The number 11 was perfectly on time. Faye noticed a new advertisement on the side of the bus as she boarded. It was the image of a rising star with the slogan, ‘The Name on Everyone’s Lips’. Faye felt silly as she found a seat, realising that she, a dignified sixty-three year old woman, had looked at it a bit too long. She hoped that no one noticed, and she chose a space beside a window, settled herself and opened the paper. As Faye turned the pages, that face suddenly met her gaze again. She thought there was something about his hair, or maybe his chin, that looked a bit like a photo she had seen of her Dad. The film star one. The one where he was young and he looked so strong, so dashing, like he could have the world at his feet. Maybe that was what Mum first saw in him. This time, the young actor was beside an opinion piece. A writer was commenting on his age (36, which made him seem old to the columnist), and the loveliness of his eyes. Faye tutted, concluding that the journalistic quality of this newspaper was going downhill. She resolved that tomorrow she would take a different paper. Then she stared and stared at the young man’s lovely eyes. When she caught herself on, Faye wondered what was the matter with her. Why would an intelligent woman of her age be distracted by a man like that? She would never look twice at a thirty-six year old in the street; was this the result of clever marketing? The suggestions plastered to the side of the bus being reinforced by the cynical editorial approach? This idea comforted Faye. It seemed to feed in to the burning debates of her youth, when she and her friend Edwina obsessed about the sexual revolution and what it meant to be a woman in what was still, in the 1970’s, a stilted world. A middle class stuffiness had frustrated them in their tender years, like when the minister had come to visit and they had to sit at peace and seem interested in the parish flower festival. Mum never cared about any of those things, but heaven forbid that the minister should actually know that. Edwina had moved from Northern Ireland to London in the hopes of a better life, but Faye genuinely didn’t know whether that’s what she’d found.

    Faye’s mother had always said that she was a free woman no matter where she lived; and living in London wasn’t a sure fire way of having it any better. Faye got to thinking about their trip to Edwina’s fortieth birthday bash years ago. It was in a small back room in the Punch Tavern on Fleet Street. A far cry from the flooded fields of County Down. For the first time, Faye felt drowned out by the endless noise of London. Lost in a Saturday-night-in-the-West-End crowd. At one point a group of young men arrived in the pub and tried to crash the party. Edwina told them it was a private function. They went to the bar, followed by Faye’s Mum, who was in her seventies by then and determined to buy herself a drink. The bar man handed Mum a glass of wine provided by one of the young men. He was apparently a little bit famous; he had been in a couple of films and was now in a play in the West End. Faye’s Mum loudly assured everyone that she had never heard of him, and said,

“I grew out of boys like that more than five decades ago.”

Edwina fell about laughing and said it had been the best thing about turning forty. Faye had often wondered if what her mum had said was really true.

    As the bus pulled up to the next stop, the usual schoolgirls got on, making the excited, chittering sorts of conversations that schoolgirls seemed to have made for Faye’s whole life. She thought of her own chittering on the bus, particularly about a student teacher called Mr Fox-Garrett, who had a very distinct Anglo-Irish accent. He wasn’t lost in the mists if the Northern Irish identity crisis, he nailed his colours to the mast, one crisp consonant after the other. A lot of girls in Faye’s class built elaborate fantasies around the idea of being the future Mrs Fox-Garrett, and how he would not stay a teacher forever. Someday, he would be a screen icon, or a High Court Judge, or maybe just Prime Minister. Complete with a flat in Downing Street. Something less boring than teaching in Belfast, anyway. Faye had to admit to herself that she had been besotted then, just as she was five minutes ago reading the paper. Come to think of it, there had never really been a time when she hadn’t been besotted with someone. There was always a boy who seemed so charming, but lived far away. Before social media, or computers at all, there had been a lovely pen pal she never met. There were times when there were no young men just about in the middle distance, so Faye switched her allegiance to film stars. Especially the one who played James Bond. Edwina had put Faye up several times as she went to see any public appearance of his she could get to. Faye had thought nothing of it at the time. Wasn’t it normal for young women to be like that? The thing that annoyed her was: why had it persisted into her sixties?

     Edwina thought it was great. Great altogether to be cutting out pictures of boys from the Sunday Times supplements and sticking them on the fridge. She had actually done that for Faye’s last visit, and put the face of her latest crush, quintessentially English and a fraction of her age, on the door of her fridge. The love of her life, she said. When he got his knighthood, she’d be lady, which was remarkable since for the first half of her life, she could barely make it as an admin clerk. Edwina had always said that this was because her face didn’t fit, she couldn’t play the corporate game, like the square peg in a round hole of the office. Faye laughed at the fridge picture through a tight throat. Edwina said;

 “I’d rather have a pin up than be pinned down.”

     The next Sunday, they had gone to Covent Garden and heard a woman in her late forties singing ‘O Mio Babino Caro”. She had opened her throat to fill the busy space and connect with anyone who passed by. Faye had been spellbound and Edwina had pulled at her sleeve to get Faye to follow her into a nearby church. She wanted to go there because she had heard they kept cats. Edwina loved cats, but her landlady didn’t allow pets. Faye thought about the colonies of them wandering to her house from the farmyard up the lane. She stopped to draw breath at the door of the church. It seemed as if the droves of Sunday afternoon people, just a few feet from the door, were miles away. The church felt wooden, warm and square, with a high ceiling and candles at either side of the altar. It was saturated in silence. No questions and no answers. Faye felt free to wander through it; she took the centre aisle right up to the top, dropping 50p into the candle box to light one. She didn’t really know what it was for, but it felt like the right thing to do. Faye sat in a pew and Edwina came to tell her that she was going to look around for cats. A few minutes later, Edwina returned with a smirk on her face, saying she hadn’t found a cat, but she had found the grave of Noel Coward and started singing ‘Mad About the Boy’ and nudging Faye. Faye should never have mentioned her latest obsession. For fear of irreverence, they had to move on, out into the closed in crowds and over the cobbles, keeping in step with the city until they reached Leicester Square.

     The bus thumped to a stop. More schoolgirls got on and Faye couldn’t help looking twice at one of them, who was not wearing a standard school skirt, but a pair of jersey trousers stretched over a well-formed baby bump. Faye had no desire to judge the child, but she couldn’t help being a bit startled that there was no attempt to be discreet about the situation. One of the rules of the school Faye and Edwina had gone to was that girls were not allowed to be seen eating in the street in uniform, because it was deemed to be unladylike and therefore detrimental to the reputation of the school. A baby bump would have been catastrophic. Faye recalled her constant struggle to maintain her deportment in spite of her lack of control of her limbs and the fact that she stood head and shoulders above all the other girls. She had been teased for being man sized. 

     Being man sized turned out to be useful since Faye had grown up without her Dad. He died when she was eight. No one ever explained why, he just seemed to get sick and fade away. Faye’s Mum was quite petite and Faye was the one to reach things from the top of cupboards or cut the hedge or change light bulbs. It had made her indispensable, but she was also left determined that she would show people that despite her size, she was every inch a lady. This led to years and years of holding her anger in; anger with Mum for always needing her, even when Faye was dreaming of something else. In Faye’s childhood days it would have been considered unseemly for a girl to have words with her mother. Even after Mum died, Faye still used all her energies to hold in her rage. It was stuck where it was, leaving Faye always looking for something she couldn’t describe. Some sort of solution to the problem of being Faye. Now Mum was in her grave and Faye was dutifully getting the bus once a week to bring her flowers. She was more like her widow than her daughter.

     “Truth be told, you are the real love of my life.”

     Edwina had once announced this in the burrito bar up two escalators in Victoria Station. She didn’t usually come to see Faye off on the train, so Faye deduced that something was working on Edwina since she heard the news that Mum had died.

     “That’s last night’s wine talking.” Faye had been stumped for a good reply to this.

     “No, really. We have been friends for a lifetime. You should sell up and move in with me.”

     “Me? Live in a flat in Whitechapel? I’m used to so much space.” Faye couldn’t imagine fitting her belongings into Edwina’s flat.

     “It would be a big change, but you’d be happy. You must be lonely now your mum is gone, and I am too.”

     Faye hadn’t answered. She hadn’t thought of Edwina being lonely, or of the fact that Mum was not going to be there when she got home. Or that she might be able to make a new start in a capitol city, especially at her age.

     Edwina made one last attempt,

     “You’re never too old to begin again.”

     Faye just smiled, gathered her bags and left for the Gatwick Express.

     The number 11 was moving round the corner now, reaching the edges of Belfast, and all the people heading into town for work. Faye felt like she wasn’t really moving with it, something was holding her still. It was the photo, was it his hair or his chin? It was a woman’s voice singing Noel Coward inside her head. It was the mud-puddles in the waterlogged fields. It was pregnant schoolgirls, and actors buying Mum a drink. It was Edwina alone in Victoria Station, and the image of a man on the side of the bus. Try as she may, Faye couldn’t seem to remember his name, or to think where she was. People were packing the seats, all with somewhere to go. It was unbearably stuffy. Faye opened the top button of her ivory blouse and took a deep breath, relieved to know that air could still move freely through her chest. She paused to savour the moment, but the bus just kept rolling on towards the graveyard.