Page 94 of The Flowers of Bay C
‘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?’
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.
