Over the seat back

The bus was full, and it was raining, and everyone on it had the look of people who had decided to be somewhere else in their heads until their stop.

Except the baby.

The baby was facing backwards over her mother’s shoulder in the row in front of Mr. Osei, and she had found him.

He was a large man in a wet coat with a folded newspaper on his knee. He was sixty-one, and until eleven minutes past eight he had been having an unremarkable Tuesday. The baby looked at him with total seriousness. He looked back, because it seemed rude not to.

Then, without quite meaning to, he lifted the newspaper and hid behind it.

When he lowered it, the baby’s face had opened completely. He was not prepared for this. He put the newspaper up again.

By the fourth time, a woman across the aisle had taken out one earbud. By the sixth, the teenager beside him had stopped scrolling and was watching over the top of his phone, pretending not to. The baby’s mother could not see any of it. She was looking out of the streaked window with the particular stillness of someone who has not slept properly in months. She could feel the baby laughing against her shoulder, though. Once she turned her head a little, saw the newspaper going up, and turned back, and her shoulders dropped half an inch.

Mr. Osei varied it. Slower. Then fast. Then the newspaper came down only as far as his eyes. The baby considered this development and approved of it loudly.

It occurred to him that he was being very silly in front of about forty people, that none of them seemed to mind, and that the teenager beside him had now joined in, leaning out around the edge of the seat on his own schedule, so that the baby never knew which side the next face was coming from.

At the hospital stop the mother stood, gathered a bag and the baby, and turned towards the doors. The baby, now facing forward, twisted round to keep them in sight.

“Thank you,” the mother said, to both of them, and to the woman with one earbud, and got off.

The doors closed. The bus pulled out. The teenager put his phone away altogether. Mr. Osei unfolded his newspaper, found it badly crumpled, and read the same paragraph three times without taking in a word.