The 42

There are rules on the 42. Nobody wrote them down but everybody follows them. You don't sit next to someone if there's a free double. You don't talk, unless something's gone wrong with the bus, in which case you talk about the bus. Upstairs is for the young and the people who want to be left alone, downstairs is for the rest of us. I'd been getting the 8.10 for about a year after Jean died. Didn't need to, I was retired, but I'd go into town, walk about, have a coffee in the library, come back. Get out of the house. Everybody tells you to get out of the house and it turns out they're right, which is annoying. She sat two rows ahead, left side, window. Grey coat. A bag with a tartan pattern that had seen better days. She always had a paperback, and she always got off at the hospital stop, and I'd decided, in the way you decide things about strangers, that she was a nurse. She wasn't. She was visiting her husband. I know that because one Thursday the bus stopped dead on Wilmslow Road with a hiss and everybody groaned, and the rules changed. We were allowed to talk. "Third time this month," she said, to nobody in particular, and I was the nobody nearest. "Gearbox," I said, as if I knew. "Sounds like the gearbox." "Does it?" "No idea. But it sounds confident, doesn't it." That got a laugh. Then, because we were stuck and it was raining, she told me about her husband. Eighteen months in a care home now, after a stroke. He didn't always know her. She went every day, and some days she thought that was for him and some days she thought it was for her, and she'd stopped trying to work out which. I told her about Jean. I hadn't said it out loud to a stranger before. It came out plainer than I expected. "My wife died last spring. Cancer. Quick, in the end." "I'm sorry," she said, and she didn't do the face people do. She just said it.

The bus started again. We didn't talk after that, the rules were back. But the next morning she gave me a small nod when she got on, and I nodded back, and that was that for about three weeks. Nod. Nod. Off at the hospital. Then one morning there was a free double and she sat next to me anyway. "I've decided the rules are stupid," she said. "They are a bit." "I'm Pauline." "Terry." We talked. Not about anything. Where the good bakery was, whether the council would ever fix the crossing by the Co-op. She got off at the hospital and I went into town and had my coffee, and I noticed I was sitting differently. Sort of forward. It's been four months now. We have a coffee on Tuesdays, after her visit. She talks about Alan and I talk about Jean and neither of us has to pretend the other one isn't there. I don't know what this is and I've stopped needing to. My daughter asked me if I was "seeing someone" in a voice like she was picking up something with tongs, and I said I was seeing someone on a bus, and she said that wasn't an answer, and I said it was the only one I had. This morning Pauline got on and there was a free double and she walked straight past it. Sat down next to me. Opened her paperback. Didn't say anything. Neither did I. Best bit of my week.