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“You should have seen how old and terrified she looked swinging back and forth in that hammock,” my mother had said.

            But that was a different conversation. I was thinking about it as I nursed a gin and tonic in The Railway. If I was in private I would have downed the whole thing in one and at once been onto another but I had to manage my enthusiasm, being in a public house, and the hour not yet five. Yes, we had forced granny into the new garden hammock, just like she used to force me to play the recorder for her sister, and we had taken pleasure in her discomfort.

            “We’ve always been very fond of the middle East. We’ve been to Jordan, Lebanon, Syria…”

            “Actually, we made rather a mess of Syria,” his wife interrupted.

            There were two couples at the one six-seat table in the pub, right by the old upright, facing each other. I had only just started listening to their conversation, the little bit of gin in the chilled glass having at last caught up with the tonic and so allowing me to take in my surroundings with a keener, calmer ear. The bunch at the six-seat table were talking about travel. Those who had just finished speaking wore, in the lady’s case, a peach-coloured blouse, and in the man’s case a chequered short-sleeved shirt. His grey hair was shaven almost to the scalp, hers was long, dirty blonde, and wet-looking though the weather was dry.  

I noticed that the other wife, who was wearing one of those baggy, feminine shirts, mostly white but patterned in a few faint blue lines, put her handbag on the keyboard lid of the old piano. I found this irritating, an infraction really, something wrong which wanted correcting.    

            “But…you know, so dodgy. I’m not going to Africa anymore. You know, nothing works. I mean, it’s fascinating, a place like that, it can’t not be fascinating, but…no, we’re more inclined towards South America these days”.

            “Yes, we’ve done Peru, Venezuela, Columbia, Chile.”

            It was at that moment that a bus came noisily round the corner. It stopped to pick up the passengers waiting at the station stop, and was then off again with a chorded wail of its engine. The bus went right past the pub and we saw very clearly into the driver’s seat. The driver was an enormously fat man, an apron of belly-fat ballooned outwards in an unfortunate ring making a huge bulge in his purple polo shirt. The women, by the way, were drinking white wine with ice in it; the men were drinking ale. 

            I expected the couples talking about travel not to notice the fat bus driver.

            “Goodness!” the woman who had put her handbag on the piano began, “I’m amazed he’s able to fit in the…” she searched for a noun. “…booth”. I’m not sure it was the correct noun.

            I was also amazed at this. But, I thought, however it had come about, he was able to fit in the booth. He had managed it. He was in, that was the salient take-away. Perhaps getting out would be a struggle. But, as far as we were in a position to judge, he was in and he was driving the bus. He was a fat man doing his job, driving the bus. 

I imagined making some snide, sniggering comment to my mother and my mother having no way of joining in the derision. I imagined two athletic black men laughing at this fat man. I imagined a large husband and a much smaller woman glimpsing and laughing at this fat bus driver in an Eastern European language, in an icy Slavic laughter. I imagined sitting down at the couples’ six-seat table and asking the woman who had made the comment what possible benefit, what conceivable use was a nasty comment like that. 

            But what conceivable use was a natter about someone’s brother in Montreal, or a question like “Have you ever been to Montenegro?”.

            They would talk about me, too, once I left. So, I resolved not to leave. I’d remain in that pub and grow groggy, examining their unexamined lives.