Chapter 35The Last Bus

At twenty past five, without turning on the light, she ran her fingers once over the sheet of plasters in her pocket in the dark.

Ten to a sheet. The foil squares pressed one by one under the pads of her fingers, every square flat, no gap as she ran over them. She had bought this sheet last month at the pharmacy downstairs; the assistant had put it in a small paper bag and had not asked her what it was for. Yesterday at noon she had given one away. She counted twice, and both times it was nine.

When she had counted, she put the sheet back in the left pocket of her jacket, zipped it shut and pressed it with her palm to make sure it would not slide out. On the bedside table was a packet of biscuits; she took one and put it in her trouser pocket. The other sheet was in the drawer of the bedside table. She had bought the two sheets together, and the drawer had never been opened.

A strip of streetlight came in through the gap in the curtains and fell on the foot of the bed. She did not look at it. She got up, felt for the hook behind the door and took down her work uniform. The uniform was grey; she had worn it for three years, and one cuff had been mended once, with thread that was not the colour of the cloth. She took the sheet out of her jacket pocket and put it in the left pocket of the uniform. The flat was one bedroom and one kitchen; she lived alone, and had lived there for nine years. The lift stopped only at odd-numbered floors. She lived on the third, and going down she still took the stairs, counting them one by one.

There was no one on the street yet in the early morning. The streetlights were on, and the ground under them was dry; in the gutter by the road there was still water from last night’s rain, black, not moving. The sky to the east had gone a little pale, not light, only a little lighter than the night. At the bus stop she waited for the six-oh-five, and the bus came on time. There were streaks of water on the windows, running down at a slant. On the bus there was only the driver and a boy in school uniform, sitting by the window asleep, his school bag held in his arms. She sat down in the third row with her hands in her pockets, feeling the sheet of plasters. The bus crossed a bridge. The water under the bridge was black, and a few birds sat on the railing; as the bus passed, they flew up. She sat until the bus stopped in the back street behind Twin Court.

At the door to the staff corridor in the back street there was a sensor. She held her card to it, and the lock clicked. Inside was a narrow corridor with a fire plan on the wall, and at the end of the corridor was the clock-in machine. She pressed her finger to it; the machine beeped and the time came up on the screen. Twelve minutes past six.

The storeroom was on the left of the corridor, and inside it smelled of cement and disinfectant mixed together. The cleaning trolley stood against the wall, with two cloths hanging from it, a bucket, a mop and a roll of black bin bags. She pushed the trolley out, hung new bin bags on its side, and set the bottles of cleaning fluid in a row, labels facing out.

At half past six she reached the food court.

The shutters of the food court were not all up yet; one after another they hung half open, showing the bases of each stall’s stoves and the feet of the freezers underneath. Thirty-one plastic stools were piled in front of the first stall, white, stack after stack. She pulled them out one by one, wiped them and put them back in place. She had to run her hand down the legs of every one; where she felt something on a leg, she wiped it off with the cloth, and if it would not wipe off she scraped it with her fingernail.

The mop water had to be changed three times. The first bucket was the dirtiest and was for the floor; the second was for the stools; the third was the cleanest and was only for rinsing the cloths. The three buckets stood in a row, each with a cloth over its rim.

Round the leg of the seventeenth stool was a band of tape. She had wrapped the tape herself and wrapped it crooked, long on one side and short on the other; by the third turn it had gone askew. Every morning she took it off and wrapped it again, and when she had finished, it was crooked on the same side. When she took it off, the back of the tape carried the dust of the day before, and it got into the whorls of her thumbprint and had to be rinsed off with water. She wrapped it, pressed it with her thumb and made sure it was firm.

There was a thin film of condensation on the freezer door. She wiped it away with the cloth and a patch of clear glass showed through, and in the glass was a person in a grey work uniform. She glanced at it and went on wiping.

At seven the woman who sold breakfast came in pushing her cart, its wheels rattling loudly. She saw Aini and nodded. Aini nodded too, and neither of them spoke. The oil in the stall’s wok heated first, and a ring of it gleamed along the rim. She moved the stools she had wiped to one side to clear a way for the breakfast woman. The woman’s wheels went over a drainage channel, and the tin boxes on the cart clattered once along with them.

※

At noon she ate a packet of rice on a different bench.

This bench was beside the escalator on the second floor. When she sat down she leaned back a little, and the slats she leaned against were cool. The escalator kept moving; most of the people going up and coming down had their heads bent over their phones. At the top of the atrium hung a large screen, silent, playing a stretch of seaside road with no one on it. The rice was wrapped in banana leaf; the leaf had dried, and when she opened it there was a very faint smell. Under the rice were a piece of fried chicken, a fried egg, a pinch of fried peanuts and a small spoonful of chilli. She ate the peanuts first and left the egg till last; when the middle of the egg touched the rice, she broke it up with her spoon. She ate slowly, folded the leaf into a square and put it in the bin. Next to her lunch box was an empty drink bottle; she took it out and put it in the recycling box. On the box was a sheet of paper with the word Recycling on it, the letters rubbed blurry by hands.

Another cleaner was wiping the stainless-steel doors of the lift, wiping slowly. Half the atrium apart, they each lifted a hand once, which counted as a greeting.

She did not sit on yesterday’s bench. Yesterday’s was by the fountain, against the rim of the pool; its slats had been bleached pale by the sun, and one of them stuck up a little. That was something she had not noticed yesterday. Today she noticed it.

She had cleaned this atrium for six years. The year she arrived, the fountain’s jets had only one tier, and the tiles round the pool were another colour; she could not remember what colour. The month they changed the tiles, her hands were white with dust every day when she finished work.

In the daytime the fountain was on. The jets rose from the middle of the pool and fell, beating ring after ring into the surface. Every twenty minutes it stopped once, and while it was stopped there was only a pool of flat water, with the tiles on the bottom showing through. That was when Aini cleaned. While the water was off, the lights in the bottom of the pool were off, and the surface reflected the strip lights in the ceiling, one strip after another, trailing in the water.

At two in the afternoon the supervisor came by once. He stood at the edge of the fountain, looked round the pool and said, “That ring round the edge. Do it again.” She said, “All right.” He looked once more at the entrance to the fountain, said nothing, and left.

In the afternoon she cleaned the tiles round the fountain. The ring round the pool was pale grey tile, and every tile had to be done. She pushed the mop from the inside outwards, one pass, then went over it again with the cloth; to do that she had to crouch and press the tile with the pads of her fingers, pressing until she could feel the water in the grout lines. She stopped only when she could see the tread of her shoes in it. Where it had dried it went pale, and the lines were still seeping, slowly, drop by drop, slower than she could wipe.

A child had taken his shoes off and was standing barefoot on the tiles at the edge of the pool. His mother, not far off, holding her bags, called out to him once. The child did not get down; he walked two steps on the wet part and walked back. Aini made no sound, and waited for him to get down from the edge himself.

At three the atrium filled up. A woman pushing a pram went past her; the wheels went over a joint in the floor tiles and the pram shuddered. The woman looked back once and turned away again. She pushed the mop into the joint and cleaned that line too. She rolled up the cuffs of her uniform a little; on her wrist was a faint pressed mark, made by the mop handle, which would fade in a while.

At four she had ten minutes’ break. She sat on the third step of the staff stairs. There were forty-two steps in all; she had counted them many times, and every time it was forty-two. A small insect was crawling along the strip light in the stairwell; she watched it crawl to the other end of the tube and crawl back. The stairwell door was iron, and once it was shut the noise outside was kept out, leaving only a faint hum from the light.

Yesterday at noon the woman had sat on that bench by the fountain and taken off her left shoe. It was a satin pointe shoe with a very thin sole, and when she took it off, the opening folded over. A blister had rubbed up on her toe, swollen, the skin shiny. Aini took a plaster out of the small drawer of the cleaning trolley and held it out. That one she had torn from the sheet in her pocket that morning and put in the drawer. The woman said thank you and stuck it on her toe, crooked, one side lifting. Aini did not correct it.

The wet-floor sign was white, the folding kind. She took it off the cleaning trolley and shook it open; the two legs locked, and the sign stood. She set it at the entrance to the fountain, facing the people coming in from the atrium. On the sign was a little figure, feet slipping, body tipping backwards; there were no words on it. She put one leg of the sign on the joint between two floor tiles, and the other came down at a slant on the face of a tile, so it stood at an angle. She stepped back two paces and looked, then went back and pressed down the leg on the joint until it did not wobble.

The tap for the staff corridor was behind the food court: a sink, a white wall, and on the wall a rota with its corners curling. She washed her hands and dried them on a clean cloth, every finger. When she had finished, she stopped for a few seconds before folding the cloth and putting it back in her pocket.

※

At half past nine, Razak came to take over.

He covered the back door and the car park, and slept in the daytime. When he came in he stood in the doorway first, looked at the atrium, looked at the food court, and only then walked in. He said they had been renovating upstairs yesterday, a drill going all afternoon, and he had not slept well. His hair was still wet; he had showered before coming. His uniform was the same as hers, grey, one cuff mended once, thread of a different colour. He took the handover book from her hand, pulled the cap off the pen, signed, and put the cap back on.

There were three lines in the handover book. Two were the supervisor’s: “Stools, thirty-one, all present.” “Fountain water level low, reported.” The line she had written herself was: “Staff corridor tissues, restock.”

He looked towards the food court and asked, “Number seventeen. Tape crooked again?”

“Crooked,” she said.

He nodded and said nothing more. He took a packet of tissues out of his pocket, went to the shelf in the staff corridor and put it up there. The packet was soft; he pressed it once before letting go. He hung his flask on the handle of the cleaning trolley.

The flask was silver stainless steel, with one worn shiny place on its side, rubbed there from years of hanging in the same spot. Inside was tea he had filled at home. He filled one flask a day, and by the next morning the tea in it was still warm.

He screwed the lid one turn tighter than anyone else would. Every day she saw him screw it like that, and every day she saw his hand rest on the lid for a moment when he had finished. Tomorrow morning she would loosen it half a turn before pouring the tea, and when she had poured it she would hang it back in its place. Neither of them mentioned it.

“Fourteen bins at the back door,” Razak said. On his key ring was a white plastic tag with the words Back Door on it, handwritten in marker. As he spoke he pointed with his finger, counting them through once. “When you count to the eleventh, stop a moment. The lid’s broken, it won’t lift, you have to step on it.”

Aini nodded. She pushed the cleaning trolley half a step towards the storeroom; its wheels went over a joint in the floor tiles and clicked. She stepped on the brake, and the trolley stopped.

“Last night at nine forty, a woman was sitting on the back-door steps, changing her shoes,” Razak said. As he spoke his eyes were on the storeroom door, not on her. “The trainer on her right foot, she tied the laces very tight, tied them twice. She spoke very slowly, every word very clear. She asked me where round here she could sit without paying.”

“I pointed out the benches in the atrium to her,” he said. “My water was one bottle, not opened. I put it by the steps and left. I didn’t say anything.”

Aini did not ask what had become of the bottle. The back-door steps were concrete, with one spot on the edge worn round, and the people who sat there would rub the soles of their shoes on that spot out of habit. She knew that spot. She took her hands off the trolley handle, tugged the cuffs of her uniform and walked towards the atrium.

At ten to ten, she finished. Her fingers had soaked white, the pads creased in ridges. Her calves were hard from standing all day, and one spot on the sole of her foot was throbbing. She had wiped the food court stools that morning; now they only needed a look. The tape on the seventeenth was still crooked; she did not rewrap it. The lights in the food court were already off, and the thirty-one stools were in the dark, only their white edges showing. She hung the mop on the storeroom wall, mop head down; water dripped from it onto the edge of the floor drain. She poured the water from the buckets into the drain and kicked the drain cover straight with her foot. She pushed the trolley in; the flask was still hanging from its handle, and it would spend the night there, hanging until tomorrow morning.

The clock-in machine was by the door of the staff corridor, its screen dark except for one small light. She pressed her finger to it; the machine beeped and her name and the time came up on the screen. Ten to ten.

At two minutes to ten she came out of the staff corridor and crossed the atrium towards the exit. The few lights near the exit had already gone off; only the row of strip lights at the information desk was still on.

The atrium air conditioning hummed overhead, air coming down from the vents onto the back of her neck. The fountain had stopped; the water in the pool was flat, flat enough to reflect the strip lights above. Most of the shops on either side of the atrium had closed, their shutters all the way down, leaving only strips of light on the floor. The wet-floor sign was still at the entrance to the fountain, white, standing on its legs. As she passed that bench she looked at the slat that stuck up, and the slat still stuck up. She touched it with the toe of her shoe, and it did not move.

A woman was walking in from the other side. What she saw first was the shoes. The person went round the wet-floor sign, giving it a wide berth, and the toes of the shoes did not touch anything wet. At the edge of the pool the person stopped for a moment, the left foot turning out half an inch and turning back. The left foot was in a satin pointe shoe, with a very faint crease across the top. The right was in a worn trainer, the heel trodden down a little, the laces tied very tight.

She knew that satin shoe. Yesterday at noon it had been taken off and put on the bench, its opening folded over.

Aini did not look up. She watched the pair of shoes go past, towards the lift lobby, the steps very light, leaving no wet prints on the floor. The glass doors of the lift lobby were shut, and the floor tiles inside were very bright, bright enough to show a person’s reflection. The person’s reflection walked two steps across the tiles. The person pushed open the glass door and went in, and the door slowly closed behind her.

※

Across from the entrance to Twin Court was the bus stop.

The bus-stop sign was iron and stood at the roadside, with a timetable stuck on it; water had got inside the plastic cover, and half the numbers had run. Above the sign was a strip light, and inside its cover a few small insects were bumping, bumping very lightly, once, then again. The last bus was at seventeen minutes past ten. She had eighteen minutes to wait. She took this bus every day, and she knew most of the people on it. When the bus reached her stop, she still had a ten-minute walk. At the junction there was a convenience store with its lights on; she passed it every day, and every day she did not go in. Beside the stop were five lamp posts; she had counted them, and one of them had had a broken light for two weeks, its cover dark inside, and no one had come to fix it. The shelter was glass, leaning at a slant against a pillar; the wind blew in at the side of the shelter and pressed the plastic bags inside it flat against the bench. She did not sit down. She stood under the sign and zipped her uniform up to the top. The iron pole of the sign was cool; she put her hand on it, one finger at a time. There had been a shower a while ago; the rain had stopped, the water from the eaves was still falling drop by drop, and the road was wet. The traffic light at the junction changed once, and the bus had still not come.

Motorbikes cut across the junction, their exhausts sounding in bursts; one passed, and another came.

Across the road was the base of the Twin Towers. Behind the glass doors of the base, a security guard sat behind a desk with a small television on it, the television not on. The towers were very tall; standing on this side, she would have had to tip her head a long way back, and the tops were still buried in cloud. She did not tip it back. She kept her head down and looked at her shoes, a pair of black rubber-soled shoes with a white mark across the toe, rubbed on by the mop.

Three other people were waiting for the bus beside the sign. A young man was looking at his phone, its light on his face. A schoolgirl carried a very large backpack, headphones round her neck, sound leaking from them in bursts, too faint to tell what was playing. An old man sat on the bench holding a plastic bag; in the bag was a cardboard box, and he put the box on his knees and never opened it.

She looked at her phone. The screen said one minute to ten.

Ten o’clock exactly.

She thought: at this hour Razak would be at the loading bay by the back door, his back to the street.

The bottle of water should still be by the steps. He would look at it, and not pick it up.

Aini put both hands in her pockets, and what she touched was still the sheet of plasters. She did not take it out to count. Her fingers slid along the edge of the sheet, square by square, and stopped at the end.

It was that very second.

In the water on the road, the lights of the Twin Towers came on from the base, floor by floor, upwards. Both towers lit together. The light was white, simply white. The first floor lit, the second floor lit, and then floor after floor, the lit part higher and higher, the dark part less and less. The towers were white stainless steel; as the lights came on, the towers lit with them, and the light ran up along the ridges of their eight points, fast and steady. The towers were shaped in petal after petal, and where the light fell on a ridge, the edge lit up into a line. The road was wet; the white of the lights fell into the water on the road and stretched out into a very long strip, all the way to just in front of her shoes.

When the lights reached the level of the skybridge, they paused.

In the water, the skybridge hung between the two towers, high above the ground, a very thin line. The skybridge was fifty-eight metres long; that number was something the supervisor had said once in the break room at handover. The supervisor had said that between the two towers there was only this one bridge. That day there had been a packet of biscuits on the break-room table, and no one had opened it.

In the water, only one lamp was lit in the middle of the skybridge, a single point, white, very small. The rest of the skybridge was dark, and so were the A-frame legs beneath it. The legs were very long, spreading down from under the bridge, and she could not see where they came to rest. Above the skybridge it was still dark.

The two pinnacle spheres lit at the same moment. The water reflected the disc in the sky, its rim pale violet, twenty-odd times the width of the full moon. The bright side took up six tenths of it. The black mouth was to the upper left of the disc, a little higher than the disc, towards the west. Round the edge of the mouth ran a fine white ring, and the stars outside the ring were twisted into curves. A few white clouds wound round the lower edge of the disc. The rim of the disc was very thin, so thin it could hardly be seen; only on the bright side did the edge show.

In the water, the disc and the black mouth came out, hanging in the sky to the north by west. She did not look up.