Page 95 of The Flowers of Bay C
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 eejitdropped 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 bagand 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 thatmy 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.’
