Night Bus

The N92 leaves the interchange at 00:40, 01:55, 03:10 and 04:25 and takes fifty-one minutes to do a loop that takes twenty-two in the day.

Nobody rides it for fun.

The eleven

Grace, who cleans three floors of an office block on Cadogan Street and gets the 03:10 four nights a week, and who has an arrangement with the driver about the second stop that has never been discussed with anyone in management.

Denny, night porter, 00:40, in the same seat since 2019 — third row, left, aisle — which the others have quietly ceded to him after a period in 2020 when the matter was contested.

Two nurses whose names nobody knows and who get on together at the hospital and get off separately, and who are collectively referred to as the nurses, and who have been the nurses for so long that when one of them was replaced in 2022 it took the regulars a fortnight to notice.

Femi, who works in a bakery and gets the 03:10 out and whose hands smell of flour on the way home on a different bus that none of these people are on.

Mr Adeoye, seventy-four, who is not going to work.

On Mr Adeoye

He gets the 01:55 on Tuesdays and Fridays and rides the full loop and gets off where he got on.

He has done this since 2021.

Nobody has asked. There was a period early on when the regulars had theories, and the theories were exchanged in the way things are exchanged on a night bus, which is to say in about four words at a time over several months.

The theories stopped when Grace said, one night in 2022, "He's just not sleeping," and everyone recognised it as true and the subject closed permanently.

He pays his fare. He reads a newspaper he has read already. At about the fortieth minute he usually falls asleep for ten minutes, and the driver — there are three drivers and all three do this — takes the last corner slower than necessary and wakes him gently rather than at the stop.

The economy

Things move on the N92.

Grace gives Femi bread rolls that the bakery cannot sell, which is backwards, and which happened once by accident in 2019 and has now been running for six years in a direction nobody has ever corrected.

Denny fixes phones. Not professionally. He fixed one of the nurses' screens in 2021 with a kit he bought and has since done eleven, on the bus, in the dark, badly, for nothing.

Somebody leaves the crossword on the seat behind the stairs, half done, for whoever gets on next. This has been going on since before any of the current regulars started and nobody knows who began it.

Rules

You do not sit next to someone. There are always seats.

You do not talk before the fourth stop.

If somebody is asleep, you make sure they get off. This is absolute and is the only rule anyone would articulate if asked, and it applies to strangers as much as regulars, and Denny once rode an extra full loop — an extra fifty-one minutes at the end of a twelve-hour shift — because a young man had gone past his stop and would not wake and Denny would not leave him.

The Tuesday

Mr Adeoye did not get on.

He had not missed a Tuesday in four years.

The 01:55 went round with Denny and one of the nurses on it and neither of them said anything until the fourth stop, at which point Denny said, "He's not on."

The nurse said, "No."

Nobody knew his address. Nobody knew his first name. Four years of Tuesdays and Fridays and a nodded good evening and the whole of what anyone had was Mr Adeoye, which Grace had got from an appointment card he had dropped in 2022 and had handed back without reading, mostly.

The Friday

He got on at 01:55.

He looked terrible and he had a bandage on his hand and he sat down in his usual place and opened his newspaper.

Denny, from the third row, said: "Alright?"

Which was, by the standards of the N92, an enormous intervention.

Mr Adeoye said, "Fell over."

"Right."

"In the kitchen."

"Right," said Denny.

That was the entire conversation and both of them considered it complete.

At the fortieth minute Mr Adeoye fell asleep, and the driver took the last corner slowly, and Grace — who was on that night, unusually — got up and stood near him without touching him until he woke.