People at bus stops

Today, at this moment, this little outpost is full of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Despite a bit of bad press locally in recent weeks, sharing a bus stop with a group of these somewhat specialised Christians is preferable to finding yourself rubbing shoulders with gangsters and thieves. In fact it’s quite a reassuring experience.

These are mainly teenagers, with a few young adults shepherding toddlers.

Everybody is smartly dressed.

The teenage boys share a kind of flexible uniform: no jeans or T-shirts here. Each has on a fresh-looking, ironed, brightly coloured plain shirt — a salmon pink one here, an apple green one there, a mustard yellow one and a sky blue number. They’re all wearing beige trousers — proper trousers with creases front and back – and, either for protection from the sun or as a gesture of youthful exuberance, a straw hat worn at a slightly rakish angle.

The wackily-positioned hat has been used for many years as a declaration of the wearer’s individuality, and in the case of the baseball cap, the quest for an original angle seems to preoccupy some young men (who would no doubt prefer to be called dudes) to the exclusion of all else.

Little do they know that previous generations were at it too. In The Catcher in the Rye, J D Salinger’s 1951 classic novel of teenage tribulation, our hero wrestles with the conundrum of how to position his red hunting hat: “I swung the old peak way around to the back—very corny, I’ll admit, but I liked it that way. I looked good in it that way.” So there they are, the young Jehovah’s Witnesses (what’s the collective noun? A suspicion of witnesses? A courtroom?). Their pleasant demeanour makes a refreshing change. Then the bus comes and distributes the human scenery to various parts.

When we make the return trip late that afternoon, the place to wait is outside a small supermarket, where the cast is altogether different. Behind the counter sits an irritable 14-year-old Chinese girl, T-shirt sweeping down her slim, untouched body and bearing the slogan, “Good girl with bad…” You can’t see the last word for the counter. Attitude? Handwriting? Breath? She looks like the good part, so let’s leave it at that. Wandering the aisles, looking for sugary drinks, is a short, dark, curvy girl about the same age, with an outrageous wiggle for one so young. Perhaps she can’t help it, but it looks so out of place on her that I have to manoeuvre in front to look at her face. Full, pouting lips accentuated by the brightest scarlet lipstick in the universe. She’s like a cartoon little temptress, a worry to her family and reliant on the rest of the world to do the behaving for her.

Outside in the shade sits a man selling small red peppers and taking occasional sly swigs from a flat half bottle of rum that he keeps safe down the front of his underpants.

Finally the bus comes and takes us down to the beach, to revel in the hissing remnants of a scorching day and let the sea work its effortless magic on tired, sweaty bodies.

At the top of the beach sits a man of perhaps 30 years, playing a flute. He can’t be a busker because he’s in the wrong place, too far away from the passers-by to relieve them of their unwanted change. He seems miles away in his head.

The man with the flute plays and plays, to no one and everyone.

At least he’s not a relentlessly booming sound system, churning out someone else’s bass-heavy mediocrity as if it were in some way unique.

He’s too young to have been at Woodstock, but maybe he feels deprived, denied the chance to do all that hippie stuff when it was fashionable, and resolved, perhaps with herbal assistance, to live out the dream here and now.

He looks like the offspring of one of those 50-something American women who turn up in hot, dusty places, skinny as twigs, burnished by the sun, weighed down with backpacks, with long, dry hair bunched up out of the way and “Independent” spelled out in sparks from their eyes.

You would like to invite her to use your shower, but she would no doubt be affronted and tell you to get your bourgeois, conformist frame out of her self-determined orbit. She’s probably got a Porsche mothballed back in Cal i fornia while she lives out her late rebellion, but here she would rather be on the bus with the real people.