Hi guys.  This is my first posting; I scribbled the framework after getting off the bus, and have done some revision since then.  All opinions are welcome as I am hoping to improve my writing style.

The bus appeared crowded at first, but after a moment Sharon realised it was an illusion caused by the presence of half a dozen prams and strollers which blocked the aisle at the front, where the fold-up seats were.  It was always like this on Wednesday; that was the shopping day for young mums, some of them looking about fourteen.  On Thursday it would be old ladies with their walking trolleys. 

Further back, Sharon spotted an empty seat.  She paid the fare, corrected the driver when he forgot, as usual, and tried to let her on at the concession rate, and negotiated the obstacle course to the vacant place. 

The sun was shining in full winter brilliance through the window.  It made her nervous; she felt that uneasy prickly sensation on her arm, around the blemish about which all the doctor's reassurance had not set her mind at rest.  So she edged towards the aisle, away from the sunlight. She knew it was irrational, but the older she got, the nearer to the age at which her mother had died, the more anxious she became about the consequences of aging.

She looked around at the other passengers, in the slow impersonal way one does on buses.  There were not so many people after all.  Most of the seats had only one occupant; middle aged women mostly, chatting over the backs of seats or across the aisle, and one old man who sat silently, staring at the floor.   At the front of the bus, the girls talked to their children or to each other.  One of the prams was a double one, with a sleeping baby behind a wide-eyed, fractious toddler.  He was grizzling to himself in an exhausted monotone, to the apparent disapproval of a younger child watching from the safety of her mother's lap.  Sharon had the feeling that her own expression was as hostile as that of the observing infant, and she looked away.

The bus turned left, and Sharon was back in sunshine for a moment.  She twitched uneasily, but a right turn brought her back into safety.  How long does it take for UV to change something? she thought.  It seemed as if there must be a moment when it would happen: one second before, and everything was normal; one second after, and the seed was sown, without her being aware of the change.  It might have happened within the last few minutes; it might have happened years ago, and if that was so, then at what point would she cease to be healthy and be ever after defined by her disease?  Like her mother: one day, just Joan; the next, after the doctor had spoken, she was Joan with cancer. And from then on, everything her mother did was subject to that definition.

The slowing of the bus brought her back from her thoughts.  She glanced out at the approaching bus shelter, one of the old blue-grey metal ones, looking faded in the bright sun.  There were a lot of people waiting here, and they crowded forward as the bus stopped and the door opened, but the driver waved them back as he climbed out of his seat.  He came back to where the old man was sitting.

"Come on, Harry," he said, very kindly, as if talking to a child. 

He put one hand under Harry's elbow, shifting it carefully to find just the right position.  Thus assisted, and with his free hand clinging to the back of the seat in front of him, the old man rose very slowly, and shuffled towards the exit.  The girl with the double pram, without being asked, manoeuvred it off the bus to give them a clear passage.

The thought came to Sharon, with a mild sense of shock, that the old man was taller than the driver, and proportionally big-framed.  She wondered briefly if he'd played sport in his youth; football, perhaps.  Not rugby; he was too tall for that, and not sufficiently heavy-framed.  She thought he must have always been slender, and now in spite of his height, he looked almost weightless, and as colourless and transparent as a long-finished seed pod. 

Supported on one side by the driver, on the other he grasped at any support, the back of a seat or a pram.  He didn't make eye contact with the other passengers; his expression didn't change at all, so it was not possible to tell whether he was embarrassed by his own weakness, or unaware of the presence of other people.  Sharon concluded the latter.

I hope I don't get like that when I'm old, she thought, and she tried to remember if her mother had been similarly affected.  And the realisation came, too late by years, that her mother, who had been active and independent all her life, would have gone to any lengths to hide the discomforts and the loss of dignity that old age brought with it, as she had done with the consequences of her illness, resisting help from her family as well as from the nurses.

Reaching the door, Harry faced another challenge: getting down the last low step to the ground.  He no longer appeared weightless; being a big man, if he fell he would fall hard, and he looked brittle and easily shattered.  Sharon was unaware that she was holding her breath, and that her hands were just barely extended as if to try to catch him; and she didn't notice herself relaxing as one of the waiting passengers took Harry's other arm, helping the driver to guide him safely down and bring him to the shelter.   Even sitting down, for Harry,  seemed to take a very long time. 

The driver placed his walking frame in front of him, and got back onto the bus; and to Sharon's astonishment, Harry was left there alone.  Nobody had come to meet him; there was nobody to see him home.  But as the bus pulled away, the last Sharon saw was Harry raising his head, and with an uncertain hand straightening the collar of his jacket.