“Where are you now, Number Nine?” an accented voice crackled over the radio.

Geoff grabbed the receiver without looking. “I’m just leaving the Arterial Road.”

“You’re late. Make up for lost time.”

Geoff knew what that meant. When he got to the next bus stop, there were two people waiting, but nobody on the bus had pressed the bell to stop. Geoff drove right past.

He checked the mirror. The guy at the bus stop was giving Geoff two fingers. Geoff kept going.

The bell went off twice, so at the next bus stop he had to stop. There were three people waiting. Bus timetables didn’t take into account stoppage time, so the more people waiting at a bus stop, the later the bus became.

An old man and an old woman got off the bus and two teenagers got on. They both had exact change. The thirtysomething woman gave him a fiver.

“Sorry,” she said.

Geoff shook his head dismissively and smiled as he worked out her change. Severely fuckable, he thought.

NOTES:
There, I call it the Arterial Road, though it's a pretty much a throwaway comment, seeing as he's leaving it, and so is the pound coin. Like shopkeepers, I use bus drivers more than once as handy conduits to get the coin from one character to another completely unrelated to the previous one. The idea that different characters see the same thing completely differently is something I develop later. "Severely fuckable" is a line I pinched from "Alien: Resurrection", though I don't make a habit of pinching from Joss Whedon. I just thought it the kind of quickly established misogynism that was appropriate for Geoff.