Chapter 27 #2
This time it responds to his coaxing and turns over, the bus shivering and rattling as it crackles and then roars into life.
As he drives away I look out of the window behind me at the bus shelter where a blue hospital wheelchair sits abandoned, drip stand still in place with empty IV bag attached, stark and desolate against its backdrop of weathered cedar wood and drifted snow.
Maybe by the morning it’ll be so deeply buried it will be lost to the world, like we might have been if this out-of-time bus that looks like the set of a ghost story hadn’t loomed out of the mist and whipped us on board.
Amina and Violet huddle together into the big fleece blanket and Kat lays the picnic rug over Jodie, who is tumbling quickly into sleep, tucking her bare feet into its faded folds.
I wrap my arms around my chest and shiver.
There’s no heating on in this thing and the cold saws through my bones.
I sit here in the murky darkness, watching the bleak landscape rolling by, darkening shades of grey chasing the remains of day through an angry sky.
I have a thought, and I don’t know why I didn’t think of it already. My mind must be slowing, numbing along with my frozen limbs. I lean over so I’m closer to the driver. ‘Do you have a phone? Can I just call my son to let him know we’re all safe, and then he can tell the ward?’
The driver shakes his head. ‘Sorry, darlin’. It’s me being all thumbs, see. Mine got all smashed up the other day, silly eejit dropped it on the pavement and that was that. So it’s in with the repair bloke.’
‘Oh.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Don’t worry. Do you have, I don’t know, like a radio, like a walkie talkie thing?’
He smiles wryly, shakes his head. ‘Not in this old girl.’
‘Maybe we should stop as soon as we get to the next village,’ Kat says. ‘Then we can at least let them know.’
‘I’m not stopping in a village in this. Trouble enough getting her started just now. Only another quarter of an hour or so into town. You can phone someone from the depot.’
‘Can’t you take us to the hospital?’
He massages his temple. ‘Can’t get this old thing through that mare of a car park. Not in these conditions.’
‘I bet you can.’ I cross my fingers under my knees.
He shakes his head and makes a face like Jake makes when I ask him to tidy his room or bring his extensive collection of crockery down to wash up.
Silence drapes us in its soporific potency as we relax into the rhythmic chugging of the bus and swishing of the windscreen wiper, watching the white world stagger by.
The bus struggles up hills and through the village we’d hoped DCD might drop us in.
I gaze out of my window at the empty stillness of its snow-shrouded streets, and think about how I’m glad he didn’t, after all.
Nobody would want to come out of their warm houses to help a bunch of women who look like they’ve had a few too many out on a jolly.
I look round at the others. They all have their eyes closed.
Snowy pokes his little head out of the zip of Barbara’s sleeping bag and nestles back into her neck.
I think Jodie is snoring slightly, though that might just be the rumbling growl of the engine.
Violet’s head is tucked into Amina’s shoulder, and I think about how far they have come.
How far we’ve all come.
I fold my arms more tightly around myself and stare out of the window.
The world out there is an alien planet lit in unearthly luminosity, the snow dancing on the windows and colonising the fields.
I feel my bones melting like the snow that trickles down the glass, dragging me down into something a little bit like relaxation, and close my eyes.
‘I’m taking her on her final journey.’
I blink and look up at the driver, who is peering ahead into the storm, both hands clenched tight around the wheel as if the bus might skid out of control any moment.
‘What?’
He glances at me and then chuckles. ‘Oh, no, I don’t mean…’ He thumbs back towards Barbara. ‘I don’t mean it’s her final journey.’
It might well be, though. And that might be our fault.
‘No, I mean this old beast here. She’s been out of service a good while now. She’s obsolete. Useless.’
A bit like me, I start to think and then catch myself. No. Not anymore.
I gaze around the shadowy interior of the bus, taking in its torn red plastic seats, splodged with years of spilled drinks and other nameless things, its mould-rimmed windows streaming with condensation, one of them flapping open at the top and conceding the creep of the frozen outside.
Tired, tattered adverts line the sides. No electronic display or information screen for this old dinosaur.
It’s a relic of times past, of buses I would get to school when we moved to England, when I sat at the very back and hoped Jamie Harrison or Nicola Smith didn’t notice me so they could steal my bag and laugh at my charity shop coat and the haircut that my mother thought was so chic.
It echoes with the ghosts of years, with sadness and poverty and daily travail.
‘It’s ’cause of all them yummy mummies, see,’ he says.
‘Sorry?’
He scratches his chin and then grabs the wheel as the bus swerves slightly towards the verge.
A car is coming the other way, too quickly for this weather, dazzling full-beam headlights shattering the gloom.
‘Idiot!’ He stamps on the brake and it squeals back at him, and for a moment I’m afraid we’re going into a skid, the bus suddenly weightless, the other car too close.
Our driver sits on his horn and the other car swerves round us, honking back. ‘Tosser.’
‘The yummy mummies?’ I say after a few moments’ silence.
‘Oh, yeah. Well, see, firstly it was for the handicapped people. The ones in wheelchairs, so’s they had a ramp and everything. And only too right, I say.’ He nods his head firmly. ‘Took too long coming, if you ask me.’
What is he on about?
‘But then those parents had to go and stick their oars in, you get me?’
‘Those parents?’
‘Yeah, those entitled mummies, those snowflakes with their tanks.’
Snowflakes with their tanks? Jake would like that. I file it away in my mind.
‘Why they can’t just have one of those little buggies like we did when mine were wee, I just can’t imagine.
No, has to be those supersized prams these days.
They’re like Audis. Those mummies are like Audi drivers, cutting up and pushing in and getting in the way so they can have their seat that they are so entitled to.
The Lord forbid you suggest they fold up for some poor sod in a wheelchair.
It’s all, first come first serve, I know my rights, I’ll sue the bus company.
I tell you, it was simpler in the days we drove these old things around all the time. A load less hassle.’
‘Oh,’ I say.
Inside I’m thinking, can we just get back now? Can I just have some peace, a chance to close my eyes and screen out the weary day before I have to face the inevitable music?
He seems to be waiting for more of a response, so I force my eyes to resist the heavy pull upon them. ‘How come these ones are still around, then?’
‘They’re not, really. Great big diesel engines that screw the environment.
Only one or two left, rotting in some yard somewhere.
This one’s going for scrap, eventually. Only used on a quiet route it was, up ’til a year or two ago, this one here.
Got complaints about it, we did, too dirty and outdated.
Can’t say as I blame them. All going towards electric, all that carbon neutral, nowadays.
An’ then of course there’s the fact it’s no good for wheelchairs, and you have to go with the times, don’t you?
You have to make sure you’ve done all you can to include them folk.
An’ too right as well. This here bus, she’s done her last. It’s kind of fitting she goes out like this, doing her bit for others like she always did. ’
He pats the steering wheel, and I want to cry a little bit.
‘What’s your name?’ I say.
He pauses for a moment, then clears his throat. ‘It’s Cal. Callum O’Mahoney at your service, madam.’
‘And will you keep on driving? The new buses, I mean?’
‘I’m doing that now, but I reckon it’s time I was put to seed an’ all, for sure.’
‘You’re not that past it,’ I say, grinning at him.
He smiles back, a great toothy grin that lights his eyes. ‘Got some life to live yet. Got the grandkids, the littluns to keep me going. But I’m about done with all this.’
‘Are your family local?’
‘Some of them, but some of them back in Dublin. I miss them. They’d have me back like a shot, they say, but my wife was from here, see, and I can’t bring myself to go home, not while she’s here. I mean, not here. She’s passed, like, but she’s still here, you know?’
I nod. ‘What was her name?’
‘Nancy.’
He goes quiet, after that, and I watch the world go by. The bus stutters through another village and up to the outskirts of town. The lights draw us in with their promise of hope and warmth, blurring through the falling snow.
‘Nearly there,’ he says.
I wonder about him and this bus. I wonder why it’s been all the battered and broken-down vehicles for us this afternoon. First the old school minibus, then the caravan, now this.
Maybe it’s because we’re all a little bit battered and broken-down.
Maybe it’s because they all brought us glimpses of hope, and even joy, in their own weary ways.
He guides the bus through the town boundaries and onto the ring road, where snow is mulched into slush and cars throw up splashes of icy sludge as they hurtle by.
Jodie coughs in her sleep and it rattles her entire body.
I twist my hands together and take a deep breath in.
‘Listen,’ I say, leaning forward. ‘I know you could get us there. To the hospital. See her?’ I point to Barbara.
‘She needs her medication. We all do. And I just don’t think we could actually cope with another wait. We’ve been through a lot, you see.’
‘But I’ll get in trouble, see, pet, if it breaks down, or there’s a problem in the car park…’
I look at him, and look at the others, and then I swallow. ‘Please.’
He doesn’t reply.
I give him the briefest outline of our unlikely tale, about the beach and how we were stranded, and Dodgy Caravan Dude. He stares round at me, aghast, when I tell him about what was in the caravan. ‘Holy Mary, woman.’
‘So you see, I think we’re done. And you’re the only one who can help us now.’
This new audacity tastes foreign and enticing. Just yesterday I’d have said yes, that’s fine, please don’t put yourself out, sorry to be such a pain. But I’m digging up something new today, and it feels a bit like freedom.