WAITING

I saw him at a bus-stop. He was waiting. I knew he was waiting by the way he stood, not just where he stood. There’s a kind of in-built weariness and resignation about people who are waiting. There’s nothing they can do, and there’s nothing else they can do, apart from waiting, and there’s nothing they can do about it, either.

He was wearing a suit. It wasn’t a terribly posh suit, but it wasn’t scruffy either. It just looked as though it had been worn a little too often, as though, perhaps, it was the only suit he had and he had to wear it. As though, perhaps, he had to make a good impression, but he’d been trying too hard and too long to make it, and wasn’t sure who he had to make it on, or, in the long run, why. He looked – how shall I put it? – unconvinced. Unconvincing, too. Maybe the two go together.

Maybe they go with waiting. Such a neutral thing. Such an impotent thing. Can you wait “well”? Can you wait “badly”? You can be impatient, that’s for sure – but that’s because you aren’t waiting. You’re impatient precisely because you don’t want to wait. And how impatient you are certainly doesn’t have to relate to the amount of time you’re actually spending with nothing happening.

Is that what waiting is about? Being able to put up with the fact that nothing’s happening? But something’s always happening, even if we don’t have fine enough senses to perceive it. The wine in the cellar isn’t waiting: it’s maturing. So’s the cheese (unless, of course, it’s going rotten). Time is passing. Can you hear it? That rustling sound, like autumn leaves. That rushing sound, like the river you can’t bathe in twice, because it’s never the same. The whistling of the wind. The air that passes by and never comes back.

He had an umbrella. A rolled umbrella. It was raining – well, drizzling, enough to have the wipers on the interval setting – but he kept his umbrella rolled. He would, wouldn’t he? Not worth putting it up, because he was waiting.

Waiting for what? A bus, presumably, because he was standing at a bus-stop. But do you always get what you’re waiting for?

In Russia, then and now, if you see a queue and have the time, you stand in it. Who knows what you’ll get, when you get to the end, the business end, I suppose you’d call it, like a gun, but, whatever it is, you know it’ll be worth the wait, because – because people are waiting for it, so it must be. Even if you don’t want it yourself, somebody will, so you can swap it and swap it and swap it until you get something you do want.

But queues are different, anyway, because there’s shared intent and shared experience and shared gossip, and somebody to keep your place while you go for a pee in the alley round the corner which already smells, and somebody to pass the information down from the head of the queue that it’s not worth waiting any more, because they’ve just run out. Queues are a great substitute for life, barely distinguishable from the real thing, except by being better. Look at the pavements outside cultural icons, like Harrods and the Albert Hall and the Kaaba in Mecca, and you’ll see what I mean.

But waiting on your own – a lonely occupation. I mean, there may be other people waiting, but if they’re not waiting for the same thing as you, then it isn’t a queue. Waiting rooms in hospitals are like that. They probably organise the appointments so the patients can’t band together and make demands. I did see other people waiting with him, but they weren’t waiting together, if you see what I mean.

Did I mention that I’d seen him more than once? Perhaps you assumed that. Perhaps you were just – waiting – for me to say? You didn’t want to ask. You were happy to wait. Maybe he was happy to wait. He didn’t look happy, but then he didn’t look miserable, either. He just looked as though he was – waiting.

Yes, I saw him once or twice. No. More than that. Much more than that. I never bothered counting at the start, because I never expected to see him again, and by the time I’d seen him often enough to expect I’d see him again, I’d seen him so often that counting seemed superfluous.

I saw him in the rain, I saw him in the sun. I saw him in the morning. I saw him in the evening. Strangely enough, he was always on the same side of the road. You’d have thought he’d have been going the other way at night, you know, back home – if he had a home – or at least somewhere different. Anywhere different.

It wasn’t always the same bus-stop, though. But it seemed to be on the same route. Different places, but quite close together. In the middle of a big estate. Just before the turn-out on to the main road. The first bus lay-by on the clearway. Three places, then. After I’d started – expecting him – you know – waiting for him, as it were, I’d think I’d spotted him elsewhere, and I’d even slow down to have a really good look, which didn’t make me too popular with the other drivers. But it wasn’t him, after all. It never was.

He had a newspaper, too. Broadsheet. Folded, not rolled. You could see half the masthead and the top left-hand quarter of the front page. There was a photograph and half a headline. I couldn’t read it, not from that distance, but the shape was distinctive, the shape of the letters and the shape of the black and white areas in the photograph, even if I had no idea what it represented. That’s how I knew it was always the same paper. The same edition of the same paper. With the same headline and the same photograph. Every time I saw him. The suit always looked crumpled. The paper always looked fresh.

Once, I actually tried to pick him up. Sounds dreadful that, doesn’t it? What I mean, is that I tried to give him a lift. Well, he looked so lonely and so pathetic, he obviously needed help of some kind, so I thought I’d give him the kind of help I was capable of offering, namely transport. No commitment, emotional or financial, obviously, beyond a few extra teaspoonfuls of fuel, I wasn’t going to take him where he wanted to go, just a bit further along the route I assumed his bus took, because all the buses went along the clearway for a fair distance, just as I did. There are only so many places you can get off the beaten track, after all. In life, too. Unless you crash, of course.

Anyway, he was all alone, no buses in sight, and I pulled into the bus lay-by, and flashed my lights as I did so, so he could see, he was looking in my direction as it happened, as though he was looking for a bus coming along, and I pulled up and leant across and opened the passenger door and sat and waited. And waited. And waited. While I waited, the stuff in the door began to get soggy. And the seat started to get wet. Because the rain was getting heavier. I checked in the rear-view mirror. No sign of him. I checked in the wing-mirror. Still no sign of him. Was he in the blind-spot? If so, I should have heard splashing footsteps, but there was only the whoosh of the lorries on the clearway. Nothing else. I gave it another minute by the dashboard clock, leant across, closed the door, signalled, checked the mirror, noticing that there was no sign of him at all, and pulled out. There was a gap, so I changed lanes at once, and as I checked the mirror again to do so I saw that he was back at the bus-stop.

I never did find out which bus he was waiting for. There were five different ones that stopped there, and on one occasion or another I found myself far enough behind one in traffic that I could watch it pull in and pull away. And whichever bus it was, it left him behind. Perhaps he wanted to be left behind. Perhaps he just wanted to wait. Maybe it didn’t matter what for.

Then, one day, I bought a newspaper. I don’t normally, you know. Perhaps I’m not that firmly anchored in the real world. If important things happen, I reckon I’ll find out. Radio. Telly. Someone’ll tell me. Ask my opinion, and I’ll have to say, “What?” and they’ll explain. No. This was for the DVD they were giving away – the film of a Beckett play, as it happened. I folded it in quarters, to make sure the DVD didn’t drop out (I’d ripped off the polythene to make sure it was in there in the first place) and dumped it on the front passenger seat. It’s still there, in fact – a bit faded – and the DVD’s still in it – I’ll get round to watching it sometime, I suppose – but the point was, that I recognised the paper. It was the one he was carrying. Same shaped headline. Same shaped photograph.

So, of course, I kept an extra special eye out for him as I drove. And there he was, at the third of his stops, the first bus lay-by on the clearway. Looking right at me. No. Looking beyond me. Behind me. Then this huge bus filled my mirror. I’d not been expecting it, hadn’t noticed it before, it whipped up inside me out of nowhere (I was in the middle lane, the traffic slow-moving) and slotted into the lay-by. It was an old-fashioned bus, for some reason, with the open back platform, and no number, either, which was strange.

He looked – no, happy isn’t the word – completed, certain, as though he’d achieved something, arrived somewhere he was meant to be at the time he was meant to be there. Convincing. Convinced. And as he got on to the bus, he turned and looked back down the road, and that was when he really did look at me, and dipped his head slightly in some kind of recognition, before he disappeared inside – or he might have gone upstairs, I couldn’t be quite sure.

Traffic was heavy that morning – I was probably a little later than usual, because I’d stopped to buy the paper – and the bus got away, so I couldn’t see where he was sitting. It turned left at the first opportunity and seconds after it went round the corner, I heard the most almighty crash. Well, I say I heard it, but it might just have been in my head, because nobody else seemed to take a blind bit of notice, just went on driving. Normally, when there’s a crash, people flinch and mentally thank God it wasn’t them – there’s a kind of hiatus, and everyone’s more careful and polite for about ten minutes. But they just went on cutting each other up and switching lanes without signalling as normal.

As I went past the left turn, still in the middle lane, I slowed down and looked and got hooted at for my pains, but everything seemed to be in order. I looked again, from the far side of the carriageway as I drove home. Nothing. No flashing blue lights. No blue and white tape. Nobody measuring marks on the road with cones to protect them. Just traffic, traffic, traffic.

As you might expect, I’ve never seen him again. Not surprising. His waiting, clearly, was over.

But now I have to ask myself – not what he was waiting for, because I admit I’ll never be able to find that out, no chance at all, especially now it’s over – but why I ever saw him in the first place. Why I was given this – vision? Insight? Sight? There has to be a reason. And I’m waiting to find out what it is.

That’s it, then: his waiting has stopped; but mine has only just started.

Wildern School 4^th July 9am -3pm and 5^th July 3-4pm 2007