Free The Street Sweeper by Elliot Perlman

spent three years before being transferred to Mid-Orange. Sometimes he dreamed of his daughter who, when he woke on the bus going home, was eight years old. Her age was one thing that didn’t depend on whether he was able to find her or not. These dreams, the ones with his daughter in them, didn’t require him to be asleep.
    It was the end of his shift and the bus was crowded. His head was still against the window and no one watching would have realised he was awake as he looked around through almost closed eyes. The man seated beside him was reading the
New York Post
. An older white woman next to this man stood trying to read what she could of the man’s paper while holding a small cage that contained a very docile cat. Lamont had trouble making out the age or breed of the cat but preferred not to risk looking more carefully in case the cat-lady, observing he wasawake and taking an interest in her cat, attempted to press a claim to his seat.
    Lamont’s daughter might be anywhere in the city. Then again, she might not be in the city at all. She might not even be in the state. And yet, she could be on that very bus. It was too crowded to see everyone but even if Lamont could, he hadn’t seen his daughter since she was two and a half, so who exactly was he continually looking for since his release? How many light-skinned black girls could he find on buses, on the subway and on the street if he looked hard enough? He knew he could get arrested for looking too hard, not that that was going to stop him.
    Somewhere in the city there was another bus crawling through the streets, exhaling fumes and edging its nose tentatively between the traffic. This one was just moderately crowded and only a handful of people were standing. One of those standing was a child. A light-skinned black girl with braided hair tied tight with red ribbons, she was aged somewhere between seven and ten. On top of a red T-shirt she wore a mid-season jacket, unzipped, as if in anticipation of a change of season in the middle of her day. Seeing a newly vacant seat towards the back of the bus in the section with the row of seats that flip up to accommodate wheelchairs the young girl took it. She could not have been sitting for much more than a minute when she offered her newly acquired seat to a man she’d just noticed who was standing talking to a seated friend of his.
    The standing friend had not by any measure been desperate to sit down and when the little girl actively volunteered her seat to him he was instantly arrested by her charm, her grace, her politeness, and by the warmth of her personality. She had delivered all this with the manner of her offer and with something inside her she was too young to realise she had and certainly too young to name. After engaging her in conversation for a few minutes he asked her whether she was travelling alone. Unfazed by this question, the young girl with the braided hair tied tight with red ribbons waved her hand in the direction of the other end of the bus as if to indicate she was not travelling alone. At this the man seemed relieved.
    A stop or two after this, the young girl moved towards the exit. There were two older women, somewhere in their sixties, standing with herby the exit. They had made their way from the front of the bus. She talked freely to them and an observer of the whole scene could have been forgiven for thinking that one of these women was the little girl’s grandmother. The two women in their sixties and the young girl were among a number of passengers who got off at the next stop. Through the still open door it was possible to hear one of the women – they were in the street by then – ask the girl, ‘Are you travelling alone, dear?’
    There was a story Lamont had been told in Mid-Orange about a certain cat-loving Corrections Officer who had worked there some years before Lamont’s time.
    The CO had found a prisoner feeding cats that had strayed into the prison. Not only did he not