The Girl at the Bus-Stop (2 page)

Chapter 6 – Bubblewrapper’s Delight
35

Chapter 7 – Waterloo Sun Seat
38

Chapter 9 – Suspicious Minds
.
51

Chapter 10 – Master and Servant
58

Chapter 11 – Too Sci-Fi
73

Chapter 12 – Eatin’ Trifles
.
80

Chapter 13 – Making Plans With Nigel
88

Chapter 14 – The Game of the Name
.
97

Chapter 15 – Brasserie in Pocket
104

Chapter 16 – Leave in Silence
.
112

Chapter 17 – Holidays in the Sun
.
121

Chapter 18 – Are Friends Eclectic?
.
130

Chapter 19 – Senses Working Overtime
.
140

Chapter 20 – 2000 Smiles
.
150

Chapter 21 – A Glass of Champagne
.
157

Chapter 22 – Seasons in the Sun
.
164

 
  
Reuben Rudge hated Dave Banstead more than life itself. Earlier that day he’d allowed the bullying sales manager to humiliate him in front of the entire office at the crumbling headquarters of Einstein & Unger, Motor Factors. Rudge would have rejoiced in telling the horrible bloated git exactly where he could shove his job, but in the thick of a recession he’d had to take it like a mouse.

On this occasion Banstead had blamed Rudge for an ordering mix-up which had resulted in a consignment of too few alternators and too many starter motors arriving from the Chinese manufacturer. Rudge had felt his neck glow almost white-hot as
Banstead’s
verbal horse-whipping cut ugly welts into his self-esteem. He had tried wracking his brain to try and remember details about the order, just so he could at least try and fight back with some facts. He had no recollection of it whatsoever, and had sat in silence until his manager finally exhausted his limited vocabulary of expletives.

The rest of the staff didn’t think much of Banstead’s management style either. He possessed all the people skills of a dog chained up in a breaker’s yard, and his brow-beaten workforce had discovered no redeeming qualities in the man whatsoever.

‘I wouldn’t take any notice of him, Mr Rudge,’ Mrs Garner the cleaning lady had said sympathetically. ‘He leaves the toilet in a terrible state, and I have to open all the windows.’

‘I’d hate to be his poor wife,’ said Sharon from accounts. ‘Just imagine waking up next to that big fat belly every morning? It would be like sleeping up against an overfilled cold hot water bottle.’

‘What about if he was on top of you doing the business?’ suggested Lauren, the new girl. ‘He’d need at least nine inches before he even got near the target, so anything less and he’d break your ribs trying to get it up.’

‘But somehow you just know he hasn’t,’ a smirking Sharon had replied. ‘I bet he’s stacked like a button mushroom.’

The women had cackled at the remarks, and Rudge had smiled politely before delving into the company’s archaic computer system to try and clear his name. He had hoped to prove to Banstead that the flaky software was to blame for the cock-up on the order, but having wasted over an hour on his quest he’d discovered that it was his fault after all. He’d simply entered the wrong quantities against each part number, and had neglected to double-check the docket.

Rudge had moodily knuckled down to his afternoon’s toil in silence, ignoring the cheerful Friday afternoon banter of his colleagues. He had no longer felt part of their world, and the easy efficiency in which they set about their tasks was at odds with his stupidity and carelessness. He had been making a lot of schoolboy errors lately, and he couldn’t understand why. Ordering car parts was not exactly a difficult job, and despite his lowly position in the workplace he could at least pretend to be interested.

As soon as five o’clock came around he’d been the first out of the door as usual. He’d rushed from the building without a word, and walked at an almost Olympic pace through the 1970s industrial estate to reach his bus-stop.

After enduring a forty minute journey squashed up on a seat next to an obese woman smelling of piss, Rudge walked home that evening with his head down. His spirits couldn’t sink much lower if they’d been made out of lead. He just wanted to go to bed, pull the covers over his head and wait for death. He consoled himself that at least it was the end of the working week and the incident would be forgotten about by Monday.
 
He knew by now that life was full of varying degrees of positivity and negativity, cancelling each other out to reach a plateau of mind-numbing indifference.

By the time he reached the top of his road he’d already pushed Banstead to the back of his mind. This was unusual because since Banstead had joined the company three years before, Rudge had endured one dreadful working day after another.
 
People are often subjected to one nemesis at a time in life, but Rudge seemed to be stuck with two. It occurred to him that Dave Banstead and Mrs Rudge were in cahoots, operating a 24/7 rota system on a mission to make his life as unbearable as possible.
 
Rudge perked up a little when he remembered that there was an added bonus to the weekend. Mrs Rudge would be away at her sister’s until Monday.
 

He glanced at the sign for his road, Pine Avenue, and wondered why street names were always so unimaginative. As he walked along, quite jauntily now, he went through some alternative names in his head. He decided that street names used in pop songs would be a much better alternative, and in
 
just a few yards he’d come up with,
Baker Street
,
Blackberry Way
,
Penny Lane
,
Warwick Avenue
and
Heart Attack and Vine.
He abandoned the idea when he couldn’t think of enough titles to cover just the roads on his dreary housing estate, and frowned in disappointment.

He stopped to watch the sun-tanned smiling thirty-something builder bloke rinsing the shampoo off his BMW coupé, parked on his symmetrically patterned block-paved drive. Rudge knew that the man had plenty of reasons to look happy as he’d often seen his attractive wife leaving for work in the morning. Now there was someone he could aspire to, the man seemed in total control of his life. He even wore designer logo clothes for work, albeit covered in cement dust and paint.

As the last of the suds were dispersed from the wet silver paintwork with a jet-wash hose, Rudge felt a pang of jealousy. He often wished he still had a car of his own, but five years’ previously he’d written-off his elderly Citroen after a collision with a deer. Foolishly Rudge had accepted a derisory pay out from his insurers, and the subsequent loss of No Claims Bonus meant that he couldn’t afford insure even the most modest of replacement cars.

He’d tried seeking additional compensation from the Highways Agency. He’d argued that the animal had run across the road in front of him a good fifty yards or so before the warning sign for deer. It hadn’t washed, and neither had the suggestion that they move the sign back fifty yards to prevent further tragic loss of people’s No Claims Bonuses, and to the local deer population as well of course.

It was Rudge’s wife who’d suggested that he should invest the insurance payout in a season ticket for the local bus service. The savings on car insurance, road tax, servicing and fuel would easily pay for a decent summer holiday in her favourite destination of Lanzarote. After constant badgering he had reluctantly given in to her demands, but having owned a car since he was seventeen it had been a bitter pill to swallow.

He couldn’t dispute the fact that urban roads were now so gridlocked that streets often resembled skinny car parks, and at least buses could use the Bus Lanes. That’s if they weren’t blocked by shop fitters’ vans, or twenty four seven retail delivery trucks bringing urgent unnecessary crap from the Far East to replenish the shelves.

Despite the inconvenience of walking to and from bus-stops in all weathers, wasting hours of his life waiting around, sharing his personal space with nutters, yobs, smelly people and the totally baffling he had quickly adapted to the harsh reality of his new routine. Despite the abject misery of the whole Public Transport experience, he knew it was the sensible option.

The builder bloke stopped washing his car for a few moments to watch Rudge watching him. Rudge turned away and moved off at a quick pace for two house widths, before slowing down again. He looked ahead and saw one of his neighbours, Mr Potter, acknowledge him with a half-hearted wave.

His name probably wasn’t Potter, but ever since Rudge had lived there all he ever saw him do was potter about in the front garden. He seemed to fill his days touching up the masonry paint on the rendered bungalow, re-pointing the brickwork of the garden wall, clipping his privet hedge or painting his wrought iron gates with multiple coats of black Hammerite. He seemed to occupy his time with anything that would keep him from having to go inside his home. He couldn’t have been more than sixty, but he looked like a cadaver in a cardigan.

Today he was in the process of renewing the fence panels on the border between his and the neighbour’s drive. It didn’t seem that long ago that Rudge had witnessed him putting the old ones up.

‘Just changing the fence panels,’ Potter explained unnecessarily, ‘we’ve had shiplap time and time again over the years, so we’re getting a bit fed up of it. We thought we’d go for close boarded this time. It’ll make a nice change.’

Rudge nodded curtly and smiled politely before continuing towards home.

‘What sort of brain-dead imbecile gets fed up with the style of their fence panels?’ Rudge asked a horrible-looking flat-faced fluffy cat sitting on a garden wall, ‘Did he and Mrs Potter spend hours browsing through
Which Fence Panel
magazine before making a conscious decision to waste hundreds of pounds for the sake of it?’

The cat jumped down on to the pavement and sprayed a short stream of piss against a rhododendron bush before strutting off with its tail in the air. A few minutes later Rudge reached his unremarkable and unloved semi-detached house, stepping on to the empty and uneven tarmac drive and up to the tatty front door.

As he put the key in the Yale lock he looked across at his own fence panels, realising as if for the first time what a terrible state they were in. Some sections were dry and splintered, whilst others had gaping holes where the knots had dropped out. The whole ensemble hadn’t seen a coat of creosote or wood preservative in the fifteen years they’d lived in the property. The wooden fence posts were rotten at the bases and looked decidedly wobbly, like a child’s baby teeth ready to come out with the gentlest of tugs.