‘Okay, folks,’ the bus driver said, and she gulped quickly at the coffee, drank enough to get her back into the bus.

When she sat down in her seat again the strange man sat down beside her. It was so dark in the bus that the lights from the restaurant were unbearably glaring and she closed her eyes. When her eyes were shut, before she fell asleep, she was closed in alone with the toothache.

‘The flutes play all night,’ the strange man said, ‘and the stars are as big as the moon and the moon is as big as a lake.’

As the bus started up again they slipped back into the darkness and only the thin thread of lights along the ceiling of the bus held them together, brought the back of the bus where she sat along with the front of the bus where the driver sat and the people sitting there so far away from her. The lights tied them together and the strange man next to her was saying, ‘Nothing to do all day but lie under the trees.’

Inside the bus, traveling on, she was nothing; she was passing the trees and the occasional sleeping houses, and she was in the bus but she was between here and there, joined tenuously to the bus driver by a thread of lights, being carried along without effort of her own.

‘My name is Jim,’ the strange man said.

She was so deeply asleep that she stirred uneasily without knowledge, her forehead against the window, the darkness moving along beside her.

Then again that numbing shock, and, driven awake, she said, frightened, ‘What’s happened?’

‘It’s all right,’ the strange man – Jim – said immediately. ‘Come along.’

She followed him out of the bus, into the same restaurant, seemingly, but when she started to sit down at the same seat at the end of the counter he took her hand and led her to a table. ‘Go and wash your face,’ he said. ‘Come back here afterward.’

She went into the ladies’ room and there was a girl standing there powdering her nose. Without turning around the girl said, ‘Cost’s a nickel. Leave the door fixed so’s the next one won’t have to pay.’

The door was wedged so it would not close, with half a match folder in the lock. She left it the same way and went back to the table where Jim was sitting.

‘What do you want?’ she said, and he pointed to another cup of coffee and a sandwich. ‘Go ahead,’ he said.

While she was eating her sandwich she heard his voice, musical and soft, ‘And while we were sailing past the island we heard a voice calling us …’

Back in the bus Jim said, ‘Put your head on my shoulder now, and go to sleep.’

‘I’m all right,’ she said.

‘No,’ Jim said. ‘Before, your head was rattling against the window.’