Nightmare on the Nifty Fifty
Not just another worst local bus journey story - this experience scarred me for life.

The number 50 bus service in Birmingham has the reputation of being Europes most frequent service*, passing through six or seven heavily populated innercity and residential areas on its way.

Living in and around the 50 route and being a poor bastard who cant drive, I have seen quite a few incidents over the years on the buses, including:

- a woman repeatedly smashing another womans head against the bus window until she lost consciousness
- a crackhead going for a young guy with two broken glass bottles and chasing him off the bus into the sunset
- kevs (chav ancestry) setting the top deck on fire and escaping out of the (top) emergency exit
- frequent police raids on the bus with a sniffer dog

I'm not saying its a ghetto bus, just that it seems to have a lot of action. Bud smokin', spray can totin', chav scrotum action. But enough of those fun memories. All of that paled into insignificance one night last year.

I was sitting halfway in the downstairs deck with my girlfriend. It was about 9pm: the time when all local nutters come out of the woodwork. The bus was around half full as it pulled up to a stop and a few people got on.

From the shadows emerged a small figure, wearing a dark long coat**. As the figure shuffled onto the bus and into the light I could see it was an old woman with a hood partially covering her face.

She came slowly down the aisle, completely ignoring the driver, peering at people with eyes like saucers, bulging out. The terrifying thing about her was that she had some kind of bright green paint/liquid smeared over her mouth and nose and it was splattered pretty much everywhere else on her.

Then the smell of solvents hit me, a powerful stench of pure alcohol mixed with burnt plastic. She walked past to the back of the bus, leaving a trail of green footprints.

Sitting tight, we could hear her rooting around in the rubbish on the back of the bus mumbling in a low voice as the intense odour of whatever she had been sniffing/eating/drinking filled the bus. She started to shuffle back. As she came past me (sitting on the outside seat) her head quickly turned and from under the hood, she stared at me for a good couple of seconds. Those seconds were decades to me, transfixed by the vacant, malevolent look. Then the green wizened face was gone, leaving me with the shakes and a recurrent bad dream.

Probably sounds like fuck-all to you hard knock b3tan travellers but glue sniffers and solvent-addicts scared the fucking shite out of me before this happened. Not one of my most favourite journeys.

*PR claim devised by the rent-a-bums at Travel West Midlands
**Think I Know What You Did Last Summer
( prem1um is full of life, Tue 12 Sep 2006, 12:28, Reply)