Bus Call

“Dot. Femi. Sylvie. Lenny, that’s two, that’s fine. Marek, Bel, Jonesy. Keith’s on.” Fitz lowered the clipboard she doesn’t need. “That’s seven and a driver.”

Nobody moved. It was one in the morning in the loading bay behind the Leeds arena, and the drizzle was the same drizzle Newcastle keeps on a timer, and the bus was running with the door open and the step lit, and we were standing on the tarmac in the order she’d counted us, because that’s how you stand at a bus call when you’ve done seventy of them.

“That’s one short,” said Lenny.

“It’s the number I was given.”

“By who?”

Fitz looked at him the way she looks at a cable somebody’s left across a doorway. “Get on the bus, Len.”

We got on the bus. I got on last, because I’d been waiting for a name that didn’t come, and I stood on the step with my hand on the rail and looked back across the loading bay.

Hal’s Volvo was by the gate with its engine running and its lights on. Every night of five years it had waited behind the bus with the interior light on until Fitz had finished, and then pulled out after us and followed us up whatever road it was, like a man who doesn’t trust a coach to arrive. It wasn’t behind the bus. It was in front of it. And as I stood on the step the interior light went off, and it pulled out through the gate ahead of us, onto the ring road, and there were two heads in it, not one.

The door hissed. Keith put the bus in gear. We followed Hal out of Leeds, which in five years we’d never done, and I stood in the front lounge and watched the Volvo’s tail lights going north up the motorway ahead of us, two red points in the rain, and I didn’t count anything, because there was only one thing to count and it was in the passenger seat.

· · ·Scene break

I’ll put the Tuesday show down, because it’s owed, and then I’ll leave it.

I sang the bridge to the ear again. I’d decided it for Leeds, both nights, and I’d said it to nobody and I kept it. What I hadn’t decided was what he’d do, and on Tuesday, when the two amber specials came up and everything else in the building went out, he didn’t step in.

He stayed on his mark. Four feet. Bel’s grey tape, where the plot puts him, where Bel stopped re-taping in the second week because we’d never once stood on it. He sang his line from there, a third below and a fraction late, to the room, the way you’d sing a harmony to a room you’d been booked for. It was a good harmony. It was the best-sung line in the building.

Thirteen and a half thousand people watched two people stand four feet apart and sing past each other. They sang the last line back on the beat. Nobody shouted anything from block C.

In the dark, Fitz’s torch found us on the marks and said “Cable,” and I walked the fifty-eight steps with him behind me, and he didn’t stop at the living room door, and he didn’t say anything in it, and at some point between the living room and the loading bay he’d found Fitz and given her an address, because he’s the only one of us who ever does.

· · ·Scene break

The bunks were dark. Bottom left, third from the front. I didn’t lie down in mine. I sat on the edge of it with my boots on the blue strip, and across the aisle the curtain on his bunk was open all the way, and there was nobody in it.

I’d never seen it empty at night. In five years. It had a pillow and a folded blanket and the parlour guitar in its case against the wall at the foot, and it had the blue light lying along the front of it like a line you don’t cross until you’re told.

I knew what I was looking at. I’d been told about it once, in a living room in Manchester, by the man whose bunk it was. A listing in a free paper. A chip shop. Three names where there should have been four, and nobody rang. I’d never been on that side of it. I’d heard it, and I’d thought I understood it, and I hadn’t, because it turns out you can’t hear a thing like that, you can only have it done to you, and then you know what the silence is shaped like. It’s shaped like a bunk with a blanket folded on it.

He’d sung his line to the room. He’d stood on his tape. He’d got in a car.

The curtain at the front moved, and it was Fitz, in the aisle, with no clipboard.

“I’m going to say a thing,” she said, low, under the road, “and then I’m going back to my seat, and I’d like you to not make it into anything. He asked me not to tell anyone. I’m telling you, because I’m not having you sit there all the way to Aberdeen doing arithmetic.” She waited to see that I’d heard. “He’s in the Volvo. With Hal. As far as Aberdeen. He’ll be at the hotel. He gave me the address, which is Hal’s address, which is the same hotel as yours. That’s all I’ve got, and it’s all you’re getting.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. I’ve counted him. I count him in the car. It’s still seven on this bus.” And she went back through the curtain, and Keith’s radio came up behind it and went down again as the curtain closed, a man in Sheffield saying something about potholes, and I sat on the edge of my bunk with my hands between my knees.

Above me, Dot turned a page, and then didn’t turn the next one, and then put the book down, and came down the ladder in her socks.

· · ·Scene break

Dot sat on the floor of the aisle with her back against his bunk. Not in it; against it. She’s thirty-six and she has knees she complains about on stairs, and she sat on the floor of a moving bus with her legs out along the blue strip and her socks crossed at the ankle, and looked at me in the dark.

“I’m going home,” she said. “Tomorrow. Well. This morning. Ailsa’s meeting the bus.”

“I know.”

“You don’t know Ailsa.”

“I’ve met her. Twice. At the Aberdeen shows.”

“You’ve met her in a green room. That’s not meeting.” She pulled her cardigan round herself. “She’s a vet. Large animals. She’ll have been up since four with a cow and she’ll still be there at eight with a flask, and she’ll not come on the bus, because she thinks buses are for the people who live on them, and she’ll stand in the car park till I get off. She does it every year.”

The bus went over a join in the road and the parlour guitar in its case knocked once against the wall behind Dot’s head. She didn’t turn round.

“I was a teacher,” she said. “You know that.”

“Music. In Aberdeen.”

“Nine years. The same school. Fourteen-year-olds, mostly, and the fiddle club on a Wednesday, and the orchestra, which was eleven children and a tuba.” She looked at her socks. “I met Ailsa in my second year there. We were married in my eighth. And for all six of those years, and a bit before, if anybody in that staff room asked me what I’d done at the weekend, I said I’d been out with a friend. My flatmate. My pal. I had a name for her for every day of the week, and not one of them was hers.”

I didn’t say anything. I’ve learned that from him, if nothing else. You let a person put the thing on the table themselves.

“Nobody would have minded. I want to be fair to them. It wasn’t that sort of place, and it wasn’t that sort of year. It wasn’t them. It was me. I’d decided, somewhere, that the staff room was a place where if I said one true thing the whole building would come down, and I’d have to stand in the rubble with a register and teach 3B the recorder.” She breathed out. “So I didn’t. For six years. I got very good at it. I could do the whole of a Monday morning without a pronoun.”

“What happened?”

“We got married on a Saturday. In a hotel by the beach, with forty people and a ceilidh band that couldn’t keep time. And on the Monday there was a staff meeting, and the head did the thing heads do, where you go round the table and say one bit of news, and it came to me.” Dot looked at me then, over nothing, the level look, without a fiddle to do it over. “I said, ‘I got married on Saturday. Her name’s Ailsa. She’s a vet.’”

The bus did sixty. Keith’s radio murmured behind the curtain. Across the aisle the blanket lay folded on the bunk.

“That was it,” she said. “The chemistry man asked if she did cats. The deputy head cried, which I’d not have predicted. Somebody went out at break and came back with a cake from the garage, and it was dreadful, and we ate it.” She put her head back against his bunk. “I said it in a staff room in front of forty people and nobody died.”

I laughed. I didn’t mean to. It came out of me in the dark, low, and it wasn’t the camera one, and Dot let me.

“A year after that,” she said, “Hal rang. A band from Yorkshire, a folk duo going to five, needed a fiddle for a tour. And I’d have said no. I had a pension and a timetable and a mortgage we’d only just got. But I’d found out, that year, that you can say a thing and the roof stays on. So I went into the same staff room, on a Monday, at the same table, and I said, ‘I’m leaving to play the fiddle in a band,’ and the chemistry man asked if I’d be on the telly.” She almost smiled. “It’s the same muscle. That’s all I’m telling you. I’m not telling you what to do. I don’t care what you do. I care that you know it’s a staff room. You think it’s a cliff, and it’s a staff room with a biscuit tin in it.”

“This is twelve thousand people.”

“Aye. And a truck.” She didn’t argue with it. “I didn’t say it’d be the same size. I said it’d be the same muscle.”

· · ·Scene break

We sat for a while. The bus climbed onto a long flat stretch somewhere past Newcastle, and the road came up through the floor smoother, and at the back Lenny opened a can and then, after a moment, didn’t drink it, and put it down on the floor by his bunk, and I heard it roll.

“He’s in a Volvo,” Dot said. “That’s all he’s in. He’s not in a free paper.”

I looked at her. I don’t know how much of it she knew. I’d never told her about Hawser, and he’d told me once and said he wouldn’t again, and Dot has a way of knowing the shape of a thing without being handed it, the way she knows a string’s going flat before it has.

“He stood on his tape tonight,” I said.

“I saw.”

“He’s never stood on it.”

“No. He’s stood half a foot off it for three years, waiting for you to notice.” She pulled her socks in and got her knees under her, which took a while. “And you sang to his ear for two nights on purpose, and he noticed that. He notices everything you do, Sylv. It’s his worst quality.” She got up by the rail of my bunk and stood in the aisle over me. “I’d not change it either.”

“Dot.”

“I’ve said my thing. That was my thing. I’ll not say it twice; I’m not Femi’s mother-in-law.” She put a hand on the top of my head, once, flat, the way you’d steady a music stand. “Get some sleep. Ailsa’ll be there at eight with a flask, and she’ll want to look at you, and you’ll want to have a face.”

She went up the ladder. The book didn’t open again. After a minute I heard her breathing change, the way a person’s does when they’ve put a thing down they’d carried a long way, and she was asleep before Berwick.

I didn’t sleep. I lay down, finally, with the curtain open and the blue light on the floor, and I looked across the aisle at the folded blanket, and I let myself do the arithmetic Fitz had come through the curtain to stop. Four hundred miles. Seven hours. Two people in a car older than Lenny, one of whom doesn’t talk and one of whom only talks in tunes, and no guitar between them. I’d have given a great deal to know what either of them had said by Edinburgh. I’d have bet, knowing Hal, it was nothing at all.

It was the first night in five years he wasn’t three feet across the aisle, and I didn’t sleep through one minute of it.

· · ·Scene break

Aberdeen at eight in the morning was grey granite and a white sky and gulls on every lamp post, and the bus came into the hotel car park with the sun trying and not managing, and Ailsa was there.

I knew her from the green rooms: tall, weathered, a waxed jacket with the pockets full, a flask in one hand. She was standing by the kerb where the bus would stop, not waving, the way Dot had said she would, and when the door hissed Dot went past Fitz’s count in her socks with her boots in her hand and the fiddle case under her arm, and down the step, and across the tarmac, and kissed her wife in front of a bus, a car park, a man walking a dog, and eight people she’d been on the road with for six months.

It wasn’t long. It was about as long as a last line. Then Ailsa said something I couldn’t hear and Dot laughed and put her boots on, standing on one foot and holding onto Ailsa’s sleeve, and they walked off to a muddy car with a dog guard in the back, and Dot didn’t look round once.

The man with the dog didn’t look up. Nobody filmed it. Nobody died.

The Volvo was already parked, nose in, in the corner of the car park by the hotel’s back door, with dew still on the roof. Hal was in the driver’s seat with his coat on and his head back and his mouth open, asleep. The passenger door was shut. The passenger seat was empty.

On the dashboard, in front of it, was a paper cup from a services, and next to the cup a set of guitar strings still in the packet, which he’d have bought somewhere in the night because it’s the practical thing, and I stood at the bottom of the bus step with my bag and looked at them through the windscreen for longer than anyone needs to look at strings.