Kho 1

He was sitting facing the rear.  He was staring into the panel of the rearward Plexiglas window.  In the black of the evening outside people were reflected behind him.  Two old women sitting side by side, and - about seven feet - three seats - back - a young girl staring vacantly at the ceiling.  On a side seat sat a student-type with a rucksack.  Beyond the glass there was an identical vehicle following close on, shadowing, as if it were a kind of memory of the first in which he sat, collected with the luggage of his journey and on his way to his new home.  The driver was visible through the screen’s oblate facade, moustached, carefully turning the wheel to and fro.  He had his lower lip pressed against his upper; reminding the passenger of a photo of himself taken some years before,  his expression disconsolate, the cheeks beetroot red, the lips down-turned.  He watched the driver, wondering if he were being ignored deliberately out of nerves, or if he couldn’t in fact be seen.  The window behind which the driver performed his fixed manoeuvres was itself a reflection of the vehicle in front of it, where he was sitting, and there too was the unreeling passage of the road and trees passing shown as on a river; the tarmac turned into a liquid, the white and yellow lines of its surface like logs, artificial, abstract; miraculously swept into an upwards stream.

Tags: The Passenger