Day IV Extract: More Amanda

I’ve decided to convert Amanda’s story to 1st person POV so this will be the last post you get with it written in 3rd person.

Today I combined elements of my public transport adventure and wander through the mall on the way to meet up with Tracey O’Hara, with Amanda’s story. I’m still try to pin her down as a character, she’s very changeable, but I’m wondering now if she has a rather mercurial nature?

Here we find her in peak hour bus hell.

– – –

A woman with bad body odour and a lime green dress with black pokadots sat down next to her, the dress clinging to and emphasising all the wrong curves of her body. She wore a long black crocheted vest with it and a pink satin flower in her hair. It was like, she was a day late trying find her way to Eagle Farm for race day. No the woman wasn’t a fashionista with an eating problem – just some wack-job with bad taste in clothing. The whole get up screamed ‘wrong’: go home, go directly home, stay inside the house, do not inflict this on the general public.

Her arms flapped as she dug into a huge handbag, spreading the stink of her B.O. as she trawled through the overstuffed thing, disgorging the conents onto her lap when she couldn’t find what she was looking for. Amanda gagged at the smell and the sight of auburn tufts of hair in her arm pits. She turned back to the look out at the platform again, looking for the English guy, wondering if he lived here or if he was backpacking. She couldn’t see him, the commuter crowd had swallowed him alive. She hoped he found his way and at the same time, got rid of the snail trails of crusted drool around his mouth and chin.

She heard the hiss of a can and turned. The woman moved a can of Impulse around her, disappearing in a fog of body spray, with each protracted spray -as though she’d suddenly become aware of how bad she smelt and was doing an agent-orange styled dousing.

Amanda sneezed. The woman looked at her and kept spraying. Amanda sneezed again.

Could the afternoon get any worse. She sneezed again, wishing she had the guts to tell the woman to put the fucking can down. Her eyes began to sting and burn. She’d never had an allergy or reaction to anything before. Rather than the Impulse (she’s worn plenty of it in her time) she was certain the reaction was telling her to move away from the badly dressed woman.

“I think the young lady next to you might have an allergy to your perfume,” a woman in a business suit, standing next to them said. Amanda pushed the sleeves of her hoodie into her eyes when her travelling companion looked at her, with the same determination on her face, as though she would recommence spraying despite what the other suit had said.

“It’s not perfume.”

Amanda bit her bottom lip. Whatever the fuck she wanted to call it it wasn’t agreeing with her. Someone else close by coughed. She preferred the stink of the woman’s detoxing body, without the Impulse over lay now, simply because it didn’t make her eyes burn or nose itch.

“Perhaps you can wait until you get off,” the business suit continued. “I think we’d all appreciate it.”

The woman held the can, uncapped and Amanda, thought about karma and how karma was going to get this woman if she didn’t put the fucking can away.