As I walked to the bus-stop a woman I’d noticed off and on for a long time finally spoke to me. I’d first seen her a couple of years ago when she looked very bad, as if she hadn’t seen any daylight for six months – thin, white, ill-looking with frightened glasses. Something bad must have happened to her. From time to time I saw her walking along the street; if she had to cross a road she waited on the pavement a long time to make sure there were no cars coming. Once I saw her with a man I presumed to be her father walking beside her slowly and protectively. That was the first time she said hello. A couple of times before that she’d glanced at me timidly but this was the first time she’d actually spoken. I suppose she’d begun to recognise me at about the time that I’d started to recognise her. Since then I’d run into her about once a fortnight and on each occasion she’d said hello more vigorously – more familiarly and confidently – than before. She had pale skin and stunted ginger hair. When I saw her another time she was wearing a little eye make-up. There was something ghostly about her slow regeneration; although she looked much better you could see she was still in a bad way. There are people like that. You see them and your first reaction is ‘what happened?’ She was recovering from something bad that happened, that was for sure. To find out more would be to become involved. I didn’t want our nodding acquaintance to increase.
The last few times we’d bumped into each other she’d taken me completely by surprise and on this occasion, walking to the bus-stop, I didn’t notice her at all until, suddenly, there she was, standing a couple of feet away from me. I knew she was going to speak.
‘You’re very good-looking,’ she said, holding my eyes for several seconds before I could think what to do. I mumbled something and walked on, leaving her standing there. Then I crossed the road quickly.
At the bus-stop I watched her walk away and wished I had smiled and said ‘So are you!’ I thought of calling out to her but it was too late. Instead I concentrated on small things: two milk bottles lying in the gutter, each with a tiny pool of grey milk in the bottom; a car braking hard to avoid a dog padding across the road.
Two other people were waiting for a bus and we took it in turns to stamp our feet and moan. More people showed up. The wind howled as if it longed for the coarse grass of the moor.
Across the road a man in a greasy anorak nipped into the phone booth. He fumbled for change, pressed a few digits which served only to ignite the blue touch paper of his anger and then hurled the phone back into its cradle. While we laughed, he strode off with his anger and rage, tremors of ill-feeling spreading out across the city. Perhaps he’d been trying to phone the Samaritans. In six months’ time maybe he’d buy a shotgun and massacre four people in a sleepy town somewhere and no one would be able to say for sure why he did it, no one would know the part played by the broken phone and the people at the bus-stop laughing.
By now there was a large herd of us huddled round the bus-stop, nourished by the thought that when the bus came we were really going to give the conductor a hard time because we were freezing and late and wished we had the money for a fucking taxi even though you hardly saw any taxis round here.
Phones and buses: part of the war of attrition that the city wages on its inhabitants, part of its attempt to purge itself of citizens and become pure, empty possibility.
We waited another ten minutes and then saw a bus barging its way towards us through the wind.
‘Come on in,’ said the conductor, leaning out to help an old woman with her shopping trolley. ‘It’s nice and warm in here.’
As if he was welcoming her into his home.
The memory of that gesture warmed me for the rest of the day.