The spy on the bus

 It was the hair that caught my attention, as it was supposed to.  The man was sat at the front of the bus on the upper deck, staring forward intently as though willing the bus to move faster through the crowded streets.  I only knew he was a man because I was sat on the opposite side of the bus, one row of seats behind him, and so had the only view of his profile that allowed me to see a hint of an Adam’s apple and a tiny patch of beard stubble that he’d missed covering with powder.  He was dressed as a woman of a certain age; that is to say an age where she refuses to tell you what it is and hopes that you’ll think that she’s younger.  He was wearing a brown, high collared coat that he must have searched through every thrift shop in East London to find and a blue and gold silk scarf to accent it, and his hair had been inexpertly dyed blue.

Only it wasn’t his hair; it was a wig.  You would never have known it; I would never have guessed if I hadn’t had the one seat on the bus where I could see the little details that had been missed, and I could see his naturally dark hair, short, just where the wig didn’t quite fit.  The wig was black, or perhaps a very dark brown, and the dyeing had been done just enough so that it caught attention.  Whoever this man was, he wanted people to remember him as an older woman with dyed shoulder-length hair and a coat that reminded them of their grandmother.  He had gone to such as effort to put this image into my mind, and indeed the minds of everyone who saw him, that I had to know more about why he was doing this.

The bus crossed the junction by the Bank of England where the roadworks had been going on since the first Roman invasion, narrowly missing hitting one of London’s feral cyclists who had decided, as is the wont of their clan, that other road-users were inferior and to be ignored and proceeded up towards Moorgate station.  The man pretending to be a woman reached behind him with one white-gloved hand and rang the bell.  I immediately started fussing as though realising that my stop were imminent and so, when he/she descended the stairs I was able to follow, stumbling and mis-stepping, and being completely ignored as a typical slow-thinker on the bus.

I alighted with another mis-step in order to allow myself time to look around and generally seem annoyed with busses, their drivers and the world in general, and so appreciate without seeming to that the disguisee was walking briskly, but not so fast as to draw attention, up the street.  Their gaze was across the road so, to keep myself unobtrusive, I crossed the road, narrowly avoiding another feral cyclist for whom pedestrians were… well, pedestrian.  As they shouted foul imprecations about my mother I reached the relative safety of the pavement (cyclists in London have no qualms about riding on the pavement if that will maximise the chaos they can sow) and they struck a pothole that the roadworks were, ostensibly, to solve and so we went our separate ways.  My quarry, for want of a better term, was far nicer-mannered than I and crossed the road at the pedestrian crossing at the traffic lights.  I had anticipated this and deliberately dawdled, but even so I was only just behind them as they headed towards London Wall and I needed to find a way to slow down a little.  Thankfully the street was moderately busy and so it was easy enough to fall a little further behind the disguisee every time another person managed to walk into my path while staring, rapt, at their phone.

They came to a halt at a café some minutes later and, looking around in a way that no Londoner ever has, they seated themselves a little fussily at an outside table.  I went inside and sat at a table in the window where it was easy to continue my observations and where the wind didn’t rustle my clothes and chill me to the bone.

Two minutes later a young man in a black suit and a grey shirt that didn’t really match it at all came in, looked around, and then glared at me.

“I think that’s my table,” he said.  Not quite aggressively, but certainly with emphasis.

“We can share, love,” I said.  “There’s three empty chairs here.”

“Hmph.”

He sat down though, and the waiter came over with a look of trepidation: one never knows in London how strangers will interact until you’ve had a chance to watch them.

“Is everything alright?” he asked, his tone indicating that he did not want to get involved in a private quarrel.

I nodded.  “I’ll have a latte,” I said; it was still breakfast time as far as I was concerned.  “My guest will have…?”

The young man looked up.  “I thought you were my guest,” he said.  “We can argue it out over the bill.  I’ll have an orange juice please.”

The waiter hesitated, obviously concerned still, but since we weren’t shouting or throwing things, he opted for discretion and left.

“Well?” said the young man quietly.  He appeared to be engrossed in his phone.  I took a free newspaper out of my bag.

“He’s good,” I said.  “The wig is a nice touch; provides something for people to notice that distracts them from everything else.  He missed a couple of things, but he’s convincing.  He is good enough.”

The young man smiled, seemingly at his phone.  The waiter set our drinks down and backed off.

“I’ll leave you to pay,” said the young man.  He picked his orange juice up and headed outside to sit with the disguisee and let them know that they’d passed our first test.