The bus wash is a drive through with brushes that close in on the vehicle and a counter that logs each cycle and the water used. It runs at four every morning with the bay empty. The brushes come in from the sides and stop where a bus's sides would be, and go round the shape of one, and the water that goes to the drain is grey with road dirt, and there is no road dirt in an empty bay.
I am the yard supervisor at a bus depot and the wash is the last thing a bus goes through before it sleeps.
The wash.
A bay with brushes on both sides and one overhead. A bus drives in slowly, the brushes come in until they touch, they spin, the bus goes through, and the water is caught in a pit and goes to the drain. It logs each cycle and the water used, because the water is metered and the meter is what we pay.
At four every morning it runs a cycle on an empty bay.
The cycle.
The brushes come in from the sides. They come in until they stop, and where they stop is the width of a bus, with about the give in them that a bus's side gives, and they spin, and they move, along the bay, the way they move along a bus, from the front to the back, over twelve metres, and at the back they come round, as they do round the back of a bus, and meet, and stop.
The overhead brush comes down to the height of a roof. A single decker's roof. It runs the length.
The water in the pit, when it drains, is grey. I have had it tested, because I wanted to know, and it is road grime, brake dust, diesel soot, the mixture that comes off a bus after a shift, and it comes off nothing.
What has been checked.
The controller, replaced. The sensors that find the sides of the bus, replaced. They find the sides of a bus at four.
The bay, at four, by me, standing in it, in the middle, where a bus would be. The brushes came in. They stopped a foot from me on each side, at the width of a bus, and spun, and I was inside a bus that was not there, with the brushes going along its sides and the water coming down off a roof above me that was not there either, and the water was warm, the way the wash is, and it was grey when it reached the floor.
I could not see the bus. But the brushes could feel it and the water ran off it and I stood inside it and I did not touch the sides, because I did not want to know what they felt like.
Whose bus.
The depot has had one accident that was a bus's. Twenty years ago, a single decker, on the ring road, in the ice, into the barrier, and the driver, and it was the last thing that bus did, and it had been due in for its wash that morning at four, because four was its slot, because four was when that driver liked to bring it in, before anybody else, so it was clean for his first run.
He never got it washed. It came back on a low loader and went for scrap and the driver did not come back at all.
What is done about it.
The water meter reads a cycle a night that no bus accounts for and the office has it as a leak, and the wash company has been out and found no leak, and the office has stopped asking the wash company and started asking me, and I have said, it is a bus that does not come in any more, and the office has not asked again.
What I do.
I run the yard.
The wash has a control panel, and on the panel is a button that a driver presses when the cycle is done to say the bus is clear, so the next one can come in. It was never pressed on that bus, because that bus never came.
I press it. At four, when the brushes come round the back and meet and stop and the water stops, I go to the panel and I press clear, and I say, that's you done, which is what the wash man says, and the brushes go back to their rest, and the bay drains, and the log has the cycle as complete instead of aborted, which it was every night before, and I think that is all that was wanted: a clean bus, and somebody to say so.