Chimney of Broken Keys

The last bus out of the city center on a Tuesday night in August is a special kind of torture, and I was on it, thirty-five years old and sweaty, with a guitar case digging into my shoulder and about eleven quid in my pocket after a day of busking to people who mostly pretended I was furniture. The heat wave had turned the whole city into a wet sock, and the bus had that sticky vinyl smell like old chips and cleaning fluid that never quite kills anything. I got on at Piccadilly Gardens, nodded at the driver who didn't nod back, and looked down the aisle for a seat.

There was exactly one, and it was occupied on the window side by a woman with a big hatbox on her lap and a look on her face like she'd already decided I was a problem. She was thirty-something maybe, thirty-three, thirty-four, dark hair pinned up with what looked like a knitting needle, and she had that particular glare people get when they've been sitting on a hot bus for a while and have decided the world owes them an apology. I dropped into the seat beside her anyway, because the alternative was standing for forty minutes with a guitar and no knees worth mentioning.

"Evening," I said, mostly out of habit.

She did not say evening back. She looked at me, then at the guitar case wedged between my knees and her hip, and she made this small sound through her nose like I'd personally insulted her grandmother. The hatbox sat on her lap like a little round passenger of its own, and I remember thinking, this woman takes hats seriously, because nobody carries a box that carefully for something they don't care about.

The bus pulled out and lurched through the industrial edge of town, past the shuttered units and the lockups with their roller doors down, and the streetlights came through the window in stripes every few seconds. She was muttering something, low, and I caught enough of it.

"Unreliable musicians," she said, to the window more than to me. "Every single time. Unreliable, self-important musicians."

Now I'll be honest, that stung a bit, because I'm a musician and I'd like to think I'm only two of those things. I turned to look at her properly, and that's when it clicked, the face, the shop, the whole thing. Sheena. The hat shop off the Northern Quarter, the little one with the feathers in the window, where about five years back I'd been set up with a drink by a mutual friend, and I'd sat in the corner of the pub and watched her walk in and then, God help me, told her to her face that I wasn't me. I was young and stupid, well, younger and stupid. I'd felt rotten about it for about a fortnight and then buried it under about five years of other bad decisions.

"You're the hat woman," I said, before my brain could get a vote.

Her head turned slow, like a gun turret. "Excuse me?"

"Sheena, right? The milliner. Off Oldham Road, the shop with the..." I gestured at the hatbox. "That's you."

"And you," she said, and her voice went flat and cold in a way I'd only heard from traffic wardens and my mother, "are the guitar man who sat in the corner of that pub for two hours ordering one coke and refusing to admit he was waiting for someone until I walked out."

"That's not," I started.

"Dave said you'd be there at eight. I was there at eight. You were there at ten past eight, sitting there with your little case, and when I asked if you were Dillon you said no."

In my defense, and there is very little defense available here, I had panicked. I'd seen her come in, seen her scanning the room, and I'd bottled it and said no to her face, and then she'd sat at the bar for twenty minutes waiting for a man who was sitting twelve feet away dying quietly into a coca cola. It is not my finest hour. It might actually be my worst hour, and I once got locked in a cellar in Dobson.

"Okay," I said. "Yeah. That was me. That was a rubbish thing and I'm sorry, and the coke thing was pathetic."

"Pathetic," she agreed. "You know what's funny? I gave musicians another year after that. One more year of men who cancel, men who vanish, men who are on tour in someone else's bed. All downhill from the bloke who pretended not to be himself."

"I did feel bad about it."

"Oh well then," she said, flapping a hand. "As long as you felt bad. That fixes everything, that does."

I shut up, because there was nothing to say that wouldn't make it worse, and the bus rattled on through the heat, and I looked at the stripes of light going past and thought about how the city is mostly ugly at night and how that's part of why I love it. She went back to her hatbox, adjusting it, checking it, fussing. Then the bus hit one of those potholes that Greater Manchester Council has been meaning to get around to since roughly the invention of the wheel, and everything jumped, and she made a noise, a sharp little oh, and started patting her pockets.

She patted her coat pocket. Then her other coat pocket. Then the bag at her feet, rummaging in it properly, tipping things half out, a purse, a bus pass, a tape measure, a small pair of scissors that I sincerely hope she's licensed for.

"Where are they," she said. "Where are they, where are they."

"Lost something?"

She turned on me with real venom, and the bus lights made it worse somehow. "My keys. My ring of keys. I had them at the stop, I had them when I bought the ticket, I know I had them."

"Maybe check the box?"

"It's a hat, not a key drawer." She stood up into the aisle, wobbling as the bus took a corner, and looked at the floor around her seat, under the seat, and then she straightened up and looked at me, and she looked at me like I was the last bus to regret, which is a thing I'd know about.

"You," she said.

"Me what?"

"You were wedged in next to me. You've got fingers, I've seen them, all over that thing." She pointed at the guitar case. "People like you, buskers, always skint, always needing ten quid. A key ring with a brass hat on the fob, the kind of thing you could sell in ten seconds outside a tube station."

"A brass hat on the fob," I repeated slowly, because it was such a specific accusation that it almost sounded like a compliment to her imagination.

"Don't repeat it at me, pat your pockets."

I patted my pockets, all of them, jeans, jacket, the little zip one inside the jacket where I keep picks and nothing has ever been in there but picks. Nothing. I turned out my jacket liner for good measure and a receipt fell on the floor and that was everything.

"Nothing," I said. "See? Nothing. I've got eleven quid and a receipt for a pasty, and if I was going to pick your pocket I'd have gone for the purse, not a key ring I couldn't even fence without walking past your shop to do it."

"Very funny."

"It's not funny, it's a bad business model."

The driver called something out about this being the last stop for the hospital, and Sheena dropped back into her seat, and the keys were not anywhere, and I could see her doing the arithmetic in her head, the shop, the locks, the landlord she'd mentioned to nobody in particular on boarding, the whole tower of it, and her face had gone from angry to something worse, which was scared.

"They're on this bus," she said quietly. "They have to be."

"Then we get off with them or we ride back and search," I said, before thinking, because apparently my mouth had taken over the night shift from my brain. "I'll help you look. Call it the start of the apology."

* * *

The driver put us off at the hospital stop, which is a bleak place to end a journey even when you're not being put off it with a woman who hates you, and the last two passengers shuffled off ahead of us into the lit sliding doors while the driver killed the engine and gave us both a look through the mirror, the kind of look that says whatever happens next is your business and not mine.

"He's going to shut the doors," Sheena said.

"Then he's going to shut the doors. Mate," I called up, "give us ten minutes? My friend's lost her keys, they've got to be on here somewhere."

The driver sighed the sigh of a man who has heard every story in the city and believes none of them, but he left the lights on, which was something. Sheena went down the aisle on her knees like it was the most natural thing in the world, a grown woman in a good coat crawling the floor of a night bus checking under every