The duty board is the screen that says which driver has which bus and which run. Every morning it allocates the school run to a village that closed its school in 2004, to a driver who retired the same year, and bus 27 leaves the yard at ten to eight with nobody in the cab and comes back at nine, and its passenger counter, which counts people through the door with a beam, says thirty one.
I am the allocations clerk at a bus depot and the duty board is mine, which means that when it does something I did not put on it, I am the one who has to explain.
The board.
A screen in the drivers' room and the same on my desk. Every duty, every bus, every driver, for the day. I build it the night before and the system checks it and the drivers read it in the morning and go.
At ten to eight there is a duty on it I did not build.
The duty.
School run, to a village fifteen miles out, a village whose school closed in 2004 and whose children go to town now on a different run. Bus 27. Driver, a name. The name is a driver who did the run for twenty years and retired when the school closed and died a few years after, and whose card was cancelled, and the system will not allocate a duty to a cancelled card, and it does.
Bus 27 goes. The yard camera shows it pull off its bay at ten to eight, nobody in the cab, the blind saying SCHOOL, and go out of the gate. The telematics show it doing the run. Every stop in the village, the way the run went in 2004, and the school gate, which is a housing estate now, and back.
The passenger counter is a beam across the door. It counts thirty one on, at the village stops, and thirty one off, at the school gate, and at nine the bus is back in the yard, and the seats, the driver who takes it out for its next run says, are warm, in the pattern children sit in, in pairs, at the back first.
What has been checked.
The board, rebuilt from nothing. The duty appears.
The bus. Swapped for a different bus in bay 27. The different bus does the run.
The run, by me, following in my car. The bus went out of the gate at ten to eight with nobody in it. It drove. I will say that plainly. It drove, at the speed of a school bus with a careful man at the wheel, to the village, and stopped at the stops, and the doors opened, and I sat in my car behind it at the first stop and watched the doors open on an empty lane with nobody at the stop, and stay open for the time it takes children to get on a bus, which is a long time, and close, and I watched the counter on the dash, which I could see through the back window, go up by four.
At the school gate, which is houses, the doors opened, and stayed open a long time, and the counter went down by thirty one, and the bus turned round in the road where the turning circle used to be, and came home.
Who.
The school closed. The children did not die. They grew up, they are in their thirties now, they live in the town. I have found some of them. None of them know about the bus.
The driver died. The run died. And I have come to think that it is not the children on the bus, not the real ones, but the run itself, the thing he did every morning for twenty years, with its thirty one stops and its thirty one children, and that a thing done that many times by a man who loved it does not stop because a council closes a school.
He is doing his run. The children are whoever his run remembers.
What is done about it.
Bus 27 is on the board as allocated to a school run that does not exist and the fuel it uses is on the reconciliation and the council, which pays for school transport, is not invoiced for it, because I cannot bring myself to, and the office has asked why 27 does fifteen miles a morning for nothing, and I have said, it is a positioning run, which is a thing we have, and they have let it go.
What I do.
I build the board.
I have stopped building it around him. I used to leave the duty off and it appeared. I put it on now. School run, village, bus 27, his name, ten to eight, with the note that every school run has, which is, thirty one pupils, check count at gate.
The counter is right every morning. Thirty one on, thirty one off. And on the board, when the bus comes back at nine, the duty goes from running to complete, the way they all do, and beside complete there is a field for the driver's confirmation that the count was right, which is a tick, and it is ticked, and I did not tick it, and I do not think the system did either.
I think he did. I think a man who drove thirty one children to school every morning for twenty years and never lost one is still counting them off at the gate, and ticking the box, and coming home, and I am not going to be the one who takes the run off the board.