Jennifer barely tapped her smartcard on the beeping device before she found herself pushed roughly inside. She felt only faint air-conditioning; she saw people already standing, but looked around for seats anyway. There were none. A couple of frumpy older women stood blocking her entrance to the rear, their arms clinging onto a vertical grab bar by the backdoor. The blue-green of their taut nerves surfaced under their thin skin, but the women held on - like stubborn tentacles stuck to the steel rod.
Someone behind her gave a shout - Jennifer knew it was the driver - and with effort the two sour-looking women pulled away and slid slowly forward. Jennifer followed, and reached the rear just as the double-decker bus lurched. She hated this part of the ride the most - the first twenty minutes when she was forced to stand, to press herself against wet bodies that slipped and slapped about her like oily sardines.
Jennifer eyed for the least greasy-looking inch on the nearest grab bar and pinched two fingers around it. She felt a little heady, and refused to think about whose hands had perspired over it minutes before. Instead, she concentrated on admiring her murky reflection on the windows: twenty and tall, with porcelain skin and raven hair, and eyes that spoke before her painted lips did. Her beak tilted upwards, at an angle where fishy faces of the passengers fell away and she saw only psychedelic splotches of what must be evening light.
She released her fingers from the cool rod and fanned herself, wondering for the third time why she hadn't just taken a taxi home. Then she could've avoided the rush-hour stream for one evening - one luxurious evening home after school, with no one to step on her strappy Novo heels, assail her nostrils with waves of body odour, or contaminate the air-conditioning.
The bus jerked at the next stop, and Jennifer saw something glint. She looked down and saw for the first time the person seated a short distance away from her: a scrawny Chinese man in his late forties, dressed in loose muddy-green shirt and trousers. His shoulder-length curls looked like thirsty seaweed; the wink had come from its roots, where it shone strangely. He looked almost flammable. His swarthy round face was dry and sparsely cratered, like a biscuit. Jennifer briefly considered averting her eyes, but like a terrible accident she was drawn to him, and couldn't look away.
He spoke first.
"What're you looking at?"
Jennifer stiffened. She suddenly felt very warm, and thought the air-conditioning must have died. She looked around to see if anyone noticed.
"I'm over here, missy," he said this time in Mandarin. "Something wrong?"
She saw two yuppies nearby, dressed in identical office-wear and sitting side by side, their eyes closed. She wondered if they were really sleeping, or just avoiding her gaze; the other standing passengers were looking elsewhere. Only the Chinese man continued to stare at her, with a straw hat on his lap, running his coarse fingers along its brim.
Someone pressed the bell. It jolted the nodding passengers and all at once they upped and left, like numb fishes spilling out from a net. It was this bus-stop outside the central train station that Jennifer waited for everyday, when she could finally have one of the newly-vacated seats for the remainder of her journey. She saw the last bunch of sweaty schoolboys alight, dressed in attires as uniform as the temperatures of the tropical climate...
"Missy, are you DEAF?" The man said loudly. "You look like you better sit down."
Perspiration now beaded into a necklace too tight for her and as the man hurried in her direction she opened her mouth to scream, but nothing escaped. Her knees finally gave way to the heat, and the fisherman extended a steady hand; he felt her forehead and yelled something to the driver. The bus lurched to life, and with the same hat that he took with him to his routine fishing trips to Pulau Ubin, he fanned it quickly over his face.
Jennifer tried to keep her eyes open as the straw hat flitted between them, like the cheerful wag of her Labrador's tail, like the fins of a dying fish.
