The Man At The Bus Stop Told Me I Would Remember In Nine Days

It was the 06:20 bus, which is a bus for people who have to be somewhere unglamorous by seven. There were four of us at the stop. I noticed him because he was the only one not on a phone.

Fifties. Supermarket fleece. The face of a man who has been on his feet for thirty years.

He said, to me, not to the air: "You will remember in about nine days. Don't fight it, it goes easier."

I said something like sorry, what? — the British reflex, apologising for someone else being strange.

He said, "You'll be washing up, probably. It usually comes when your hands are busy." And then the bus came and he got on, and I did not, because I suddenly could not, and I stood there and let it go, and I was late, and I told my manager the bus was full.

Nine days later I was washing a pan.

What arrived was not a memory the way memories arrive. It was more like being handed a photograph of yourself that you have never seen, from an angle nobody could have taken. I was on my back. There was a low ceiling. There were two figures and a third that stayed near my feet and did nothing, and I understood — in the way you understand things in the flat, boring middle of a memory — that this had happened when I was nineteen, in the summer I lost my car keys and my temper and, according to my mother, "a whole weekend to a hangover".

I stood at the sink with a pan in my hand for, my partner says, about twenty minutes.

I have never seen the man again. I have gone back to that stop at 06:20 more times than I want to admit in writing. I have described him to the other regulars and got nothing, because he is describable as any tired man in the country.

Here is my honest doubt: I am suggestible, I have a good imagination, and a stranger planted a seed and my brain grew it. That is a completely respectable explanation and it might be the true one.

But he said nine days. Not "soon". Nine.

And he was right.