Memory: The Glasgow Redhead

The beautiful green was still passing in front of my eyes. I could have stared at the English country-side for days, which was good because the bus trip was scheduled for nine long hours.

Coming out of London the bus had been packed, so Jonathan was forced to sit next to me and Aaron with an elderly woman. As the hours trickled on by, the bus began to slowly empty. How strange it is to drive all the way up a country, and only lose a few passengers an hour. The Western luxury of personal space was required eventually, and I booted Jonathan out to his own pair of seats.

The bus halted in Newcastle, one of the last English towns before the land grows even greener as it becomes Scottish. This city was to be our next stop after Edinburgh, so I strained to look out of every window to get a good angle. Something was happening on the far side of the bus, and I strained to peer down at the people standing there.

It was a tall, red-headed girl about my age. Pretty. She seemed to be crying, and was hugging an elderly man and woman. After her luggage was placed inside the bus, the sobbing young girl clambered up onto the bus, and began to look around for spaces. There might have been empty pairs further down, but this half of the bus had at least one person in every pair.

Jonathan was a few seats in front of me to the left. As the girl got on, he and I looked at each other, smiled, and then both slowly removed our book bags from the adjacent seats, lest she decide to sit there. She seemed to hesitate for a moment, then walked over and sat next to me, still covered in tears. She leaned over to get something out of her book bag, and I smiled at Jonathan and gave him a thumbs up.

Despite the minor tension leading up to her become my 2 hour travel partner, I failed to say much to her for the first hour. I hated the idea of being the creepy traveler, straining for conversation when there should be any. She began to listen to the Counting Crows on her headset, so I resigned to reading a book for a while. As the air outside the bus grew even colder, her face lightened and mood improved. Like any British youth, she pulled out her cell phone every 5 minutes and sent a text message, or talked to someone for a little bit.

About an hour in, I said as nonchalantly as a bored guy sitting next to an attractive girl can manage: “Leaving or going home?”

She looked at me for a moment, then said in a think Glasgow accent, “Goi’n, I just said goodbye to meh Nanny and grandpa.”

Part of me felt it was strange that a girl of 18 would be crying over this parting, but then I remembered that, from experience, girls over there tended to be more weepy about parting with family.

We basically had slow conversation over the next hour. It was the kind of awkward conversation that involves asking a question every five minutes, getting a response, then pausing for another five minutes before vice versa happens. Her name was Michelle. She lived in Glasgow, but obviously her grandparents lived in Newcastle. The news that she was continuing on the Glasgow slightly saddened me, as I knew that Edinburgh was my stop, so there could be no, “Shall we continue this conversation elsewhere?”

She was interested in the fact that I was ‘from’ America. Like so many girls there, she had never been, but really wanted to go. I didn’t feel like talking about America very much, so I tried not to ask her too much about Scotland.

Before anything substantial came out of it all, our cranky bus driver announced that we were in Edinburgh. The windows of the bus were drenched, and through the warped environment water creates, I could see the grey buildings of this new city waiting to greet me.

Michelle got off with us, as she was taking a different bus to Glasgow. She giggled as Jon, Aaron and I huddled together, looking over the map and trying to find the hostel we would be staying at, under the Castle Rock at that beautiful city. I turned a corner and she was gone, left to a memory.