Tales From A Bus by jwilson136 (finding audrey TXT) 📕

took out my Walkman. As I put the headphones into my ears I was knocked against as someone sat down on the outside of my seat. I didn’t look to the person who sat beside me but I did then notice that sitting in the seat of me was a young boy, maybe nine or ten but he was a small nine or ten if you know what I mean. His skin I remember noticing was very, very pale and he lacked that certain life-fullness that all kids kinda have. It’s difficult to explain but you’d know what I mean if you saw the boy. A middle aged and overweight woman sat on the front seat across from the kid, a very average man sat beside her. I could tell straight away that they were the boys parents, the woman looked like she was carrying the worries of the world on her shoulders, the man looked as her he wanted to be someplace else. As the bus revved up and pulled away the rain finally began to fall, but even then it didn’t give itself full over to it and only a pitiful drizzle fell.
By five minutes into the bus journey I knew that my Walkman would not last the distance, the tape was already beginning to sound warped and the auto-reverse button was clicking itself on and off the way it does when the batteries are just about dead. The thing was I remember putting a spare set into my brief case that morning, or at least I was almost sure at the time that I did. I suppose I swore to myself at first when I had to go to the bother of replacing the set in the Walkman but I did smile smugly when I remembered the set I had spare in my briefcase. I’m not the real modest type and often people think of me as being arrogant and I admit it, at times I may well be arrogant. So every once in a while God does little tricks like this just to remind me that I’m human and when I confidently reached into my briefcase to where I was sure I had placed the batteries and found them no longer there I did curse aloud. Loud enough so that the man sitting next to turned first to me no doubt to say something but perhaps seeing the look on my face thought better of it and turned back to his own world. It was then, in the height of my humour, that I first heard the boy cough.
When I was twelve years old my Granddad died. I have never been exceptionally or even very close to anybody else in my family but I loved my Granddad with an intensity that really surprised me. He had smoked all his life, first cigarettes for the first thirty years of his life and then when the quacks told him he had to give up the smokes he took up the pipe and smoked that for the other forty-three years or so that remained. Lung cancer got him in the end but as he pointed out to me whenever he got the chance, (like for example when my mother wasn’t around,) it took him over seventy years to develop lung cancer and he smoked from about the age of ten on whereas some others died of it before they had even reached middle age. Anyway for me the worst thing about my Granddad’s death was seeing him in hospital just before he died. I remember this one time going to see him and coming home in tears, I was too young to be told everything but I knew that he was well on the way up the Crow Road.
I was walking down the corridor to his room when I heard a terrible sound, it was the sound of death if I ever heard it. It was my Granddad coughing and I could tell there and then that he would never leave the hospital vertical so to speak. The sound of that deep, wet and sorrowful sound stayed with me from that day on and I never again wanted to hear anything like it. With the batteries running low on my Walkman and the sound from the earphones alternating between Blur and some other Indie band whose name escapes me at the time I heard the sound again, and I could feel death close by.
It was a natural reaction to look up and see where the cough was coming from but I felt a bit disorientated for the noise seemed to be coming from somewhere in front on me but the only person in front was the small boy and he was far too young and small to produce such a sound and besides he seemed to be shaking with laughter. My hand, without me telling it to, ran down to my belt and switched the Walkman off and it was only then I realised that this young boy was indeed the source of that horrible sound and he was not shaking with laughter but rather he whole, thin and slight body was being racked by the sickness that was within his lungs. I’m no doctor, but I knew then, as I knew with my Granddad, that the boy was sick. Sick well beyond the limits of medical science.
I’m not sure how long I stared at the boy for but when my concentration broke I looked around the bus and saw that I was not the only one to notice the boy. Every other passenger on the bus seemed to know that this poor kid was sick but they were all looking away. Not one of the other passengers looked ahead, some stared out windows, others at the roof, others at the floor and even others looked at others looking at the floor. One man was giving his wallet a detailed examination, while another was reading the makers guarantee on his briefcase. Nobody wanted to look at or even be on the same bus as this boy. The only person who’s eyes met the boys were those of his mother, and hers were filled with tears. The boy when he finished coughing wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his jacket the way kids do and smiled across at his mother as if to say ‘look mom, it’s no big deal, I’m grand now’. But the mother only nodded her head slightly and when the boy looked back out the window she buried her face in her husbands shoulder.
The bus journey seemed unnaturally long and quiet and the only breaking in the silence was when the boy coughed. Again it seemed that his lungs were on the point of collapsing. I didn’t take my eyes from the kid but I didn’t remove my headphones either. Somehow I felt that if I had the headphones in I could pretend to all the others on the bus that I didn’t hear the kid and so didn’t have to do anything for him. But the thing was I desperately wanted to help somehow, even if it was just to go up and sit beside him and talk to him. Not as a healthy adult to a sick child but just as one human being to another, but I couldn’t. For a while afterwards I tried to fool myself into thinking that I would have eventually picked up the courage to talk to the boy but I know that I was only fooling myself, I could never have spoken to that boy if the bus journey was to Florida and back. I think I felt bad for him, how this kid had done nothing wrong and yet you could almost see the life draining away from him with each breath that left his lungs. It made me fell very sad and guilty about all the stuff I’d put into my body over the years, alcohol, drugs, cigarettes and how I was still being allowed to live. I sat there on the bus, feeling depressed and doing nothing. The bus journey went on and I felt worse. At the airport the bus first slowed and then stopped. I could see the long before we stopped the reason why.
The road ahead was blocked with what looked like a serious accident. At least three cars were involved and the blue flashing lights from the police, fire brigade and ambulance vehicle filled the night sky. The crash was on the far side of the bus but I got a good view as I was near the front, I don’t really consider this luckily but I was none the less a bit pleased with my good seat. After all I had the best view, if there was any blood on the road well shit then I’d see it! As it happens there was blood and quite a bit of it too. The bus moved in spurts as the police controlled the two-lane both direction traffic into a single lane. I could clearly see the firemen working with cutting equipment on one the cars, its body twisted well out of shape to an almost unrecognisable lump of metal. A woman stood by one of the car with a blanket thrown over her shoulders, blood was visible from a cut on her head. One of the ambulance crew was doing his best to treat the cut but she would not be moved from her spot beside the car. You didn’t have to be Sherlock Homles to figure that she was concerned about the occupant sitting trapped in the drives side of the car. The bus stayed at the scene for maybe a minute or two before the Garda stopped the traffic going the other way and waved us on.
Just as the bus moved off a man approached the crash site. The first thing that I noticed was how well dressed he was and that he moved through the carnage without the flustered to-ing and fro-ing of the other people. He walked passed the police as if they weren’t there and went straight to the car that the woman was crying beside. The fireman with the cutting equipment put down the saw and went to talk to his superior about some problem that he was must have been having. The man in the suit took his place by the car and they passed each other without so much as a nod. This all seemed a bit strange to me but what I say next left me speechless.
The man in the immaculate suit looked into the car and it seemed began to talk to the trapped person in the car. Time seemed to stand still at this point and then the man reached into the car and put his hand on the forehead of the trapped driver. It stayed there for a moment and then it began to glow, not the hand now nor the head, just the space where contact was shared between the two. A very soft blue glow seemed to radiate from the area. My mouth hit the flow and I came closer than I ever have come to losing control of my bladder. I felt physically weak and think that I almost passed out because when I looked back the man was gone and the fireman with the cutting saw was walking back to the car. When he reached the car he looked in for a moment and then put down the saw. The woman beside the car started screaming crying and had to be pulled away form the car. When the police moved in around the car I knew that the driver was dead.
I looked around the bus wanting to stand up and shout out if anybody else had seen what had happened, but my voice had deserted me and my legs would