There is a bus shelter across the road. It has been there since we first moved in, more than twenty years ago. Familiar and unfamiliar faces gather there each day. I watch them from the window of my childhood bedroom, before they are driven somewhere else.

There's an elderly man who, like the bus shelter, has been here ever since we arrived. He used to be a bus driver himself. He always talks to the current drivers, standing by their side throughout every journey. There are signs telling passengers not to do this, to refrain from distracting the driver unless it is an emergency, but he seems to be exempt. No one seems to mind. He has earned it. Even if there are empty seats, he will stand next to the driver's cabin, talk with them through the plastic glass.

At least, that's what he used to do. With age, he appears at the bus shelter less and less frequently. He used to travel almost every day, but now I might not see him for weeks at a time. Occasionally, I'll see him walking on the pavement. He is slower than he's ever been before. His head is turned to the ground. When he sits, he looks very grey. And he has started talking to himself, something I hadn't noticed until now. He will start quiet conversations with nobody around, as if he can't wait for the bus to arrive. He needs to talk, and if there isn't a fellow driver nearby, or a passenger whose attention he can command, he will talk to the empty shelter until someone else is there.

I might do the same when I'm his age, especially if I find myself alone. The conversations I've always held with myself will start to spill out into the world. Loneliness drives them into the open. I won't care if people are listening. There will come a time when all conversation has to end, and the fear of this will force me to be more talkative, even if there is no one to talk to.

Today, they are commemorating the Normandy beach landings. Those who survived have almost died out. The final tides recede. I walk through the living room and hear, on the television, a soldier playing a trumpet for the dead. There is talk about sacrificing today so that others can have their tomorrow. Memorials are a compression of time. They make us think of overlapping paths, and paths that end, and paths that never were, winding and branching beyond our sight. The bugler stands in front of a gleaming white wall, somewhere on the coast of France. The bricks could have been laid yesterday, or eighty years ago. Time seems to have been scrubbed from them.

From the window, I watch as my father leaves the house with his bicycle. He is going to a beer festival. The person he usually goes with is no longer here, so he is going on his own. He will cycle to the station, then catch a train, then walk, then he will drink six pints of ale, walk back to the station, return on the train, and cycle home, all before dark. Tomorrow, we will buy food for the week and cut things down in the garden. The hedges and the trees and the wild growth in the corners by the fence will all be pruned, unwanted branches and leaves shredded and bagged. We will watch the forecast to see if rain is on its way, to see if tomorrow is a good day. We will plan accordingly.

Another man walks past, somewhere in age between my father and the old ex-bus driver. I never see his face, but from behind he looks like an older version of my dad, a similar build and gait, and wearing similar clothes, and for a second I let my mind tell me that it's him, knowing all along that it's not. I imagine he has returned early from the beer festival, in secret, unaccountably aged. He has left his bicycle somewhere and is now walking around the neighbourhood for no clear reason, looking for somebody only he can see, possibly talking to himself. He passes through the suburbs unnoticed, a graying figure in an early summer, beneath a sun capable of burning pale skin. I'm the only one who sees him on his way, and only because I happen to look up at the exact moment he passes by the window, and even then it's only for a second, and who can say that anybody's there?