real tight. And again he looked just as Linda had many times found herself looking. And again he opened them. And he did this over and over again. And each time he cried a little more and he didn’t even seem bothered by the fact that Linda was watching. He didn’t even notice that she was there and that she was cupping her own hand every time and holding it over her own nose and breathing deeply. And though she wasn’t crying and wiping away red teary eyes, but she did feel sad. Not for herself, but for him.

  Linda had never seen him before. He didn’t live in the apartment. She knew that because she had never seen him at any of the condominium meetings. She’d never really been home at this time of the day, though. She’d never been home at this time of the day ever. She’d never been fired from her job and had her car taken away so….

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, approaching the young man.

  He mightn’t have been young. He might have been older or old even, but he looked young and he sounded young too, in the way that he cried.

  “It’s nothing,” he said.

  “It’s not nothing,” Linda said. “It’s no good being sad and being a liar, just because you don’t want to talk about it. You could just have said that you know. It’s none of your nosiness. You could have said that. Course it wouldn’t have been very nice. Did something happen to make you sad?”

  The Gardener lifted his face from his hands. His eyes were all red and watery. It looked like he had been crying for a good time, time enough for most of the day to go by and for most of his job to still not be anywhere near done.

  “My day is pretty bad too. Normally I drive” she said.

  The Gardner looked at Linda, his tears desiccating in the desert of her honest address. “I can’t smell the grass anymore,” he said, opening his fingers and letting a handful of fresh trimmings fall to the floor. “And I got nothing now. There aint nothing to live for.”

  Linda heard every word and she knew the meaning of each one. But lined up, side by side, she had no idea what he was talking about. It was as if his words were a deck of cards and though she knew the look and color of each one, without her knowing someone had changed the game completely and with it, what each card meant. And now she didn’t know if she was winning or losing. All she could do was tilt her head, nod and smile politely, like the way people did when they said “Mmmm, delicious” and all they really wanted to do was spit out whatever disgusting sauce was in their mouth and say “Christ, what the fuck was that?”

  “Do you like to cut the grass?” Linda asked.

  “If I can’t smell it then what’s the point?”

  “You work just to smell the grass?”

  “Of course. What other reason is there?”

  “Money,” Linda said.

  “Money’s not a reason,” said The Gardener. “Money’s like herpes. You only really find out you have it the second you give it to someone else.”

  Linda smiled, as if she understood, or had gotten herpes.

  “The road to poverty is spoiled with riches.”

  Linda smiled again, thinking of a rocky road with trees that had diamonds for flowers and little colored butterflies that sprinkled gold dust on people’s shoulders when they stopped to count their money.

  “If you don’t want money then why do you work?”

  “What was the best day of your life?”

  “The day before yesterday,” she said. “It was my birthday.”

  It wasn’t though, not the best day of her life. She only said that because she didn’t talk much to other people, she didn’t really get much of a chance. When she did though, she always felt pressured to say something fast, like when she went into a cake store and the counter was right at the entrance and that would catch her by surprise only slightly less than the attendant who was right there, standing over the cakes she didn’t’ like and wearing a look on her face as if Linda only had seconds to choose before she was being rude and wouldn’t be allowed to come back again. And at the cake shop, she always chose the first cake she could see which was always the cake right below the attendant’s pointy chin and it was always the cake the only grandmothers liked to eat, the one that tasted like licking the back of a battery.

  And this, talking to The Gardener, felt pretty much like that. The day before yesterday wasn’t so great. Ok, she swam good, true. And she did manage to keep her face under the water for longer than she ever had before. But it was her birthday, and nobody gave a shit. She just sat there eating that god awful cake by herself while trying to make sense of an eviction notice. That wasn’t the best day.

  Really, the best day was when she was nine. It was the first time she had ever been on a train, especially one of the new electric ones that took people to and from the city. Her aunty took her on a ride, just for the fun of it. She wasn’t her real aunty. It was just what they called the carers back then.

  If she thought of it now, she would definitely remember how fast the train was, watching from the edge of the track as it appeared out of nowhere, looking so small at first and then growing up so big and moving so fast as it neared the station. At the clinic, Linda heard people talk that way all the time about their children; that they grow up so fast.

  Watching the train arrive, though, that wasn’t the best part. The best part was pressing the white button and hearing the doors swish as they opened, like in the movies, and then walking on, holding onto her auntie’s hand real tight so that she wouldn’t fall into the space between the train and the end of the platform. It was really scary but worth it, though when she was on and safe.

  Then came the best parts; the dinging sound as the driver warned that the doors were about to close, then the swishing sound as they did and then the people running really fast to try and get on board, even though the doors had already closed and the funny faces they made, when they cursed out loud and made themselves seem really mad and fierce like a bear or something, so people didn’t laugh at them, on account of how silly they looked, making such a big scene.

  The best part though was sitting in her chair and looking straight ahead, through the doors into the next carriage. She could see almost into every carriage, even the first one. And when they turned left or right - looking through the clear doors into every other carriage - it looked like the train was about to derail. It was so exciting. Nobody else seemed to notice, though. They were all staring out the window or at their shoes, trying their hardest not to have to look at the person who was sitting right in front of them, they too, hoping they didn’t have to look at anyone else.

  When they got back to the station, her aunty gave her an ice-cream and let her lick the whole thing while they waited for one of the nurses to come and collect them. And her aunty, she told her not to tell any of the other children, which was definitely the best part.

  But The Gardener, he kind of made Linda feel like the lady at the cake shop. She didn’t think anyone else would give her the time to think about all the things she had done in her life and then to pick just one to talk about. Most people, though, were so good at talking to other people, they had done it so much every day of their lives that they didn’t need much time to think about stuff. They always knew exactly what they wanted to say. Just like in cake shops, those people didn’t look nervous or antsy, like they really had to pee because, even though they just walked in the door, they were so good at buying cakes for all the parties they had had and all the parties they had been invited to, that they always knew exactly what they wanted. And they probably never ended up picking the cake that tasted like licking the back of a battery.

  “The best day of my life was on my ninth birthday. Mum and dad were still together. Dad hadn’t gotten that promotion yet and he wasn’t cheating on mum, at least, not that we knew. It was the last day I saw my best friend before his parents moved them back to Lebanon. We played armies in the grass all day lo
ng and later after I blew out the candles on my cake, my folks gave me my present. It was a black puppy. I wanted to name him Ahmel, after my friend. They said it was a wonderful name but the next day, they made me change it to Rover. Dad had mowed the lawn that afternoon, just before the party. I didn’t really think too much about the smell back then, I was having too much fun with my best friend. But after he went away, and after mum and dad split, I didn’t really have much of anything. And it was pretty lonely, except every now and then, when mum would get someone in to do the lawn and trim up the hedges. It was nice you know, to be able to go back there, to that day. And now” he said, his silence hinting towards the few green flakes caught between his fingers and in the grooves on the palm of his right hand.

  “I got fired today,” said Linda, sitting beside The Gardener and staring straight ahead, at the vines that were all overgrown and still hadn’t been trimmed properly. “And I got told to move out. And I don’t know how to find somewhere else to live. I don’t know who to call. Graham did everything for me. But he stopped and now I don’t know what to do. So I have no job and I have nowhere to live. And I watched a television show last night, the one where they break down the door and shout ‘FBI, freeze.’”

  “Yeah I know the one. I watched it too.”

  “I think the bad man on that show, the one they had to shoot because was trying to hurt that girl, I think that’s Graham because he used to do some of those things to me. And I always thought it was because he liked me, like mums and dads, but now I’m not sure. Some of the things he did, they really hurt and called me some not nice names too. He told me today that he doesn’t want to see me anymore. And he took his car that he gave me and he took back his apartment as well. And he made me have to quit my job too. And I don’t think he really liked me, not like he said he did. You know he never even bought me chocolate on my birthday?”

  “That’s fucked up,” said The Gardener.

  “I know,” Linda said. “He’s knows as well, that I really like 80% cocoa.”

  “What? He raped you? Yeah?”

  “What’s that?”

  “He made you do things yeah? Things you didn’t want to do?”

  The Gardener was manic. His face was all red and his eyes were bulging out of his head. They were only like that though because of the way he felt; which was a mix of consideration and vengeful rage. He voice, it whistled when he spoke, kind of like a bomb, dropping over its target. And his face got rounder as he shouted about how someone had to do something. He looked like an elephant that was about to charge a group of stupid tourists. His hands, though, were completely calm and they were anchored to Linda’s. Her aunty used to hold her the same way when she wanted to know where Linda had hidden the keys to the pantry.

  “What’s his name? Where does he live? Have you got his address?”

  The Gardener was asking so many questions, Linda coupled barely keep up with the first. She noticed, as she answered each question one by one, that The Gardener wasn’t crying anymore and he wasn’t holding onto those little bits of grass anymore, as if they weren’t half as important as knowing all about Graham and what time he normally left the clinic and whether he’d be alone or not and if he kept a gun in his glove box, which he didn’t.

  “Did you see there is a party tonight? Here in the games room. I bet lots of people are invited” Linda asked.

  The Gardner was looking at her and at the same time, he was looking right through her. He didn’t even see her lips move because he was looking at a piece of brick on the wall that was showing, behind Linda’s head, from where the beige cement rendering had broken away.

  “I bet there’s cake too,” Linda said to herself, The Gardener having up and left ll of his tools and contraptions behind, taking only a set of sheers and some cable ties.