This story was commissioned for From the Top Deck, an anthology published in the Oxford Secondary English series in 1989. Jan lived in East Oxford for almost 20 years. She knew the streets well, and her razor-sharp gaze missed little, even from the top deck of buses …

It would have been better if we’d moved to another town, somewhere a long way off, somewhere different; a place where, if you caught the wrong bus, you’d just get lost.

Gran wanted us to move to Bedford, to be near her. Mum’s been trying to get her to move to Oxford for years, to be near us. Gran said all her friends were there, and Mum said, Well, all my friends are here, and so we stayed, and Gran still comes over on the bus from Milton Keynes. She has to have my room and I sleep on a sofa bed downstairs. We don’t have a spare room now.

East Oxford looks like a claw on the map, like a webbed foot with claws. All the buses go down the High Street, over Magdalen Bridge, but when you get to The Plain the road branches off. One claw is St Clements, which goes on to London, one is Cowley Road which goes to Cowley, surprise surprise, and the third is Iffley Road, where we used to live.

Ours was quite near The Plain, only a little way past the bus-stop opposite the school. Charles and James used to wish that we lived further up, where you could look out across the road to the running track where Roger Bannister did the first mile in under four minutes back in nineteen fifty-something. From where we lived all you could see was the boys kicking around in the playground, and where we live now you can’t see anything but the backs of the houses in the next street.

Charles and James were always after my room; I wish I’d let them have it. They had a room each, when we lived in Iffley Road, but they said they wouldn’t mind sharing if they could have mine because it was the biggest, after Mum and Dad’s, and it had a bay window over the porch, with a seat in it. It was the window-seat they wanted. If it had been their room, I’d never have stayed on the bus, that time.

It only took about ten minutes to walk to the city centre, when we lived in Iffley Road, so if we weren’t on our bikes we usually did walk there and back. We still do, although it’s further to go, now. But that Saturday it was coming up to Christmas and I was loaded with shopping, so I caught a bus home, the 43. I caught it in Queen Street, outside the Clarendon Centre. The Cowley buses stop there as well, the ones we catch now. Anyway, it was raining.

The bus was packed, everybody had more than they could carry and what seemed like six kids each, all the same size, as if they’d been born in a litter instead of one after the other. There was a fat old bat arguing with the driver about the cost of a half fare to Howard Street which was nothing to do with him really because you buy your ticket in the queue, down in the city. There was a girl with her, who was the half fare I suppose, although she looked big enough to have children of her own, blocking the gangway and chanting, ‘Boring. Boring. It’s only fifteen p anyway. Boring.’ I just shoved past her and went upstairs, which I wouldn’t normally do. I feel sick on buses anyway. I usually sit as near the door as I can, to be first off at my stop. I don’t like buses at all, actually. I hardly ever catch them.

But this time I went upstairs. I had three carrier-bags and a shoebox under my arm, but there was only one empty seat on the lower deck, between two people with Christmas trees. One was artificial, that was OK, it was all folded up in a polythene sheath and looked like a kind of festive guided missile, but the other one was real, with lethal twigs sticking out and it was a freak tree, it was a mutant. It had two spikes at the top instead of one, a kind of prong. I didn’t fancy that shoved up my nose when I sat down, so I went up. I wish I’d risked the prong.

There weren’t many people on the top deck – not when I got up there – so I grabbed the nearest seat, the little one on its own at the top of the stairs. It’s on the near side, isn’t it always, that little seat, next to the pavement. I sat on it because I didn’t want some other nutter savaging me with a Christmas tree. If I’d sat on the other side I’d have been looking out into the road. I wouldn’t have seen anything. I’d have got off at the right stop.

My room had this little bay window over the porch. I was leaning my head against the window of the bus and what I saw, as the bus came crawling up Iffley Road, from The Plain, was that the light was on in my room. The traffic was really heavy and there was a tail-back both ways. I think we must have been held up by the lights at Donnington Bridge Road, on our side, and that’s miles up the hill. I was just getting all my stuff together, but not in a hurry because I could see it would be ages before we got to the bus-stop, and when I saw that light shining out of my window, I changed my mind. I thought, I bet that’s the boys mucking about in my room, and I decided to stay on the bus till the next stop. Because I wanted to look in. I wanted to see what they were up to. I hoped they’d look out and see me looking in, because I’d often looked out myself when buses went past, and wondered about the people on them. It’s only when I do that sort of thing, and see people in a crowd but on their own, that I realize that people are people, all separate and important to themselves, like me. And anyway, I thought it would give Charles and James a shock if they looked out and saw me catching them red-handed in my room.

But mainly I just wanted to look into the room because I’d never been past our house on the bus before, because we lived so near the stop. It would have been pointless to go on to the next one. If only I’d got off where I should have.

Someone rang the bell and people got out, but I didn’t. I looked down at the pavement and saw one of the Christ mas trees, the one with the prong, lurching about in the yellow wet light. Then the bus moved on, about a metre at a time, up the hill. The next stop is by the church, it was going to take ages to reach it, so I didn’t get up, I just sat there, and I was just sitting there when the bus came level with our house. I looked into my room. There were two people in there. It wasn’t the boys, it was Mum and Dad. They were talking to each other. That’s what I thought they were doing at first. I thought, when I get in I’ll say, ‘What were you and Dad talking about in my room, just now, eh?’ and they’d wonder how I knew. But the bus didn’t move and I saw that they weren’t talking, they were having a row. Mum must have been doing the beds because she was clutching my duvet, like she was hugging something precious, and it was half out of its green cover. I make my own bed, of course, but I’d forgotten about it with all the Christmas shopping, and I suppose she’d looked in and seen, and said lazy cow, and gone in to do it herself. If I’d done it she wouldn’t have been in there when the bus went past.

Dad had his back to her but he was talking, or yelling. His fists were clenched. He was looking out of the window, but he couldn’t have been seeing anything or he’d have noticed the bus and all the people on it. It was only afterwards I realized that if anybody else on the bus had been looking out of the window, they’d have seen him too, and what happened. I though t of that Agatha Christie book where a woman on a train looks out of the window and sees a woman being murdered in a train that’s on the other track, only nobody else sees.

The bus didn’t move and all the time I could imagine the traffic-lights red at Donnington Bridge Road. Mum wasn’t saying anything but she suddenly threw the duvet down and turned round. Dad turned too, at the same minute. They were facing each other. I saw Mum say something, just one word, and her head jerked when she said it. I saw Dad shout. I saw Mum go towards him with her arm up, and then the bus did move. Someone rang the bell which I’d been meaning to do, to get off at the church. Everyone likes to be first to ring the bell. It’s childish, but everyone likes to.

But by then I’d forgotten about the bell, only I’d sort of programmed myself to get off. I wasn’t really thinking of anything except getting in and finding out that I hadn’t really seen what I thought I’d seen, but I got all my stuff together and went downstairs. I was thinking, really. I was already thinking that if I’d got off at the right stop it wouldn’t have happened, like it was a kind of punishment for cheating the bus company. I wasn’t feeling guilty about cheating the bus company, not out of a couple of pence, but it’s not true about people’s minds going blank. There’s always something going on in there, even if it’s really daft, like this was.

I got off the bus and ran back down the hill with all the carrier bags bumping against my legs and the sharp corner of things making dents in me. When I took my jeans off that night I couldn’t think where all the bruises had come from, at first. ·

The light was still on in my bedroom but I couldn’t see anything from down on the front path and I couldn’t hear anything because of the traffic. I’ve got my own door key but I didn’t bother looking for it, I just ran up the steps and banged on the glass panel. It: was really old, that panel, all different colours, of lilies and leaves. I used to love looking at them when the sun shone in.

Someone came running down the hall and opened the door. It was Charles. He said, ‘What’s the emergency? Someone jump on you?’ He was grinning. I thought, nothing’s happened after all. I said, ‘Where’s Mum?’

He stopped grinning. He sa id, ‘What’s wrong?  Did someone jump on you?’

I said, ‘Oh yerse. There was a rapist hiding in the holly bush.’ It was about a metre high, our holly bush. Even the cat couldn’t hide in it. ‘I just wondered where Mum was,’ I said.

‘Doing the beds I think,’ said Charles. I slammed the door, so it could be heard upstairs, and we went into the kitchen. I said, ‘Where’s Dad?’ You’d think I’d have gone up to look for myself, wouldn’t you, but I didn’t. I was still waiting for everything to be all right after all. Then I heard feet on the stairs and Mum called, ‘Is that Chrissie back at last?’ She came into the kitchen. There was a red mark across one side of her face, a really hard mark, it had an edge to it. Charles said, ‘Coo, you had an argument with a door, Mum?’ and she laughed, dead natural, and said, ‘No, I was stripping Chrissie’s bed and she’d left the Dictionary of Quotations under the duvet. When I started to pull the cover off it flipped up and hit me.’

‘What, the cover off the dictionary?’ said Charles.

‘No, you nitwit. The cover off the duvet.’ She patted the red mark. ‘I shall have a black eye.’

I had left the Dictionary of Quotations on the bed. It was such a daft excuse; she must have been working it out as she came downstairs. I knew that I was supposed to say that I was terribly sorry because it was my fault for not putting the dictionary away and making my own bed, but I didn’t. I looked at Mum and I looked at Charles and I said, ‘Dad hit her.’

I didn’t see it happen, but I knew. Dad never hit any of us, even, but I knew and now Charles knew, too. Dad came in and then James did. It was time to get tea ready but we all stood looking at each other and wondering how to pretend nothing had happened. I wondered how often Mum and Dad had to pretend nothing was happening. I wondered what Mum would have said if I’d let her, if I hadn’t stayed on the bus, if I hadn’t looked through the window. We managed to go on pretending over Christmas but by the New Year it wasn’t any good. Dad wasn’t home on New Year’s Eve. He went to live in Banbury soon afterwards and that’s when we sold the house.

I’d almost forgotten how it happened – well, forgotten to remember how it happened – until the other day. We live in Leopold Street, now, off the Cowley Road, and it’s on a different bus route, further away, but you still catch the bus in Queen Street and go down the High over Magdalen Bridge.

I wasn’t paying attention, I was in a hurry because we were going out and I was late. I came out of the Clarendon Centre and saw the Iffley Road bus and I ran for it. The man with the ticket machine was standing by the door. I said, ‘Fifteen, please,’ and he gave me a ticket. You’re supposed to state the destination but I didn’t. If I had, he’d have told me I was getting on the wrong bus, but I never realized until we got to The Plain and the bus didn’t go up Cowley Road. When I saw where we were going I couldn’t move. I’d managed not to go up Iffley Road since we left, but I didn’t get off. I looked out of the window.

The front garden was full of bicycles. There were students living in the house. You can always tell by the bicycles. When we were finding a new house Mum wouldn’t even look at the ones that had bicycles outside. The lilies had gone from the front door and there was a piece of hardboard tacked over where the glass had been. The light was on in our front room, what had been our front room, and someone had painted the walls green. There were posters up and dead spider plants on the windowsill. I was glad I was downstairs and couldn’t see into my bedroom. The bus went by quite quickly so I didn’t have to look long. I stayed on the bus and rode all the way up to the Magdalen Arms, and then I walked home down Magdalen Road. I hadn’t cheated the bus company this time because I’d paid enough for the ticket, even though I hadn’t meant to. I wasn’t crying but it gave me time to stop wanting to.

But I should have got off at the proper stop. If I had, I might not have remembered what happened last time, I might have forgotten everything in the end. I might have.

It would have been better if we’d moved to another town, somewhere a long way off, somewhere different; a place where, if you caught the wrong bus, you’d just get lost.

Gran wanted us to move to Bedford, to be near her. Mum’s been trying to get her to move to Oxford for years, to be near us. Gran said all her friends were there, and Mum said, Well, all my friends are here, and so we stayed, and Gran still comes over on the bus from Milton Keynes. She has to have my room and I sleep on a sofa bed downstairs. We don’t have a spare room now.

East Oxford looks like a claw on the map, like a webbed foot with claws. All the buses go down the High Street, over Magdalen Bridge, but when you get to The Plain the road branches off. One claw is St Clements, which goes on to London, one is Cowley Road which goes to Cowley, surprise surprise, and the third is Iffley Road, where we used to live.

Ours was quite near The Plain, only a little way past the bus-stop opposite the school. Charles and James used to wish that we lived further up, where you could look out across the road to the running track where Roger Bannister did the first mile in under four minutes back in nineteen fifty-something. From where we lived all you could see was the boys kicking around in the playground, and where we live now you can’t see anything but the backs of the houses in the next street.

Charles and James were always after my room; I wish I’d let them have it. They had a room each, when we lived in Iffley Road, but they said they wouldn’t mind sharing if they could have mine because it was the biggest, after Mum and Dad’s, and it had a bay window over the porch, with a seat in it. It was the window-seat they wanted. If it had been their room, I’d never have stayed on the bus, that time.

It only took about ten minutes to walk to the city centre, when we lived in Iffley Road, so if we weren’t on our bikes we usually did walk there and back. We still do, although it’s further to go, now. But that Saturday it was coming up to Christmas and I was loaded with shopping, so I caught a bus home, the 43. I caught it in Queen Street, outside the Clarendon Centre. The Cowley buses stop there as well, the ones we catch now. Anyway, it was raining.

The bus was packed, everybody had more than they could carry and what seemed like six kids each, all the same size, as if they’d been born in a litter instead of one after the other. There was a fat old bat arguing with the driver about the cost of a half fare to Howard Street which was nothing to do with him really because you buy your ticket in the queue, down in the city. There was a girl with her, who was the half fare I suppose, although she looked big enough to have children of her own, blocking the gangway and chanting, ‘Boring. Boring. It’s only fifteen p anyway. Boring.’ I just shoved past her and went upstairs, which I wouldn’t normally do. I feel sick on buses anyway. I usually sit as near the door as I can, to be first off at my stop. I don’t like buses at all, actually. I hardly ever catch them.

But this time I went upstairs. I had three carrier-bags and a shoebox under my arm, but there was only one empty seat on the lower deck, between two people with Christmas trees. One was artificial, that was OK, it was all folded up in a polythene sheath and looked like a kind of festive guided missile, but the other one was real, with lethal twigs sticking out and it was a freak tree, it was a mutant. It had two spikes at the top instead of one, a kind of prong. I didn’t fancy that shoved up my nose when I sat down, so I went up. I wish I’d risked the prong.

There weren’t many people on the top deck – not when I got up there – so I grabbed the nearest seat, the little one on its own at the top of the stairs. It’s on the near side, isn’t it always, that little seat, next to the pavement. I sat on it because I didn’t want some other nutter savaging me with a Christmas tree. If I’d sat on the other side I’d have been looking out into the road. I wouldn’t have seen anything. I’d have got off at the right stop.

My room had this little bay window over the porch. I was leaning my head against the window of the bus and what I saw, as the bus came crawling up Iffley Road, from The Plain, was that the light was on in my room. The traffic was really heavy and there was a tail-back both ways. I think we must have been held up by the lights at Donnington Bridge Road, on our side, and that’s miles up the hill. I was just getting all my stuff together, but not in a hurry because I could see it would be ages before we got to the bus-stop, and when I saw that light shining out of my window, I changed my mind. I thought, I bet that’s the boys mucking about in my room, and I decided to stay on the bus till the next stop. Because I wanted to look in. I wanted to see what they were up to. I hoped they’d look out and see me looking in, because I’d often looked out myself when buses went past, and wondered about the people on them. It’s only when I do that sort of thing, and see people in a crowd but on their own, that I realize that people are people, all separate and important to themselves, like me. And anyway, I thought it would give Charles and James a shock if they looked out and saw me catching them red-handed in my room.

But mainly I just wanted to look into the room because I’d never been past our house on the bus before, because we lived so near the stop. It would have been pointless to go on to the next one. If only I’d got off where I should have.

Someone rang the bell and people got out, but I didn’t. I looked down at the pavement and saw one of the Christ mas trees, the one with the prong, lurching about in the yellow wet light. Then the bus moved on, about a metre at a time, up the hill. The next stop is by the church, it was going to take ages to reach it, so I didn’t get up, I just sat there, and I was just sitting there when the bus came level with our house. I looked into my room. There were two people in there. It wasn’t the boys, it was Mum and Dad. They were talking to each other. That’s what I thought they were doing at first. I thought, when I get in I’ll say, ‘What were you and Dad talking about in my room, just now, eh?’ and they’d wonder how I knew. But the bus didn’t move and I saw that they weren’t talking, they were having a row. Mum must have been doing the beds because she was clutching my duvet, like she was hugging something precious, and it was half out of its green cover. I make my own bed, of course, but I’d forgotten about it with all the Christmas shopping, and I suppose she’d looked in and seen, and said lazy cow, and gone in to do it herself. If I’d done it she wouldn’t have been in there when the bus went past.

Dad had his back to her but he was talking, or yelling. His fists were clenched. He was looking out of the window, but he couldn’t have been seeing anything or he’d have noticed the bus and all the people on it. It was only afterwards I realized that if anybody else on the bus had been looking out of the window, they’d have seen him too, and what happened. I though t of that Agatha Christie book where a woman on a train looks out of the window and sees a woman being murdered in a train that’s on the other track, only nobody else sees.

The bus didn’t move and all the time I could imagine the traffic-lights red at Donnington Bridge Road. Mum wasn’t saying anything but she suddenly threw the duvet down and turned round. Dad turned too, at the same minute. They were facing each other. I saw Mum say something, just one word, and her head jer ked when she said it. I saw Dad shout. I saw Mum go towards him with her arm up, and then the bus did move. Someone rang the bell which I’d been meaning to do, to get off at the church. Everyone likes to be first to ring the bell. It’s childish, but everyone likes to.

But by then I’d forgotten about the bell, only I’d sort of programmed myself to get off. I wasn’t really thinking of anything except getting in and finding out that I hadn’t really seen what I thought I’d seen, but I got all my stuff together and went downstairs. I was thinking, really. I was already thinking that if I’d got off at the right stop it wouldn’t have happened, like it was a kind of punishment for cheating the bus company. I wasn’t feeling guilty about cheating the bus company, not out of a couple of pence, but it’s not true about people’s minds going blank. There’s always something going on in there, even if it’s really daft, like this was.

I got off the bus and ran back down the hill with all the carrier bags bumping against my legs and the sharp corner of things making dents in me. When I took my jeans off that night I couldn’t think where all the bruises had come from, at first. ·

The light was still on in my bedroom but I couldn’t see anything from down on the front path and I couldn’t hear anything because of the traffic. I’ve got my own door key but I didn’t bother looking for it, I just ran up the steps and banged on the glass panel. It: was really old, that panel, all different colours, of lilies and leaves. I used to love looking at them when the sun shone in.

Someone came running down the hall and opened the door. It was Charles. He said, ‘What’s the emergency? Someone jump on you?’ He was grinning. I thought, nothing’s happened after all. I said, ‘Where’s Mum?’

He stopped grinning. He sa id, ‘What’s wrong?  Did someone jump on you?’

I said, ‘Oh yerse. There was a rapist hiding in the holly bush.’ It was about a metre high, our holly bush. Even the cat couldn’t hide in it. ‘I just wondered where Mum was,’ I said.

‘Doing the beds I think,’ said Charles. I slammed the door, so i t could be heard upstairs, and we went into the kitchen. I said, ‘Where’s Dad?’ You’d think I’d have gone up to look for myself, wouldn’t you, but I didn’t. I was still waiting for everything to be all right after all. Then I heard feet on the stairs and Mum called, ‘Is that Chrissie back at last?’ She came into the kitchen. There was a red mark across one side of her face, a really hard mark, it had an edge to it. Charles said, ‘Coo, you had an argument with a door, Mum?’ and she laughed, dead natural, and said, ‘No, I was stripping Chrissie’s bed and she’d left the Dictionary of Quotations under the duvet. When I started to pull the cover off it flipped up and hit me.’

‘What, the cover off the dictionary?’ said Charles.

‘No, you nitwit. The cove r off the duvet.’ She patted the red mark. ‘I shall have a black eye.’

I had left the Dictionary of Quotations on the bed. It was such a daft excuse I’d ba n: believed i t, only I knew it wasn’t true, and I knew she must have been working it out as she came downstairs. I knew that I was supposed to say that I was terribly sorry because it was my fault for not putting the dictionary away and making my own bed, but I didn’t. I looked at Mum and I looked at Charles and I said, ‘Dad hit her.’

I didn’t see it happen, but I knew. Dad never hit any of us, even, but I knew and now Charles knew, too. Dad came in and then James did. It was time to get tea ready but we all stood looking at each other and wondering how to pretend nothing had happened. I wondered how often Mum and Dad had to pretend nothing was happening. I wondered what Mum would have said if I’d let her, if I hadn’t stayed on the bus, if I hadn’t looked through the window. We managed to go on pretending over Christmas but by the New Year it wasn’t any good. Dad wasn’t home on New Year’s Eve. He went to live in Banbury soon afterwards and that’s when we sold the house.

I’d almost forgotten how it happened – well, forgotten to remember how it happened – until the other day. We live in Leopold Street, now, off the Cowley Road, and it’s on a different bus route, further away, but you still catch the bus in Queen Street and go down the High over Magdalen Bridge.

I wasn’t paying attention, I was in a hurry because we were going out and I was late. I came out of the Clarendon Centre and saw the Iffley Road bus and I ran for it. The man with the ticket machine was standing by the door. I said, ‘Fifteen, please,’ and he gave me a ticket. You’re supposed to state the destination but I didn’t. If I had, he’d have told me I was getting on the wrong bus, but I never realized until we got to The Plain and the bus didn’t go up Cowley Road. When I saw where we were going I couldn’t move. I’d managed not to go up Iffley Road since we left, but I didn’t get off. I looked out of the window.

The front garden was full of bicycles. There were students living in the house. You can always tell by the bicycles. When we were finding a new house Mum wouldn’t even look at the ones that had bicycles outside. The lilies had gone from the front door and there was a piece of hardboard tacked over where the glass had been. The light was on in our front room, what had been our front room, and someone had painted the walls green. There were posters up and dead spider plants on the windowsill. I was glad I was downstairs and couldn’t see into my bedroom. The bus went by quite quickly so I didn’t have to look long. I stayed on the bus and rode all the way up to the Magdalen Arms, and then I walked home down Magdalen Road. I hadn’t cheated the bus company this time because I’d paid enough for the ticket, even though I hadn’t meant to. I wasn’t crying but it gave me time to stop wanting to.

But I should have got off at the proper stop. If I had, I might not have remembered what happened last time, I might have forgotten everything in the end. I might have.

(c) Estate of Jan Mark. Not to be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission of the Estate, c/- David Higham Associates.