It's the middle of winter, the early hours, Maple Road, north London. Flecks of drizzle, invisible in the freezing fog, dance upon my face. My footfalls the only sound, crisp, isolated as I enter the tedious world of the bus stop man for the last time.

“Late again.” The cretinous character grins, forever enlightened by the ambiguity of his words. Of course, I should respond by asking him if he means me or the bus so that he can explain through a series of well-rehearsed snickers that he's actually talking about the both of us. Today I ignore him.

The bus stop man remains undeterred.

“Only joking, pal.” He chuckles some more and shoves his wristwatch in my face to prove the point. “You got five minutes yet.”

“You don't say.”

“Cold one, ennit?” He smudges a mitten across his capillary-ridden conk, studies the slug-like trail on his glove, cutting me a sly glance.

“Freezing.” I agree, hands firmly rooted in pockets.

“Think this is cold?” He rubs his mitts together, then claps several times in rapid succession. The sound is muffled, reminds me of the noise my pillow makes when I'm pummeling it to death late at night, pretending it's his stupid face. “Gonna get a helluva lot colder, pal. Weather man said so.”

“Did he?”

“Helluva lot colder.” He shakes his head, incapable of elaborating, and stares into the orange haziness of the streetlights. He's silent for ten seconds, fifteen tops, then he opens his mouth, more words spill out into the night air, chilled clouds of vapor. “She'll be along in a minute.”

The way he goes on, you'd think he was talking about her majesty, the Queen on one of her royal tours. He gesticulates as badly as he articulates, waving his snotty woolen glove like a paper flag on a stick, anticipating the arrival of our four-wheeled figurehead.

I nod my head. Perfunctory tight-lipped smile.

“All set for Christmas?” he asks.

Fingers curl into fists, but my hands remain in my overcoat. Nuclear missiles on launch pads. I refuse to spend the rest of the year with him asking me if 'I'm all set for Christmas' every twenty-four hours and that is exactly what that moron with the mind of a goldfish will do if I don't finish this here and now.

“It's November,” I say. “Plenty of time.”

“Comes round faster every year, don't it?”

That has got to be the bus stop man's all time number one, brain-freezing rhetorical remark. Christ, he hits me with some fantastic nonsensical bullshit, but this sentence is so skillfully structured it invokes no response whatsoever.

He sniffs, throat grumbles like a machine in a smoothie bar, then he sneezes a snake of snot down his duffel coat. Mop-Up Mitten knows what to do.

“Think I'm getting a cold,” he says.

“Lot of it about.” I give him a sarcastic bus-stop-man-style reply. Means nothing.

The imbecile reminds me of a doll with a cord hanging from its neck that you pull to make it talk. Communication skills all claptrap and clichés, severely stunted in a repertoire of repetitive rubbish. The fact that I happen to be standing here listening to this lunacy is just pure bad luck on my part.

Inevitably, the number seventeen grumbles through the night, turns the corner with Cherry Tree Avenue in painful slow motion. Less than a hundred yards away, invisible save the headlights, blurred moons struggling to penetrate the dimness. The vehicle advances with the enthusiasm of a hearse.

The bus stop man reaches for the cord in his neck.

“Here she comes!” Tears in his eyes, I swear it. He grabs a handful of loose change from his pocket, pretends to calculate the fare, closes his woolly fist around the coins. “Can't see in this light—not since the clock's changed...”

“Driver will have to sort it out.” I complete his sentence for the last time.

“How did you know I was going to say that?”

“Just a hunch.” I tip him a wink. We're almost done here. I wave my laminated bus-pass, the size of a credit card, in front of his face and say, “Should get yourself one of these. Save yourself a fortune.”

The bus stop man usually chuckles at this, slaps me on the back, tells me he'll think about it. Today, he unexpectedly slips out of character. He grips my throat with his snotty glove, wet, cold, crushing my neck.

“Know something?” he snarls through ruinous teeth. Breath plumes, a halitosis nebula. He grasps my collar with his bus-hailing hand, pulls me even closer, all predictability shattered by this unprecedented outburst. “I never met a more sarcastic cunt than you.”

I struggle. Launch one of my missiles. It bounces harmlessly off his sandpaper chin, knuckles grazed, fingers aching. He buries an iron fist in my stomach. Once. Twice. Pulls a dripping blade from my gut. Holds it like a magician with a rabbit plucked from a top hat.

“Always taking the piss, ain'tcha?” His knee hits me between the legs with such ferocity, my feet leave the ground. He slams me into the bus shelter. It's raining glass … and blood. Jesus, lots of the red stuff. “I ain't sharing this bus stop with you any longer!” he screams.

The vehicle slows. Air brakes chuff.

I take another swipe. He pulls the serrated blade across my wrist. Kicks my jelly legs from under me. I'm tumbling through the bloody shards like a man falling through broken ice into the deepest and darkest of diesel-smelling lakes.

I'm under the wheels. Crumpled. Broken. Bones crack, limbs snap, twisting beyond the bounds of possibility. My body's crippled, an abstract figure beneath the bus, paralyzed and bubbling in unimaginable pain.

The bus stop man's sensible loafers and brown corduroys run across Maple Road into the darkness of Victoria Park. He's not who I thought he was at all.

END