Delight #1

A miniseries

Consider the particular delight of the double-decker bus. Here it comes, tilting from side to side as it reels down the hill before reaching a rickety stop in front of you, the slight wind of it lifting your hair off your sunblock-sticky neck. You’ve waved and smiled at the driver so perhaps a certain friendliness has been established already, but when you get on, you bolster things further. Kia ora! you might say; or hello!; or, once, are you really about to admit this, you were listening to some music that made you do it, and thank God no one was getting on behind you, yo. You hit the stairs, and once you’re up there — breathing that familiar bouquet of stale air conditioning and salt and vinegar chips (somebody’s left a crumb-smeared packet) — you choose the closest seat to the front, miraculously free, the one that lets you feel most like you’re flying through the enormous window.

That’s a pretty spectacular bus ride, the one into town: zipping along Wallace, picking up all the Massey students with their nose rings and oversized grungy t-shirts, and maybe a couple of retirees going into town for an afternoon lark; hooning along Taranaki while the trees rush past you at eye level in one big green swoooop, sea winking in the distance. The seats around you fill with other people, every one of them interesting — the gym-goer in beige lululemon, whose Instagram reels, you can’t help noticing, are all fitspo; the skinny guy with the kererū neck tattoo, hip-hop seeping from his earphones; the caterwauling high schoolers with their Roman sandals and (aha) packets of chips — will you ever get over the interest of other people? And maybe the bus driver is one of those carefree souls who likes to fling the bus around corners — like yesterday, the driver of the 3.28pm Number 27 service, a born flinger, I salute you. So you’re in for a little rolling around, nothing sillier, like an illustration of your lack of power to control anything. Which feels much more palatable when you’re up there in the clouds, leaving every sadness on the pavement. Eventually, anyway, you come to a stop (flung backwards in your seat with a final, cheery emphasis) and, descending the vertiginous stairs and hollering THANK YOU from the back door, find yourself hopping out in the middle of town. And maybe it’s only Wellington, but how dare you use the word only. Here you are, alighting from a modern multi-storey electric vehicle like the city denizen you are, freshly alive, in front of the lane where people wait night and day to ride a historic cable car to the gardens high above, and just here there’s a supermarket where maybe, today, not all the fruit is bruised.

Such a bus ride — rollicking, chaotic, definitively loud — is surpassed maybe only by the private double-decker experience, which is harder to come by, but not impossible. If you’re a librarian, for instance, going home to a small suburb, and you finish work after 8 o’clock and the city’s empty because it’s only a small city after all — maybe when you ascend to the upper deck, you’ll find yourself alone and remain that way for the rest of the ride. Imagine, you go wheeling through the city: obnoxious restaurant signage, edgy outfits, starry streetlights, lilac clouds. The whole city plays itself for you, and how could you think it small?

This series is inspired by the essayettes in Ross Gay’s collection The Book of Delights.