Page 3 of The Second Chance Bus Stop
‘The town hall. Between the town hall and the library. Just off Kensington High Street. The street is called Hornton Street.’
My legs wobble, and again, it’s not from a strenuous leg day. She’s back there. We’ve had months with no incidents, months when she’s agreed to stay home except for special occasions, but here we are.Fuck, here we are again.
‘Can you make your way here quickly, please? I’ve tried to reason with her, but she keeps saying she will stay here until the 16.14 bus and be back in time for dinner.’
‘Forty-five minutes,’ I tell her. I wipe the sweat from my forehead, gaze longingly at the showers as I rush past them and take a deep inhale when the cool summer air surrounds me. The realisation that I have one more problem in my life now hits hard. Can’t help feeling that this is a turning point.
Care home, my brain tells me as I run down the road. Two words that could solve this, change our lives forever. Safety, comfort and pudding every day! I can’t do this any longer. It was meant to be a solution, me spending time with my mother and supporting her after her diagnosis. I didn’t take the decision lightly. It was a long, guilt-infused process, and I knew it wouldn’t be easy. But this constant, relentless fear was never part of the plan. Even as her full-time carer, keeping her safe is becoming more difficult each day. I hop on the bus because Ihave no time to make it back to the house first, plus there is no damn parking where she is (I mean, come on, Mum, if you’re impersonating a homeless person, why do it in Kensington of all places? At least if you chose Romford I could find street parking that wasn’t ten quid an hour). My phone battery is low, so I spend the time it takes the bus to get there caught up in my thoughts, annoyed thoughts, thoughts that push at the chest angrily. I get off and let the frustration out by running the rest of the way. I run past shops and coffee places. Everyone is so well-dressed they scare me.
The social worker—I’ve forgotten her name already—is still there when I arrive. In a big cardigan with a tote bag hanging off her shoulder and shoes that look like she treasures them and takes them to be restored rather than buy new ones. She stands a few metres from Mum, hovering like a bodyguard, attempting to see but not be seen.
‘Mum,’ I say, nodding a silent thank you to the lady, hoping this is it, that she’ll leave us and there’ll be no reports, home visits or follow-ups.
‘There was really no need for you to come here.’ Mum’s cheeks are rosy, and she looks as if I’ve just turned up to her primary school playground to embarrass her. She looks around to see if there’s anyone watching. But who apart from the social worker would watch us? An older lady and her young adult son. I notice that Mum hasn’t changed out of her home clothes. The soft brown velvet pants I bought her and which she initially resisted and dismissed as inappropriate attire are now apparently appropriate for outings to the city centre.
‘Let’s go, Mum. We’ll talk later.’ I usher her away, happy that she is okay, but also far too aware of what this means.
She’s back at the bus stop.
Sophia
Svedala
It’s 11.30, and I’m in my flower shop, the morning after my disastrous kiss, and I’ve just moved to close my tenth transaction of the day.
‘A flower is the reproductive structure found in plants. The biological function of a flower is to facilitate reproduction by providing a mechanism for the union of sperm with eggs.’ I say this to the man who’s just walked into my shop, picked up a dozen of pre-banded pink roses and shared that he’s off to a date this evening. For good measure, I add, ‘Good choice. Hopefully they will help facilitate the union of sperm and eggs.’
He looks around me as if trying to make sure no customer is next to us. The doorbell hasn’t rung, so I know we’re alone. He doesn’t look reassured which means I may have misread the interaction. Perhaps he was hoping for someone to walk in. Perhaps he was hoping for a crowd to appear so he isn’t alone with justme.
‘I know there are people more comfortable with other terminology, but I think it’s degrading to speak of the reproductive process like that,’ I explain helpfully.
‘Got ya.’
‘There aren’t many customers through the doors at this time of the day. If you look at Google, you will see that our peak times are 12.30 and 17.30,’ I inform him as he yet again fixates on the door. ‘Card?’ I add as I tap in the price.
‘Contactless.’
‘Like my contacts list,’ I say, but he doesn’t laugh.
He taps his card, holds it mid-air as we both stare the machine down waiting for the rattle of receipt paper to break the heavy silence.
‘Wonderful,’ I say when the card goes through. ‘Would you like me to wrap these for you? We don’t sell them with plastic wraps as they’re harmful to the environment, but should you wish I can package them for you in compostable paper.’
I ready the shiny paper and the stickers with our company name on them, Blom’s Blooms. I am not called Blom. That would be too much of a coincidence. But my uncle’s mother did have the maiden name Blomberg, and so the name was born.
Hearing my therapist’s voice in my head, I remember to put my heels down on the floor as I move across the room. I have a tendency to walk on my toes, but there really isn’t any need to add to my height. Mum always attempted to make me feel better once we both realised I wasn’t going to stop growing at sixteen. ‘There are some women who are like Arabian horses and others that are like large Shire horses. Big-boned is just how we’re built,’ she’d say. It was just that later when I went to search for these breeds online, it became clear that the Arabians went for a lot more money than the Shires, so what she told me didn’t actually make me feel better.
‘I don’t need any wrapping, thank you,’ the man says apologetically, just as I’m about to start. ‘I’m in a bit of a rush.’
Once he’s run off, I defeatedly do what I do after every human interaction: go over what I could possibly have done wrong. I can’t read strangers, and my two options are to trust that every person means well and adores me or to assume the opposite, that they hate me. I can’t think of anything I could have done wrong this time. I shared interesting and situation-specific knowledge, I wished him good luck (a polite pleasantry reserved for even remote acquaintances or strangers), I made a joke that has a track record of making customers smile, and I offered to package his purchase beautifully.
I think how my uncle would have laughed at my joke had he lived to know whatcontactlessmeant. My uncle left me more than the shop. He was safety and stability, cinnamon rolls and strawberry squash with floating ice cubes. He always took the time to explain things to me, with words that somehow also managed to cover the answer to the next question, the one I hadn’t even asked yet. One week in summer and one week at Christmas break I was allowed to take the train by myself all the way from Jönköping and stay with him here, in the house attached to the shop. My brothers never came; they were too busy with hockey training, Lego assembly and friends. ‘Tell me which flower you are, Sophia,’ my uncle would say. And I’d think carefully, swing my legs back and forth on the chair and remember all the large, colourful pictures in his Latin dictionary of plants.
‘I think I may be aTridax procumbens.A grass flower. It’s not so fancy and just smells like grass. It’s small and unnoticeable, but still a flower with its own melancholy.’ I stumbled on that last word, knowing how to spell it but not quite how to say it. I hadn’t had an opportunity to try it out yet. I liked the dance it did on the back of my tongue.
He nodded contentedly.
‘Grass flowers are one of nature’s most understated arts. They’re exquisitely designed, Sophia.’
