The suburbs

The bus dropped me off in the suburbs and when I got off, I felt like I was visiting another country. It was a wonder the driver didn’t ask to see my passport when I boarded and put my exact change in the hopper. It was strange to be on a bus again, it made me realise how rarely I take them these days. The free coach from the station to my office doesn’t count, that’s a different experience altogether, always full of people you know and have at least something in common with. Buses aren't quite like that - half the fun is that mixture of people you see every day and new people whose paths cross yours only now and again. To the regulars on that bus that day, that meant people like me.

And yet I was suddenly reminded of all those years on the bus - different numbers, routes and stages in my life. The 65 from the Brecon Road shops into town in 1996, living at home with my mum and my brother and working in Reading for the first time. Trips to the supermarket en masse on a Friday, totting up who owed what on the weekly shop in tiny columns down the left and right margins of the Waitrose receipt. The horrors of the number 17 from that miserable house on Talfourd Avenue in 1999 where everybody but me took drugs all the time. I remember the windows steaming up that winter and the breath of all the shivering passengers forming in thick clouds like cotton wool in the air. You could have reached out and torn it into balls. The number 20 from the university in 2002, living with someone I didn’t much like in an area where I was constantly reminded of the student I still wished I was, gliding down the long graceful tree-lined hill that was Kendrick Road, taking me into town at nights so I could drink with friends and pretend I didn’t have to go home at the end.

Just like Jason Bourne, even after he loses his memory, can’t help but scan a room for exits and suspicious strangers, my knowledge of buses is still the same. Back then, it was all about women; I actually got several dates on buses, back in the days when women were far more desperate and the internet had not yet taken hold of everyone. I always used to find a seat where I could look at someone attractive, either straight on or (for the advanced practitioner) by checking out the reflection in the window. Old habits die hard; I found a seat near the back with a good view of the only woman on the bus who looked like a human. Of course, she was easily ten years younger than me. Old habits, like old clothes, can become embarrassing.

When the bus coasted along the long road that bisects the suburbs, past the big unattractive supermarket, past the police station, it reached a stage where I could hear the percussive sweep of the top deck pushing the branches of trees aside. I hadn’t heard that sound in years, and I’d forgotten how calming it could be. The smallest leaf made its way in through an open window and landed on my shoulder. I didn’t want to brush it off.

Twenty minutes early to see the dentist, I had nothing better to do than to go exploring. The sunshine was vast and unhesitant, baking the streets and casting every building in the most flattering of lights. If the suburbs were ever going to be beautiful, it would be on a day like today. They still weren’t beautiful, though; every house looked exactly the same, every unfashionable UPVC window or dark wood door-frame probably had the same widescreen television, Ikea Billy bookcases and dining table behind it. I remember when this suburb was built it was the largest housing development in Europe. We used to tell that fact to visiting relatives as if it was something to be proud of (of course, back then we lived in the suburbs ourselves).

I was shocked by how quiet it was - school would surely have finished and yet there seemed to be nobody around. The occasional child would go past on a bike, heading for the cycle path that presumably went to the signposted BMX park. Even the reference to a BMX seemed dated, but that might just have been because I remembered them the first time around. Suddenly I felt very old.

The bus shelter was deserted, although someone had scratched an obscenity into it in the glass, presumably someone less enamoured with the facilities for local cyclists. Everything seemed green yet characterless, as if this place only really existed at night. Next to the shelter was a notice board advertising the usual sad mixture of events that passes for community life in places like this - raffles, church events, amateur dramatics performances, tribute bands at the community centre. I looked long enough to realise that the majority of the notices were out of date, which somehow seemed fitting.

My dentist is in a parade of shops - I suppose that’s what we had, before malls came along, parades or shopping precincts. When I grew up in the suburbs, going to the shopping precinct was the major event of Saturday, and the shops there were important. Beatties, the only games shop, where I could order Dungeons and Dragons books and lead figures that I would half-heartedly try and paint in the garage, all fingers and thumbs and white spirit. Milwards, the shoe shop that, every year without fail, supplied me with an increasingly clownish pair of huge black sensible shoes for the school year ahead. Hong Kong Garden, the Chinese takeaway we went to for special occasions on Friday nights, serving fish, chips, acrid brown curry sauce for the rest of my family and an apocalyptic orange sweet and sour sauce for me, with huge chunks of pineapple floating in it. The video shop, our main means of escape from the suburbs (the multiplex wasn’t to arrive for years).

This parade, though, was a far more threadbare collection of establishments. A couple of almost stereotypical estate agents, with spiky haired spivs in cheap shirts swivelling idly in their chairs waiting for the day to end, collapsing under the weight of their immense tie knots. A gym called “Curves”, clearly hedging its bets in a way I didn’t know whether to find shrewd or endearing. “Caffe Med”, an Italian restaurant which looked a lot like a leisure centre with a menu in the window full of spelling mistakes. I spent a couple of minutes considering how frayed squid would actually taste.

The shops were even more forlorn. The chemist had a slogan saying We care! in a tacky cursive script, and as I took a photo of it the woman behind the counter scowled out of the window at me. “Mike’s Waterfront Warehouse” was long closed down, probably on the basis that it was nowhere near water of any kind. “Booze Bargain” threatened exactly that, though you could tell from the outside that it just meant cheap booze, which was hardly the same thing. The only other shops seemed to be trading on their inability to spell; “Pet Fayre”, “By-Wise”. As I slouched around, taking it all in, a couple of schoolkids wandered past. The uniforms said they must be around fourteen, the hair and makeup suggested they were in their early twenties and from the look they gave me, I might as well have been the wrong side of fifty. If I’d asked them to take me to their leader, what would have happened?

I’ve never been so pleased to walk into a dentist’s waiting room in my life.

On the way home, intact and undrilled, I sat at the front and pretended to drive the bus. I was too old for eyeing up women, and there were no women on the bus anyway. Besides, you are never too old to enjoy driving the bus. I watched out the front as the roads slipped by, an identikit maze of houses, cul-de-sacs named after cars, or local dignitaries, or other towns somewhere. The bus went past Sellafield Way, a clear sign that a local authority had run out of ideas. And slowly, the streets got less leafy, the driveways less long and the off-road parking less plentiful, and the world started to look like the world I knew. But I was still thinking about the suburbs.

Because the truth is that for many years of my life, I lived somewhere like that and I looked around me and thought This is enough. There was a park to walk the dog in, and a hill to go down in a sledge, and a video shop if you wanted to be somewhere else, and fried food covered in orange sauce on Friday nights. And there was a back garden, and a barbecue, and a garage with a lawnmower in it, and a driveway lined with lavender bushes. And there were only three pubs, and one of them involved a walk across the park and along the lake, and the other was right on the edge of town. And there weren’t restaurants, because we didn’t eat out back then, there was the pub at the edge of town and the Indian takeaway and that was all. And that was enough.

I don’t know when it stopped being enough. I don’t know what enough even means any more. I can go out whenever I like, do whatever I want, eat wherever I fancy. The world has changed so completely that, for me at least, the suburbs are like a living museum of how things used to be. It’s as odd for me to think people still live that way as it would be if you took me to Eastern Europe, or an Amish village.

On the bus home, I thought about the suburbs and I wondered why I didn’t feel sad. And I wondered why I did.