Short story · 4 min read · Set in Hesselby ·
My Timetables Come Early
A caretaker who cleans the bus shelters finds the frames stocked with leaflets for services that do not run until next spring.
Hesselby has eleven shelters on its bus runs, and every one of them is on my keyring. I keep the glass washed, the benches dry, the timetable frames clean — a printed case, glazed, with a clip rail inside, so that people do not read the old sheet by mistake. The round takes an hour and a half, and I have done it on Tuesdays and Fridays for more years than I am going to count out loud.
In September the depot issues the winter timetables. I collect them at the hatch, count them out in my notebook, then change every frame walking the round. I did it this year on the eighteenth, and I have the notebook entry to show: ISSUED, COUNTED, FRAMES DONE. That is the whole of what the job asks.
It was on the Friday follow-up that I first found a frame holding a leaflet.
Not a timetable — a folded tourist leaflet, thin glossy card, three folds. In the shelter at the quarry mouth, clipped neatly into the frame on top of the winter sheet. I took it out with my glove on, read it standing in the road, and put it back, because taking it home seemed a much worse idea than leaving it where it had arranged itself.It was a service leaflet. A new Sunday-only run out to the marsh village — THE COASTLINE CIRCUIT — with a time table, and under it a start date: the first Sunday of the coming spring. Not this past spring. Coming. Sensible rural departures, fares in old money, a five-digit telephone number, and every line of it plausible, polite, and a year ahead of that frame.
I did the sensible thing, which in Hesselby means the paperwork thing. Wrote it up — shelter 7, frame, extraneous leaflet, details — and handed the leaflet across the hatch. The man took it in two fingers, looked at the start date, and said: "That's next year." I said I knew that. He put it in the lost-property drawer and said the matter was done.
Except that on the Tuesday round the frame held the leaflet again. Same fold. Same gloss. Same start date, which had not moved — a detail I would offer anyone who blames the depot, because a misprint does not stay pinned to one future Sunday while the world moves over it. By the Friday there was one at the stone bridge, then at the school corner, then one in every shelter on the run, clipped in the frame, face-out, waiting.
I stopped reporting them. That is the part I am least proud of and most certain of, and it took me until November to be certain. In October I reported again, and a typed line came back with the wages: FRAMES RECORDED CORRECT AT LAST CHECK. But the last check was mine — I had signed the count of my own round, and there was no other. Someone had gone round behind me, confirming the frames against something, and the something had them recorded correct.
It is the early part I still cannot sit with. Not the leaflets themselves — the leaflets are kind. A Sunday run to the marsh in spring, a fare anybody could pay. It is that they arrive early. Every piece of print I have ever handled carries a release date and does not appear before it, and here is print respecting no date at all except one, a Sunday in April that has not happened yet.
I service the last shelter of the round at a quarter to four on my Fridays now, and I stand a while with the chamois raised before I wipe the glass, and behind the glass the leaflets sit in their clip like patients.
If I could ask one question and expect it answered — which is no longer permitted on one count and impossible on the other — the question is not about print, or dates, or April. It is this: who is issuing the early copies — and can they see, from wherever that timetable is being printed, whether anyone will be waiting at my shelters on those Sunday mornings to read them?