I only ever saw a double decker bus fall over once. It was the number eleven, over in Bourneville, not five minutes from the chocolate factory. You might remember the story, it was all over the newspapers at the time, with accusations of blame falling on all and sundry – was it the drivers negligence that caused his death, and the death of his passengers? Was it an unclearly marked road? Poor visibility? No firm conclusion was reached, but I mention it so that if you have some recollection of the news items of the time, you may be able to piece together a visual more vivid and accurate than the one my words could ever conjure. I had just gotten off at the previous stop. It was still morning. There was drizzle in the air, a hangover from the previous night’s rain, the sky was a great grey duvet and the road gleamed wet. The bus pulled away from my stop, turned a little too sharply into a corner, causing the wheels to mount the pavement, which in turn caused a nearby man out walking his dog to jump back in alarm. The bus then clipped an unfortunately positioned lamppost, teetered uncomfortably, and for one silent second lay in that awful no man’s land of precariousness, between balance and imbalance, between life and death in fact. It could have been any number of factors which caused it to fall rather than simply and happily righting itself – if the road hadn’t been so wet, if there hadn’t been so many passengers sitting on the wrong side of the bus, if the wind even had been slightly less strong that morning. All of us there, and no doubt those unfortunates still on the bus willed it back onto four wheels, held our breath, perhaps even swayed slightly to the left, but the bus, with a mind of its own and those tricky laws of physics to obey described a slow, painful arabesque, and fell flat into a puddle in the road. The contents of the puddle flew back upwards, as though mocking the bus with negative motion, and landed, soaking the man and his dog. One day in very fortnight I would skip school. You might not think if you spoke to me that I’d be the sort to do that, or that I’d be very good at it if I was. But I did, and I was. Usually, I would pick the day to skip a long while in advance, so I could plan exactly what to do and then ensure I’d be ok to do it. Most truants know to stay away from town centres, but most truants overestimate the vigilance of our police force. If you’re not wearing a school uniform then they’ll leave you alone – much easier to dream up a training day or a particularly youthful looking college student than to have to fill in all the relevant paperwork and make all the phone calls and ask all the questions. Anything for a quiet life. My plan for the day in question had been to go into town. I would get changed in the McDonald’s toilets during the morning rush, and then sit on a bench somewhere, eat my sandwiches and watch the people until it was time to go home. I still love to do that. Or at least that had been the plan, a long tried and tested one with a history of success at that, until a couple of days beforehand a boy at school called Simon told me all about the number eleven bus. He said that the number eleven has the longest route of any bus service in the entire country. I’m not sure if this is really true, and Simon was often engaging in tedious practical jokes, but this seemed such a ridiculous thing to bother lying about that I believed him then, and I suppose I still believe him now. As soon as he told me, I knew I had to ride the number eleven all the way round, the whole circle, and that the next opportunity to do this would be Thursday, the day I planned to skip. Normally I wasn’t nearly so impetuous – I would make a schedule and stick to it, indeed, the careful planning and execution became almost ceremonial to me, and the longer I kept playing truant the more detailed and elaborate those schedules became. Not that I ever did anything particularly daring or likely to get me in trouble – so much did I fear getting caught, but even this meagre risk was more than enough for me. The thought of it fills me with a tangible sense of dread even now. The night before a truant day I would often lie awake torturing myself with the potential questions that a tawdry parade of police, teachers and parents would rain down upon me – “Where did you go?” “Why there?” “What’s wrong with school?” I could answer none of them satisfactorily, not even to myself. I guess that illicit thrill, however much of a cliché, played a big part in why I did it, why I kept doing it, for the continuing forgery of sick notes, odd excuses meant that getting found out became increasingly likely over the months and years, and the later I actually was discovered, the harsher the consequences. But, like those who leap off mountains, or travel to the poles, or even just watch horror films, it was the proximity to danger, to fear, that made me appreciate both danger and fear, and the lack of it in my everyday existence, all the more. And how wonderful those stolen days were, spent in odd places, places I wouldn’t ever dream of going at the weekend or during the holidays – any bleak concrete shopping centre, or ugly cul-de-sac became an adventure, fraught with perils, but containing infinite hidden riches and excitement. I even began to think that places withheld their charm to me during my real free time, and that only in those few midday, midweek hours would they show themselves in full bloom. And the looks people would give me, the ‘shouldn’t you be in school?’ scorn, the envious glance, the knowing wink, I loved them all. It all filled me with a kind of succulent ambivalence which squirmed and undulated all through me on those days, and made me savour them in a way I couldn’t savour any other day, everything seemed clearer, as though only once a fortnight I put glasses on and saw the world properly after thirteen days of murky half-blindness. For this particular Thursday, however, I didn’t make much of a plan, reasoning in part that simply sitting on a bus and riding round didn’t warrant it, but also I had an odd nervous feeling about prospect, a niggling sense of premonition. Forgive me, please, if you feel I’m foreshadowing events, or that I, with hindsight, am endowing myself with the power of premonition, but I distinctly felt a slight discomfort at my hastily decided preparations. At the time I dismissed it as mere nerves at having changed my mind so soon before the allotted day, and perhaps that’s all it was, but to calm myself on Wednesday night I sketched a rough map of the route, and listed all the places I could think of that it passed through – from Yardley on to Stetchford, past the swimming baths, past where my best friend from primary school who I don’t see anymore still, to my knowledge, lives, through the awkward junction where it crosses the fourteen route, up the hill to the Fox and Goose and on to Erdington’s rows of charity shops and the grimness of a local shopping centre dying out to supermarkets and Merry Hill, and yet further, to Aston, where I was supposed to be at school, Perry Bar, Handsworth and so on, all the way round and back to where I started. But even this list didn’t calm me. Thursday morning arrived in unspectacular fashion, but I awoke feeling much more comfortable and excited about the forthcoming day. So elated was I, in fact, that I could barely conceal my glee from my mother, who looked questioningly at me. I don’t think she suspected a thing though, and happily I bounded out of the house and into the damp morning. I turned off my usual route as soon as I was out of sight of the house and walked the half-mile to the eleven stop. Unusually, I didn’t have too long to wait before a bus turned up, it was long enough ago for it to have been one of those grey and blue ones, the old design. I got on and showed my pass. My favourite seat was even free, which was fortunate for the time of day – I like to sit downstairs, on the back seat by the window, preferably on the same side as the doors, but that bit isn’t too important. Today I got the perfect seat – nothing, I thought could ruin today, and I settled back. The driver took things leisurely up Stoney Lane, that pleased me, nothing worse than bus drivers rushing, and I gazed happily at the familiar territory, the health centre, the swimming baths, my old friend’s house, all well known to me. On we carried, up past what would soon become the ghastly new Retail Park, but was then just derelict warehouses and yet further onto the Fox and Goose, with its giant bingo hall and pragmatic post-war architecture, not a dribble of concrete wasted, not on the covered walkways of the shopping complex, not on the car park, nowhere. Everywhere bustled with the new morning, people rushing now, a bit late to school or work perhaps, and nowhere yet filled with those gangs of youths who would ask all kinds of difficult questions about your haircut. It was nice to start like this, on well known territory, and I relished the thought of the less familiar places yet to come, perhaps a few eleven stops were still completely unknown to me, and then later on the places would grow more and familiar as I came gloriously full circle. One stop after the Fox and Goose a boy and a girl got on and came and sat down at the back, by the other window, just a little down from me. I noticed them right away, so different were they from anyone else on the bus, or anyone else that you ever saw on the whole eleven route even. They looked a few years my senior, but probably still of school age, and, if you were in the right company, you might say they dressed twee. Of course that word, and indeed the whole notion was unfamiliar to me at the time. I saw a boy with longish straight dark hair, parted on one side, a sort of bowl cut, wearing glasses with thick black frames, a thick brown duffle coat and black flared cords. I couldn’t see what was under the coat. I saw a girl with two blonde pigtails, a flowery blouse underneath her coat, the collar of which I could just make out, and a dark skirt which looked like it was made of tweed or something like that, black tights and red mary-janes. They were both thin and small, but they held hands and sat and whispered and giggled to each other on the back seat as though oblivious to all else. I was fascinated. I don’t think I’d ever seen people dressed like that before, nor a couple so quietly content. It’s difficult to put into perspective now of course, but I was instantly attracted. To say I fancied either of them, or both of them would be a misinterpretation though, I was too young and naïve for such desires to be properly manifest then, rather their presence aroused in me a kind of new curiosity. Their look, their comportment, even from just the fleeting glimpse I got, suggested a kind of quiet defiance, an embrace, a clinging to even, of certain values, certain ideas of youth or of love or of the world, and an outright rejection of others – and perhaps they were wrong to reject the values they did, if they did (far be it for me to put words in the mouths of those I’ll never know), but on the number eleven, headed towards Erdington high street, they spoke another world to me. We carried on riding like that for some time. I stole occasional glance over at them, or attempted to eavesdrop on their conversation, but to no avail. After a while, somewhere around Handsworth, the girl pulled a walkman out of her bag, and she and the boy took one earphone each, and from then on they sat silently listening to the girl’s tape and holding hands. Some three quarters of an hour later, they turned the tape over and resumed listening. By now we were a good way along the route, just getting into Bourneville – I had more or less left the couple to themselves, so caught up were they in the music and each other that I couldn’t get much else out of them than what I already had. But I was grateful for that at least. I gazed absent-mindedly out at the pretty houses and trees and factories, enjoying myself, thinking that this wasn’t taking quite as long as I’d anticipated, and that maybe I’d have time to go into town for a bit afterwards as well. Just then, as we approached another stop, I noticed, standing there in the small queue, and even doing that pointless shuffle forward that people about to get on buses so often do, Simon, a friend of my mothers. I cursed inwardly. I couldn’t let him spot me here, he certainly wasn’t the sort I could confide in, quite the opposite in fact, and even if he had been, this was my secret, and I wasn’t about to go confessing it, even to the most sympathetic ear. Cursing him again, I stood up, glancing back for the last time at the couple on the bus. Apart from me they had been on the bus the longest of anyone, and there were certainly quicker ways of getting to these parts than the eleven, I wondered if they had the same plan as me. This thought, though I would never find out an answer to its implied question, comforted me as I turned away and shielded my face, disembarking just as Simon climbed aboard. I’m pretty sure he didn’t see me – he’d be the sort to say something if he had, but I’ll never know that for sure either. I decided at the bus stop that all was not lost; I would simply get on the next bus that came along and finish the route. It would be almost as good. And this is what happened. The bus took a corner too fast, it hit a lamppost, which caused it to overbalance, and it fell over. The noise made by the impact was horrendous, for weeks afterwards everything else seemed quiet in comparison. People stopped. Cars stopped. I, powered more by some neglected reflex than real intention, ran straight across the road to where the bus was lying. A bus on its side is still taller than most people. The whole of the driver’s side had been completely crushed. The metal twisted and distressed, the paint cracked, the windows broken, the tyres popped. Everyone on the bus had died instantly. I peered into the hole where the back window had been. Everything was slow and still and silent. Inside, bodies wee crushed and askew, stricken, some pierced by shards of glass or pieces of metal, others near invisible under piles of others, unrecognisable under seats and bars, limbs protruded at sickening angles, the whole frame had collapsed in on itself. It was hardly recognisable as the same bus I’d been riding not a minute beforehand. I looked over for the boy and girl. They lay against each other, a trickle of blood ran from the corner of the boy’s mouth onto the girl’s forehead and then down the side of her mangled face, mingling with her own blood, a whole pool of it now oozed out from under the bus. And the last newspaper article I remember about the incident was a complaint from some local resident about how some of the bloodstains on the road were yet to be removed. Their walkman lay between them, strangely unharmed by the wreckage. I reached inside and managed to pull it out, there was some blood on the casing. I removed the tape, and put the walkman back inside. By now more people were arriving, so I pocketed the tape and left quickly, still prominent in my mind was the idea that I could be caught playing truant. But I knew too that this would be the last time I ever could, and the last time I could ever take the number eleven too. I walked the whole way home, shaken. That evening I pulled the tape from my pocket. On one side it said ‘Tigermilk’ and on the other, ‘Sinister’, which rather dates the piece. Without bothering to rewind it I put the ‘Tigermilk’ side on. All at once the words filled my room – “Why don’t you lead me to a living end…” And that’s how I fell in love with Belle and Sebastian. _________________________________________________________________ Use MSN Messenger to send music and pics to your friends http://www.msn.co.uk/messenger +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. 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