The 43 terminates at Weld Street. After midnight it goes one stop further, and the sign on the front changes to a place I cannot find on any map.
I have taken the 43 home from work four nights a week for eleven years.
That is not a figure of speech. I did the sum once on a bad night when I could not sleep, and it comes to somewhere over two thousand journeys, which is more times than I have done almost anything. I know the route the way you know a song you did not choose to learn. I know that the driver has to swing wide at the mini roundabout by the retail park because a delivery lorry took the kerb out in 2019 and the council never fixed it properly. I know which seat has the split in the moulding. I know that between the crematorium and the bridge there is a stretch of about ninety seconds where nobody's phone has any signal, and you can watch a whole deck of people look up from their screens at the same moment.
The 43 terminates at Weld Street.
It says so on the timetable. It says so on the little plastic panel on the pole at every stop along the route. It says so on the front of the bus, in orange dots: 43 WELD STREET. Weld Street is a T junction with a launderette on the corner, and there is a bit of hatched road there where the buses sit with their engines off for four minutes before they go back the other way. I get off two stops before it. Everyone gets off before it, or at it. In eleven years I have never once seen anyone still on the bus when it pulled onto the hatching.
I want to be careful here, because the whole of this depends on you believing the boring part first.
The last 43 of the night leaves the depot end at ten past midnight and reaches my stop at about twenty to one. It is not a busy bus. Most nights there are four or five of us. There is a woman who works at the hospital laundry who gets on two stops after me and always sits downstairs on the left. There was a lad for about a year who I think worked at the casino, and then there was not.
On the night I am telling you about there were three of us and I was the last one left.
I had missed the earlier one because a lift went out at work and we had to walk the trolleys down, and by the time I got to the stop I was tired in that flat way where you are not really thinking, you are just being carried. I went upstairs, which I do not normally do, because the heater downstairs was on full and it was already a warm night. I sat at the front. The other two got off at the parade.
And then it was me, and a driver I did not recognise, and the whole top deck.
I looked up when we came to my stop, which is the third from the end, because you always look up, your body knows. The bus did not slow down.
I rang the bell. It made the noise it makes. The little sign at the front lit up and said STOPPING, and the bus did not stop.
I want to say I was frightened at that point. I was not. I was annoyed. That is the honest version. I thought, he has missed it, he is on autopilot, I am going to have to walk back from Weld Street in the dark and it is going to add twenty minutes onto a night that has already been too long. I went down the stairs holding the rail, and I stood behind the yellow line and I said, mate, that was my stop.
He did not answer. He was looking at the road the way drivers do.
We went past the second to last stop. We went past Weld Street.
Here is the thing I have never been able to explain to anybody without sounding as though I am building it up.
The road past Weld Street does not go anywhere. It goes about two hundred yards and then it is a gate and a chain and a strip of scrub where the old sidings were, and after that it is the back of the industrial estate and there is no way through. I have walked it. I walked it as a kid. You cannot get a bus down there, not because it is forbidden, but because there is physically nowhere for it to go.
The bus went down it for eleven minutes.
I timed that afterwards, from the clock on the ticket machine, which was the only clock I could see, because my phone had gone to that pale grey no service screen and stayed there. Eleven minutes at what felt like about twenty miles an hour. You can do the sum on that as well as I can.
The windows were the problem.
It was dark outside, properly dark, and the lights were on inside the bus, so all I could see in the glass was the inside of the bus and my own face in it. That is normal. That happens every night of the year. But when we came past the gate, or where the gate should have been, the reflection did not change and the darkness did not change, and I understood that I could not tell whether there was anything out there at all. I was not looking at a night. I was looking at a window with nothing on the other side of it.
I sat down. I did not choose to. My legs did it.
The sign changed.
I could see it in the reflection, backwards, in the glass of the door: the orange dots at the front of the bus rearranged themselves the way they do when a driver changes the destination at a terminus. It took about a second and a half. I read it backwards before I thought to turn round and read it properly, and by the time I turned round it said the same thing forwards.
43 ALDERSHAW
There is no Aldershaw.
I have looked. I have looked in the way that a person looks when they are trying to prove to themselves that they are not unwell. I have looked at the council's street index, and at the old ordnance survey sheets in the reference library, the ones in the big flat drawers that you have to ask for. I have looked at the parish records that got scanned. I have typed it into every search that exists and I have got a hotel in Surrey and a man on a professional networking site and nothing else.
There has never been an Aldershaw. Not a hamlet that got swallowed, not an old name for somewhere that got renamed. I checked that too, and it was a long afternoon.
The bus stopped.
The doors opened. The engine did the thing engines do when they go to idle, that drop in the note. The driver did not turn round.
I did not get off.
I have thought about that more than I have thought about anything else in my life, and I still do not know if it was courage or the exact opposite. I sat in the seat with my bag on my knees and I looked at the open doors, and past the doors there was a pavement, which I could see, because the light from the bus was falling on it. Ordinary pavement. Council slabs, the grey ones with the four little dots, and a kerb, and a drain with leaves in it.
And beyond the reach of the light, nothing. Not blackness like a field at night. Nothing, the way the edge of your vision is nothing when you are not looking at it.
There was a bus stop. There was a pole, and a panel on the pole, and the panel had a timetable in it. I could see the shape of the columns.
I could have read it. That is the part that gets me at four in the morning. I was six feet from it. If I had stood up and leaned out of the doors without stepping down I could have read what times the buses go from Aldershaw, and where they go to, and I did not, because I had decided with my whole body that I was not going to be nearer the doors than I already was.
The doors closed after about forty seconds. The engine came back up. The bus went forward, and I felt it turn, a long slow turn, the kind you feel in your shoulder against the window.
And then we were coming back up the road towards Weld Street, and the gate was there, and the chain was on it, and my phone had four bars.
He let me off at my stop.
He did it without me ringing the bell. He pulled in, and the doors opened, and I stood up and walked down the bus and I was going to say something and I did not say anything. He was an ordinary man of about sixty with a lanyard and a flask on the dash. As I stepped down he said, mind how you go.
That is all he said. It is what they say. I have had it said to me a thousand times.
I got in and I sat on the end of my bed in my coat for a while.
I did not stop taking the 43. That surprises people when I tell them, and I understand why, but you have to understand that it is the bus. It is how I get home. There is one other route and it puts me a mile and a half away on the wrong side of a dual carriageway, and I am not walking that at one in the morning to avoid something that I am not certain happened.
So I take it. And I get off at my stop, and I have got off at my stop every single night for two years and four months since.
But I go upstairs now, and I sit at the front, and about a minute before my stop I stand up and I go down and I hold on to the pole by the doors. I have my hand on the pole when the bus pulls in. I do not know what I think I would do. Hold on, I suppose.
And twice, in that two years and four months, I have looked back through the rear window as the bus pulled away from my stop, and there has been somebody still sitting on it.
Not the laundry woman. She gets off before me now, they changed her shifts.
Both times it was a man in a coat, sitting downstairs on the right, with his bag on his knees, looking straight ahead at nothing at all.