Six Thirty, and the Street Is Already Working

I walk the dog at six thirty because he is eleven and no longer negotiates about it. What that has given me, entirely by accident, is a daily view of a version of my street that most of the people who live on it have never seen.

There is the sweeper, who works the west side first and has done for as long as I have lived here. There is the milk delivery, two men and a crate rack, who have a route so efficient that they have never once been on the same stretch of road as me twice in a week. There is the man who opens the shutter on the photocopy shop at twenty to seven for reasons I cannot work out, because nothing is photocopied in this neighbourhood before nine.

And there is the tea stall, which is the only one of them that is a destination rather than a route.

This is my first edition. The dog is called Bruno and he is the reason for all of it. Without him I would see this street for the first time at about eight forty, by which point it is a completely different and much less interesting place.

For about two years the cat at number fourteen sat on the gatepost and Bruno lost his mind about it, every morning, with total consistency, for the full length of the wall.

Then in roughly February it stopped. Not gradually. It stopped in about a week. Now he walks past and does not look up, and she stays on the post and does not look down, and both of them are extremely obviously aware of the other one.

I have no theory. Nothing happened that I saw. There was no confrontation, no incident, no change in either household. One week it was a war and the next week it was a treaty and neither party has ever indicated what the terms are.

The only thing I will say is that he is eleven now, and eleven is the age at which a dog starts deciding which of his principles he can actually afford.

The stall opens at six and by six forty there are usually five or six of us standing around it, and we are the only people on that road who are not on our way to something.

It is a mixed group. Two men who have retired, a woman who has just finished a night shift and is going the other way through her day entirely, a school teacher, me, and Bruno, who has a following.

Nobody has ever suggested meeting. There is no arrangement. The stall opens and the same people are near it, which is a much more durable structure than a plan.

There is a gap between a parked car and the corner and it is, by my estimate, adequate. The driver does not believe this and has never believed it, and every morning he attempts it in four movements where two would do.

A man from number twenty-two comes out to guide him. He has done this for three years. He is not employed to do it and I do not think the driver has ever asked. He simply started, at some point, and now it is part of the manoeuvre.

The children do not watch. To them this is just what a bus is and how long a bus takes. In about eleven years one of them will be reversing something somewhere and will do it in four movements without knowing why.

Bruno barks at it. Every day, three years, the same bus. This is the one item on the entire walk he has refused to become accustomed to and I have stopped apologising for him.