The One-O'Clock Bus · novella
3The Rules of the Hour
There is a way to teach the night route and a way not to, and the way not to is to tell a person what to expect. So on the Monday I told Priya Nair nothing except the covenant, which is the whole of it and takes four words: drive the route as printed.
“That’s it?” she said. We were at the fuel island, 23:41, the clock above it reading 23:43 because it runs ninety seconds fast and has since before either of us, and I was showing her how you draw fuel and enter the draw and never once trust the gauge. “Drive the route as printed. That’s the big secret of nights.”
“It isn’t a secret. It’s on the card.” I gave her the card. “A timetable is a promise made to strangers who aren’t here to see whether you keep it. The retail park at oh-fifty-two doesn’t know if you came through at oh-fifty-two. That’s exactly why you come through at oh-fifty-two. You keep it because no one’s checking. If you only keep the promises somebody’s watching, you haven’t got a route, you’ve got an audience.”
She wrote drive the route as printed on the back of her own hand with a biro, which I chose to take as respect rather than what it plainly also was, and we took 17 out of the gate at 23:47, left onto Harrow Vale, into the city with its lights left on.
The first night, she was good. I’ll enter it plainly because it surprised me and I don’t like being surprised on my own route. She sat where the relief sits, on the flip seat by the cab door, and she did not fill the silence, which is the rarest thing a person of twenty-four can do. She read the cab the way I read a defect book — the third hook, the log rack, the duty cards and what sat under them — and she read the road the same way, and after the hospital stop she said, “The porter sleeps before you’re moving,” and after the interchange she said, “You logged that thirty seconds down and you didn’t have to,” and I said, “You log what’s true or you don’t keep a log,” and she wrote that on her hand too, under the covenant, and ran out of hand.
It was a four-nights-in-five night. Cleaners, the couple at Askew Lane not-arguing, the locked market, the launderette on Fenn Street with its one warm window going by. At one o’clock nothing happened, because the hour does not perform on demand and there was no one aboard who needed it to. I have had a hundred nights where the hour comes on and simply passes through the bus like weather through a house, touching nobody, because everybody aboard was already going where they needed to go. Those nights the blue book gets a single line. That night it got: nil.
“Boring,” said Priya, delighted, at the depot at half five. “Everyone said. I love it.”
I thought that would be the shape of teaching her. It was the shape of one night.
The second night she saw it, and there was nothing I could do about that, because the hour is not mine to hide. It belongs to the bus.
Cyril got on at the interchange at eight minutes past one.
He gets on most nights. Seventy-odd, cap, a coat too good for the year it was bought in, and he rides to the far interchange and gets off and crosses and rides back, and pays both fares, and this is not against any rule I have ever been shown. I had told Priya about him on the Monday — “a regular, rides for the warm, you take his fare and you don’t make him explain it” — and she had nodded and filed it, and when he came up the steps she said, “Evening,” at exactly the right volume, and he touched his cap to her as though the night had improved.
“Interchange, please, driver,” he said to me, the way he says it every night, and I gave him his ticket, and at one o’clock the hour had already come on — the streetlights down their half-tone, the rain gone confidential, 17 idling like she’d heard her name up the road — so that when Cyril sat down I already knew, the way you know a corner’s iced before you’re on it, that tonight was not going to be his interchange.
Her indicator went the wrong way at the war memorial.
Not the interchange. Left, off the card, down toward the taxi office on Bell Street where the private-hire drivers sit between calls with the light on and a card school going and the kettle never off, three or four of them, all night, every night, the only lit door on that stretch. I did not turn the wheel. Priya felt the turn before she saw the sign for it — I watched her feel it, her head come round, the arithmetic start behind her eyes, this is not the route, he’s off the route, why is he — and then the doors opened on their own sigh outside the taxi office, and Cyril did not stand up.
“This isn’t the interchange,” he said, to the window, which is where they say it.
“No,” I said.
He looked at the lit door and the men behind the glass, and something in his face gave way very slightly, the way a knot gives, and he said the thing the hour was charging him — I have entered a hundred of these fares and they are always the truest sentence the person owns — he said, “I don’t much want to go home yet, if I’m honest,” and the moment it was out of him he was up and off, cap touched to Priya again, across the wet road toward the warm and the cards and the men who, I would put money on it, kept a chair for him and had noticed on the nights he didn’t come.
The doors closed. 17 came about and took us back to the route with the mild satisfaction of a vehicle in gear, and I looked at the clock and it was oh-one-eleven and we would make the coach station down by two minutes, defensible, rain.
Priya said, “What was that.”
Not a question. She was staring at me with her whole face open, no armour on it anywhere, lit up like the taxi-office window, and I understood that this was the moment the route turned for me, because she had seen it clean — the wrong indicator, the door on a street with no stop, the old man saying the true thing and going toward people — she had seen exactly what it was, before anyone had taught her to disbelieve it, and all she wanted was for me to say yes.
“He’s a regular,” I said. “You get to know where they really want putting down. Bell Street’s got an all-night cab firm, they let him sit. Kinder than the interchange, this time of year. I use my discretion.” I heard myself say discretion. “The log’ll show the interchange. He paid for the interchange.”
I want this entered accurately, because a log is for the things that are hard to enter.
The lie I told Vera Brandt in that daylit room cost me nothing. I have turned it over since and I am sure of it. Nothing there, about Corvus Road — that was a wall I put up in front of a stranger who was paid to test walls, and she wrote down the wall and the pause behind it and we both knew the game we were playing and neither of us was hurt by my move in it. It was a professional lie between professionals. It kept.
This one did not keep. This one I felt go out of me and land on her, on Priya, who had done nothing but see truly and say what was that with her whole open face, and what I did with discretion and kinder this time of year was reach into a thing she had witnessed with her own eyes and take it off her — make her wonder, for the first time on this route, whether she could trust what she’d plainly seen. I have kept a false log for eleven years and slept. I did not enjoy the four seconds after I said discretion. She was quiet a moment, and then she said, “Right. Yeah. Discretion,” and wrote nothing on her hand, and looked out the windscreen, and I had my exemplary route back and it tasted of tin.
Then we came to Corvus Road, and the bus did a thing it has never done in eleven years, and did it with a witness in the cab.
Corvus Road is a timing point, oh-one-twenty-six, and we were early, which is the only place on the route we ever are. She slows there. Every night, the odd-numbered side, walking pace, past the postbox and the school railings and a door I have no professional business being aware of, and at the far corner she gathers herself and drives on, and the blue book gets four words and the official log gets none. I had said nothing to Priya about Corvus. There is nothing to say. On the card it is a stop we pass and stand a minute at the far end of, and I had let her think that was all it was, and I was ready to read the adverts above the empty seats the way I do until the corner let us go.
We came onto the odd-numbered side and 17 dropped to her walking pace, slow as a hearse in the rain, and I felt Priya go still beside me — she’d already clocked that we always slowed here, she misses nothing, she’d have had it by the second pass — and then, halfway along, outside the door with the light I don’t look at, Bus 17 stopped altogether and opened her doors.
On nobody. On an empty wet street and a porch two doors up with a lamp behind the curtain.
She has never done that. Eleven years she has walked that street with her doors shut like a woman walking slow past a house and keeping her eyes ahead. Now she stood there with her doors wide on the rain and the empty pavement and the one lit window, idling, listening, the way she listens on the road for the ones who need her — except there was no one aboard who had asked for Corvus Road, no fare to charge, no true sentence owing from anyone but the man behind the wheel, and I sat with my hands in my lap and my hands on nothing and did not get up, and did not speak, and after a while — a long while, the longest that street has ever held me — she took the offer back, sighed her doors shut, gathered at the far corner, and drove on.
“There’s no stop there,” Priya said. Quietly, now. Watching me and not the road. “Abel. There’s no stop there and she opened the doors. She waited.” And then, because she is who she is, straight to the centre of it, the question I have spent eleven years arranging my nights so as never to be asked: “The old fella, fine, discretion, whatever you want to call it. But there’s nobody there. Who does she stop for on Corvus Road?”
I heard the answer I had already given once that week, in daylight, to a woman with a highlighter, and I heard it come up in me again to give to a girl in the dark who had watched the doors open on nothing and understood before I did that nothing was exactly the wrong word for it, and I gave it to her anyway.
“Nothing there,” I said.
She looked at me for a second longer than was comfortable. Then she faced front, and we ran the route as printed down to the interchange, on time to the minute, in a silence that was the first thing all night I hadn’t had to falsify.
I did the log at the desk in the cab at twenty to six, official first, in the round unhurried hand: 01:19 coach station, 2 late, rain; no incidents. Then the blue book from under the duty cards, true, because a false record is a debt and I pay debts: 01:08 Bell St, left against card. Cyril — delivered to the cab office. Said the thing. And under it the four words that street has always been allowed and no more, and then, because the true book records everything or it is only a diary, I made myself add the fifth thing it had never needed before: 01:26 Corvus Rd. Slowed. Opened. Drove on.
I looked at Opened in my own hand for a while. It sat there like a light left on in a house you’d told yourself was empty.
I was reaching for my coat when I turned and Priya was in the cab doorway, come back for the gloves she’d left on the flip seat, and she had them in one hand, and in the other, held the way you hold a thing you have already decided you are allowed to pick up, she had the blue notebook.
She’d have known where it lived since her first night. She reads the cab. She’d had its corner under the duty cards since before I ever taught her the covenant, and now she had the whole of it open to the last page, to my hand, to left against card and said the thing and Opened, and she was not reading it guiltily. She was reading it the way she read the road — carefully, and without any intention of looking away.
“This isn’t the route as printed,” she said.
The fuel-island clock ticked its ninety seconds fast through the windscreen. Somewhere out on the apron the first bird started up, and the metal ran with wet, and I stood there in eleven years of my own careful hand held open in a girl’s steady grip, and found I had nothing printed to say.