The Early Bus

Pip Lahey boarded the early bus from New Norfolk to Hobart on the morning she began her Diploma of Social Work at Hobart Technical College. She was seventeen, had never made the journey alone, and carried a folder of enrolment papers she had already checked twice. The bus was full of mill workers, office staff and students going in for the start of the year. The only free seat was beside a young man near the back who had a textbook open on his knee and was not reading it.

Greg Lahey was nineteen and had caught the same service most mornings for a year. He was between his first and second years of a Bachelor of Engineering at the University of Tasmania and spent the summer labouring on a construction site in the city. He moved his bag to make room for her and went back to not reading his book.

The conversation began somewhere past Granton, when Pip opened her folder and the name on the top sheet was visible from the next seat. Greg remarked that it was his name too. Pip assumed he was making a joke and said so, and he produced his student card to prove it. Neither of them knew the other's family, though both had grown up knowing the Lahey name was spread thinly across half the Derwent Valley.

They spent the rest of the trip trying to place one another. Greg's father, Thomas, ran the general store on the High Street; Pip had been in it a hundred times without paying attention to who stood behind the counter. Pip's father, Patrick, worked at Boyer Mill. They traded the names of grandparents and great-uncles and found no point where the branches met, only a shared certainty that they must. Greg said his mother would know. Pip said hers would know better.

The bus reached Hobart a little after eight. Greg pointed her towards the Technical College, which she already knew how to find, and they went their separate ways without arranging to meet again. Both were on the same bus the following morning.