Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Wakeham ·
The Bus Shelter at Wakeham
A bus driver on the Wakeham circular says a man in a brown raincoat waits at the stop by the chapel every Tuesday, and every Tuesday he gets on the bus, pays with coins from a previous decade, and asks the driver to take him back to the stop he left from.
- reliability: corroborated
- witness: Gwen Parry, bus driver
I've driven the Wakeham circular for fourteen years, and it's a quiet route. Six stops, out past the chapel and the old mill and back down the valley road to the depot. Most of my passengers are the same faces I've seen since I started. Mrs Cole with her shopping trolley on Thursdays. The two lads from the farm who never say a word. The retired teachers who go to the library on Tuesdays and sit at the back, talking about books.
The man in the brown raincoat started in the autumn.
He was at the stop by the chapel when I came round on the Tuesday afternoon run, standing under the shelter with his hands in his pockets, quite still, looking up the road. A thin man, grey-haired, with a long face and a pale, patient expression. He did not wave. He did not look at the timetable. He just stood, and when the bus came round the corner and pulled in, he stepped forward and held out a handful of coins.
I looked at the coins. They were old, big copper pennies and silver threepences, the sort that were withdrawn before I was born. I told him the fare was on a card now, or in notes, and he smiled at me, very politely, and said these would do.
I took them. I have never refused a passenger in fourteen years and I was not going to start.
He sat down at the front, in the seat behind the driver, where Mrs Cole always sits. He did not look out of the window. He sat very still with his hands on his knees and waited, and when I pulled away from the stop, he leaned forward slightly and said, in a quiet, courteous voice, "Would you take me back to the stop I came from, please? I'm afraid I've forgotten where that was."
I told him there was no stop by the chapel on the Tuesday timetable. He said he knew that. He said he had got on there years ago, and he had been meaning to go back ever since, and he was sure I could find it.
We drove the circular. He did not speak again. At each stop, when the doors opened, he watched the people getting on and off with a close, searching attention, as if he were trying to remember a face. At the old mill stop, a woman in a green coat got on, and he half rose from his seat, and then sank back, and did not say anything. At the library, the retired teachers got off, and one of them, a small grey woman with a book under her arm, turned to look at him as she passed, and her face went quite pale, and she hurried out without a word.
When we came back to the chapel, the man stood up and thanked me, very kindly, and got off. He stood on the pavement under the shelter, looking at the empty road, while the doors closed and I pulled away.
In my mirror I saw him turn and walk up the path to the chapel gate, and stop there, and look back at the bus. He lifted one hand, very slowly, and I could see, even from that distance, that his fingers were holding a small, old-fashioned ticket, the kind you used to get from the conductor on the trams.
I checked the cash tin at the end of the shift. The coins were there, every one of them, copper and silver, dated across fifty years. And tucked between two of the threepences was a ticket, printed in a faded red, with the stop name on it, the name of a place that has not been on any route since 1958. Under the name, in pencil, very neatly, someone had written: *Next Tuesday. Same bus.*