The Bloke at the 6:40 Who Hums

There is a man at my bus stop who hums. Not loud. Not a busker. He stands under the shelter on Sydney Road with a backpack and a takeaway coffee and he hums, low, the same tune, every single weekday morning at 6:40. I've never asked him what it is. You don't, do you. It's Melbourne. We stand a metre and a half apart and look at our phones. I noticed it the first week I moved here. By the second month I'd stopped noticing, the way you stop noticing the fridge. It was just what the bus stop sounded like. Trams in the distance, the bakery's roller door going up, this bloke going dum, da-da dum, da-dum. He's fifty-ish. Hi-vis some days, a suit jacket over it other days, which I've never worked out. He gets off three stops before me at the hospital. Last Tuesday he wasn't there. Wednesday he wasn't there either. And standing under the shelter on Wednesday with the roller door going up and no humming, I caught myself doing it. Dum, da-da dum, da-dum. Quiet. Without deciding to. The whole thing, top to bottom, with the bit in the middle where it goes up and then sort of sighs back down. I knew it. I knew every note. I could have sung it to a piano player and he'd have got it in one. I have no idea what it's called. I've tried humming it into my phone and my phone thinks it's four different songs, none of them right. Thursday he was back. Same coffee, same backpack. He looked a bit tired. He started humming before the bus came round the corner and I felt something in my chest unclench that I hadn't known was clenched. I didn't say anything. He doesn't know I exist, probably. But I hummed along, under my breath, a metre and a half away, and for about forty seconds on Sydney Road there were two of us doing it. I still don't know what it is. I'm not sure I want to. If I look it up it'll have a name and a singer and a year and it'll belong to them. Right now it belongs to the 6:40.