She was running before the doors closed, down the whole length of the BUS with her coat open and her bag going behind her — and the driver had already pulled out and he did not look at her once.
Not out of cruelty. He has a SCHEDULE and a mirror and a line painted on the concrete.
And she was on the wrong side of all three.
“That is my son’s bag.”
She said it to the glass, level, not screaming it.
Which is the part people get wrong about women in car parks at half past six.
He kept his eyes forward. “I cannot stop here.”
Which is true. It is a depot APRON, not a stop, and there is a rule about it.
And the rule exists for a reason and none of that had anything to do with what was on the seat.
Because the bag was still on it.
A small one. The kind with a cartoon on the front that a boy stops wanting at about eight and keeps using anyway because it is HIS.
Row three, on its own. Where he had been sitting.
He was not on the bus.
She had put him on it at the school GATE an hour earlier.
She watched it go, and she went to work.
Somewhere between there and here he had got off, or been got off, and only his BAG had come the whole way.
“Please.”
That was all she had left by then.
And a woman in her sixties, four rows back with a headscarf on, who had been watching the whole thing through the window with her hands in her lap, reached up and pulled the CORD.
The bell went. The driver looked at his mirror, and then at the woman, and then at nothing at all for about a second.
“Open the door.”
She did not say it loudly either.
Eleven minutes on the apron
The boy was three stops back and he was warm and nothing at all had happened to him.
That is the answer, and she did not have it for another eleven minutes, and those eleven minutes are the story.
He had got off at the temporary stop at the bottom of Corliss Street, where the roadworks are, and he had walked forty metres in the rain to the laundromat on the corner, and he was sitting on the orange plastic chair by the big dryers with his coat still on, eating vanilla wafers out of a packet the woman there had opened for him.
The bag stayed on the seat because his hands were full of the biscuits and because at that stop everybody stands up at once and pushes, and an eight-year-old goes with the push.
None of which anyone on that apron knew yet.
The door folded open. Stacey Nowak went up the two steps and along the aisle past four people who had all decided to look at their phones, and she picked the bag up off row three, and it weighed nothing, and that was the worst part of the whole evening for her, that it weighed nothing.
She said his name into the empty seat like an idiot. She said it once.
The driver had his hand on the radio and he was talking to the depot in the flat voice men use on radios, giving the route number and the time and the words lone juvenile, which is a thing she would think about later.
The woman in the headscarf was standing in the aisle by then with her handbag on her forearm.
“Corliss Street,” she said. “He got off at Corliss Street.”
Forty pounds a week
Stacey is thirty-four and she does four nights a week at the packing place out by the retail park, half six until half two, and she has done since Owen was five.
The maths of it is the only reason any of the rest of this happened.
School finishes at ten past three. The nights start at half six. Between those two facts there is a hole of three hours and twenty minutes, twice a week, on the two nights her neighbour Sue could not have him, and into that hole she had put her sister.
Kirsty is five years older and lives two streets from the school. The arrangement was four years old and had never needed writing down. On Tuesdays and Thursdays Owen goes on the 41 from the school gate at twenty-five to six, after homework club, and he rides five stops to Corliss Street, and Kirsty is at the stop, and she walks him the two hundred metres to Kirsty’s flat and gives him his tea, and Stacey picks him up at three in the morning off the back of her shift.
She paid her sister forty dollars a week for that, in a card at Christmas and in cash on a Friday.
Stacey had offered more twice and been told to stop being daft. It was not really a wage and both of them knew it. It was the thing you do because it is your sister, and the forty was there so that neither of them had to say out loud that it was a job.
What the forty bought, if you had asked her that Tuesday, was a woman standing at a bus shelter on Corliss Street at twenty past six with her hood up. That is the whole of it. Somebody to stand at that stop and be there when the doors open.
There was another way to do it. The school runs a club until six, arts and cooking and a football thing, and it is four pounds fifty a session, which is nine pounds a week, which is thirty-six a month, and in September she had stood at the office window with the form in her hand and given it back. The forty to Kirsty was money that stayed in the family. That was how she had said it to herself, standing there, in those words.
The other thing worth knowing about Owen is that he does not carry that bag. He wears it. He has worn it since Year One and he sleeps with it by the bed on a Sunday night so it is ready, and the zip on the front pocket broke in the spring and he never asked to have it fixed, because with the zip broken he can get a hand in there while he is walking.
Four years. Eight rides a month, more or less. Two hundred and something bus journeys.
She had never once come home to an empty flat.
The woman in the headscarf
Her name is Halima Chowdhury and she was on that bus because she cleans the leisure centre and the shift starts at seven.
She got off at the apron with Stacey because the bus was going nowhere until the driver had finished with the radio, and she stood under the overhang out of the rain with her hands in front of her, and she did the thing almost nobody does, which is stay.
“He is a small boy,” she said. “Grey coat. He sits on the third row on the left because the heater is under that seat.”
Stacey looked at her.
“I am on this bus Tuesday and Thursday,” Halima said. “So is he.”
Then she opened her handbag and took out a notebook, the little kind with the elastic band round it, and she went back through it with her thumb, and it was full of times. Bus times, in pen, four to a line, going back pages and pages.
She had started keeping them eleven months before, when her husband Faruk was on ward six at the county and she was doing two buses each way every day and one of them was never where the timetable said. She wrote down what actually happened instead of what was printed. She never stopped after he came home. She said it was a habit now, like the cleaning.
And because she wrote down times, she wrote down other things.
She turned the notebook round so Stacey could see it, and put her finger on a line halfway down a page.
“Last Thursday,” she said. “Six twenty-two. He gets off at the bottom of Corliss Street, where the barriers are. Not at the shelter. The bottom.”
“He gets off at the shelter. My sister’s at the shelter.”
Halima did not say anything for a second. She turned the page back and put her finger on another line, and then another one on the page before that, and each time she said a date out loud in the same voice, and she got to four before Stacey put her hand flat over the notebook.
“Why were you even watching him?”
“Because for eleven months nobody looked at me,” Halima said. “So now I look.”
Rhoda’s biscuits
The laundromat on Corliss Street has been there longer than the road markings and it is one of about six places on that stretch with the lights still on at half six in November.
Stacey went back on the 41. Trevor the driver took her, off route, with the depot on the radio telling him what it was going to cost him, and Halima came too and stood by the pole holding on with both hands.
Owen was on the orange chair with his knees up. He had crumbs down the front of him and he had his shoes off and up on the seat, which he is not allowed to do, and when his mother came through the door with his bag in her hand he put his shoes back on first before he stood up.
The woman who runs it is called Rhoda and she is about sixty and she was folding somebody’s service wash on the counter and did not stop folding.
“He’s been good as gold,” Rhoda said. “Same as always.”
Same as always.
Stacey had her son’s face in both hands by then and she still heard it.
“How do you mean, always?”
Rhoda put the towel down. She looked at Owen and then she looked at Stacey properly for the first time, and something went across her face that was not quite an apology.
“He comes in when it’s raining, love. He waits for his auntie. He’s no bother — he sits by the dryers where it’s warm and he does his reading book.”
“How many times has he done that?”
“I thought you knew,” Rhoda said. “I did think somebody knew.”
The front pocket
They walked home. It is a mile and a quarter and she did not have the money for a taxi and could not have sat still in one anyway.
Owen talked about a boy called Ryan who had been sick in the corridor. He held her hand, which he had stopped doing in front of the school but still did in the dark.
At the flat she put him in the bath and then she sat on the floor of the hallway with the bag in her lap and she went through it the way you go through a bag when you already know.
Reading book. A jumper he had said he lost. A conker with a hole started in it and no string yet. And in the front pocket, the one with the broken zip, loose against the lining, a card.
A service wash loyalty card, the size of a bus ticket, Corliss Street Laundromat along the top and ten little boxes underneath.
Six of the boxes had a stamp in them.
And under each stamp, in blue pen in an old woman’s handwriting, a date.
The first one was the fourteenth of October.
She sat on that hall floor with the water running in the other room and she counted the dates twice, out loud, the way she counts pallets at work, and there were six of them and they were all Tuesdays and Thursdays and the last one was that afternoon.
Three weeks. Six evenings. He had been walked into that laundromat by nobody, and Rhoda had given him a stamp each time to give him something to hold, and every one of those nights Stacey had been at the plant with her phone in her locker.
She put the card down on the carpet next to her leg and picked it up again.
The fourteenth of October was the Thursday Kirsty had sent a photo of Owen at her kitchen table with a plate of pasta in front of him. Stacey had looked at it on her break with a cup of tea going cold and sent back a heart. She could remember the photo. She got her phone out on the hall floor and found it, and the pasta was there and the table was there and the clock on Kirsty’s wall behind his head said quarter past seven, which is fifty minutes after a bus gets to Corliss Street, and there is no reading of that photo where it is a lie.
Which is the part that took the longest to sit down with. Nobody had invented anything. He had been fed. He had been picked up. He had been somewhere warm the whole time and Kirsty had not once been wrong about the actual facts.
She got him out of the bath and dried his hair with the towel over his head like she has done since he was two, and she made her voice into an ordinary voice.
“Owen. Where’s Auntie Kirsty been meeting you?”
He went still under the towel.
“She’s been busy.”
“Since when?”
“Since a bit.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
And her son said, from under a towel, with his hair sticking up: “Auntie Kirsty said don’t make a fuss about it. She said you’d lose your job.”
Kirsty’s kitchen
She went round at ten past eight on the Friday with Owen at Sue’s and the forty dollars in her coat pocket in a bank envelope because it was Friday and she had drawn it out on the way like she always did.
Kirsty had the telly on and a glass of wine on the arm of the chair and she was in her uniform for the late round at the care home, the job Stacey had put her name in for two years ago.
She let her in and she talked for eleven minutes.
She talked about how they had moved her rounds to a four-till-eight and how she had told them she could not do Tuesdays and Thursdays and they had put her on anyway, and what was she supposed to do, hand in her notice. She talked about how Corliss Street is a two-minute walk, honestly, two minutes, and how Owen is nearly nine and half the kids in his class walk further than that on their own. She talked about how she rang Rhoda’s the first week — she did, she rang the laundromat and asked if he was in there, and Rhoda said he was, so what was the problem. She talked about how Stacey had no idea what it was like to be the one everybody leans on, and how nobody ever asks how she is doing. She said the word fine nine times.
Then she said the thing she had been circling.
“And you’d have lost the shifts. That’s what would have happened. You’d have gone in and told them you couldn’t do Thursdays and they’d have put you down to two nights, and then what? I kept you in work, Stace.”
“You texted me at twenty to seven. Every night. Safe home.“
“He was safe.”
“You texted it from this kitchen.”
Kirsty picked her wine up and put it down again without drinking it.
“You’re going to sit there and tell me forty quid a week is what a childminder costs,” she said. “Go on. Ring one. Ring one and ask them what they charge and then come back and tell me what I owe you.”
That is the closest thing to an apology that was said in that flat.
Stacey took the envelope out of her coat and put it on the counter next to the kettle, all of it, the full forty, because she had said she would pay for the week and the week was over.
“That’s Friday’s.”
“Don’t be like that.”
“I’m not being like anything,” Stacey said.
She shut the door behind her. She did it quietly, because the woman upstairs works nights too.
The following Thursday
She went to the school office on the Monday and asked for the form back.
Four pounds fifty a session, two sessions, nine pounds a week, and Owen does cooking on a Thursday and comes out at six smelling of flapjack. To pay for it she asked the plant to move her to three nights and a Saturday day shift, which is about ninety pounds a week less, and she has stopped putting anything in the credit union, and in January she will find out what that means.
She also went to the depot. Not to complain. She sat in the little room with the plastic chairs and told a supervisor with a lanyard exactly what Trevor Mundy had done and why, and she gave them Halima’s name because Halima said to, and she found out while she was sitting there that it was his third one, and that a third one is a meeting.
He kept the job. He got the meeting.
The following Thursday it was raining again, that same thin rain that comes sideways across a car park, and she was at the school gate at six with her coat done up this time, because she had learned that much.
The 41 went past them on its way in from the retail park with its windows all steamed, and she stood there and watched it, and row three on the left was empty, and Halima Chowdhury was four rows back with her hands in her lap, and she lifted one of them off her lap about two inches as they went by.
Owen came out with a flapjack in greaseproof paper and his bag hanging off one shoulder.
Stacey put her hand out for it without thinking, the way she had all week.
“Mum,” he said. “It’s on my back.”
If somebody you know is holding their week together with an arrangement nobody has ever said out loud, send this to them and ask who is actually standing at that stop.
For more stories about the wild rides life takes us on, check out I Picked That House Because The Hospital Was Seven Minutes Away or perhaps My Husband’s Rule Was That Everybody Who Sleeps Here Signs Something, and for a truly unique tale, don’t miss My Name Was Notarized On Page Four And I Have Never Met The Notary.
