I bought a ticket and boarded a bus. I don’t remember the journey. I came to when we pulled into a dark shady place and the driver turned the engine off and the bus rattled into silence. I got off with everyone else and followed them out of the bus station and into daylight. I recognised where I was from photographs and TV clips, but I’d never been there before; I’d never been in a city before. I walked past shops and glass buildings and tall old buildings, people everywhere. Not like Clifton, not like Raithswaite. It was too much of everything and I went back to the bus station. There was stand after stand and signs with letters and numbers on them and I couldn’t make out how any of it worked. I asked a man in a fluorescent vest which bus went to Clifton and he said, ‘Read the board lad, read the board,’ and pointed to a huge perspex timetable cemented into the tarmac. I stood in front of it and all the numbers, times and destinations swarmed together like an army of flies that wouldn’t stop moving and I thought for a second that I might pass out.
‘Stand D, love. Twenty past the hour.’
I looked down at a middle-aged lady. I didn’t know what she was saying to me. ‘Clifton love.’ She pointed behind me and said, ‘Stand D. Twenty past the hour.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’ And I don’t know what my face was doing because she reached out and put her hand on my arm and said, ‘Twenty past the hour love,’ and tugged my sleeve before walking back to wait for her own bus.
An hour into the bus ride I saw an ivy-covered bridge over a train line, a broken barn in a field, a bicycle shop at the end of a row of houses. These places belonged to a time that didn’t quite exist any more, half-memories stirred. Slowly buildings and streets began to look more familiar, I understood where I was, and then, finally, the bus stopped in the centre of Clifton. I stepped off and headed in the direction of Kemple Street. I wanted to approach the house from the same direction I had done the morning it happened. At the top of Kemple Street I found the track that cuts through to Hawthorne Road. It looked just as it always did, weeds and grass, potholes and grey gravel. I walked out of the end of the track and back into my childhood, all of it in front of me, like it had been waiting. I started down the hill. I passed Mr and Mrs Dawson’s, Mr and Mrs Jackson’s, old Mrs Armer’s, some houses different, some just the same. Things are supposed to shrink when you get older. Nothing was shrunk here. Everything as it was. Then I was there: number seventy-five. They’d built a room over the garage. Probably an extra bedroom or a study, maybe a games room. People had those. The doors and windows were new, but you could still tell, it was still our house. I turned away and carried on. Mrs Franklin’s, Mr and Mrs Seedall’s, Mr Mole’s, Mr Taylor’s. Further down to houses where I didn’t know who had lived there, not even by sight sometimes. The numbers were getting smaller now, my steps slowing. Then, finally, nine, seven, and five. I started looking from number nine. Just in case. My eyes to the floor, staring. Come on, I was thinking, come on then, show me, show me. I walked up and down, up and down, but the eight-year-old me was right. There wasn’t a spot of blood anywhere.