School portraits / A first term, August to the Christmas concert
The Bus He Was Not Allowed to Drive
A Swedish father in Discovery Bay, a seven-year-old at Repulse Bay, and the school rule that took the school run away from him.
Tomas Hallberg had one plan for Hong Kong, and it was to drive his daughter to school. Then he read the admissions FAQ for Hong Kong International School and learned that Lower Primary pupils travel by school bus, that the bus company had been doing this since 1971, and that the father of a seven-year-old was not part of the arrangement.
He read it twice, once in English and once in the voice of a man being told his services were no longer required. Elsa, who was starting Grade 2 at the Repulse Bay campus, took the news better. “Does the bus have a name?” It had a route number. There were sixty-five of them. She chose to be excited about this, which Tomas found slightly disloyal.
The family lived in Discovery Bay, where the Hallbergs had no car, and where the FAQ said the pupils were collected from Central Pier 3. So the school run became a ferry, a pier and a bus, in that order, with Tomas allowed to accompany exactly two-thirds of it. On the first morning he got Elsa to the pier forty minutes early, which meant they stood together in the August heat watching other people’s children arrive at a sensible time. A woman in a lanyard checked the list. Elsa climbed on. Tomas waved at the bus until it turned the corner and then waved briefly at the wrong bus, which had the same colour and none of his daughter in it.
He had moved eight thousand kilometres to do the school run and been told, politely, that the school run was taken. His wife, Karin, pointed out that he could still do the ferry. He did the ferry. For three weeks he did the ferry with the commitment of a man training for something, and at the pier he learned the bus parents’ hierarchy, in which the mothers who had done it for four years spoke only to each other and the new fathers held the water bottles.
The trouble started in week four, when Elsa asked if he could stand “a bit further back” at the pier. By week five it was “you don’t have to come up the ramp”. By week six she had a bus friend called Mei-Ling, a bus seat she described as hers in a tone that did not invite discussion, and a bus song that Tomas was not permitted to learn. The ferry became a place where he sat near his daughter while she looked out of the window at the ocean, which had not, as far as he could tell, changed.
In December, Elsa’s class sang at the Christmas concert at Repulse Bay, and Tomas took the bus to it, a proper public bus, with a seat, as a kind of experiment. Afterwards, in the car park, Elsa introduced him to Mei-Ling’s mother, and then to the woman in the lanyard, and then, with a small proprietary gesture, to the bus. “This is Papa. He does the ferry.”
He stood on the pier the next morning with the water bottle and did not go up the ramp. The bus pulled away. Elsa did not look back, and the thing that surprised him was not that it hurt but how quickly he had become a man who checked whether a bus had turned the corner safely, when all he had wanted was to drive it.