The Bus That Waits

The 6:14 leaves at 6:14.

Emeka has driven it for nine years and he is proud of this in a way he would find difficult to justify to anyone. The city is not built for punctuality. The road out past the market is a rumour of a road. And still: 6:14.

Except on Thursdays.

On Thursdays the 6:14 leaves at 6:19, and the regulars have stopped mentioning it. For the first year they mentioned it constantly. There was, briefly, a petition.

What happens on Thursdays is that at 6:16 or thereabouts, a woman comes down the hill from the direction of the teaching hospital, walking fast and badly, carrying a plastic bag. She gets on. She sits in the third row on the left. She does not apologise, because in nine years nobody has told her there is anything to apologise for.

Emeka worked it out in the third month. The hospital changes its visiting hours on Thursdays. He did not ask. He simply began, on Thursdays, to find that the engine needed a little longer to settle.

The passengers worked it out at different speeds. Mrs Balogun, who sells fabric and misses nothing, had it inside a fortnight. The students took longer, because students are not looking. The man in the grey cap has been catching this bus for six years and Emeka is fairly sure he still believes the delay is mechanical.

Nobody has ever said the word hospital out loud on the 6:14.

This is the part Emeka thinks about. Not the waiting — the waiting is nothing, five minutes, less than it takes to eat an orange. What he thinks about is the enormous, coordinated, entirely unspoken effort of forty adults agreeing, week after week, year after year, not to look up when she gets on.

Because they could look. It would be natural to look. A person arrives late, out of breath, carrying a bag from a hospital — of course you look.

They don't.

Mrs Balogun, who could tell you the marital status of every trader on her row, looks out of the window. The students look at their phones. The man in the grey cap, who Emeka once watched argue for eleven minutes about a fare of thirty naira, looks at his hands.

Last Thursday she did not come.

Emeka waited until 6:21. He has never waited until 6:21. He could feel the whole bus not saying anything, forty people staring very hard at nothing, and the silence had a shape to it, and the shape was a question none of them were going to ask.

At 6:22 he pulled out.

He drove the route badly. He took the corner by the school too wide and a man selling plantain shouted something he deserved.

This Thursday she came at 6:15.

Early. Walking normally. The plastic bag was gone.

She got on and she sat in the third row on the left, and Emeka, who has driven this bus for nine years and has never once spoken to her, found that his hands were not entirely steady on the wheel.

And then Mrs Balogun — Mrs Balogun, who has looked out of that window every Thursday for nine years — turned around in her seat and said, quite clearly, to nobody in particular:

"Good morning."

And the students looked up. And the man in the grey cap took off his cap.

And the woman in the third row put her hand over her mouth and laughed, once, and it came out wrong and wet, and she said good morning back.

Emeka pulled out at 6:16.

He was, for the first time in nine years, two minutes early at every stop, and not one person complained.