Susannah Rigg
Eight Stops Back
The first stop comes quickly. You barely have time to get yourself to your seat, lower deck, by the back window, when the bus begins to slow to let old passengers off, new passengers on. You’d normally sit on the upper deck, but you don’t trust yourself with the stairs today. A woman carrying a chihuahua in a bag skuttles out of the rear doors. The little dog’s ears flap back, caught in the wind, making it appear startled. An elderly lady wearing a long black coat dawdles by the front door, digging around for her bus pass for so long that the driver hurries her on, “don’t worry about it love, I trust ya.”
Eight stops and then get off the bus. Count them so you don’t miss it. You repeat the mantra to be sure. Your head hasn’t righted itself since the phone call that morning. You look at the piece of paper in your hand, Farnham Street, Cherry Tree Elder’s Home. It was always eight stops away, she was always eight stops away, you never knew. Are you glad you never knew?
The bus pulls into the next stop, the breaks squeaking metal upon metal. A young guy sits down next to you, his headphones wrapped around his head giving him Mickey Mouse ears. You wait to be annoyed by his music but you realise you can’t hear it over the loud hum of the engine. You watch his head bop to the inaudible beat as he scrolls through his phone, looking intently at pictures of amps and mics. For a while you look too, until he turns his head just enough to let you know that he’d like you to stop. You stare out the window instead, repeating the number two to yourself, so you don’t forget. Two stops down, six to go.
The street passes by in a puddle of greys. It was raining that morning when your phone rang, the droplets trickling down the window in your kitchen. You’d been planning to stay in and work on the play you are writing, the one that was due last month, the one you already spent all the money from. Now you are on a bus heading along the road to your past. When would you get back to the play now this had been thrown into your world? When you answered that call you may as well have grabbed your script and thrown it into the air, letting it land, as a sombre confetti, wherever it pleased, to be trampled on, lost under the sofa. But then, that’s how life always felt with her, before.
Out of the window, you watch a man in a dark suit appear from a narrow alleyway and ponder how you wouldn’t have seen him if the bus had passed a few moments earlier. What if you had popped to the shop when the phone rang, missed the call? Would they have called back or chalked it up to a wrong number? Could you still be at home with a warm cuppa, browsing the internet while your play blinked at you from the corner of your screen waiting to be finished? Would you be enjoying some morning TV, watching other people’s lives, rather than being tossed around in your own?
Someone presses the bell and you repeat three over and over in your head and then wonder if you should wait for the bus to stop first in case you get confused and think four when the bus pulls in. Stop overthinking it. You’ve been on a bus before. You’re an adult.
At the third stop you notice a café. You’ve been there before, although you don’t remember ever coming to this area of the city as a child. You remember hot chocolates that tasted like muddy water and a croissant that was so hard you dropped it on the plate from a height just to hear the thud. It had made you laugh. She’d hissed at you to stop messing around though and told you to go up to ask for a new one. You were embarrassed, six years old and shy around adults, scared of them. Rightly so. You resisted, asked her to go, but she told you it was your croissant, your responsibility. You said, you’d just eat it stale. She screamed at you then. A few people turned to look and you scuttled up to the counter to ask for a new croissant from the angry-looking man, who threw another one into your tiny hands. You’d had a stomachache that night, you blamed the croissant. Misdirection was all you had.
You’ve never much liked responsibility as an adult. Maybe you used up your quotient as a child? She said you were like your dad, not a fan of responsibility. You believed her, until one day you realised you were just tired, so tired.
As the bus rushes into stop number four, dragging a wheel against the kerb, a string feels like it is being pulled around your heart, like those cuts of beef in posh pubs, ready to roast. Halfway there, halfway back to a life that you chose to leave. No, it wasn’t a choice, it was a necessity. It was survival. Stay and live with your lungs always working on restricted air or go and have a chance at something.
Had you made anything out of that ‘something?’ Sometimes you wondered. But you never regretted the decision, except when the guilt flooded in, except when the emails about Mother’s Day or the Christmas adverts caught you off guard. Then, you were left in puddles on the floor. A normal day could turn in an instant, forcing you back under the duvet from which you’d already struggled to emerge. Your mind played tricks, Christmases were ok, weren’t they? You had presents to open. Society played tricks she’s your mother, she gave you life. Oh yes, she gave you life and then sucked it back from you, using your heart to pump blood around her own, as if you owed her that.
An elderly man gets on at stop five, along with the scent of rancid chip oil from the kebab shop outside. A teenage girl in a baby-pink tracksuit gives up her seat so that he can sit his frail bones down. He drops into it without bending, his sinews no longer flexible enough to lower him with grace. His body showing him up. You wonder if he is alone. Who he has in this life? Who joins him for Christmas? You stare at his wrinkled face for clues, expecting the wrinkles to write out his sadness, instead you notice contentment scribbled in his brow.
The sun has come out now and it shines in through the bus windows, making a little rainbow on your lap. You place your hands on your denimed knees and try to hold the colour-filled arc, but it disappears against the lightness of your palms. You remember being told at school that you looked pale, maybe you were getting ill. You feigned feeling fine, even though a fever was rising, pooling sweat under your ponytail and dripping down your shirt collar. Illness wasn’t tolerated in your house. Once, hallucinating from fever, you finally called out, convinced you were dying, not wanting to die alone and go to little kid heaven. No one came.
As the bus rolls into stop six —or is it five, no it’s six, you are sure it is six—it glides to a stop as if the driver has found his stride. A flustered looking woman drags a pram and a toddler in through the back doors. Standing bodies move to make space, some taking it as their cue to go and sit upstairs out of the way of the elderly and the babies. The woman locks the pram into place and pulls a hand through her knotted hair, the bags draped over the pram handles bulging like the ones under her eyes. She leans against the inside of the bus, smiles weakly at the old man. The toddler asks questions and flicks at the toy that is hanging on the side of the pram. She stops him by placing her hand over his and flashing him a warning look. The chaos around them whispers with the secret you already know, motherhood is impossible. You have shirked that responsibility too. Or was it taken from you? Depleted from mothering both her and you. Scared of patterns repeating.
Your mother had a stroke they told you on the phone as the rain pattered outside like any other rainy day, as the smell of toast from breakfast still lingered in the kitchen air, May not survive it, they said. Your coffee bubbled on the stove. Next of kin, Had to let you know. You stared at the photo of you and your friends celebrating the opening night of your first play. You had wished that night that there had been family there to share it too. It's complicated you said down the phone, as the guilt rose up above your nose and mouth, pulling you under water, a sensation you recognized. We understand. They’d heard it all before, a relief and a mockery of years of acute pain.
The bus clatters into stop seven and your head bumps against the window with a muted thud. When did you move so close to the glass? You spent so much of your life making yourself small, it comes naturally, but it no longer feels comfortable. Taking tiny breaths for your entire childhood, it took years of training to fill your chest as if life wasn’t yours to absorb, as if someone else needed the air more than you.
Your voice too, always so quiet. The actors performing your first play had taught you how to project. You’d thought you might explode from all the stagnant, crushed down words that seemed to rise up from inside you as you called out across the empty theatre, as if they were being pumped from you, like alcohol from the stomach of a drunk.
You see stop eight approaching.
“Excuse me,” you say to the people next to you. Your voice comes out as a whisper. They don’t hear you.
“Excuse me,” you say again forcing the words out.
You go to stand up but your whole body is heavy, you can’t lift your arm to grab onto the seat to pull yourself up. Your legs have no strength.
“Sorry, do you want to get off?” the man next to you wearing a buttery coloured Shalwar Kameez asks. When had the boy with the headphones left?
You open your mouth to say yes, instead you hear yourself say “No.” Your voice sounds different. You let go of the seat in front and make a show of settling back down. “Sorry, I thought we were at a different stop.”
The bus pulls in. You watch each passenger as they get off, searching for your face among them, sure you will find it, but you don’t. You chose something else. No, not a choice, a necessity, the only way you get to live.
The door closes. The space on the bus feels like it is expanding, a sponge dipped in water, you grow again alongside it, taking up your rightful place on your seat. The bus pulls away from stop eight, rushes on to stop nine. Your mind wanders to your play, you know now, how it will end.
Susannah Rigg is a writer, editor and writing mentor. After over a decade as a travel writer, she now devotes herself to writing fiction. She is Assistant Fiction Editor at Wallstrait Literary Journal and her short stories have been published in Inkfish, South 85, Westchester Review and others. Susannah recently relocated to London after 15 wonderful years living in Mexico and is finding her hometown to be far more beautiful than she remembered.
