Bart — Born On A London Bus

Do you create your characters before an event, or after?

I woke early having thoughts that reach backward, to some event that changed who I am, and then, lying there, I let fiction take over.

I’ve never thought of myself as a storyteller, certainly not a writer, a man who studied, learned grammar, or a man who can confidently spell words of more than eight characters.

That’s not me.

I like to write. That’s it. The writing itself.

A few years ago, twenty, maybe, I created a character called Bart. To this day, I still know everything there is to know about Bart, so perfectly did I write him down, and so easy did he come to the page. Our conversations back then were deep and today feel ancient.

Bart was born riding a London bus, he was reading the Guardian newspaper. The bus groaned, swayed, leaned, turned, stopped, its hot brakes squealing, low hanging branches scraping its double-deck roof as it crisscrossed the crowded London streets, back and forth, back and forth, till it was back at the depot, cleaned, ready to start the next morning, the same journey as the last.

Writing is a pitiable pastime, dedicated to creating scoundrels, fools, wanderers, ugly women, sirens, veterans, businessmen, lovers, and loafers, all stirred up in a slop of London moodiness and memory induced creativity.

Bart, as I recall, wasn’t interested in making conversation, though I had deliberately nudged his arm while reaching into my rucksack and apologized.

Bart didn’t look up from reading the newspaper, an editorial about Thatcher.

How brave, I considered, to go where he goes, his last cry for happiness faded within himself. This is his time, alone, riding on a bus, reading the newspaper before arriving at his place of employment.

Had I to guess Bart’s occupation, seeing the Guardian Newspaper, his green tweed jacket, John Lennon glasses, balding early, thirty-five or six, I could say with some assuredness, he is a Social Worker.

Bart doesn’t feel the need to do anything else, nor had a different direction in mind, trapped contentedly inside a ten-year-old habit, believing he is doing something important, and enjoys the opportunity to help others in need.

Bart was never the shiniest jewel in the school classroom but had earned his Higher Education Diploma in the field of Social Work. At nineteen, he found employment with the London Youth Organization, which prepared him for the moral dilemmas that can arise in his line of work.

I remember thinking, as we sat silently together, me knowing everything about him, what was he on the cusp of achieving — or not? What secret chapter of his future life he kept hidden? Where is his heroic side?

He lived in central London and had, for thirty-five or six years, not had a single highlight to look back upon. Every day was a fateful accident of non-life-changing events. He changed other lives — or not.

Bart was in the unenvious position to explore the aftermath of nothing ever happening to him. He was born to a family living in a terraced street, in Tooting. They were a private family, never spilling into public view. Every weekday morning, Bart carried his guts into the school classroom. When the day was over, the ball games played, newts caught at the park’s filthy pond, Bart never dreamt of anything more.

Well cared for, he learned manners, drank tea, helped paint the house, took to making his own bed, but never once picked up junk from the Thames, thinking to make art.

The only unimaginable thing that would happen to Bart was meeting Harry Hogg who boarded the same #22 bus at the Strand. Bart was heading to Paddington, having to work with self-confessed porn addicts.

Bart closed his newspaper at Oxford Circus to take a call on his portable phone, then wrote something in his notebook before staring out the window, having removed his glasses, pinched the sides of his nose, which screwed up his eyes, and tucked the glasses into his jacket pocket, leaving one temple hanging on the outside.

We got off the bus at Marble Arch.

Bart’s life is full of senseless tragedy, suicide, addicts, homelessness, poverty, safe houses, and child abuse. Every day his life is touched by these things, hurts small and large.

Bart, you are in terrible shape. You are hurt. I cannot spare you pain without casting you back into those ominous dark clouds of childhood fantasy. With all my imagination, I do not seem capable of limiting that pain. I always hoped I’d have good news for you, a place in a book filled with travel and wonderment.

I have shed other characters without thought. Dismissed them back to their darkness, keeping no recollection of their arrogance, mannerisms, honesty, or such traits I blessed upon each of them.

I was able to let go of the elegance, the fancy phrases, beauty, heroism, eyes green or grey, and companions for a while. How smoothly I let them go, blurred, incomplete, and unrefined.

I had a grand adventure in mind for Bart, one to rival my own. I know his anguish, the depths of his love, the burnout, the weariness of taking on another’s heartache. A story like Bart’s is like putting a piece of rough marble in the hands Rodin. I’m not Rodin.

I don’t know when I wore out the idea of a happy, fulfilling life for Bart.

Ten thousand words in, or forty, I always imagined I could give Bart a certain brilliance, a notable disposition, but such imaginative skills proved beyond me back then.

Bart was somehow leading me.

Indeed, some of the turns he took were too terrific for words. I followed him, saddened by his liberal gait, the places he’d never see, tall grasses never walked through, teenage girls, women, their affections worn so openly.

We walked down the Edgeware Road, passing the butcher’s shop, the chemist, internet café’s, Bureaux de Change, Yoga fitness, and came to a run down shabby fronted off-license, broken beer bottles, cigarette butts, in the curb, and used needles scattered while the noise from a building site was like standing next to a jet engine.

Why had Bart led me here?

Before I left my study this morning, I looked through everything I had written for Bart; four thousand hours soaked the manuscript. Bart, as a boy, full of books and poetry, a child who wanted beauty, heroism, and glory, the kind of glory only found thousands of miles from home. But Bart’s days came down with the same agony as a bad tooth.

I allowed him to grow, become a man, a social worker on the London streets. The mystery of suffering remains unresolved.

No one is going to ask Bart about a trip to Antarctica. He couldn’t answer about being humbled, inspired, awestruck, and how after that, when it was the same every day, it felt uneventful.

Bart brings out his glasses, and bring out the notebook. The boarded-up store is the same address as that written down in his flopped open notebook. He checks his watch; it is five minutes before nine o’clock. The police were five minutes away.

Inside, Bart, with two cops standing a few feet away, one of them putting in a call for the Coroner. Bart will never understand the loss of clients to addiction. The dead girl, lying curled, knees hugging her chest, just twenty years from riding her first tricycle, then a university student, in the end a lonely woman with no place to go.

Everything about Bart’s life slows down; a stillness descends, another friend has lost the art of breathing.

Another punctuation mark in his day.

Bart won’t leave London, won’t stop working eighteen-hour days, shrinking into dark places, wearing his unwitnessed uniform, carrying a Guardian newspaper, his days filled with senseless tragedy.

Bart has been an idea for a long time. Writing is death and life again. It feels impossible to take him farther.

He just won’t come along.

Bart, like a London bus, is sometimes too late. London, will never be innocent of tragedy.

Bart is his own kind of hero, just not mine.

I leave him crisscrossing London, working among immigrant families, doing remarkable things before heading back to the depot.

His journey will begin again tomorrow.