I was ironing school blouses badly, which is how I know it was a Monday, because Monday's the only day I bother with the collars. Our iron's an old Morphy Richards that belonged to my mum, no steam settings that work anymore, and I keep meaning to bin it and don't. Anyway. One eye on the ironing board, one eye out the kitchen window, because Effie needed to be at the end of the lane for the 47 by twenty to eight, and she is fourteen and cannot be trusted to leave on time.
The 47 doesn't really stop on our lane. It stops at the crossroads, but there's a layby about two hundred yards before that, just past the old silage clamp, where it slows down sometimes if someone's waiting. Not on the timetable, never has been. Driver's discretion, my neighbour says, though I've never once seen anyone actually standing there.
That Monday I scorched the collar, wasn't paying attention, and when I looked up the bus had already gone past our crossroads and was easing to a stop at the layby instead, which it doesn't usually do that early. Somebody got on. I couldn't see much from that distance. A shape. A coat maybe. Effie got on two minutes later at the crossroads like normal, and I didn't think about it again until Wednesday.
Wednesday, actually it might have been Thursday, the bins were out so it must've been bin day, I always mix those two up. I was ironing again, same blouses, worse job of it, and this time I watched the whole thing properly, because something made me. Bus slows at the layby. Doors open. Nobody visible waiting there, not from my window, but someone gets on anyway, unhurried, like they'd been standing just out of the hedge line the whole time.
Then it pulls away and stops again at the crossroads for Effie, and she gets on, and through the window of the bus I could see two people sitting where usually there's nobody, right up the back. One of them had her scarf. The blue one with the moon phases on it, she wears it every day, I bought it off a stall in town two winters back, remember thinking at the time it was overpriced for what it was.
She still had her own scarf on. I want to be clear about that. She was wearing it, and there was another one just like it, up the back of the bus, on somebody who wasn't her.
I didn't say anything to her that night. I told myself I'd imagined the second scarf. By teatime I nearly believed it.
Friday I burned the collar right through, a big brown iron-shaped mark, had to put the whole blouse in the bin. I was watching the window instead of the board again. Bus came. Slowed at the layby same as before, only this time it didn't fully stop, just eased down to walking pace, and whoever gets on there didn't wait for the doors. Just stepped up through them while they were still opening.
Effie wasn't at the crossroads.
I know she left the house, because her school bag's not on the peg. I checked the peg about eleven times that morning. It's still not there now, hanging in the empty space where it should be, with the little enamel badge she pinned on it last term, a fox, catching the hall light every time the front door opens and shuts.
"Coastal Bus Stop" by Stumbling Photographer is licensed under CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/.