A short story. Made up, like the others.

The 43 ran for the last time on a Friday, which Declan thought was a poor day for it. Nobody rides a bus on the last night of a route to be sad. They ride it because they were already going somewhere.

By the Quay stop he had four passengers. Two students, loud and kind about it. A man with a cello case who had said, getting on, “Is it still the 43?” and then nothing else. And Maeve, who sat in the second seat on the left, where she had sat on the 7.40 home every weekday for eleven years.

At Fenner Road he slowed. The bell had been broken since March, so what Maeve did, every evening, was lean forward and say “Fenner Road, please, Declan,” in the voice of someone ordering a coffee she had ordered before. He looked up in the mirror.

She hadn’t leaned forward. She was looking out of the window.

“Is this our stop?” said one of the students.

“No,” said Declan. “Fenner Road’s not for you.”

He pulled in anyway and opened the doors, and the cold came in, and nobody got off. After a bit he closed them again.

“You live there,” he said, to the mirror.

“I do,” said Maeve.

“You can get off.”

“I know where I live.” She was folding a glove into a smaller glove. “I thought I’d see where it ends. Eleven years and I’ve never been past my stop. I looked it up. It turns round at a car park behind a garden centre.”

“It does.”

“Is it nice?”

“It’s a car park.”

The man with the cello said, from the back, “I’d like to see it too, actually,” and one of the students said they would also like to see it, and that was how it was decided.

It was a car park. The lights were on a timer and had gone off already, so he stopped the bus in the middle of it and left the headlamps on, and they sat there looking at a wall of stacked compost bags and a trolley someone had left standing with great dignity. Declan turned the engine off for the first time in a long time and it was very quiet.

“Right,” said Maeve, to no one, and nodded, as if something had been confirmed.

He drove them all back the way they had come, and at Fenner Road he opened the doors again and she stood up.

“Same time Monday,” she said, and then heard it. “Well.”

“Well,” said Declan.

She leaned forward. “Thank you, Declan.”