What is remembered: Albert.

There is an old man lives not far from me, I think, he often gets on my bus a couple of stops from mine, in his late sixties, maybe, could be seventies, it's hard to tell when people are as unkempt as he, walks with a zimmerframe, his grey hair uncut and so uncombed it has gone into dreadlocks at the back, not a wino but surely he lives alone, everything about him speaks of an old man living alone, teetering on the edges of coping with life. The very edges. There is a distinct, unpleasant, strong smell of stale urine he brings with him onto the bus. Several times, he has sat in the seat in front of mine, and I have watched the back muscles of the person he sits next to stiffen, as we all recoil from his odour.

I pick through my thoughts and feelings, I find things I don't like, I find myself thinking oh no, not again, not him, not all the way into town with that smell around us, around me, invading my nose, my space. I think of his life, his home. He must live somewhere. I can't imagine his home. I don't want to imagine his life, his shopping, his lone evenings and lone mornings and lone dinners, does he wash, does he wash his clothes, does he read a paper or listen to the radio or watch tv. Does anybody ever call on him, on the phone or visiting-wise. Was there ever anyone in his life, women, a woman, a wife. Children. A mother, surely. A childhood. Fifty years or so and it could be either one of my sons. You can never tell, can you, beforehand, who's going to land up being that ill-smelling barely-coping lonely old man. It could, in another twenty-five years or so, be me, except I'm not a man, but I understand the conditions of loneliness, of life itself becoming too much of a task to master, apply to women as well.

Once, almost twenty years ago, on my street in London, I came across another lonely old man. Less unkempt than the one now riding my buses he was, his hair neatly shorn, and no zimmerframe, although one might have been useful for him. I found him half-kneeling on Sydney Avenue, just off the North Circular, a worn shopping bag standing next to him, its half-open state revealing its contents, a small bottle of Scotch and two chocolate bars. He didn't ask for help, his look was not pleading, in fact, he looked like he'd just half-knelt on the pavement for a reason, but people don't, so I stopped and asked if he was alright. His smile was one of embarrassment. I don't think I can get up, he said. That's alright, I said, I'll help you, and I can't remember how we managed it, I think I just offered him my arm and he pulled himself up, leaning on me, but I do remember his frame, his bone structure, his skeleton, tangible through his clothes and his skin and his negligible flesh, like a big decrepit bird's. In spite of the Scotch, there was around him no whiff of alcohol, just a faint trace of the same stale urine odour of lonely old men. I had to say something, feign normalcy, help him over his embarrassment. I was twenty-one, twenty-two. My name's Anna, I said, what's yours? Albert, he breathed, and in the two syllables I thought I heard a life.