The Bus Stop

Walter cut the Leberkäse thin, the way the tom liked it, three slices already going grey at the edges, and carried the saucer out to the bus stop. The salt had crusted white along the kerb again; he scraped a boot through it and set the dish behind the leg of the bench, where the wind couldn’t reach.

He stepped back and waited with his hands in his coat pockets, the way a man waits for a train he has paid for.

The perspex of the shelter was cracked corner to corner, a slow lightning that had been spreading for years, and behind it the timetable had gone the colour of weak tea, the figures bleeding under a film of damp. 9:14. The 9:14 came through if you flagged it, and nobody flagged it, so it didn’t. Walter knew the driver by the slope of his shoulders. The man never even slowed.

The cat came out from under the dead hedge low to the ground, ears flat, one of them torn down to a notch, an old fight from before Walter’s time with him. He ate without ceremony. Walter watched the working of the small jaw and felt the morning settle into its proper shape.

“There,” he said. “Go on.”

The factory had been down that road, past the allotments. He had welded bogie frames there thirty-one years, the blue flare of it printed on the inside of his eyelids even now, and the gate had shut in the spring of 1998 with a chain and a notice and men standing about not knowing where to put their hands. He had taken this bus to it for thirty-one years. He took the walk to the stop still. A man should be somewhere by nine.

On Sunday Antje came with her good coat and her clipboard and the smell of the car still on her.

She moved through the flat the way she moved through everything, opening, assessing, the cupboard under the sink, the bathroom, the little blue book of his blood pressure that he kept up in pencil to show her. She found the folder on the table. He had meant to put it away. The papers from the Sonnenhof, the photographs of a room with a view of a courtyard and a chair upholstered in something wipeable, his name already on the line at the bottom, the date left blank because he had not been able to make his hand write a date.

“You signed it,” she said.

“I read it. Reading isn’t the same as the other thing.”

“Papa.” She set the folder down flat, squared it. “You can’t leave it open like this. They’ll give the place to someone else and then we start from nothing.”

He filled the kettle so his back was to her. “I’ve a routine here. I’m up at seven. I do my walk. I shop Tuesdays. I’m not sitting in a chair waiting to be told when the soup is.”

“There’s hair on everything.” She held up two fingers, grey between them. “It’s on the settee, it’s in the kitchen, I can smell it, Papa, the whole flat, and you can’t even—” She stopped, started again, gentler, which was worse. “You can’t look after yourself and now there’s a cat?”

“It’s Köhler’s cat. Downstairs. It comes up the stairs when the door’s open.” The lie came out smooth as solder. “He feeds it like a king. You should see it. Fat thing.”

She looked at him. He held the kettle very steady.

That night the radio said minus fourteen by morning, the hard cold coming down off the plain with nothing to stop it the whole way from the Urals. He put his dinner in front of him, the schnitzel he’d fried, and looked at it a long while, then scraped two-thirds of it into a margarine tub and put the tub at the back of the fridge behind the milk where she would not look.

The cold did what it said. The bench wore a skin of ice you could see your own grey shape in. The salt-grit had frozen into the kerb so it was one thing now, kerb and salt and ice, a single grey stuff.

It was still black at half eight when the tom came up, and he was carrying something.

Walter thought, a mouse, and then, a bird, the wing of it hanging wrong, and then the tom dropped it on the toe of his boot and Walter bent stiffly with a hand on the bench and looked, and the thing was not dead. A small bird, smaller than a sparrow, its feathers not finished, frost in them. The chest going. Just going. A flutter you could have missed.

The cat sat back and would not touch his saucer. He sat with the bird between them and looked up at Walter and did not eat.

“What am I to do with that,” Walter said. The cold had got into his knuckles and made him hard. “Eh? What’s that to me.”

He scuffed his boot and sent salt-grit over the small frozen thing, covering it, and he picked up the saucer with the food still in it, because there was no sense leaving good food to freeze, and he went home.

He could not put the bird down all day. Behind the eyes it kept on, the chest going, going. He took his dinner out at six and stood over it with the fork and put the fork down. He scraped the whole plate into the bin this time, not the tub, the bin, and stood with the empty plate in his two hands and understood, the way you read a gauge, that he had not been hungry in some days now. Not yesterday. Not the day before. It had gone out of him quietly like heat from a flat with the windows open.

He went back at dawn to bury it. He took a serving spoon and a carrier bag and meant to dig a hole in the soft ground under the hedge and put the thing in and have done.

The cat was not there.

He waited. He cleared the salt off the small grey mound with the side of the spoon and the bird was gone, a fox, a crow, the way of it, and he straightened and looked down the empty road where it went pale into the fields, and he waited for the cat the way he waited for the 9:14, which is to say without belief and without leaving.

It did not come.

Nor the next morning. He stood in the dark with the saucer full and his breath going up white and stiff and nothing came down the hedge-line, no low grey shape, no notched ear. The shelter ticked as the cold worked it. Somewhere off towards the depot a dog. He stood until his feet stopped being feet and then carried the full saucer home again, which was a thing he had not done before, and the carrying of it was the worst of the whole business, the weight of food that no one had come for.

That evening he took the phone off the wall and dialled Antje’s number, which he knew by heart and had never once rung on a day that was not Sunday. He got as far as the last digit. He stood with his thumb over it and the dial tone purring and put the phone back on the cradle, gently, as though it might wake.

Sunday she came finished. He could see it in how she carried the folder, no longer at her side but in front of her in both hands. She had a pen clipped to it. She had stopped arguing somewhere on the drive and arrived past it.

“I’ve put the fourteenth,” she said, before her coat was off. “Of February. They’ll hold the room to the fourteenth. That gives you six weeks, Papa, to sort what you want to bring. I’ll do the boxes. I’m not letting it drift again.”

He had the lie sitting ready in his mouth, polished from use. Köhler’s cat. Fat thing. All fine here. I’ve my routine.

He took his coat off the hook instead.

“Come out a minute,” he said.

“It’s minus eleven.”

“Come out.”

She followed because it was easier than not, down the stairs and along the frozen path, her good shoes skidding once on the glassed-over pavement so she took his arm without thinking and then was surprised to find herself holding it. He brought her to the shelter. The cracked perspex, the tea-coloured timetable, the bench under its skin of ice. And on the ground behind the bench leg the saucer, where it had stood three days, the Leberkäse in it gone black and shrunk and the whole dish rimed white, a little bowl of ice with food set in it like something kept under glass.

He didn’t say it was the cat’s. He didn’t say there was no Köhler. He didn’t say he came here to a bus that had stopped running its old route the year the works shut, nor that he set a plate down each morning so the morning would have a thing in it that needed him. He stood with his cap on and looked at the frozen saucer and his daughter looked at it too.

“I come here every morning,” he said. “There’s nothing here.”

The wind moved the cracked perspex a little on its frame, a small dry sound.

Antje did not put her arms around him. She did not say a soft thing. She crouched on her heels in her good coat, careful of the ice, and looked at the saucer a long time, longer than he expected, long enough that he wondered if her knees would let her up. She touched the rim of it once with a gloved finger.

“I’ll come Wednesdays as well,” she said, still looking at the dish. “Not just Sundays. Wednesday after work.”

She stood. She brushed the grit off her palms, one against the other. The folder was still under her arm. The fourteenth of February was still written on it, and she did not take it out, and he did not ask her to, and that was understood between them and left alone.

They walked back. On the low wall by the bins the grey tom sat with his torn ear and his front paws together, ordinary as a stone, watching them come with the flat gold unbothered eyes of a creature that has eaten elsewhere and owes nothing. Alive. Indifferent. It did not come down.

Walter looked at it. He did not call it. He had called it for a year, and a man learns when a thing is not going to come, and he found he could let it sit there being alive without needing it to be his.

He went up. He hung his coat on the hook. He took the schnitzel from yesterday out of the fridge and warmed it in the pan with a little fat until it spat, and he sat down at the table where the folder had been and ate it, all of it, wiping the plate with bread at the end the way his mother had made him do, and when he was finished the plate was clean and the calendar on the wall had a small extra mark on it, mid-week, in his daughter’s hand.