Short story · 4 min read · Set in Dunmore Row ·
The Rolls of My Old Bus
A borough bus sold for scrap still shows the early turn on her destination roll, and the duty card in the cab has every seat sold to the count.
I drove the 88 out of the depot on the 8A for the nine years up to 1979, which is long enough to know a bus. She was a borough employee, like me, due at the shed before the lamps were down, and my own morning for most of those years was the early turn: off the stand at 07:12, Dunmore Row by 07:31, the hospital men getting on with their collars soft and the first of the shop girls after them. Forty-three seats she had, and the ordinances of the 8A did not encourage standing, so a full house on the 8A was forty-three sold and no more, and a driver knew when he had one.
In the autumn of 1979 the 8A came off the sheet, and the 88, who was the 8A in the flesh, went to the yard off Dunmore Row for scrap, rear axle gone and no worth in the rest of her. The last night of the route, per the standing order, I wound her destination roll to NOT IN SERVICE — both rolls, the head and the side, wound by hand with the brass key from the rack, in the bay, under the lamp. I did not sign for it, because the winding of a roll is not a thing that is signed for, but I did it, and Trueman's man has the same statement from me twice in writing since.
She stands in the second lane at Trueman's to this day.
On her head roll, since the first week in the yard, is 8A DUNMORE ROW. Not NOT IN SERVICE, wound by me under the bay lamp and witnessed by nobody, which is the sort of wound a roll takes and keeps. 8A DUNMORE ROW, clean set, centred, as if set for the early turn of a working that came off the borough books in 1979. The flats on the winding spindle were stripped before she ever went down to the yard; the key went back to the rack and the rack was sold off in 1984, and nothing at Trueman's turns that roll. They have turned her wheels with a bar to skid her about the lane for the weighing, and the roll has come through each move on the same face, square and bright, the white letters on the black, as rolls go.
The cab clip holds her card. A driver's working card is his own to take away at the end of it; mine was in my pocket when the 88 pulled into the yard the last Thursday, and I remember the pocket, coat and all, when the coat went for sacking in 1985. The card in the clip is not mine. It is the same February weather every time: the early turn as I ran it, the depot to Dunmore Row, the times in her own column, and under the totals, filled in and ruled off in a hand like mine in the old way, one line: sold 43, balance nil. Forty-three of forty-three. It is the same arithmetic every visit, and I am the last man in the borough able to say what a balance means on an 8A card, which is this: the box and the tray agreed to the penny, nothing given over, every seat accounted and every fare squared against a seat. Sold out to the last chair and nobody standing, in nine years, happened to me once. The card says it was that morning, the last one, the Thursday.
I go down in February, every second year, with my tea in a tin. Trueman lets me sit in the cab with the handbrake on, and the men dust her Mondays and none of them ever sits on her seats, and I have not asked them why, because the answer is not in why. On wet mornings her windows fog from the inside. The roll reads Dunmore Row by lamp light and reads it again by daylight, and the card reads sold 43, balance nil, ruled off, patient, like a cash desk about to open.
What I have never settled, going down the yard the last four times, is who the count balances for. Somebody sold forty-three seats on an autumn morning and took the fares, and somebody squared the card, and it was not me, because I wound both rolls to NOT IN SERVICE and slept the sleep of a man shutting a book. So if the roll is set and the card is squared and the seats are all sold to the last one — whose fares are those on the tray, and who, since 1979, has been giving them change?