A missed bus leaves a young woman trapped in a stranger’s grievance — and in one of the week’s best examples of tension built from politeness, heat, and social pressure.

The heat struck Ester the moment she slammed the door on ‘Supreme PC and Photocopying’.  Supreme’s had air-conditioning- one of the occasional advantages of working there- so Ester hadn’t paid much attention to the customers’ complaints. But already, turning onto the long, quiet street leading to her bus stop, she felt sticky. This only added to her agitation, which had blossomed ever since her argument with the man at PC Number 5.

“Bastard,” Ester kept repeating to herself. “It was his fault. He wouldn’t shut up.”

One side of this street was lined with small, neat semi-detached bungalows. Ester walked on the opposite side, beside railings which enclosed a large field. A banner advertising a fair which had left the week before was stretched across the railings, and it seemed to Ester the smiling faces pictured were already beginning to fade.

“I told him thirty minutes, didn’t I?” Ester thought angrily. “Not my fault he’s an idiot.”

Ester stopped walking and pulled on the back of her pumps, airing her blisters as her manager, Janette, had advised when Ester requested a plaster. She took her phone from her back pocket and checked the time. Four-thirty-eight. Ester studied the black digits for a few moments. Then, sighing, she stared down the road which stretched endlessly into a smoggy blue horizon. The Twenty-Five would have been and gone. Sunday service meant it would be an hour’s wait until the next one, and this meant she would be late getting ready to meet her boyfriend Ryan, and then late meeting Ryan, and after that…Her entire evening had been thrown off course, and all because of that man.

After sending a short message to Ryan, Ester continued along the street. Slower now, imagining how she would solemnly, apologetically describe the incident to him over burgers at Belly Busters. Her jaw ached at the thought of food.

“Anything like that happens again and I’m quitting.” She told herself. “The place would fall apart without me. I’d get something at that café on the pier.”

This new future soon appeared before her with gorgeous clarity. Basking on the beach on her break. A smart white shirt and a black tie with gold trim. Free candyfloss and chips and donuts from the other stalls on the pier. She had been given nothing by Supreme’s, not even free printing. Everything she had from them she had needed to take for herself. But on the Pier…

As she fell into fantasy, the sun’s glare grew weaker, and her feet stopped screaming. A black tie with gold trim. Sunbathing. Candyfloss and chips and donuts and people could bring their dogs in there too.

Ester hadn’t progressed much further down the street when she noticed movement at the corner of her eye. Something hovering, like a fly. She stopped and looked over at the fly-thing. There was an elderly woman perched on the low front wall of one of the bungalows, waving a tool childishly in Ester’s direction. Squinting, Ester saw she held a pair of garden shears.

With slight embarrassment, Ester looked over her shoulder. The field was empty except for groups of crows traversing the grass and pecking at discarded polystyrene tubs. She turned back. Ester didn’t recognise the woman, but she supposed she could be a Supreme’s customer. Somebody who quietly typed out e-mails, or listened to music on Youtube, and left without much of a fuss. Still, Ester didn’t feel much like talking. As quickly as it had faded, the pain returned to her feet, and she felt the sting of the sun on her neck. Ester half-raised her hand, then continued, limping slightly.

She had not gone more than a few steps when she heard the voice.  

“Hey! Miss!”

Ester hesitated, then turned and shrugged at the woman in an exasperated manner. The woman had dropped from the wall and was waving more frantically. A shock passed through Ester’s body. In a second, she saw ransacked rooms and bruised, broken bodies. An emergency. Ester hurried across the road, exaggerating her limp to temper the woman’s expectations.

“Thank God,” the woman said when Ester was stood before her.

She was small and squat, with wild curly grey hair and dark darting eyes which reminded Ester of a squirrel. With her free hand, the woman lightly touched a small golden pendant hanging around her neck.

                  “Thank God,” the woman repeated. “I knew you’d be able to help me.”

Ester’s stomach tightened. But she fought the excuses forming on her lips and smiled professionally.

“What’s the matter?”

The woman’s face darkened. With her shears, she gestured to the adjoining bungalow, and said, “it’s the lady next door.”

Sharply, Ester looked over. It bore no obvious scars of an intrusion; it appeared solid and dull and quiet, like the rest of the street. The two front windows winked at her in the sun.

Absentmindedly, the woman batted at a fly which had landed on her forearm. “Stuck up cow. She said my garden’s rubbish. She makes me feel like rubbish.”

“What?” Ester said, certain she had misheard. “What’s wrong with your neighbour?”

“I know. Got to be something wrong with her. Saying my garden’s rubbish after all the time he spent on it.”

Ester frowned. “That’s it? She said your garden’s rubbish?”

A soft, sad look spread over the woman’s features, and she nodded. For a fleeting moment, Ester saw her nan in this elderly stranger. “I can try and cheer up the old dear,” Ester thought. “Not like I’ve got anything better to do.”

Ester peered over the woman’s wall and looked approvingly into her garden. A small square of scorched grass with a stone frog furred with green moss at the centre. Four fragile-looking sunflowers growing in a pot set beside the demarcating fence, a few pink clouds of peonies, a lavender bush. She noticed the curtains of the bungalow were drawn, and there was a letter sticking out of the letterbox like a tongue.

“Very nice,” Ester said.

Then, with a more critical expression, she assessed the neighbour’s arrangement. A square of slightly greener lawn, this time populated by a chipped family of gnomes. Pink peonies. Lavender. A few big daisies, their heads bobbing like people laughing, despite the stillness of the day.

Ester turned back to the woman, who stood thoughtfully rubbing her pendant.

“How could she say that?” she remarked. “They’re basically the same?”  

The woman’s hand dropped.

“The same?” Her voice made Ester think of shattering glass. “Just the same?”

Ester wiped the sweat from her forehead with a damp palm, then corrected herself.

“I mean yours looks way better. More colourful.”

Beaming, the woman exclaimed, “Exactly! That’s what I’m trying to say. So, you just need to tell her that for me. Wait, let me show you first. Come here…” With the shears, she gestured for Ester to follow her through the front gate.

“I’m sorry, I can’t,” Ester replied quickly. She wiped the sweat from her forehead with her forearm. “Got to get the bus. I’m meeting my boyfriend.”

She turned and looked towards the bus shelter. She imagined the relief of sitting on the bench and removing her pumps.

“Which number?”

“Twenty-five,” Ester replied without thinking.

The woman checked her watch, then nodded impatiently.

“That’s fine. You’ve got ages. It won’t be down here until quarter to. You’ll see it come by, then you can run for it.”

Ester’s heart quickened. She began to speak but stopped. The woman reached out and took her hand.

Ester stepped back and the woman’s grip tightened. Her palms were soft and cool, and Ester felt fingernails digging into her skin.

“If I had lied,’ Ester thought, ‘if I had said the Number Fifteen, or even the Five- I’d nearly be at the bench.”

It was like her mum often remarked: she always had to make things difficult for herself.

For a few seconds the women stayed entwined, neither giving ground.

“What are Supreme’s charging for colour printing now?” the woman asked.

Ester stared at her, stunned by this divulgence of personal information. The woman no longer bore any resemblance to her nan. Her face was a stranger’s, hard and cold.    

“Fifty pence.”

The woman nodded, then stared at Ester’s chest.

“Hi-speed internet. Hi-quality printing. Come and say Hi at Supreme’s.” The woman smiled. “I like that. Friendly, isn’t it? ‘Come and say hi at Supreme’s.”

Realising she still wore her work polo neck Ester felt a surge of relief. After everything that had happened with the man at PC Number 5, she hadn’t bothered to change. The woman’s features softened again. This time when she tugged Ester’s arm, Ester relented.

“Close that behind you,” the woman instructed Ester as the passed through the gate.

Dandelions had sprung between cracks in the short footpath, and the woman kicked and cursed at them as they walked along.

“Now, just you get a good look around,” the woman said, leading Ester onto the lawn. “See if you aren’t impressed.”

As Ester stared at the flowers and soil and bushes, she imagined what Ryan would say when she described this later. She saw him wiping ketchup from his mouth with the back of his hand, speaking through a mouthful of meat and bread, “Don’t get it. Why didn’t you just take off?”

The woman was speaking again.

“You won’t believe this, but me and your manager, Janette, were in the same year at primary school. St Christopher’s, do you know that, off Copson Street? Been close ever since. I was there when her and Nav first opened the shop.”

Ester turned around, amazed. The woman looked at least a decade older than Janette. Ester watched the woman place the shears thoughtfully beneath her chin. They were rusty, appeared almost unusable.

“Been a lot of problems there recently, hasn’t there?”

Ester flushed, growing even hotter, even stickier.

“What problems?” she asked quickly.

But the woman lowered her eyes, and turned away, either not hearing or ignoring the question. She walked over to the flower bed beneath the front wall and sank stiffly to her knees.

Ester batted a fly from her arm. I’m free, she thought, staring at the woman’s back. She looked at the closed metal gate, and beyond it to the street which would take her home. But she didn’t move. Like ‘Dean’s Donkey Ride’ donkeys who occasionally got loose from Dean on the beach, she didn’t take advantage of her freedom. She stood there, baking in the sun, immobilised by the new, unwelcome presence of Janette.

“Barberry,” the woman shouted. She pointed with the shears to the spiky, red-spotted bush huddled behind the low front wall. “Keeps intruders away.”

Ester wondered if Janette had also been forced to admire the garden. She struggled to picture her manager doing anything outside of Supreme’s. She lingered there like a ghost. Unspeaking, but an unsettlingly powerful presence. Perched on her stool, flicking her thin bleached blonde hair whenever a new customer entered. Chewing a biro, making the occasional nonsense squiggle in her ring-bound notebook.

“Foxgloves. Pretty things, but don’t eat them. Lavender. Get down here and smell it. Come on, you’re still young. You should be able to bend down easy enough.”

It was only in the past month that Ester had noticed Janette watching her. Even when Janette was in the back office, Ester knew she was being watched. And when Janette asked a rare question, Ester was certain it was designed to trip her up.

“Come on,” the woman repeated. Ester felt herself moving towards the woman and suddenly she was kneeling on the hard prickly grass.

Earlier, she had only glanced at the lavender. But now, only a metre or so away, she saw it was covered in bees. Little crooked legs crawling, wings buzzing, stings bouncing. The woman’s face was dangerously close. Ester scratched her arms, itchy all over. Down there, she could smell the sweetness and muskiness, but there was something else too. The tang of sweat, compost ripening in the sun. Ester felt dizzy, light-headed.

“And she says this is rubbish…They’re enjoying it, aren’t they!” the woman was saying. She crawled deeper into the bed, not minding the lavender or the bees. “My husband used to do all this. Used to take such good care…” The woman trailed off, and Ester wasn’t sure if she had stopped speaking, or if it was just that she could no longer hear. 

But the voice returned. This time, raised in a scream so shrill Ester felt it like a bolt of electricity through her body. The woman withdrew from the bed and rose to her feet, cursing the “filthy gits”. She brandished an opened bottle of Budweiser.

“Every time the fair’s on, they chuck their trash in here.” She upturned the bottle and a small amount of liquid dribbled out. “Look at the flowers, they’re all bent.”

The woman threw the bottle into the street with a power that surprised Ester. She heard it rattling against the concrete and closed her eyes. Her head throbbed.

“Well, I reckon it’s time for you to go next door and speak to the queen,” the woman said. “She went in with one of her boyfriend’s not long ago.”

Ester squeezed her eyes tighter. She hoped the world around her would simply melt away, that she would wake up in the cool, clean seating area of Belly Busters.

The buzzing seemed to grow louder, then she felt metal against her skin. When she opened her eyes, the woman was beside her, resting the shears against Ester’s forearm.

“A lot of problems at Supreme’s, isn’t there? I told Janette- you’ll find out soon enough what’s going on. These things always come out, one way or another. Probably one of the customers, you know what it’s like around there…”

The woman’s gaze was fixed somewhere around Ester’s nose. Her mouth continued to move, but Ester only heard the words distantly, like they came from underwater.

Ester thought of Janette looking over her shoulder as she made change. Janette returning unexpectedly to Supreme’s for a forgotten umbrella or bag on nights Ester locked up. 

A plane flew low overhead. The woman nudged a fly on Ester’s arm with the shears. A tall woman pushed a pram past the gate, shouting as she went, ‘you okay, Maud?’

‘Fine, fine,’ the elderly woman replied, without turning around.

“Every day, he was out here, even though his back was ruined,” Maud continued. “And for her to say that to me…Like it’s nothing…Like I’m nothing! It would mean so much to both of us, and it’s such a little thing?”

She’s talking nonsense, Ester assured herself. She doesn’t know anything about anything. She probably doesn’t even know Janette. Imagine yourself in the white shirt, the black tie with the gold trim. Smile, but be firm. Ester rose first onto her knees, then onto her feet. The sting of her blisters came as a kind of relief.

“I’m sorry, it’s not right me getting in the middle of anything,” Ester asserted, “But you can tell her I said it’s the best garden I’ve been in.”

The woman frowned, uncomprehending. She looked up at Ester they way a displeased child might regard a parent.

“But she’ll listen to you.” The woman’s voice was low as she spoke. “Just like Janette listens to me. I told Janette, give that girl the benefit of the doubt. You should always give people the benefit of the doubt. No need to involve anybody else at this stage.”

Ester stumbled backwards. She felt as if the yellowed grass and dry mud had fallen away beneath her feet. She looked at the gate and thought of the series of events which could be sparked by her fleeing. Then she turned to the neighbouring bungalow and considered the little family of gnomes neatly arranged just so on the lawn and the kind of person who had placed them there. She raised the bottom half of her polo shirt and scrubbed the sweat from her face.

Guessing at the mental calculations Ester was making, Maud smiled. It was a perfect bright, sunny Sunday, full of buzzing bees and fabulous coincidences. And as sure as the sun was bearing down on them, it was time for certain people to be confronted by truths. For a moment, she watched the girl struggle to walk in her pumps, her face all screwed up. Then with a soft deferent expression, Maud offered her arm.

Together, the elderly woman and the young girl retraced their steps along the broken footpath out onto the silent street where far in the distance, the girl’s bus stop stood.

coercion realism social tension suburbia suspense women