Diary fragment · 3 min read ·
The Bus That Stops by the Tram Sheds
A bus conductor keeps a diary of the early-morning run he works each day, and each morning there is one more passenger than the timetable allows, a child in a school cap who always sits on the stairs and never pays.
- dated: The first week of the new autumn timetable
- narrator: Ray Torrance, bus conductor
- reliability: unreliable
Monday. Five-fifteen from the depot. Eleven passengers on the first run, all regulars. Mr Teal with his newspaper, the two nurses from the infirmary, Mrs Cole with the bag of bread for the cafe. Everybody paid. Everybody sat where they usually sit. Nothing to report.
Tuesday. Stopped at the tram sheds on Calder Row, where the timetable has no stop. A little girl got on, in a grey school jumper and a cap with the badge rubbed off. She did not pay. She went straight to the stairs and sat on the third step, with her knees tucked up and her satchel on her lap. I said she needed a fare. She looked at me as if I had asked her to name her favourite colour, and said nothing.
Wednesday. The girl was on the stairs again. Mr Teal asked me who she was. I said I did not know. He said she looked familiar, like someone he had taught to swim at the baths years ago, and then he frowned and said that could not be right, because the baths had closed in 1974.
Thursday. Checked the passenger count at the depot. Twelve on the sheet. Eleven people got on at the regular stops. The twelfth had boarded at the tram sheds and was not written down by anyone. I looked at the sheet again and saw the number had been changed in pencil, very neatly, from eleven to twelve, in a hand I did not recognise.
Friday. The girl was sitting in the front seat today, very upright, her hands folded on her satchel. As we pulled away from the tram sheds she turned round and looked at me, and her face was grey and small and very sad, and she said, in a voice like a radio left on in another room: "You said you'd wait for me."
I did not understand. I asked her what she meant. She did not answer. She got off at the next stop, which is not on the route, and walked away down a lane that does not exist, and when I looked back she was gone.
Saturday. Went to the library in town to look up the school register for Calder Row, 1958. There was a girl listed in the Infants, a Susan Dale, aged seven. Her address was the tram sheds. The register note beside her name said *Absent since the fire. Bus conductor to be informed.* The name of the bus conductor was mine.
Sunday. Didn't sleep. The depot phoned at dawn. They said the Monday run had been cancelled, because the bus had been found parked at the old tram sheds, its doors open, the stairs empty, and on the third step a single school cap with the badge rubbed off. I drove out there to collect it. When I got to the sheds, the doors of the bus were shut, and a small pale face was pressed to the glass of the front window, watching me come up the path, waiting, very patiently, for me to pay the fare.