Everything hinged on my exams. That’s why I took the 83 bus. That’s how I met him.

From school the 83 took an ugly route. Dull views. Dull houses. Typical of Sheffield: squalid terraces and post-war pleb. But this long route gave me time. I could think. I could plan.

I took the only spare seat, wedged tight at the back of the bus between a wide woman with five Aldi shopping bags, and a scruffy little twelve year old hunched right in the corner. He was a mess. Hair matted in a sticky donkey’s tail over his ear. Clothes stinking like a drain.

His hands, black with biro, wrung the neck of a Lucozade bottle. He glanced at me as I sat. His eyes flicked instantly away. Then he shrugged up the oversized sleeves of his blazer, the Ibiza blue of The Maundy School, before twisting his tie around to hide its terminally chewed tip. He recognised my uniform, of course, as the top boys’, St Marks.

“I’m going home.” It was the voice of an uneducated mouse.
He stared ahead, bending an exercise book around his bottle.
I was forced to reply: “Me too.”
The soft parks and avenues vanished as the bus entered a street of boarded windows and sooty walls.
“This is for Billy.”
He held out the bottle. I smiled.
“My brother. He’s not well.”
“I’m sure he’ll like it,” I said. I didn’t want to talk. I was thinking about that revision plan to stream me for Oxford.
“He’s been ill,” the kid said, talking to his bottle. “Like Mum and Dad.”
“Really?” Choosing this bus had been a mistake.
“We manage, alright. I’ve a great Hornby layout. Dad made it. D’you want to see?”
I could get off at the next stop, and walk the extra mile home. But, as I rose, he joined me. I’d chosen his stop.