Free The Good Mayor by Andrew Nicoll Page B

counted out coins from her coat pocket with the other. Enough to get to Castle Street. Sometimes ten minutes is a long time.

    Agathe leaned back on the bench and looked down the road, a little fearfully, towards The Three Crowns. No sign of anybody coming and, when they were eventually thrown out, the last tram would have gone. Nobody coming out. She stood up and walked to the door of the shelter, holding on to a cast-iron pillar as she looked the other way up the street, across the bridge and towards my cathedral on its hill. The late evening sun was blazing from its domes and pinnacles and the cathedral was swirling a cloud of pigeons around its head like a matador’s cloak. Agathe felt suddenly envious of those pigeons. Maybe they had no freshly painted bathroom but pigeons weren’t too fussy about that sort of thing in her experience, and they had a place to sleep where they were welcome, where they would be warmly greeted, a place of tremulous, dancing, burbling physical contact, a place to raise their young, a place where, if they failed to arrive one evening after an accident with a hawk or a dustcart in the street, they might be missed if only for that night. She sighed. “What have I got? A kitten who pees up the curtains!” She felt lonely and ridiculous. She should be sneaking out of the house to meet a wealthy lover who would take her dancing and feed her steak and murmur hot-gasped nonsense in her ear before … before … Before what?

    “I don’t know before what,” said Agathe, “but I’ll know it when I see it and it’s not ‘before’ waiting at the tram stop to go and see some mad old lady I never spoke to ‘before’ this morning.”

    She did a little dance, tapping from heel to heel in the tram shelter. “Ten minutes! Ten Minutes. I’ll give them ten minutes. If it’s not here by the time I count to a hundred, I’m going home.”

    And she began to count as she danced. “One elephant, two elephant, three elephant …” By the time she reached “a hundred and sixty-three,” the tram was waiting at the junction, its single headlamp glowing in the dusk.

    It clanked up to the stance, slowed, stopped, let Agathe hitch her skirt and climb aboard and clanked off again over the bridge.

    Agathe had the tram to herself. She sat primly, knees together, holding her handbag on top of her thighs. The conductor said, “All right, dearie?” and Agathe hated that. She knew he was going to say something stupid like that.

    Why couldn’t he just have said, “Good evening, where to?” or “Yes, Miss?” or something polite and straightforward? But, no, it had to be “All right, dearie?” as if this chirpy display of bravado on an empty tram would suddenly ignite her libido and make all her clothes fall off. She gave him a cold glare, one of her “shrivellers” and said, “Castle Street,” with a heavy strain on “please.”

    “That’ll be …”

    But Agathe cut him short, tipping a column of coins into her palm with a magician’s ease. “I think that’s right,” she said definitely.

    The conductor punched out a short green ticket from the machine that hung at his waist and went to stand on the back platform. He looked at her from there, dangling by one arm from the pole on the step, swinging out over the rushing pavement.

    Agathe’s disgust was bottomless. She refused to reward him with even a glance but the trees where she’d watched the birds that morning were passing by only as dark shadows now. She concentrated instead on reading the advertisements that ran along the edge of the ceiling, a small milky light bulb burning between each.

    Tired, liverish, lost your fizz?

    Try

    Pepto Pills!

    And there was a picture of an old man, leaping out of a bath chair to do cartwheels. His walking stick was flying through the air behind him. “Stupid,” thought Agathe. “Silly. Why would a man in abath chair need a stick? I mean, if you’re wheeled about all the time, what’s the