Sydneysiders

It is on the buses of Sydney that I get to know the Sydneysiders. Most of the time, when not on a bus, I only see a rarefied circle of people, none of whom were born in Sydney: my neighbour, the Canadian who lives downstairs, with the fish; the Macedonian dentist, who, as Toby told the hairdresser, lives behind the stone at the bottom of the garden; and the swimming pool mums, some from Melbourne, a lot from England, but none from Sydney. We stand on the poolside, watching our kids flailing up-and-down with purple noodles, speculating on where all the born Sydneysiders are.

I might know one born Sydneysider. She is one of the women from the aspiring novelists’ support group. She claims to have been the first woman to wear slacks at Sydney University back in the 1950s.

We, the aspiring novelists, are now a community group, and as a result can hold our meetings in the meeting room at Newtown Neighbourhood Centre; we are booked in after Narcotics Anonymous. The neighbourhood centre does not have quite the same ambiance as Madame Fling Flong’s cocktail lounge, our previous meeting venue, but the meetings are now cheaper, and, in the toilet at the neighbourhood centre, there is a yellow box in which to deposit our used syringes; Madam Fling Flong’s lacked this facility.

So, on Sunday, after several hours of sitting in the library, honing, editing and scrutinizing 1327 words for hackneyed phrases and old clichés, I rode the bus down to Newtown, multitasking: listening to the voices of Sydney while transporting my 1327 words to the aspiring novelists’ support group. The bus was almost empty. I eavesdropped with ease on the conversation between the driver and a lady passenger.

“So what do you do when you’re not working?” asked the driver leaning out of his seat to look at the woman as he stopped the bus in front of Coles at Neutral Bay.

“Shopping, I clean the house, go to church...”

“You go to church?”

“Not so much now that I’ve moved.”

“Do you go to parties?” asked the driver as the bus glided over the Harbour Bridge.

“No.” The woman laughed. The bus pulled up outside Wynyard station.

“Me neither. You should go on holiday. I go on holiday every three or four months,” said the driver as the bus lurched down York Street. “I just tell them that I am going away; they always say that they can’t guarantee that the job will be here when I get back, but it always is. I ring up, say I’m back, and they say, ‘ok, you can start tomorrow.’” The bus stopped, some people got out. “You have to take the time off in this job. I was supposed to have today off, but they called me in. Double pay, extra this, extra that they offer when they ring you up on your day off, and if you still say no, they beg you: ‘The passengers are out there, waiting for a driver, what am I going to do?’ And sometimes I agree to work, and sometimes I don’t.” The bus stopped at traffic lights, and I stared at the statue of Queen Victoria on her throne above the Sunday traffic, thinking how enormous she looked for such a tiny woman. “In five years on this job, I’ve never crashed. There are people who crash every week, they’re the worse, usually foreigners,” continued the driver. As he turned the bus into George Street, he turned once more to the lady: “You should go on holiday to one of those Greek Islands.”

“No, I could never afford it,” said the woman, getting off the bus at Railway Square. I got off too.

At Newtown Neighbourhood Centre, the fan whirring, Mardi Gras rehearsals going on above, I read out my 1327 words, used the toilet, but not the syringe-disposal unit, and then I took the bus back home.