Terms of Help

Imani met me outside the depot gates carrying a tripod and a bag that appeared to contain bricks.

“I can carry that,” I said.

“It's mostly a flask.”

“An ambitious flask.”

She handed it over. Something square pressed against my hip.

“And books,” she admitted.

“Do the books need to be here?”

“No. They came to college and haven't found their way home.”

Her father came to get us wearing his uniform with the top button undone. He had her eyes and a much louder laugh.

“Bea?” he said.

“Yes. Hello.”

“Gideon. Don't call me Mr Holt. Makes me look round for somebody in trouble.”

Imani rolled her eyes, but she was smiling.

He signed us in and led us along the marked pedestrian route. The buses stood in rows, engines clicking as they cooled. The air smelled of warm rubber and cleaning fluid. Somewhere inside a workshop, a radio was playing under the noise of a pressure washer.

“She's told you this is art?” he asked me.

“She has.”

“Because last time she made me stand beside my own bus looking as if I'd forgotten where I parked it.”

“You looked fine,” Imani said.

“I looked unemployed.”

“You looked tired.”

“I was tired. I'd finished work.”

“That was the point.”

He gave me a look of patient suffering. I liked him immediately, which made me worry I was doing it too obviously.

The bus was out of service in a space away from the vehicles still moving. Gideon had cleared the photograph with his supervisor. He unlocked the doors, then stood back while Imani climbed aboard with the equipment.

Inside, the seats held the day's heat. A child's sticker had attached itself to the window above the rear wheel. It showed a smiling dinosaur missing one eye.

I put the bag where Imani pointed and waited.

She walked the length of the aisle without her camera, looking first towards the front and then back towards the depot lights. Gideon checked beneath a seat for something a passenger had reported missing.

“What is it?” I asked.

“A blue glove.”

“In June?”

“People lose things in their own time.”

He found a pencil, a receipt and an unopened sweet. No glove.

Imani set the tripod halfway down the bus.

“Dad, could you sit where you normally sit after a shift?”

“At home.”

“On the bus.”

“I don't normally sit on it after a shift.”

She lowered the camera.

“Right. What do you normally do?”

“Check for left property. Write up anything that needs doing. Swear about crumbs.”

“Could you do that?”

“I was trying to.”

She stepped aside, and he went back to work. I held a small reflector near the aisle because the overhead light put a shadow across his face whenever he bent down. After a few seconds Imani asked me to lower it.

“It's too much,” she said. “He looks like he's discovered treasure under the seat.”

“I found a sweet,” Gideon said.

“Don't eat that.”

“I wasn't going to.”

He put it in a bag for rubbish, then glanced up at her with a grin. She took the picture.

There was no announcement that she had got it. She made several more frames, checked one, adjusted her position, and waited while he wrote a note about a sticking window latch. I liked seeing her concentrate. At college she often looked as though she was holding back a comment. Here she did not seem to care whether anyone needed one.

When she asked me to sit near the front so she could judge the balance of the frame, I did. Gideon passed me with the rubbish bag.

“She'll tell you to move three inches in a minute,” he said.

“Two,” Imani said.

I moved two inches.

We were packing when his phone rang. He read the message, smiled and typed an answer with one finger.

“My sister wants to know whether you've learned pastry yet,” he told Imani.

“She can stop asking.”

“Shall I put that exactly?”

“No.”

He looked delighted.

Outside the gates, he offered us a lift. Imani said we were going to get food and walk back through town.

He looked at her, then at me, then carefully at neither of us.

“Text when you're heading home.”

“I will.”

“Both of you. To your own parents. I'm not taking on extra administration.”

He drove away before I could decide whether to laugh.

We bought chips from the place opposite the bowling alley and sat on a low brick wall beside the bicycle racks. A group of younger children came past in football kits, talking over each other about a disputed goal. One of them carried a boot with the sole hanging off.

Imani tore the paper open between us.

“Salt?”

“Yes.”

“Too late. It's already on.”

“Then why ask?”

“To make you feel involved.”

I laughed, then found I could not quite stop. It was not especially funny. That seemed to be part of the relief.

She watched me without making it a problem.

When I could speak, I said, “I did manage nearly an hour.”

“Of what?”

“Not talking about Friday.”

“You're allowed to talk about it.”

“I know.”

“I just don't want to be the person you come to only when something terrible has happened.”

I picked a chip from the folded corner of the paper.

“You aren't.”

“I don't know that yet.”

There was no sharpness in it. She was telling me where we actually were.

“I like your photographs,” I said.

“That isn't the same thing.”

“I know. I like you when you aren't making them too.”

She looked down, and for once I could see her being uncertain.

“Even when I'm telling you you're wrong?”

“Not only then.”

“Good. That's a terrible basis for anything.”

A bus pulled up across the road. We watched three people get off, one carrying a bunch of flowers upside down.

“I wanted to tell you before,” I said. “Before all this. At the screening night in April. But you were talking to that girl from graphics, and I decided she was your girlfriend.”

“Priya?”

“I don't know.”

“Short hair? Orange coat?”

“Yes.”

“My cousin.”

“Oh.”

“She does have a girlfriend. Not me.”

I covered my face with one hand. Imani nudged my knee with hers.

“Very thorough investigation, Bea.”

“I'd like that not to become a running joke.”

“I can't promise.”

The embarrassment was almost pleasant. It belonged to a world in which the worst thing I had done that evening was misunderstand a family relationship.

We ate the rest of the chips. I told her about Mr Patel wanting the stitched-sole section left in my portfolio. She told me about a photograph she had ruined by opening the back of a film camera because she thought it was empty. Neither story had a hidden clue.

When we stood, she took the heavy bag back and gave me the tripod.

“Fair distribution,” she said.

We walked towards the park, where the path stayed lit until the main road. The swings were empty. Somebody had tied a birthday balloon to a bench and left it there, half deflated, turning slowly in the evening air.

At the gate, Imani stopped.

“I'm not very good at guessing,” she said.

“Neither am I, apparently.”

“So. Can I kiss you?”

“Yes.”

I said it too quickly, which made her smile just before she stepped closer.

The kiss was brief and a little awkward because I was still holding the tripod. I managed not to hit her with it. Her hand rested against the side of my neck, warm from carrying the bag, and when she moved back I wanted her to do it again so badly that I said so.

She did.

A bicycle bell rang behind us. We moved out of the path, laughing apologies at a woman who seemed more interested in getting home than in our historic moment.

“I should text Mum,” I said.

“Probably not about that exact part.”

“No.”

I wrote that I was on my way. Mum replied with a thumbs-up and a question about whether we needed bread, which was so ordinary that I nearly cried.

Imani waited while I put the phone away.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes. Just—”

I could not finish.

She took my free hand. We walked as far as the corner before our routes separated. Nothing had become simple. I still had messages I had not read and a statement about Rowan waiting on my account. But her thumb moved once across my knuckle, and for those few minutes I did not have to make that mean anything beyond itself.