Spring Meadows And Cinnamon

The top deck is full, as usual for this time of day. I’ve seen several fellow passengers on the same journey most working days for the past 32 years. A couple of them I can say ‘good morning’ to, but I’ve never had a real conversation with any of them.

The windows are opaque with condensation, though some have wiped a spy-hole in theirs to observe the rain streaming down the glass and attacking the pedestrians on the pavement; we can hear it pounding on the roof when the bus makes a stop. After completing a once-over of my neighbours, I wipe the window next to me with the sleeve of my jacket.

I got caught in the rain on the way to the bus-stop, and of course – sod’s law – I didn’t have my umbrella with me. After weatherman Michael Fish’s reassurance, back in 1987, that we needn’t worry – that there would be no hurricane coming our way any time soon – I should have learned to be sceptical of the BBC’s weather forecasts, but I’m a very slow learner. They’ve got better, sure, what with the new technologies and all, but they’re by no means infallible, as this morning has proved.

School was cancelled the day after the hurricane, which would have been a bonus but for the fact that I’d miss seeing Fay, who took the same bus in the mornings. She was in the year above me, so I knew her only from the journey to school, breaks, and the canteen at lunch-time.

There was a certain haughtiness about Fay that sometimes comes with beauty. Her hair was almost black, long, straight. Her skin tanned in the summer – freckling around her nose. She had delicate lips which, when I caught a very rare smile if she were sitting near me at lunch, revealed white but slightly uneven teeth – though to my mind they were perfect – and a dimple in just one cheek. But her most striking feature was her eyes – an exquisite green that changed shade with the light, watching everything, almost always inscrutable.

I remember one rainy day when I also didn’t have an umbrella – because to carry one would have brought ridicule from my peers. My shoes were soaked, and just as today I could feel the water seeping through my socks. I worried that I’d be spending the day with damp feet, and wondered whether that would bring on one of my colds, which I caught and still catch easily. I popped a cough sweet into my mouth and I do the same now. The strong menthol is refreshing on my tongue and opens up my nasal passages, letting the not-unpleasant aroma of damp clothes – mine and my neighbours’ – flood in.

Fay used to get on a couple of stops after mine. The top deck was practically full that day. I saw her coming down the aisle, rocking a little with the motion of the bus, and realised when she was halfway along that she was heading for the seat next to me, the only one free at the back.

Then she sat, nudging me over a little and inadvertently sending some drops of water my way from her hair. I don’t think I breathed once after that, unless it was to inhale her: a blend of whatever perfume she wore and her natural scent, a fragrance redolent of spring meadows and cinnamon – exquisite, light notes lying on the thick, ambient dampness.

We didn’t speak – I because it would have been a first, and I knew that my words would get mangled as soon as they reached my mouth; she (I imagined) because of her haughtiness. And so we rode on to our destination … and I fell in love there and then, intoxicated by meadows, cinnamon, and my proximity to perfection.

It was that kind of adolescent love that has little rhyme or reason, apart from the action of powerful impression upon the hopelessly impressionable. I never knew what kind of person Fay really was – she might have been an angel, smart, funny, or none of those things – because I didn’t speak to her, that day or ever again. I thought about it a lot and planned shaky gambits to accidentally-on-purpose bump into her and remark on the weather, or the teachers, or her shoes, but the plans never came to fruition and a few weeks later she was gone. I hadn’t seen her for days and nonchalantly asked around, only to discover, to my horror, that her family had moved out of the area.

And now I’m reminded of the film ‘Citizen Kane’, with old Mr Bernstein reminiscing about the young woman in a white dress, carrying a white parasol, that he spotted getting off a ferry once in his youth. He saw her for only a second, he says, and she didn’t see him at all, but he muses on how a month hasn’t gone by since that he hasn’t thought of her.

Fay is my woman in a white dress with a white parasol; I think and dream about her often. Perhaps it’s because of the absence of other significant women in my life, but who knows which is the cause and which the effect. All I know is that the day on the bus – and another moment a week or so later – are etched into my memory and onto my heart as if with a razor-sharp tool.

The other moment came in the canteen. I was with my friend John, chatting about football most probably. I saw him look over my shoulder and gape slightly. An instant later I found out why: Fay passed our table with her lunch tray, and as she walked away, she turned and looked back at me – me! – then smiled, and the smile was in those sublime eyes, too.

After she moved, the rest of my time at school was a barren emotional desert but for the cacti of hurt I brushed up against on a daily basis, whenever I remembered that smile and the many (at least perceived) missed opportunities.

While the cacti have thinned out, I still encounter them occasionally, like this morning as I trundle towards another grey day at my desk, thinking of what might have been.

Then I realise why my mind must be drifting back to those times: spring meadows and cinnamon! I crane and jerk my head to the front, side and behind me to find her because I know it’s her; that scent is unmistakeable. The people in front are a mixture of men and youngsters on their way to school. I look towards the back. More of the same, a couple of old ladies, and some tourists. I gasp in exasperation but settle when I realise the truth. It’s the other way round: sensing her in the moment can only be down to wishful thinking, prompted by my reminiscences.

And so I return to the now, still with a trace of that imagined scent in my nostrils. I have to wipe my window again to check where we are and see that my stop’s up next.

I shift in my seat, getting the man beside me to give me room to pass. I’m up and ready to move to the stairs when I see her; she’s been sitting directly behind me, in my blind-spot. Our looks meet and she smiles – in recognition perhaps? – with her uneven teeth, the dimple in her cheek, and those eyes.

She gets up too; I let her pass and gulp in her scent as she does. I feverishly rack my brains for a pretext to approach her, wishing I had an umbrella to share. I'm determined not to miss the opportunity this time, though, whatever the outcome.

And I follow her down the aisle towards the torrential rain outside, which I can hear pounding on the roof again as the bus slows.

Or maybe that's just my heart.