Page 19 of The Second Chance Bus Stop
‘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 doa lotof 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 Iknowit’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.
Eliza
London
Eliza used the old lady on Hornton Street as the main argument to her girlfriend when delivering the news that it was, finally and without hope, over. The lady with grey-streaked hair and a tote bag, who always stands there, or paces the area, only leaving when the rain pours down. Even then Eliza still spots her through the doors to the red-bricked library looking out with focused eyes, as if waiting for the rain to stop. Or something else. Now she’s surprisingly what comes to mind as she pours herself a glass of juice and starts to find the ingredients to assemble a sandwich. Her girlfriend of eight months is on the sofa watching a show. She didn’t acknowledge Eliza’s return to their shared flat, or the fact that Eliza might, at eight thirty in the evening, not have eaten yet.
‘She’s there.’ Eliza says to Sam’s hoodie-clad back. ‘Consistent. I turn the corner at two ten and I know she’ll be there. I walk into this flat and I never know if you’ll be here because you never text, never call, never do anything, really.’
The back turns now, her girlfriend’s face animated.
‘She?Are you seeing someone? Oh myGod, you are so not the cheating type.’
Eliza wonders what Sam, her girlfriend/ex-girlfriend knowsabout cheating types and whether she might actually be one herself.
‘No. She’s retirement age. I don’t even know her, but she’sthere.Don’t you see? She’s there, and I don’t evenknowher.’
There are no tears because this isn’t sad, really. It’s a necessary evil. Eliza always thinks that when women have made their mind up there’s no going back. She herself, can be pushed and shoved and moulded and influenced, but once she finally, amidst all life’s shoving, finds her train of thought and holds it, ignoring all the outside noise, managing to make a decision, then there’s no going back.
‘I’m going to bed, Sam, then I’ll leave early tomorrow morning for work but I think you should start looking for a place. I’m too tired to discuss it now.’
She doesn’t feel relieved, just icky. The relief comes not when the decision is made but when it’s implemented, she’s always found.
It takes five days of back-and-forth, tears (Sam’s), yelling (Sam’s), bribery (Eliza’s in the shape of a deposit for a new place), drunken make-outs (both of them equally guilty), but then one Sunday afternoon Sam is out, finally. Off partying in old warehouses turned galleries and rave venues with some crowd from East London, all of whom do much cooler things than sell property whilst wearing smart casual clothes. The only sign of life a few late-night texts sayingI miss you, babe, followed hours later, when Eliza’s silence has worn down her sweetness and the alcohol has made its way to her blood stream, byCan’t believe you kicked me out, you’re such a fucking bitch!!!
Eliza doesn’t miss Sam. And definitely not her judgemental nature. Eliza wasn’t cool enough for Sam or her friends.Can you just tell them you do interior or some sort of art with houses?Photography? You do take pictures of the flats sometimes, don’t you?she’d ask. Another thing she won’t miss.
Eliza is many things. Good with numbers and tricky clients, she’s punctual and helpful, and she makes a great pea and parmesan risotto, but she’s never been fun. And she’s never seen it as a problem. Apart from in East London warehouse parties, that is.
By Thursday she has deleted Sam’s number and downloaded a LGBTQ+ dating app. Maybe there’s another not-fun twentysomething out there who likes risotto?
Eliza speaks to Edith for the first time a week after Sam moves out.
