A Sign Of Things Not To Come

A story about somebody looking for a sign… I got a sign once. Wasn’t looking for it, but got it nonetheless - and it wasn’t a good one. It meant that I had blown my chances. Allow me to tell you my story.

First of all, I’m a bus driver. To make things worse, in Belgium. Ever heard of it? Think Trump. Think hellhole.

I was in my mid-thirties when I met this girl. She was a regular on one of the lines I recurrently drove. She was in her early twenties with short blonde hair and a nice body. Sadly enough, I never learned her name. Sadly enough, I never worked up the courage to ask her for her name. It’s not that there never was an opportunity to do so - Line 26 is very calm once rush hour has passed - or that I’m too shy to talk to women. I’ll get to the part that made me reluctant to ask her in a moment.

The reason why I kept bouncing back and forth anyway between asking and not asking her name, between inviting her to go to the movies with me or not, was that she freely engaged in conversation with me. Not something I was used to in those days, being a short, bespectacled, slightly overweight, nerdish looking kind of guy at the time. I figure I gained her respect because the first or second time she got on my bus I had to ‘lay down the law’. I had come to a stop at a traffic light and she wanted to exit. The official bus stop was about fifty meters further on and the place she worked at, was right across from those traffic lights. Her reason to ask me was very understandable: it was pouring rain. Cats and dogs stuff, you know. So it would’ve made the difference between arriving wet and arriving soaking wet at her workplace.

But however much I sympathized with her, we are only allowed to let passengers off the bus at official bus stops. Should something happen to a customer exiting when we open the doors anywhere else, there are insurance issues. And the driver would be screwed… It was even doubly dangerous in this case because on the right side of my vehicle, there was an auxiliary lane for drivers wanting to make a right turn.

So I explained to her that I couldn’t do as she wanted. To my relief, she didn’t get mad, didn’t call me a jackass or anything.

A couple of weeks later, I was driving the same line again, number 26. It’s a short line, only about 20 kilometers, running between a little community called Oreye and a mid-sized town that goes by the name of Sint-Truiden. The former is in the French-speaking part of Belgium, the latter in the Dutch-speaking part.

Typically, we make three or four runs between Sint-Truiden and Oreye before switching to another line.

At 7 p.m., her usual time to board, the girl got on at Oreye. But whereas on other occasions she’d pay for the ride and take a seat without saying too much, on this day, she greeted me very friendly. ‘Bonjour, comment ça va?’ - Hello, how are you? - she only spoke French, I learned. Being on the linguistic borderline, we get a fair amount of passengers that only speak French. She sat down on the first seat on my right side and started chatting. I got intrigued by her accent. It didn’t sound as if French was her mother tongue. Turns out it was. The problem was my limited knowledge of the language. I speak it well enough to converse with somebody, but I’m not an expert in accents and dialects. She was French Canadian. From Quebec to be more precise. Naturally, I was intrigued. What was it that made a young woman leave such a fascinating country?

The weather, she said. Way too cold in winter.

My first thought was: why did you stop in Belgium then? Why didn’t you move to sunny Spain, for example? Belgium isn’t exactly known for its great weather, you know. And what she did for a living, she could do anywhere. So I gathered that there were other reasons. Family-related, maybe? But I didn’t get into it. You’ll understand why in a little bit.

Her being from Quebec reminded me of my one-minute encounter with a bunch of Canadians in Kayseri, a town in Cappadocia, Turkey. I was on vacation there and stayed in a bed and breakfast - this was in 1991. On the morning I left, I heard them talking on the patio. They were having breakfast and one of them was telling the others that there’s a difference in expressions they use in French and Canadian French. ‘For example,’ he said, ‘when they want to say “I’m fed up with something”, they say “Je suis tanné” in Canada. In France, they say something else, but I don’t remember what.’ So I stepped in to help him out. ‘In France, they say “J’en ai marre”.’ 

The guy thanked me and, six years later, the eyes of my lady passenger from Quebec lit up when I told this story. When I came to the part where the guy used the Canadian French expression, she all but shouted “Je suis tanné!” When she got off the bus, she seemed to have grown a couple of inches. Like what I told her took her home again, even if it was for the briefest moment.

And I guess she could use moments like that, in light of what she did for a living. You see, no to put too fine a point on it, she was a whore. She worked in a brothel along a stretch of road that’s called, sarcastically, the Chaussée d’Amour - the Love Boulevard - a stretch of road with about fifty brothels alongside it. Euphemistically, they are called “bars” and they’re always looking for “waitresses”. Girls put themselves on display behind big windows and try to lure men in by dancing seductively in skimpy outfits under bright lights. Red, green, yellow, blue. In the evening, it’s a colorful stretch of road, to say the least, with a steady procession of cars driven by horny men checking out the merchandise and bargaining over the price. 

Over here, prostitution is not illegal. I use this turn of phrase on purpose because the girls and women that earn a living through prostitution don’t have any kind of social security or health insurance or anything. But they do have to pay taxes. Go figure. Luckily, there’s some movement toward recognizing what they do as a legitimate occupation - that they are sex workers.

As you may surmise, I’m not per se against what they do. They don’t force men to enter their dens of sin and pay for their services. And what they do, doesn’t make them automatically bad people. 

But, admittedly, it was kind of a shock the first time I saw her in the display window of her bar in a little tank top and Daisy Dukes. This was on the way back to Oreye after I had picked her up there for the first time about an hour earlier. When she got on the bus, she had been wearing regular jeans, a T-shirt and a jeans jacket, and very little in the way of make-up. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing that made you suspect that she was a prostitute. Her face wasn’t even that beautiful. Not ugly, God no, far from that, but on the Boulevard there were much prettier girls. For me though, there’s a big difference between a beautiful girl and an attractive one. And, oh boy, did I get attracted to her. In part, because I liked our conversations - just day-to-day stuff; in part because of what she did for a living - I’ve always been fascinated by women that throw their respectability out the window by having sex in exchange for money. How do they do that? What goes on between their ears? What does it take to turn a regular girl into a prostitute or a performer in porn movies? 

What turned my fascination into infatuation was the fact that she never came onto me. She came close once though. She got off my bus, opened her mouth to say something right before I closed the door, and then reconsidered. I’m pretty sure she had wanted to ask me something along the lines of ‘Don’t you want to stop by one day?’ Already being smitten by this Québecois, I took the fact that she exercised restraint as a sign that she didn’t see me a walking paycheck, as real whores probably would have. You may have a hard time following my logic, but at that moment, she proved to me that she wasn’t a real whore, even though she accepted money from men to fuck her.

In the days and weeks that followed there was a struggle in me. Should I ask her if she’d go on a date with me? Provided that she wasn’t in any kind of relationship. But, suppose she accepted and we hit it off for real, what then? If I got involved with her, what would people say? My family? Friends? And let’s not forget my macho co-workers, three-quarters of whom couldn’t resist making derogatory remarks about the girls working on the Love Boulevard. Would I be strong enough to stand up to them?

The next few times I saw her, I didn’t dare say anything that would make her think I was interested in her, didn’t dare ask her for her name, didn’t dare ask her out. But every time I saw her in the window of the brothel, my heart skipped a beat. I couldn’t stop thinking about her, fantasizing about her. So I came to a decision: the next time I drove her, I’d ask her. I’d gather my courage and just go for it. Like I already said, Line 26 was very calm in the evening, so there would be time and opportunity to do so.

Then, the inevitable happened: I dreamed about her. It was the night before I had to ensure the shift that would make me her driver when she went to work. I dreamed I was driving my bus along Love Boulevard. I was approaching the bar where she worked. And at the moment I saw her - she had her hands against the windowpane, fingers splayed, and looked right at me - there was the sound of shattering glass. I woke up, startled. Had the sound been real or part of my dream? I couldn’t be sure. I had a cat at the time and maybe it had been feeling playful and knocked something over? So I got out of bed and went into my living room to check. At first glance, I didn’t see anything wrong - it was the middle of the night after all and I didn’t feel like looking too closely, you know. If it had knocked anything over, the glass would still be there in the morning when I was not feeling sleepy anymore. I went back to bed and slept until nine or so - my shift started at two o’clock in the afternoon.

Of course, I remembered the dream when I got out of bed. I took a shower, ate breakfast, and with a cup of hot coffee in my belly, I started searching for broken glass, mainly in my living room - I was living in a one-bedroom apartment at the time. All of a sudden, I noticed that a picture, depicting a Greek mythological scene, wasn’t where it should have been. It should have been hanging over my desk where my computer was. Its spot on the wall was empty. So I looked underneath my desk, which stood a couple of inches from the wall to allow for the multitude of cables that comes with computers, monitors, and peripheral devices to connect to the outlet. And sure enough, there it was, lying on the floor, its glass frame in pieces.

I put the picture back on my desk and picked up the shards. I couldn’t believe that I had been dreaming about “my” girl behind her window, trying to lure men in, when that picture decided it was time to take a nosedive. Why had it fallen at that exact same moment? It had been hanging on that same wall, on the same nail, for years. So why drop now?

I went to work later that day. Around seven, I was at the bus stop in Oreye. She wasn’t there. And she wasn’t there the next time. Or the time after that. As a matter of fact, I never saw her again.

So, was the picture falling a sign? Fate’s way of telling me I hesitated too long to ask her on a date? Telling me I blew it?

To this day, roughly twenty-five years later, I keep wondering what happened to her, especially when I pass the bar where she worked. Where did she go? I keep wondering what would have happened if I had had the guts to say “screw everybody” and asked her out? Would we have gotten together? Would we have been able to make it work?

I hope she’s happy and doing well. I hope she thinks of me once in a while, the nerdy little bus driver that managed to make her laugh on a couple of occasions; that genuinely seemed to like her, in spite of what she did for a living in those days. And, who knows? Maybe she learned English in the meantime and reads this story. Wouldn’t it be something if she recognized herself and decided to get in touch with me? Come on, Reedsy, help me if this were to happen…