The Last Bus Home

Danny drove the last bus, and had for three years, and on most nights the only passenger who stayed on to the end of the route was Priya, which was the point.

She got on at the hospital stop, with her lanyard still round her neck because she always forgot, and touched her pass to the reader, which she did not need to do and did anyway, and said, “Evening,” as if they had never met, and he said, “Evening,” the same way, and she sat in the seat just behind him, where she could see the road in the wipers and the back of his head.

It was raining, but only a bit. The kind that makes the street lights look bigger than they are.

There were four other people on. A man in a hi-vis jacket asleep with his forehead on the window. Two girls with one pair of headphones between them. An old woman with a shopping trolley, who got off at the parade and said, “Thank you, driver,” and meant it. The bus stopped and started, breathed out at every stop with that long, tired sigh that buses make, as if they too have had a day.

Priya took her shoes off. She was allowed to. It was the last bus.

Danny drove the way he always drove, as if the bus were something he was carrying rather than steering. He took the corners wide and slow. He let the lights change in their own time. When the man in hi-vis woke at the crossroads, Danny said, “Two more stops, mate,” without turning his head, and the man said, “Cheers,” and put his forehead back on the window.

Priya watched the town go by. The takeaway with its lights on and nobody in it. The launderette, dark. The church with the clock that was always four minutes fast, which they both checked every night. Still four minutes fast. That was reassuring. A fox at the bins by the chip shop, doing its accounts.

“Long one?” said Danny.

“Long one,” said Priya. “Yours?”

“Same as ever.”

“That’s good.”

“It is.”

The girls got off at the park. The man in hi-vis got off at the estate, and was gone. Then it was the two of them, and the wipers, and the long empty bus lit up like a room that had been left on.

The route went out past the last houses and over the bridge and round the reservoir, where there was nothing to see but dark water with the rain on it, and came back in the other way to the terminus at the top of their road. Danny had once worked out that he could cut the corner and be home eleven minutes sooner, and had never once done it, because the bus was supposed to go round the reservoir, and because Priya liked the bit round the reservoir, and because eleven minutes was not much to give to a thing you liked.

Over the bridge. Round the water. The rain letting up. The wipers going slower now, and then off.

She put her shoes back on. Her feet did not want to go in. She made them.

At the terminus he pulled in and set the brake, and the bus sighed its last sigh of the day and settled, and the engine went quiet, and there was that moment of nothing you get at the end of a route, when the bus is done and neither of them has quite let go.

“Well,” said Danny, and turned round in his seat for the first time.

Priya looked at him, and at the empty bus, and the rain drying on the glass, and the road home going up the hill under its lamps.

“Good service,” she said.

“Thank you for travelling.”

He put the lights out from the front to the back, so the bus went dark behind them one section at a time, like a house at bedtime.

Then he locked up, and they went up the hill together, slowly, at a bus’s pace, under the lamps, with the town asleep behind them and the water dark and still round the reservoir, and the church clock, four minutes ahead of them, saying it was already tomorrow.