Page 18 of The Second Chance Bus Stop

London

When I can’t sleep the way I used to, I lie still and allow myself to flit in and out of dark stillness, without forcing it

or feeling angry. I often don’t know where my thoughts end and a dream starts. But last night I’m sure I dreamt. People retelling

their dreams are up there with the world’s most annoying human habits, like biting into Popsicles. So when I walk downstairs

I don’t share with Zara that I was back in 2000 and that it was a sunny day and my insides felt soft. I go back to that year

a lot. It’s as if my dreams have regressed more than my brain currently and are showing me a new reality I will one day be

living in once I get sicker. I try to think why that year, why then? It wasn’t my happiest time, but I did feel safe. Stable.

Having gotten rid of Blade’s father. Having given up the destructive habit of dating bad men, which I’d thrown myself into

following him and Sven. Having just bought the house, having enough work and enough love through little Blade. Perhaps stability

really is more important than joy?

I hear Zara before I see her. It is rather delightful having a female presence in the house.

A girlfriend of sorts. I love my son but he can tell me he’s domestic all he wants, modern man this and modern man that, I still find his socks next to his bed and my tea served in the fine china because the everyday mugs aren’t clean and a total disregard for standards.

Zara likes candles with strong, earthy smells and says it’s our little secret because Blade says ‘No candles. Not even a little one.’ Or a birthday one.

Zara is different to Blade in many ways.

She is not into cooking. Or food shopping.

She is into meal deals and has a standing supermarket delivery slot on Tuesdays, even though there’s a Tesco Express five minutes’ walk away.

I enjoy checking the long receipt the delivery person hands me.

Sometimes substitutions are nice surprises—did you know they don’t charge you extra for a more expensive alternative item?

—but sometimes you wonder who packed it.

We once ordered a Victoria sponge and got a three-pack of sponge scourers, which made for a rather disappointing teatime.

Zara spends most of her mornings hammering away on her laptop, occasionally grunting about a Pomodoro, then walks around the

room six times before she sits down again.

‘Reckon I can add random words to reach the word count, then colour them white and no one will notice?’ she asks me now. I

asked what she is writing on her first day here and she said it’s manuals for a flatpack furniture company and I haven’t asked

again because at sixty-four life is short and explanations about flatpack instructions can be very long indeed.

At eleven o’clock Zara closes her laptop with the force of someone closing the lid on a box containing a poisonous spider

and says,

‘Right, what do you say we find a change of scene?’

I want to tell her that you never have to find changes they will happen to you anyway.

The landscape, the people, the air. It’s not changing the scene we should be trying, or yearning for, it’s keeping it.

But, of course, people who aren’t suffering from memory loss don’t understand; they’re missing these small details that make the human experience.

‘I wouldn’t mind going to Kensington,’ I say instead, innocently.

‘I like Kensington. It’s certainly better than Knightsbridge,’ Zara replies, just as innocently.

She packs her bag, and when we get to the hallway I watch my son’s best friend put her shoes on. Those thick soled, athletic

things that she insists on wearing even with smart straight-legged trousers. Did I teach Blade how to tie his shoelaces? I

can’t remember. I think that I must have, as his mother. Zara ties hers differently to me, I observe now. She folds up the

strings into two hoops then simply ties them. Like a knot at sea. Or a knot at the end of a sewing thread. I can’t recall

how Blade ties his, and for some reason I feel desperate for this knowledge. A good mother would remember those details.

We sit on the bus, and Zara writes notes on her phone whilst I watch the rain outside. It’s only a friendly drizzle. When

we get off, Zara hooks her arm underneath mine, and she is so much taller that I hang off her like a child.

‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,’ Zara tells me as she heads into the library and hands me a paper note with the area she’ll

be sitting in written down on it. Zara seems to have grown up to be a young lady who would do a lot of things, and so I’m quite pleased with her instructions.

I stand facing east, then I stand facing west. I receive hellos from the regular faces and a tea from one of the estate agents

at Hamptons. The blonde short one who always wears those black ballet-type shoes even in sub-zero temperatures. She always

rushes past me, handing me a tea without really stopping.

Each time I come, I sit on the bench and wait.

I have my tea, I say hi to passing strangers, and I wait.

There’s an awning that helps when it rains, and when I take fifteen-minute breaks—at different times each day, so as to be waiting at all times eventually—I head into the large brown library building to warm up.

Just inside it, where you place your returned books, there’s a little girl running in circles, for no particular reason other than the running in itself.

Which baffles me, like those people in the park doing laps just for the sake of collecting steps on an app.

‘Don’t fall,’ the girl’s mother says. I never said that to Blade. It’s a useless statement isn’t it? Because we don’t fall

on purpose. We fall whether we like it or not, and we also don’t stop moving because we are scared of falling.

‘The average two-year-old falls thirty-eight times per day,’ I helpfully tell the mother. ‘Although I don’t know how many

falls she’s already had today, I’d be inclined to say that her likelihood of falling now is, indeed, very high.’

The woman shifts uncomfortably, then calls her daughter over. I smile at the girl before she’s pulled away.

The reading corner starts to fill up, and I remember, to my delight, that it’s Thursday which means Baby Rhyme Time. I lean

back in my favourite chair in the farthest corner of the library, just a few shelves separating me from the jolly collection

of babies, toddlers, mums and nannies. In my hand are the books I’ve brought with me, a biography on Churchill and a romance

novel I started but have put temporarily to the side (a very chirpy sidekick started to get on my nerve). I flick the pages

and look at the images but find the text too small and in a font which irritates me. My foot taps along with the singing of

‘The Wheels on the Bus’. We get to my favourite verse.

The daddies on the bus are fast asleep, fast asleep, fast asleep!

I think: Thank you, Lady Librarian, for speaking truth to those babies. Daddies can indeed be useless. I can think of one who was particularly

so.

I’m sad when the group dissembles and the babies, propped up in buggies with snacks and sippy cups in their hands, exit. I

sometimes feel an urge to join in, perhaps put a baby on my lap and bounce it up and down. I try to remember when I got so

lonely. It might have been three years ago, but it might also have started long before that, a withdrawal and a loneliness

hidden by motherhood and workdays, but none the less there. It’s for the best , I told myself. But now I see Blade is lonely too, and I wonder if it really was for the best. Any of it.

I have forty minutes until I promised Zara I would meet her outside at the book drop box, or so this piece of paper says,

so I decide to head downstairs. I find myself in a research section I didn’t know existed or I would have come here a long

time ago. When I find the archives I start searching the records for the year it all started. The waiting. It was 1996, and

I easily find image after image of the library, laminated onto thick paper and free to flick through. There are pictures of

author talks and community meetings. Small-crime reports and accounts of demonstrations on nearby streets. This act of stepping

back in time absorbs me completely. Then half an hour in I stop and stare.

I look and look and I think: But this must be wrong. It’s not possible. My mouth is dry and I wonder how the heart can be a muscle. If it really is, then we should be able to control it, contract

it, confine it, but I can’t, and it hurts so much I’m convinced I’ll fall down any minute.

I step to the copy machine quickly, picture against my chest. Before I press it onto the machine for a copy I check the caption

again: Pedestrians outside the new wing of the town hall, Hornton Street, Kensington. 4 June 1996. It is simply a picture, so similar to the other ones, but it’s all wrong, and I feel like I’m looking in the mirror after

a haircut and this person doesn’t look like me but I know it’s me. What I know about that day in 1996 I cannot match with what I’m seeing now. The date is wrong. You told me the fourth of June which was a Friday, and the weather forecast said sunny with cloudy spells.

I know every detail of that day. I know that I had the right date, and I know I had the right time. So why didn’t I see him? My eyes fixate on the face, captured

from the side.

There is no doubt: The blond man in the crowd, standing slightly ahead of the others, on the day he didn’t turn up to meet

me, looking as if he’s waiting for someone, on the corner of the street—that’s Sven.