Inside Susan

Susan catches the bus into town at 10:30am and sits on the back seat. She looks at the man in front's head and thinks how his fat, wrinkled neck looks like a large carrot sticking out from the collar of his shirt. She adds up the numbers on her bus ticket to see if they make 21 - but they don't. Maybe she shouldn't bother going to school at all then. Her friends will be in the yard with their arms folded on the chests, pushing up their breasts to try and make them look bigger, while the boys will be too busy playing football to notice

The bus is waiting on the High Street when it suddenly begins to rain torrentially and it sounds like someone has emptied about a million packets of dried peas onto the roof of the bus. "What if it just keeps raining?", she thinks to herself. "And it was just like being in an aquarium except it was all shoppers and office workers that were floating past the windows instead of fish." She's still thinking about this as the bus goes past Caroline Lee's house, where there was a party last week. There were some German exchange students over who were very immature. They ended up jumping out of the bedroom window. One of them tried to get her to kiss him on the stairs - so she kicked him. Later she was sick because she'd drunk too much cider. Caroline was drunk as well, she was pretending that she was married to a tall boy in glasses, and she had to wear a polo neck for three days afterwards to cover up the lovebite on her neck

By now the bus is going past the markets. Outside is a man who spends all day forcing felt-tip pens into people's hands and then trying to make them pay for them. She used to work in a pet shop there, but she got sacked for talking to boys when she was supposed to be working. She wasn't too bothered though: she hated the smell of the rabbits anyway

"Maybe this bus won't stop", she thinks, "and I'll stay on it until I'm old enough to go into pubs on my own, and it'll drive me to a town where people with black hair are treated specially, and I can make lots of money from charging fat old men five pounds a time to look up my skirt, and they'll be queuing up to take me out to dinner."

I suppose you think she's just a silly girl with stupid ideas, but remember her in those days. They talk about people with a fire within and all that stuff. Well, she had that alright - it's just that nobody dared to jump into her fire and risk being consumed. Instead they put her in a corner and let her heat up the room, warming their hands and backsides in front of her, and then slagging her off around town

No-one ever really got inside Susan, and, and she always ended up getting off the bus, at the terminus, and then walking home