The One-O'Clock Bus · novella
2The Auditor
The letter came Thursday and gave me Monday: eleven in the morning, Marchgate House, fourth floor, Room 4.11. It asked me to bring nothing.
I want that entered, because in eleven years the authority has never asked me to bring nothing. They ask for the duty cards and the defect book and the fuel sheets, and once, memorably, for a receipt from 2019. Bring nothing is not a courtesy. It means: we have it. All of it. We would rather you didn’t have a copy in front of you while we talk.
A night man asked to attend at eleven in the morning is a man asked to work a shift he does not own. I sleep from seven to three. Monday I lay down at seven and got up at half nine having done neither, shaved with the light on, and went out into a Tuesday-coloured Monday full of people striding about with cups of coffee in their hands as though the whole business were normal. Buses everywhere, mine among them, day crews, doors going, the city loud as a workshop. I have driven through that city ten thousand times and never once in it. It’s a different place with the lights off. I prefer mine.
Marchgate House has a clock in its lobby set into the stone, and it was right. I stood under it until it clicked over to 10:52 and matched the second hand against my watch out of habit, and it held. That’s the detail I took upstairs with me. At the depot the clock has run ninety seconds fast since before my time and no one has ever fixed it, and I had somehow got to fifty-eight years old believing that was how clocks were: near enough, agreed upon, allowed their minutes. This one wasn’t allowed anything. It simply was the time.
Room 4.11 was a meeting room they had let her take over, and she had taken it over the way ivy takes a wall.
Route 9 was on three sides of me. Telemetry printouts, the long fanfold kind, pinned edge to edge and running the length of the room at chest height — eleven years of a bus, unrolled. Above them, in blocks, the summary sheets. Below, at knee level where the paper had run out of wall, more of it laid over the radiator and weighted with a stapler. Somebody had gone at the whole thing with four colours of highlighter and a great deal of patience.
“Mr Mensah. Vera Brandt.” She shook my hand and did not smile professionally at me, which I appreciated more than I expected to. Fifties. Grey cardigan, reading glasses pushed up, a biro behind her ear and another in her hand. “Sit anywhere. I’d offer you the coffee but I’d be doing you harm.”
I sat with my back to the window so I could see the wall.
“You’re looking at your route,” she said. “Most people look at the window. It’s a good window.”
“It’s a lot of paper.”
“It’s four thousand and some nights.” She put her glasses down on her nose and looked along the wall herself, the way a man looks along a length of timber. “I’ll tell you what I’ve got, because I’m not clever enough to be tactical and I’ve never found it saves time. Route 9 night service runs to schedule. Genuinely — the timing-point compliance is the best on the network, night or day, by a distance that made me check my own arithmetic twice. Your log is exemplary. Legible, same hand, same ink, no gaps, no corrections. If I wanted to teach a young inspector what a properly kept record looks like, I’d take him down to your depot office and pull a volume off the shelf at random.”
“Thank you.”
“It wasn’t a compliment, it was a finding.” She said it without unkindness. “Here’s the other one. The vehicle disagrees with you.”
She got up and went to the wall.
“Odometer against scheduled distance. Fuel drawn against distance run. Door-cycle counts against recorded boardings. Any one of those, in isolation, I’d throw out — telemetry lies constantly, it’s the worst witness I’ve got. But they lie in different directions and these three agree. Route 9 as printed is eleven point four miles. Route 9 as driven is eleven point four miles four nights in five.” Her biro touched a yellow band, and travelled along it. “And on the fifth, it’s anything from twelve to sixteen. Once, nineteen. Doors open at stops that aren’t stops. Then it comes home, and the log says eleven point four.”
I looked at the yellow. It ran the length of the wall in a broken line, like a road seen from very high up.
“Now.” She turned round. “I’ve been at this twenty-two years, so I’ll spare us both the part where I pretend to have an open mind about what that pattern usually is. It’s usually a favour. A driver running someone’s cousin home, a bit of cash, a bit of cargo, a bit of everything. Sometimes it’s a second job. Twice, in my career, it was somebody being moved about who oughtn’t to have been.” She let that sit exactly as long as it needed to. “And I’ll tell you the case I actually think of, because it’s fairer than the ones I’ve just used. Care transport, out west, nine years ago. The rota was fudged. Only the rota — everyone was kind, everyone meant well, and the fudge was there so a man who was short-staffed could keep a service running for people who needed it. A driver came off a nineteen-hour stretch that the paper said was eleven, and went through a wall, and a lady of eighty-one who had done nothing to deserve any part of it spent the rest of a short life in a great deal of trouble.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I. But I want you to hear what the fudge was doing, Mr Mensah, because everyone always tells me what it was for.” She sat back down, and folded her hands. “A public record is what people who have no power have instead of power. That’s all it is. It’s the only thing a passenger owns. Any time a record stops being true, somebody has quietly decided that their reasons are better than a stranger’s protection. They’re usually decent reasons. I have never once found a cooked number that wasn’t keeping somebody warm. I’ve also never found one that wasn’t costing somebody else, and the somebody else is never in the room.”
I sat with my hands in my lap in the sunlight and thought that if I had ever been asked to write down what I believed about the log, it would have come out very close to that, in a worse hand.
Then she interviewed me, which took forty minutes and did not feel like forty minutes.
She asked short questions. She wrote down whole answers. When I stopped in the middle of one she went on writing, and I understood after the third time that she was writing down the stop as well.
“Thirteen minutes late, the seventeenth of last month. Cause?”
“Rain. The lights on Harrow Vale hold long in the wet, and there was a ramp deployment at the hospital.”
“You remember the ramp.”
“I remember the night.”
“You remember all of them?”
“I remember the ones I entered.”
She wrote that down. She asked about the fuel draw, and I gave her the honest answer, which is that 17 is a 2009 vehicle with a tired injector and drinks according to her mood; she said she’d have the engineers confirm it and made a note to do so, in front of me, which I noticed. She asked whether anyone else drove the night service. Relief cover, four or five times a year, and I gave her the names. She asked whether I had ever carried anything for anyone. No. Whether I had ever taken money outside the fare box. No. Whether anyone had ever asked me to. No.
“Good,” she said, and meant it, and then: “Mr Mensah, I’m going to give you the same thing I give everybody once, and I only give it once, so I’d like you to hear it as an offer and not a trick. If there is a practice on this route that isn’t in the manual — an arrangement, a custom, something the depot has always done and nobody ever wrote down — tell me now and it goes in my report as an irregularity. Irregularities get fixed. If I find it myself in six weeks, it isn’t an irregularity any more. It’s a finding, and findings have names on them.”
There was a great deal of daylight in that room.
I could have said: between one and two in the morning the bus goes where people need to go. I have never charged a penny for it and never chosen a single one of them, and if you would like to know what the odd miles are, they are a lad called nobody-you’ll-ever-meet getting off at his nan’s door instead of the northbound coach. I could have said it in about eleven seconds. I have run the sentence often enough in the cab to know its length.
What I said was: “The route runs as printed.”
She wrote that down too, and the pause in front of it.
“All right,” she said. “Then I’ll do ride-alongs. Three scheduled — I’ll send you the dates — and one I won’t.” She capped the biro. “That’s not a threat either, it’s just how it works. And I’d better tell you the last thing, because you’ll find it out and think it means something. I don’t drive. Never have. I use the network like everybody else.” She looked at the wall, at eleven years of my hand’s promise reduced to a coloured line. “It’s why I’m good at this and it’s why people lie to me for longer than they should. They assume I don’t know what a road is.”
At the door I asked her the only question I asked all morning. “What happens to the route?”
“That depends entirely on what the minutes turn out to be,” she said. “Some of them go back to the timetable. And Mr Mensah — a night service that can’t account for itself doesn’t get corrected. It gets withdrawn. There’s no budget line for corrected.”
I had my hand on the door when she said, quite mildly, as though it had only then occurred to her, which I do not for one moment believe:
“One more. Corvus Road, oh-one-twenty-six. Your vehicle drops to walking pace along the odd-numbered side, holds it the length of the street, and picks up at the corner. It does that every night. Not most — every night I have data for, back to the first volume.” She was looking at me over the glasses. “It’s the single most reliable thing on this route. More reliable than the depot gate. Is there a hazard there? Bad camber, school crossing, something the drivers all know about? Because if there is, it wants to be a timing point in its own right and I’ll put it in the recommendations and it’ll be there long after both of us.”
Eleven years, and a stranger with a highlighter had found the one thing on Route 9 that isn’t the hour’s doing at all.
“No,” I said. “Nothing there.”
“Nothing there,” she said, writing.
I got the door open and got out into the corridor, and the lobby clock downstairs was still exactly right, and I walked to the depot in the sunshine like a man carrying something in both hands.
They’d put the duty change up on the noticeboard, under the audit notice, on a card the size of a postcard.
Night relief training, Route 9. Driver P. Nair to accompany A. Mensah from Mon. Six weeks.
Six weeks. The same six weeks.
She was already in the cab. Twenty-four, hair up, hi-vis still creased from the store, feet on the bulkhead, eating chips out of paper at half past four in the afternoon, and when I came up the steps she got them off the bulkhead fast enough to be embarrassing for both of us and said, “Sorry — sorry — Priya. Nair. Priya.” She wiped her hand on her trousers and then thought better of offering it. “They said you’d be in at nine.”
“I’m in at nine.”
“Right. Yeah. I came early.” She said it as an admission. “I’ve wanted nights since I started. Everyone says nights are boring.”
“Nights are boring.”
“That’s what everyone says.” She was looking round the cab as she said it, at the third hook and the duty cards and the log rack and the blue notebook’s corner under them, exactly the way I look at a defect book — reading, not glancing. “Can I ask you a thing? I did the route on the map. Nine runs the retail park to the interchange the long way round, past the coach station, when Fenn Street would take four minutes off it.”
“It’s a night service. It goes where people are.”
“Yeah, but nobody’s at the coach station at one in the morning.” She screwed up the chip paper. “There’s no coach till two.”
“There’s a stop,” I said. “So we stand at it.”
“Huh,” said Priya Nair, entirely satisfied, and got out of my seat.
So: two of them, come Monday. One in daylight, who writes down the pause and does not need me to say anything at all in order to be told; and one in the cab beside me every night for six weeks, who has no armour on her, and no reason on earth to look away, and who had been on my route for four minutes and had already asked, out loud and cheerfully, a question I had spent eleven years arranging my life so as not to be asked.
And in my mouth, going nowhere, sitting there like a coin I hadn’t the right to spend: nothing there.