The Night Bus

At twenty to three in the morning, the N38 pulled away from Victoria with exactly four people on board, if you counted the driver, and Desmond always counted the driver. He had been driving night buses across London for twenty-two years, and he liked to say that the night bus was the only place in the city where people told the truth, mostly because they were too tired to do anything else.

The first passenger was Grace, a nurse coming off a twelve-hour shift, still in her blue scrubs under a raincoat. The second was a DJ called Jas, carrying a record bag almost as big as she was. The third was a young man with a backpack and a dead phone, who kept peering out of the window with the expression of someone who had no idea which country he was in. His name was Iker, he was from Bilbao, and he had been trying to get to his friend's apartment in Hackney since midnight.

"Right," said Desmond over his shoulder, "where are you staying, exactly?" Iker produced a crumpled napkin with an address on it. "Well, you're on the right bus, actually," said Desmond. "Mind you, I'd guess it's the first time tonight you've been going the right way." Iker admitted that he had already ended up in Clapham twice. "Twice," Jas repeated. "I mean, that's commitment."

Grace laughed, and something about the laugh loosened everyone up. She told them about her night: a man who had come in with a saucepan stuck on his foot, a newborn who had arrived three weeks early and in a tremendous hurry, and a grandmother who refused to take her medicine until somebody brought her a proper cup of tea. "Anyway," she said, "the baby's fine. The saucepan, not so much."

"Speaking of disasters," said Jas, and launched into the story of her gig, where the power had gone off halfway through her set and two hundred people had kept dancing to nothing but their own clapping. "To be honest," she said, "it was the best twenty minutes of the night. Having said that, I'm never playing that club again." Iker said that in Bilbao, when the power went off at a party, people simply started singing, and then, to everyone's surprise, sang a few quiet lines of a song in Basque.

The stories began to tangle, the way stories do at three in the morning. Grace wanted to know more about the singing; Jas wanted to know whether the saucepan man had been dancing; Iker, whose English was good but had never been tested at this hour, kept saying "Sorry, sorry, what?" and then laughing anyway. At one point all three of them were talking at once, and Desmond, at the wheel, was smiling to himself in the mirror.

"The thing is," he said, when there was a pause, "everybody on this bus thinks the night is the bit in between. In between shifts, in between gigs, in between where you were and where you're going." He swung the bus around a corner near Islington. "But, you know, this is it as well. This is the actual night. You lot have just had it together."

Nobody quite knew what to say to that, so Grace said, "Well, that's deep for three o'clock," and Jas said that Desmond should have a podcast, and Desmond said he already had one: it was called the N38, and it ran every twenty minutes.

Jas got off in Dalston, her record bag bumping against her knees. Grace got off at Hackney Central, waving. At the stop nearest to the address on the napkin, Desmond pulled in, opened the doors and pointed down a quiet street. "Third house on the left, with the blue door," he said. "And, Iker? Next time, don't go to Clapham." Iker stepped off into the cold gray beginning of the morning, and by the time he turned to wave, the bus had already gone, carrying its lights away across the sleeping city.