The free bus takes forever. It crawls through the city like a worm, from hospital to residence to workplace to government office to pub to hospital again. It does a loop. So few people get off and on that the bus has to wait every few stops to keep to its timetable. The driver says ‘Three minutes!’ and gets down from his seat, standing in the street to breathe the sharp air. I sit at the front on a single seniors’ seat and face the back. Am I the only old white man on the bus? Able-bodied on the outside. Not so good within. There’s a mother and daughter who look like they’re from Vietnam, speaking in the local English. There are two Indian women in their hospital uniforms. Most of us on the bus wear funny hats, including me. It’s winter. Half a dozen of us stagger down the bus in pairs and singles. I’m the only reverse-facing person.
Old. Not a word we’re comfortable with these days. It depends where you’re coming from. Sixty? The new black, the new middle aged. In the middle of my life in a dark wood. But that was at thirty! What a layered place the world has become, every street name casting a spell, every street corner, even the empty ones on this weekday morning, an evocation, if not for my fellow passengers, chatting to each other, or on their phones, or to themselves, then at least for me.
The bus stops at the market and half the people get off. A woman climbs aboard with a bag of fruit and veg, her long hair not quite grey—ash, salt-and-pepper, dry grass. No hat, and the bag woven from natural fibre, and her clothes too, fibrous, shapeless. There’s something light and precise about how she finds her way down the aisle in those burned umber pumps to a seat at the back in the raised section of the bus. A bag lady? She passes the edge of my vision. A woman with a bag. Her phone vibrates just as she is getting on the bus and she answers it because it’s important. She talks a little too loudly, patiently, telling the caller she is on a bus … in Adelaide.
Facing each other across the near empty length of the bus as it shudders forward, we share the noise and movement. What are the chances? I know who she is. It could only happen here in this small city, on this grid. Just this morning I saw an article about her. She was in Venice. I recognise her from the photograph that showed her sitting in the dirt in a remote community somewhere beyond Alice Springs, making the art that she took to the Venice Biennale. She works with natural materials—fibres, hair, feathers and clay—as the women taught her in her collaboration with them and which she had taken up in her own innovative way. She is a star in Venice, as she has been at every stage of her uncompromising career. And she took the women from the community with her to Venice, the Aboriginal women who were her partners and inspiration in the art making. They are stars too. Everyone at the Biennale was delighted to see them.
In person on the bus the artist doesn’t draw attention to herself. She becomes an invisible woman, returning from her trip to the market with her shopping, back from the glare and glamour of Venice only a few days before. The competition and the crush. The blah-blah and bling of the battleground of world art. It has all happened in this small window of time, from Venice to Adelaide, her return home. We smile faintly at each other—we fellow seniors, we travellers on the bus. We look into each other’s eyes.
A few traffic lights later, a few more blocks, the bus stops outside a government office. Here one person gets on, then two, three, a line, a group, each with cash and concessions. They tumble down the bus as it lurches into motion, holding on as they sort out their seats, calling to each other, laughing, shouting, letting their spirits fly, now that their business with government is done. The mob have come down from the desert and are dressed for the city and the cold in bright knitted beanies and football scarves, thick black coats, blue jeans and glittering trainers. They are mostly young. They cheer the bus up.
The man near me has his hand on the breast of the woman he’s with. She pushes back. They bounce together on the seat.
The artist from Venice is surrounded. She smiles a faraway smile. In Venice, in the pavilion, when she brought the Aboriginal women on stage to share the applause, she blanked on their names. Everyone was so happy to be there but she could only introduce them with a wave of her hand. She has never been good with names. She’s a visual person. When she uses words in her art, it is to break them apart, in jokes, rendering them powerless.
The language of the group fills the bus in full-voiced music as people josh with each other about where they come from. Nukunu. Anangu. Yalata. Adnamathna. I get those words at least. They’re teasing each other with names of language and places on country up north, in the different communities that have sent these people down to get what they can from government. Pitjitjinjara. Amata. Having a good time.
The bus stops at the botanic gardens. The artist politely makes her way past the woman next to her and carefully gets off the bus. Then, with some quick discussion, the whole group decides that this is where they’re getting off too. They file off, steadying themselves one by one for the last step down to the street. The elder who was sitting next to the artist eases her weight to the footpath.
‘Are you right?’ the artist asks.
The woman grins.
‘Eh? I’m right. Thank you.’
The woman heads with her mob in one direction and the artist, solitary, turns in the other. When the light goes green, she crosses the road and passes through the iron gate into the gardens. The woven bag of her market pickings hangs from one shoulder, leaving her hands free to gather any seed pods she comes across. Lying on the path. Pods of remarkable shape and feature that she can use for her art.
The bus turns the last corner and comes to the hospital stop where I get off and go for the diagnosis. I don’t know what to expect and I’m in no hurry. This ride is to the terminus. The slow, free bus makes its way from the desert via Venice and the smartphone and the city grid to the office and street and market and gardens and hospital, blood with its pathogens coursing through all our veins. I fill with euphoria. Magic happens. Grace descends.