Chapter 27
The bus shows no signs of slowing as it draws closer, its engine a spluttering growl, a cloud of black smoke spitting from its exhaust and painting the air in sooty darkness.
I marshal my strength and stand as tall as I can, waving the rug over my head then flapping it up and down, my arms shaking with exhaustion. I can’t do this. I am going to faint. I need to lie down.
I shout as the bus comes nearer and the driver looms into view through the murk. I scream at the top of my lungs and I jump up and down and I don’t know where my body finds the energy.
It screeches to a halt inches from me, its headlights picking out a great flurry of dancing footprints where I have jumped and leaped and poured myself out.
The driver throws his window open and leans out.
‘What in the name of all that is holy?’ he shrieks in a broad Irish brogue.
‘What in heaven’s name are you doing, woman? Do you have a death wish?’
I can’t find any words left in me. They are swallowed up by a rising tide coursing through my body and dragging my feet from underneath me.
I am wet cardboard, floppy and bendy with nothing to hold me up.
I fall to my knees in the snow and lower my dizzied head as my breath comes thick and fast. The edges of the world turn to black around me as I fall harder, and then I am diving through the snow and plunging deep into the frozen ground.
???
I can hear Jake knocking on my bedroom door.
Mummy, Mummy! There are no words in my mouth, my throat is closed up as my breath is whipped away by a surge of pain.
Mummy! I will help you Mummy. He is in the room with me, he is pulling my duvet over me and then he is stroking my hair.
Are you okay, Mummy? Are you okay? I try to nod, to say yes, Jake, please don’t worry about me, but my words are stifled into a grunt.
I’ll help you Mummy, just wait there. Then my world falls into mist until he comes back, gently rocking my shoulder.
I’ve made you some dinner, Mummy, to help you feel better.
He has a tray with a cup of lukewarm tea because I told him never to use the kettle and a jam sandwich and there is jam all over the tray and his sticky fingers.
He puts it on the bed with me and then he climbs in with me and he won’t let me go and he says please get better, Mummy, please.
???
‘Penny. Penny.’ Someone is shaking my shoulder.
Is it Jake? I open my eyes and the freezing world presses in on me.
Where am I? ‘Penny! Are you okay?’ Kat is gaping at me, eyes wide with worry, and Jodie is with her too, and all I can think about is Jodie in her socks in the snow.
‘Come on. We’ll help you.’ They each tuck an arm into mine and help me up, and even though I am still sagging like damp cardboard now I have something to cling to.
‘It’s okay,’ Kat says, as I begin to hyperventilate and the world tilts on its side.
‘Shh. It’s okay. You did it, Penny. You stopped him. We’re going to be okay.’
I sense a soft whisper of breath on my neck. I find Violet behind me, her arm on my back, steadying herself with the walking frame. She whispers to me, ‘You’re a brave girl.’
‘What is all this?’ the driver shouts out of his window.
‘Let us in,’ Kat says.
He stares at us. ‘I can’t do that. I’m not allowed to do that. I’m not in service, pet.’
‘Please.’
He stabs at something on his panel, and the doors hiss open, complaining in a slow high-pitched screech.
He comes out into the snow, his curly greying brown hair like a halo in the light spilling out from his cab.
He folds his arms and takes us all in, stopping and staring as he catches sight of Barbara, lost in her sleeping bag, a huddle of orange peeking through the shadows in the shelter.
‘Holy Mary, Mother of God.’
Kat says, ‘Oh, you’re religious, then? Catholic, I take it? Good. So, what would Mary say? What about your mother? What would your mam say to you now, when faced with six women who need to get back to the hospital and need your help? What would she say?’
He crosses himself and steps back, stumbling against the lip of the door. ‘I’m out of service.’
Kat points to something hanging from the rear-view mirror in his cab. ‘Nice rosary.’
He pushes out his cheeks. ‘I’m not supposed to.’
‘We know that. You told us. But you can take us, can’t you? You’re not going to leave a bunch of sick women out here in the cold and the snow?’
‘I’ve got to take this old bus back to the depot. Last time, like. Can’t take passengers in her, she’s not fit for it. Health and safety and all that.’
‘D’you think we care about how fit this thing is?’ Violet says. ‘You can fit us in there. You’ve got seats in there.’
‘They’re not very nice.’
Kat laughs.
‘Would you like us to sit out here and die?’
He runs his hand through his hair and gazes around at each one of us. His hair is almost white at the roots, his eyes a piercing green. He’d have been a bit of a looker in his youth, I reckon. Still is, really.
‘It’s up to you,’ Kat says, her eyes hard on the rosary beads.
He shifts and then gives a short nod. ‘I can get you into town, at least, I suppose.’
We don’t need to be told twice. Kat turns back to fetch Barbara and the rest of us crunch our way through the thickening snow over to the open doors.
It’s one of those old-fashioned buses, no low floor for easy access, just a high step with a grab bar up the middle.
Violet puffs and pants as she grips hold of the bar and drags herself up.
Amina lifts her walker in after her, her hijab shimmering against the falling snow as she spins around to help Jodie up.
Jodie says, ‘She’s like that song from the olden days.’
‘What song?’ I say.
‘That stilettos in the snow one.’
A sharp pang through me, memories I don’t want to remember, school buses and playgrounds and reports that spoke of my uselessness. ‘Kayleigh,’ I say softly. ‘And less of the olden days, thank you.’
‘Can’t get that thing in here.’ The driver gestures at Barbara, sitting in her chair by the door. ‘Won’t fit. I haven’t got a ramp in this baby, you know.’
Kat stares at him.
‘Gonna have to leave it here.’
She shakes her head. ‘But… but it belongs to the hospital.’
‘I don’t care if it belongs to the King. It’s not coming in my bus.’
‘Haven’t you got like a luggage thing on the side?’
‘It’s not a bleddy luxury coach, you know.’
‘We’ll have to leave it,’ I say, standing in the doorway and clinging to the pole as if at any moment my legs might give up and send me sprawling down onto the floor, which looks like it’s probably not been cleaned for a good while.
‘Do you know how much those things cost?’ Kat says.
‘We’ve no choice, have we? We’ll send someone back for it. No one’ll nick a hospital wheelchair from a bus shelter in the wild ends of the countryside.’
Kat raises her eyebrows. ‘Don’t you believe it.’ She shrugs. ‘But yes. Could you help me get Barbara on to the bus, then?’
The driver takes one look at me and shakes his head.
‘Sit down, pet. You’re fit to collapse. Here.
’ He guides me to the single seat nearest the driver’s cab, up at the front.
My limbs are shaking so much that I am jerking in every direction.
‘You look like you need a bit of the good stuff,’ he says.
‘Already had some,’ I say.
‘What have you lot been up to?’
No one replies so he shrugs and then slings himself out through the doors and lifts Barbara in her sleeping bag into his arms. ‘She’s nothing to her, has she? Ugly sleeping bag, that.’
Kat slides the oxygen cylinder from the holder on the chair and gathers up the trailing tubing.
The driver screws his brow up, his eyebrows so thick they tangle up together like a thicket full of brambles. ‘Wait a sec. What’s she have in there? Is that a cat? No pets allowed on these buses.’
Kat levels him with a look. ‘Really?’
He stands and stares at her, hands planted on his hips, and then he casts his eyes down. ‘Not like I’m not already breaking the rules, is it.’
‘You’re doing a good thing,’ Kat says.
‘And you’re a wee gobshite.’
Kat laughs.
‘Come on, get yourself settled, all of you.’ He lowers Barbara tenderly onto one of the double seats. ‘One of you’ll need to sit with her. Keep her steady. Not like I have any seatbelts or anything like that. But it’s your funeral.’
I really hope not.
Kat sits down with Barbara and straightens her up a little so she’s not sliding down the plastic covered seat in the nylon sleeping bag. She places the oxygen carefully under the seat and then puts her arm around Barbara and nods at the driver.
‘Ye lot sound like a whole load of steam trains,’ he says. ‘You all got asthma or what?’
‘Pretty much,’ I say. ‘All in the hospital. In the chest ward.’
‘Most of us got screwed lungs,’ Jodie says, peeling off her soaked-through socks.
‘What in the world are you all doing out here, then? Are you mad?’
‘Probably,’ Kat says.
Amina and Violet are sitting together on one of the double seats, and Jodie sags down on another, curling up and laying her head on her arm. She closes her eyes and I think about the dark rings around them and how they look even darker than they did.
The driver goes back outside and moves the wheelchair back into the bus shelter. He didn’t have to do that. There’s something good about this man, some inner integrity I am only catching the edges of, something diametrically opposed to DCD and Kane and Marcus.
‘Are we all quite ready, then?’
We murmur assent and he gets himself settled back in his cab. He starts the engine and it coughs and splutters and he bangs the steering wheel and yells at it to come on me auld girl. It would just about finish me off, I think, if we’re now broken down out here.
‘She’s almost done for,’ he says, trying the engine again. ‘Come on, pet, one last time?’