farhad was on diversion. He turned, the indicator ticking on as he headed down a road too narrow for two cars to pass, let alone a bus. There was a knack to the indicator: if you turned left, you had to signal right to switch it off, but someone was approaching now, and Farhad didn’t want to confuse them. The car slowed at a speed bump, its high beams boring into his retinas, so that when he looked away and blinked, two glowing orbs hovered over the street. Rain was falling now but rising on the windscreen. The teenager in the priority seat was fast asleep and he wondered if he’d have to wake her when they arrived, which they would in a matter of minutes, the streets almost empty this late. He remembered the man a few years ago who hadn’t woken up, the long wait for the ambulance. Or back in his National Express days, waiting between jobs at a service station, drifting in and out of sleep in the Costa seating area, the coach he was supposed to be driving stuck on a hard shoulder several junctions north, though no one had thought to radio him. The coffee was discounted for drivers so he always got a cup, though he didn’t care for the taste and suspected the caffeine fuelled his migraines that would sometimes last for days, floaters obscuring his vision, his mind fried and static, thoughts sinking in waves of white noise, like when those kids hacked the bus intercom, grainy laughter coming through his radio, horrible words, the most horrible things. The car finally passed and Farhad nodded to the driver who he couldn’t see. The trapped balls of light in his eyes bounced up and down on the road and he remembered his long walks to school, bouncing his football on the pavement, remembered practising kick-ups alone at break. One day, the boys in his class came up to him when their ball was confiscated and invited him to join their game. Though he wasn’t allowed out of goal, he played well, well enough that they tolerated his taking part, he made the teams even, after all. He’d been a Manchester United fan all his life, wore his Beckham shirt proudly on mufti, which made the others laugh, Beckham having moved on to another team long ago, the shirt a cheap fake. On his 18th birthday, his mother bought him tickets to see United play a friendly at Wembley. They played their reserves, but that was okay, from their seats you could barely make out the names on the backs of their shirts. Farhad had cheered, rising for the Mexican Wave. He had thought then that this might just be the centre of all happiness in the world, the beautiful game, he called it, in all seriousness, listening to the matches every weekend on his mother’s radio. Even when he got his own TV, he listened to the games, preferring the sounds of the commentary and the gravelly cheers to seeing the match for real. When he listened, it was as if he could experience the game in first and third person, being at once in the stands and in each position on the pitch. His daughter called him an old man for listening rather than watching and he sometimes wondered if this was one of the details by which she would one day remember him, a quirk that became a defining feature. She’d enjoyed football as a child but had long gone off it. One summer he’d volunteered to coach her team, did she remember? He’d loved it, willing the kids on, teaching them the importance of formation, of flow, but it hadn’t lasted long, apparently some of the kids had complained that the way he spoke was too hard to follow and a group of parents took him aside and said it was time for him to go. How do you explain that to your eight-year-old? They’d taken the bus home from practice, and she’d fallen asleep next to him. Behind them, a couple talked in another language. Whatever they were saying seemed very important, they sounded so passionate, and he couldn’t decide then, heading down the Ruislip Road, whether they were happy or angry. A young man across the aisle was drawing; he’d look up at the woman standing at the doors and then look back down at his page as he sketched. The woman got off at the next stop and Farhad imagined the teenager’s unfinished drawing, the outline done but the face without features. He pulled up at the penultimate stop now, and someone got on, which was strange, the bus’s destination only a matter of metres. The passenger tapped her Oyster and half-looked at Farhad with a slight smile. Someone paying for such a short journey had a story, he thought, they all did. He imagined how she saw him, a blank man behind the screen – on any given day, he was seen by hundreds of people, but how many would remember his face? How many even registered it? She headed up to the top deck, and he felt ashamed, it was likely she’d got on the wrong bus, or in the wrong direction, and didn’t know. The other drivers made fun of his tendency to feel sorry for his passengers – if he ever saw someone running for his bus, he would wait. This one time a middle-aged man ran a block to reach him. When he got on, he couldn’t find his card, and started to cry. Farhad let him through and checked on him on the monitors every few stops: he wept and wept. He’d have liked to have comforted him, but terrible things happened if you ever left the driver’s seat before your destination. Other drivers said there was an actual curse, which was nicer, Farhad thought, than thinking that the public were just horrible. Once, Farhad had stepped out to stop a fight between two schoolboys who looked like they might actually kill each other, and he got placed on leave for touching a minor. He remembered the weeks at home feeling as if time had slowed, he thought about going out and doing something, making the most of it, but he stayed in, listening to the incessant steady ticking sound that went on throughout the day, one of the machines in the flat playing up. He couldn’t find the source and when he described it to his daughter, she said it was a scenario straight out of a comedy show: there’s always an episode about a sound in an apartment driving someone crazy, she said, it normally turns out to be the batteries in the fire alarm, or the Carbon Monoxide detector. He didn’t have a clue what she was on about and they spent that afternoon, or evening, watching the same formulaic episode play out in Friends, The Big Bang Theory and It’s Always Sunny. She had so many theories, but Farhad couldn’t concentrate, looking at a screen that long gave him a headache, listening to that studio laughter made him sad. The ticking turned out to be the extractor fan in the bathroom, which he replaced himself. Seeing his reflection, screwdriver in hand, he saw his father, what little he could remember of him. His father had a scar on the back of his head, and Farhad would often ask where it came from. It was always a different answer, or at least that’s how he remembered it: an accident, a birth defect, a fight. Farhad would sit behind his father on car journeys and would run through each of the stories behind the scar, which was the shape of Japan. They were driving to Bisotun, Persepolis vs Esteghlal on the radio, the car having to stop at different points for his mother to throw up. Seeing her double over with motion sickness dispelled the image he often had of her as someone faultless, or at least that’s how he thought of it now, how her throwing up made her a person in her own right, a person with problems of her own, not just his mother. That day they had finally parked in the shade of the mountain, and his mother stayed in the car, too tired and ill now to go for the walk. So Farhad and his father followed the trail around the mountain from one carving to the next. His father told him about King Darius and King Khosrow. His father let him wear his aviators – he remembered the cool shade they threw over everything, how they were too big for him and would slip down his nose, the natural light seeming so bright as to look unreal. They stopped for a long time at his father’s favourite inscription. There were three languages, he said. Truly ancient, he said. Can you believe something could survive so many thousands of years? Farhad hadn’t been able to properly see the inscription, but he googled it years later when Bisotun was announced as a World Heritage Site. Apparently, the main cause of damage to the monument was that Allied forces used it for target practice in World War Two. He turned back onto the usual route now, heading towards the final stop at Haven Green. He remembered, as he often did when he reached this final stop, sitting with his daughter and watching a few kids kickabout on the other end of the green. Their ball had come rolling over to him, one of the boys walking after it. With a short run up, Farhad laced the ball the length of the field back to them. It was the perfect kick, the cleanest kind of connection. He sat down, certain of himself, and watched the kids pass the ball between them, left and right. The indicator ticked. The woman on the top deck came down. The teenager in the priority seat woke up. Farhad pulled up and let them off. He indicated right and then turned off the engine. He watched the two of them leave, walking together until the teenager turned towards the station and the woman continued on. He shut his eyes for a moment, imagining the lives they were going on to, the people they would see, slight traces of light still pulsing on his eyelids, still there.