She said: “Because the lights don’t come back on till Mum gets in.”
They are on a prepayment meter. The key kind, that you top up at the shop.
Her mother is called Seren and she is thirty-one and she works two jobs, and the second one is a Thursday night shift at a packing warehouse out by the motorway that pays thirteen dollars twenty an hour.
The money lands in the account on a Friday morning.
So Thursday is the day the meter runs out. Every week. Not sometimes. Every single week, because the gap between the top-up and the pay is one day long and it has been one day long for years.
Thursday evening, in that flat, there is no light, no heating, and no television, from about half past five until her mother gets in at ten past eleven and puts the key in on the way home.
Five hours and forty minutes of a dark flat on the fourth floor of the Tannery.
And a ten-year-old sat down with a bus timetable, which I have seen, because she kept it, folded into eight, in the front pocket of her bag.
She worked out that the 42 does two full loops between six eighteen and ten past eleven. Two hours forty each. Five hours twenty, plus the walk.
She did not pick my bus because she liked it. She picked it because the arithmetic came out right, and because it was the only warm lit room in the borough that a child is allowed to sit in for five hours without anybody asking her to leave.
“It’s the longest one.” She meant the night.
Her mother did not know. I want to be very clear about that, because the easy version of this story has a bad mother in it and that is not the story.
Seren thought her daughter was at a friend’s house on Thursdays. Bronwen told her that. She invented a friend, with a name, and a mum, and a street, and she maintained it for fourteen months so that her mother would not have to know that the dark was a problem.
Ten years old, managing her mother’s shame, on a bus, with a folded timetable.
I drove her home that night at ten past eleven and I sat in the car park until I saw the fourth-floor windows come on, and then I went and sat in my own kitchen until about two in the morning.
Here is what happened after, and some of it is better than I expected and some of it is not.
I went to Seren on the Saturday. Not to the council, not to anybody official, to her, in her kitchen, and I told her everything, including the fourteen months and including that I had known something was wrong for eleven of them and had bought sandwiches instead of saying so.
She did not shout at me. She sat down on the floor, actually on the floor, with her back against the cupboard.
The debt on that meter was four hundred and ten dollars of standing charge arrears, which is the part people do not know about prepayment meters: they take the arrears out of every top-up before you get any electricity at all.
The depot heard about it because I told nine people in one week, including my own union rep, who turned out to be the most useful person in this entire story.
Between the drivers’ social fund and a collection in the canteen we put together six hundred and twenty dollars in eleven days.
The arrears are gone. The meter went to a credit account in the February.
Bronwen is eleven now. She does not ride the 42 on Thursdays.
She rides it on Sundays, once a month, with her mother, who gets on at Kelso Row and pays two adult singles because she will not let me not charge her.
They sit in the third row behind me on the left.
And I still bring the flask with two cups in it, and nobody on that bus pretends any more that it was ever an accident.