“Hey,” the man inquired “are you a Jew?”
“Guilty as charged,” Rossen smiled faintly and returned to his newspaper.
“You ashamed of it?” the man asked
“Didn’t have much choice,” Rossen shrugged and wondered if he should leap out at the next stop.
“Ya look Jewish,” the man sniffed.
“How depressing,” Rossen joked “you make it sound like the Innsmouth look.”
It had been a stressful day at work, and David Rossen, taking his thirty-minute bus shuffle back to his flat ready to choose between a MacDonald’s or a microwave dinner found he couldn’t sit exhausted in peace, for this stranger sitting across the aisle had introduced himself.
Bald, with crater-like skin, a flatten nose and a big protruding belly on his thin frame, this guy could play an ogre in a fantasy movie, all you had to do was paint his skin green.
“You killed Jesus!” the man spat.
“Gosh,” Rossen yawned “did I? That happened, oh goodness two thousand years ago, which is an accomplishment given that I hadn’t been born then.”
“What I meant was your lot killed Jesus!”
Rossen had actually read the New Testament from cover to cover and recalled the passage where, upon the cross the Son of God called out “Father please forgive them for they know not what they do.” And hadn’t the Romans help snuff out J.C.? But nobody gave the present-day Italians grief for that.
And yet this man looked familiar. Not that Rossen would dare frequent the places this guy hung out, but hadn’t he seen him before. Possibly TV? And all at once the mental archivist in Rossen’s brain dug out the proper titbit.
“Your family were on the news, weren’t they?” Rossen recalled, “Your grandad was a schoolmaster, abused plenty of kids. Only outed recently, right?”
The man squirmed uncomfortably.
“Last Wednesday,” Rossen went on “around 6:15, BBC News, Gerald Monks, abused thirteen schoolgirls, you were on TV, defending him, weren’t you?”
“What they were saying about him was utter slander, completely untrue!”
“You really should register as a sex offender,” Rossen laughed “sins of the fathers and all that.”
“You wot? He died before I was born!”
The man’s knuckles tightened, looking almost ready to get physical. But mercifully the bus came to a stop and Rossen without missing a beat, leapt from his seat and onto the pavement in a few seconds. The troll man didn’t attempt to follow him.
Oh look, right in front of him was a KFC, which was probably as good as he was going to get this night.
