Witness account · 4 min read · Set in Stanhope Road ·
The Bus That Went Past Twice
Waiting for the last 9 on Stanhope Road, a woman sees the same bus go past her twice, four minutes apart, in the same direction. Someone boards the second one.
- reliability: disputed
- witness: Hattie Monsell, hospital telephonist
I am not a fanciful woman and I want that said first, because what I am about to set down has been laughed at twice and paraphrased unkindly once, and I was there and the depot's movement card was there.
I came off a late turn at the hospital and walked to the stop on Stanhope Road outside the uniform shop, the stop I have used for six years. The last 9 is chalked to run at 03:20, outbound toward the Ring; the 9 does not come through Stanhope Road inbound at all — it turns at the Yardley corner. It was a Thursday that I remember because Char had the Wednesday off and I had said I'd mind the fish. There was a bench at the stop, old livery green, with a folded coat on it. I sat at the other end of that bench, and the coat was gone when I stood up, and I record small things when large ones will not come out right.
The 9 came. I heard it labour up the hill the way it always does, and it came past me at 03:20 exactly. Rain-streaked, lit, half-empty. On its side the advert for the Murrow ferry crossings, the one with the gull. Registration ending in 47. I looked at the driver because you look at drivers: big man, ageless, cap back, the set of shoulders you see when a man has driven rainy nights all his life.
Then I sat and I thought about the fish.
At 03:24 the 9 came again.
Same direction. Same advert, same gull, same registration insofar as two reads four minutes apart can fix one. Same driver, same shoulders. Half-empty the same way: under the first street lamp I counted heads both times — one, two, three — and the fourth was the seat by the door, empty both times, the same magazine face-up on the cushion, open at the same page.
I did not get on. I raised my stick even. And something in me — call it the animal, call it the years of nights — declined to board a bus for the second time in the same direction. My arm came down by itself, and the bus went on toward the Ring, and the tail lights of it were ordinary, and they went out of my sight at the corner where the road turns.
I did not turn at the corner after it. I sat back next to where the coat had been, and at 03:31 rang the depot on the public telephone. The night inspector, Mr. Pell, was decent about a madwoman at 03:31 and pulled the movement card while I stayed on the line.
The card logged the 9 past Stanhope Road once. 03:20, outbound, reg. ending 47, his annotation in his own shorthand, headcount 3. There was no second pass. The depot had no bus out again until the 04:05 relief. And the odometer sheet — I have the photocopy — shows the 9's advance that shift as eleven miles, which is exactly the Stanhope-to-Ring distance and no more. Gone once, not twice.
So the bus went past twice, and the bus went past once, and I am the only witness of the twice and the card is the only witness of the once, and they are the same night four minutes apart.
Here is what I add now, and then I will stop. The following spring, on the coroner's inquest page of the paper everyone in my house buys: a man of our ward who used to wait at my stop — the same green bench — set out toward the Ring one Tuesday and did not arrive, and then did arrive eight years later on the following Tuesday, unaged, shoes through, asking after his mother. Find that a matter of parish record and not of my say-so. Seven returns the article counted, over the years, and level as a timetable it added that most of them asked to go back.
I look at the 47 now when it comes past, every night of my life, outbound, and I look at the seat by the door. Often there is a magazine face-up. It is never open to the same page.