The woman with the drip on her nose.

I still can't drive after my surgery. So when I had to go to town to post off my novel to an agent, I caught the bus.

I've always loved buses. When I was tiny my Mum and I sometimes used to take the bus on a Friday to see a friend of hers. It was a trolley bus - and all these years later, I still remember the excited hum as we rattled along the roads.

When we lived in France I usually drove, but sometimes I would take the bus to Antibes, marvelling at the scenery as it wound through the beautiful little villages on its way to the coast.

Yesterday I spent the obligatory half hour in the Post Office, felt an excited little skip of my heart as my precious parcel disappeared behind the counter, had a delicious lunch in the Veggie cafe, and set off for home.

There were a lot of people waiting at the stop. I was glad that I had remembered to get there before rush hour. To our dismay, a totally empty bus pulled in and left again without picking any passengers up. I witnessed a heartening little exchange between a middle-aged woman at the stop and a young couple who walked past, which went something like this:
Young man: "Ey! Sithee our mother! Yer reet?"
Woman: (grinning) "Aye! Ah wor reet an' all before you showed up, yer bugger!"

I love Derbyshire!

Eventually another bus arrived and we piled in - and by now it was a crush of people pushing rather anxiously to get home and start their evening. An old lady sat next to me. She had a distant, vague expression on her face so I didn't intrude by speaking to her, as I very often do. (Random conversations with strangers are one of my great joys in life). I noticed her beautifully-coiffed hair - almost remarked on it (I like to give compliments) but thought better of it as she looked frail and I didn't want to frighten her by forcing well-intentioned conversation on her.

The bus pulled away and as we drove along the passengers were still trying to settle, gently swarming up and down like bees on a hive. I glanced at the woman next to me and saw that she had a drip on the end of her nose - a drip as perfectly formed as a crystal ball. Part of me was disgusted (I have had an 'issue' with nasal discharge since my first day at school - the only thing I remember was Alan Wilcox's nose running into his milk as he drank it), and part of me was fascinated. I could see another woman passenger glancing surreptitiously from time to time; we were both, I'm sure, waiting for the moment when the drip would fall from her nose and land on her hand. It occurred to me that she might sneeze it off, as my cat sometimes does, and that she might well be facing in my direction when that happened. I edged towards the window.

Now I heard a humming sound. I don't know whether it was the old lady or a phone somewhere behind us, but in my mind she began to take on a more sinister persona, the Mad SnotWoman of Chesterfield, who sits on buses waiting - just waiting - for the drip on her nose to be fully ripe before breaking into loud singing, jumping to her feet and shaking her head, spattering liquid bogeys to the winds.

I could feel that my whole body had tensed up. Did she know about the drip, I wondered, which was still hanging, defying gravity, larger by the second and yet tenaciously clinging to the end of that ancient nose. Could she perhaps not FEEL it? I felt helpless - it isn't done to wipe a stranger's nose, after all... and then - she was only a mad old woman, probably she didn't mind...

My fellow passenger was watching more openly now, as amazed as I was that still the drip was growing larger. I suddenly felt as though I was in some black and white short, as though we were in some Brechtian silent movie.

And then...

...she patted her pocket furtively. And fruitlessly. This changed everything.

She knew. She was no longer some batty old woman with no awareness of her bodily functions. In my mind she shrank back from sinister ogre to elderly, probably lonely, woman who knew that her last shred of dignity would disappear with the drip.

What am I thinking??? Suddenly I felt ashamed for giving those thoughts headspace. I had been thinking how she reminded me of my mother, that vague, unseeing face... and how Mum once escaped from her care home and went on an impromptu (and unpaid-for) bus ride to a town about ten miles away.

There was a brief window, a moment when I could intervene before she forgot what she had been looking for, and I seized it.

Fumbling in my bag, I found a tissue - I'd used it to catch a hay fever sneeze, but on balance I knew I would rather have had that than the miraculous Drip. I spoke to her for the first time.
"Would you like a tissue?"
She started, suddenly focusing on me with eyes which seemed perfectly sane. I repeated my offer.
"Oh! Thank you! Thank you so much..!" She was all smiles and relief, and attacked the drip with relish, folding the tissue again and again over her humiliation. I murmured how annoying, how you never have a tissue that one time you need one... she gladly agreed.

And then we talked. We spoke of politics, the weather, foreign places we had both visited... This was an educated woman, my neighbour on the bus.

She got off before me. I saw her shoes for the first time. They were faux-crocodile, in shimmering, metallic pastel shades which exactly matched the colours running through her skirt. This was a woman with style. A woman who cared about her image. A woman whom I had left to sit with a drip on her nose because I thought she didn't care.