Page 28 of The Second Chance Bus Stop
I sit for a moment before adding quietly, ‘My dad used to stop the car and make me look at them. The animals. He said it would toughen me up. To see what real life was like. There were three boys and me in the car on our school run. Eventually my brothers let me sit between them in the middle of the backseat so I wouldn’t see anything dead at the side of the road. They didn’t want to be late to the hockey training just because I had to be phobia-trained with a cadaver, they said.’ Mattias never liked seeing the dead animals either—that’s why he became a vet. So maybe I wasn’t totally a freak, yet I can still remember every word my dad said when showing me roadkill.
Blade looks at me in disbelief and I shrink down, embarrassed. This is not Autistic Twitter, this is real life and real life prefers women like me to keep their mask on and be the high-functioning level-1 end-of-the-spectrummildly Autisticwomen we’re diagnosed as.
‘Do you want to stop for a break?’
‘No, I’m fine. I’m an adult now and have a heart of stone.’ I laugh as I say it, trying to lighten the mood, but it’s probably, most definitely, true.
‘Still, I can’t help thinking that the cat might have been very old. He may have chosen this very spot for sentimental reasons and drew his last breath here entirely peacefully,’ Blade says.
‘At the side of the dual carriageway? That’s his sentimental spot?’
‘Maybe it was where he met his cat partner for the first time. Yes, I feel sure of it. That was a peaceful end-of-life death you witnessed.’
I shake my head.Hopeless.This man is hopeless. But then I can feel a smile spreading across my face.
The navigation voice speaks and drowns out any thoughts I’d had. Ten days, 2,521 kilometres in total. But our first stop is only a quarter of that distance away.
I can do this.
An Almost-Retired Storage Facility Manager
Malmö
The Rent-a-Safe manager is the type of person who dislikes unfinished business. Leftovers, burial places without headstones, to-do lists without ticks. Now that he’s approaching retirement and it’s within his grasp and only days away, he’d like to leave an empty desk behind, so to speak. He’s looking at it now—this unfinished business—having taken it out of the storage compartment. Turning it around, holding it up to the light and wishing it would magically disappear out of his hands, as you so often do with unfinished business. And leftovers. Yes, he’d pushed that dauphinoise to the back of the fridge—arrest him now—because he felt bad throwing it away, but also would very much like a kebab for dinner. Things magically disappear at the back of the fridge. Everyone knows that, so who is he if he doesn’t use this to his advantage?
The box arrived on a Tuesday on the manager’s eighth day of work. It had been sent over from a lawyer’s office, one he didn’t know the name of, but then why would he? He only dealt with safes and their secrets. He had to sign for delivery, he remembers that. It came with a name, a cheque to coverfive years’ worth of rent and a ‘Please store this box until collection.’ Like bloody Paddington Bear it arrived with a tag around its neck.
So here he is now. Realising this won’t magically disappear.I could dispose of the contents, he thinks. Yes: cleaned-up, the box could be quite useful. Perhaps for putting newspapers in.
No, no. Empty desk. Law and order, code and conduct. He picks up the phone one last time. Missing a time when people would respond with their surname rather than a general generic greeting. Everything is general now. Anaesthesia, elections. He heard a news anchor refer to a political event as a ‘genny lecky’ the other day and that’s that with the world, isn’t it?
He presses the phone to his ear now. He doesn’t have to worry about a hello though, not this time and not that time last year or that time seven years ago. Becausein generalno one answers this British number he has on file, belonging to anEdithsomething.
In general, since 2016, he’s only gotten her voicemail.
