Counting

I’ve noticed recently that all the bus drivers have a different method, when they count us.

The dour-faced one at the start of the day has a handheld clicker which he presses as every head bobs past and every body descends from the step on to the pavement outside our reception. The number on the side of the clicker clocks up, the sound like a cricket, an incongruous echo of warmer climes amid the beige of the office blocks that seem to have fallen on to the landscape at random, clustered round the grotty junctions like concerned residents gawping at an accident.

At home time, it is the little Eastern European who says “thank you” without enthusiasm in a thick accent when I tell him to have a good evening, every evening without fail. I mean it, he doesn’t, and if he carries on like this I will stop. He has a clipboard on his lap and the paper fills up with five-bar gates as he tallies each of our escapes. Every line corresponds to one meal, one front door, one set of evening plans, one cocktail of disappointments and frustrations. Usually, I am the adjacent line to Mikey, or to Phil, united on a page if not in any other way. On Fridays the lines are reassembled in the pub - or would be, if anyone was doing a roll call there.

Today it was the grumpy man who resembles a Toby jug. As we all trooped past him I saw him counting on his fingers, repeating the running total to himself out loud, almost under his breath. I thought how easy it would be to distract him – to talk loudly on the phone at the top of the steps or call out random numbers and throw him off so he had to start again and could never finish. I was tempted to, but then I thought some more.

Because the thing is that none of us getting off that bus were counting the things that matter. Granted, we knew how many days were left until the weekend, or how many more rides there were until that first drink on a Friday afternoon, that next long weekend or long-awaited holiday. But I don’t think many of us had stopped to think about how many times we’d made this journey, or how many more times we would, or whether there were better things we should have been doing all this time.

We did what we always did as if we were sleepwalking - which some mornings we probably are - and you can’t complain if, while you are sleepwalking, you get reduced to a line on a page, a finger in the air or a revolving number on a handheld device. So I didn’t interrupt him because I appreciated the irony. He was counting us, and we were acting as if we didn’t count.