by R. A. Spratt
‘Where’s the bus?’ asked Fin, as they joined the group of waiting students. The Peski kids were ten minutes late, so they had assumed the bus would be there already.
‘It’s the school bus,’ said Kieran, as if this fact was explanation enough.
‘So?’ asked April.
‘It’s really old and they never service it properly,’ explained Matilda. ‘The local mechanic only really knows how to fix tractors. And the school is too cheap to send it over to Bilgong to be repaired.’
‘That’s why we only get one excursion a year,’ added Animesh. ‘Half the time the bus never makes it from the shed out onto the road.’
In the distance they could hear the guttural groaning of a very old and unhappy diesel engine, grinding its way up through the gears. Some of the more awake students cheered.
‘That’ll be the bus,’ said Kieran.
‘No kidding, Sherlock,’ said April. ‘The big bus shaped thing belching smoke as it comes towards us was a bit of a clue.’
‘Why is the bus bright pink?’ asked Fin. The bus wasn’t just a normal pink, it was an extraordinary shade of fluorescent pink that hurt your eyes if you looked at it directly for too long.
‘The school bought it years ago, second hand from a Mardi Gras Festival,’ explained Kieran.
‘They never had the budget to repaint it,’ added Matilda.
‘But it worked out well,’ said Animesh. ‘Because when the bus breaks down out in the bush it makes it easy to spot from a helicopter.’
Eventually the aging pink bus ground its way to the front of the school and stopped with a shuddering lurch right in front of the gate. The driver put the engine in neutral so it was idling, but the vibrations seemed to form some sort of harmonic frequency. The whole bus began to vibrate violently.
There was a pneumatic hiss and the doors ratcheted open. Mr Lang hurried down the steps. He was out of breath. Apparently driving the bus was a cardio vascular workout.
‘They let Mr Lang drive?!’ exclaimed April. ‘He can barely handle sitting at a desk.’
‘None of the other teachers would volunteer,’ explained Animesh.
‘Plus Mr Lang has a heavy vehicle licence from that time he drove the tour bus for Metallica,’ added Matilda.
‘He did what?!’ exclaimed Fin.
‘Mr Lang was a roadie before he was a guidance counsellor,’ said Matilda. ‘That’s why he has so much patience with people doing stupid things.’
‘Right, everyone go to the toilet now,’ barked Mr Lang with uncharacteristic stern authority. Nobody moved. ‘That wasn’t a suggestion. That was an order. This is a two hour bus trip and I’m not stopping for any reason. Once you step on that bus, there will be no pee stops. This bus is forty years old and the starter motor hardly works. I’m not turning the engine off any more than I have to. So go and pee now! All of you!’
The students turned and lethargically started ambling towards the toilet block. The bus was vibrating and shuddering even more violently. ‘Hurry up!’ yelled Mr Lang. ‘We need to get moving before the bus shakes itself to pieces.’
Twenty minutes later all their bladders were empty and they were heading off down Main Street.
They were soon passing The Big Potato, Currawong’s only tourist attraction. The oversized replica vegetable sat on a plinth on the outskirts of town. Currawong residents tried to forget it was there. It had seemed like a good idea forty years ago when the Mayor had suggested building a monument to the town’s main food export, but there were no accomplished vegetable sculptors in Currawong. As a result, when the big potato had been built it didn’t really look like a delicious vegetable. The massive brown lump looked more like a giant poop.
‘I hope he knows where he’s going,’ said Fin. He loved maps, and geography himself, so he didn’t like to see Mr Lang driving without using GPS, sat nav or even a compass.
‘It’s not hard navigating round here,’ said Loretta. ‘There’s one road in and one road out. You either go east for the city or west for the desert.’
April glanced back at the sun rising behind the bus. ‘Great, we’re driving even farther away from civilisation.’
Two hours is a long time in the comfort of your own home, when you’re reclining on a sofa, reading your favourite book or killing your least favourite zombies on a computer game. But two hours on a bus with lumpy vinyl seats, no air-conditioning, no stereo, no DVD and no cell-phone reception is a thousand times worse. Especially when you are crammed into that small vibrating space with fifty sweaty, smelly teenagers. Every minute feels like a gruelling ordeal.
They’d only been driving for twenty minutes and April already felt like she was going insane. Admittedly she didn’t have too good a grip on sanity in the first place, but all the standard things that gave life stability were gone. There was no school, no town, there weren’t even any trees as they drove further and further through grazing land with less and less grass to be grazed on and nearer to the desert.
There’s something about deserts. The absence of anything, including water and reasonable air temperatures, does something to the human soul. It is a great place to have an existential crisis.
The native Currawong kids were more used to the absence of anything to look at or do. They amused themselves by playing sticks, a game played with the fingers that is as pointless and irritating as Tic Tac Toe. Or playing card games. Reverse strip poker was popular. It’s like strip poker except instead of taking an item of clothing off every time you lose a hand, you put an item of clothing on every time you lose a hand. It is a much better game all round, particularly when played in cold weather. When you play in an un-airconditioned bus in the desert there is a very real risk of heat stroke.
But the worst thing was the conversation. The absolutely bat guano inane things people talk about when they’ve got nothing to do was just excruciating to overhear. The girls sitting right in front of April were doing a magazine quiz that determined which member of a boy band was their soulmate.
‘Do you prefer a boy with A. Lots of muscles. B. Some muscles. Or C. Floppy hair?’ asked Nerada Bravo, reading from the magazine.
‘Lots of muscles,’ said Daisy Odinsdottir, looking meaningfully at Joe. ‘I don’t care about his hair. I can cut that myself later.’
The girls giggled.
‘It says you’ve got a ninety-eight per cent compatibility rating with the drummer,’ said Nerada, holding the magazine upside down so she could read the results.
The girls squealed. Apparently the drummer was dreamy.
‘You know they’re probably all addicted to illegal drugs,’ said April. ‘Or already in long-term relationships with supermodels.’
The older girls looked over the back of their seat with sneers of contempt.
‘No one asked you,’ said Nerada.
‘Besides he’s never actually coming to Currawong,’ continued April. ‘There aren’t many pop stars sitting around their mansions thinking “where shall I go on vacation this year? I know, I’ll go to a baking hot backwater on the other side of the globe in the middle of nowhere, where the only year round tourist attraction is a giant poo”.’
‘Just ignore her,’ said Daisy.
They had been attending school with April for just two months, but already they knew that engaging her in conversation lead to an argument, and an argument always led to a fight and a fight led to being bitten by her dog and that dog had incredibly sharp teeth. In fact, there was a rumour going round that April sharpened Pumpkin’s teeth every night with a nail file. This wasn’t true at all. Pumpkin sharpened his own teeth on the bones of whatever road kill he could find in the street.
Behind April, Kieran and Animesh were having an even more boring conversation. They stared out the window, and periodically they would count.
‘Seventeen,’ said Kieran. The bus rumbled on for a few more minutes.
‘Eighteen, nineteen,’ said Animesh.
Another couple of minutes later, ‘Twen
ty,’ said Kieran.
It wasn’t clear what they were counting. April was familiar with road trip games like count the post boxes or count the Volkswagen bugs. But there was nothing like that out in the desert. She couldn’t work out the game.
‘Twenty-one,’ added Kieran.
‘All right, I give up!’ declared April. ‘Tell us. What are you counting?’
‘Animals,’ said Kieran.
‘What animals?’ asked April. There were cattle in the fields. But they had seen way more than twenty.
‘Dead animals,’ said Animesh. ‘Road kill.’
April was horrified. She clutched Pumpkin to her chest, ‘You are making a game out of the vehicular homicide of helpless wild animals.’
‘There’s a lot of them,’ said Kieran. ‘Look there’s a wombat with its legs in the air. Twenty-two.’
‘You are sick,’ said April. ‘Have you no respect?’
‘Not for wombats, no,’ said Kieran.
While April was becoming increasingly miserable, Loretta was having the opposite experience. She was sitting next to Joe and she was having a delightful time.
‘This is wonderful!’ exclaimed Loretta, enjoying every bounce and lurch of the decrepit vehicle.
‘Huh?’ said Joe.
‘It’s more thrilling than half the rides at Disneyland,’ said Loretta. ‘Those rides are just designed to feel unsafe. This bus is genuinely unsafe. You really get that I-might-die-at-any-moment feeling.’
‘You’re enjoying this?’ asked Joe. He was bewildered. The bus was horrible. It was deafeningly loud, hot, rickety and uncomfortable. It even smelled bad, as if something had died somewhere in the engine and had been rotting for three months.
‘I’ve never been on a bus before,’ said Loretta. ‘Well, I’ve been on an “airbus” but they’re not really buses, they’re airplanes. Quite nice ones too up in first class. Although not as good as the Concorde. We all miss the Concorde.’
‘The Concorde was decommissioned in 2003,’ said Fin. ‘You’re not old enough to have flown on it.’
Loretta laughed. ‘Only the public Concorde was decommissioned. There are still a couple flying if you know the right billionaire, or in our family’s case, if you perform open heart surgery on the right billionaire.’
Fin glanced at Joe. Sometimes he wondered if Loretta was lying. He knew both her parents were top surgeons, so there was a sliver of plausibility to it. Joe apparently thought the same thing, he just shrugged. With Loretta anything was possible.
‘But tell me,’ asked Loretta. ‘Why doesn’t the bus have seatbelts?’
‘Um . . .’ said Joe. ‘Buses just d-don’t.’
‘But what if there’s a crash?’ asked Loretta.
‘I dunno,’ admitted Joe.
‘We’d just tumble around inside the bus while all the glass was breaking and the metal was being torn up,’ said Loretta.
‘I guess so,’ said Joe.
‘That doesn’t seem very safe. In fact, it sounds like being inside a giant blender. We’d all be human smoothies,’ said Loretta. ‘Does no one care for the safety of poor people when they ride on public transport?’
‘I’d be glad to be put out of my misery,’ said April. She was looking very white and clammy. She was gripping the rail on the seat in front of her so tightly her knuckles had gone white as well. ‘There’s not enough air on this bus.’ She started fiddling with her collar, undoing an extra button.
‘Hey, you’re not going to take your clothes off are you?’ asked Fin in alarm. His sister was embarrassing at the best of times, but that was when she was fully clothed. Naked she’d be worse.
‘We’re all suffocating on this bus,’ said April, her breathing was becoming laboured. ‘There’s not enough air. Too many people and not enough air.’
‘The windows are open,’ Joe pointed out.
The main windows didn’t open, no doubt to prevent people jumping out, but there were smaller windows above them that pushed out at an angle and they were open all the way down the bus.
‘They’re not letting in enough air,’ complained April. ‘Stop the bus!’ She leapt to her feet. Pumpkin did too and started barking wildly.
‘No stops,’ snapped Mr Lang, glancing at April in the rear view mirror. ‘Sit back down.’
‘I want to get off!’ declared April.
‘Sit down, young lady,’ ordered Mr Lang.
‘You can’t make me,’ said April desperately, striding down the aisle of the bus. ‘I’m getting off.’ She grabbed the front door and shook it.
‘Sit down,’ said Mr Lang, the bus swerved on the potholed road. ‘Don’t distract me when I’m driving.’
‘The door won’t open, we’re trapped,’ wailed April.
‘That’s because the bus is moving,’ exclaimed Mr Lang. ‘It’s designed that way.’
‘I’m getting off,’ cried April. She ran back down the bus.
‘I knew the Peski kids were crazy,’ said Matilda. ‘Look at her, she’s bananas.’
‘That’s not very polite,’ said Loretta. ‘Why do you associate bananas with mental illness? They’re a perfectly delicious fruit full of potassium and fibre.’
April stopped in the middle of the bus and looked up. There was a skylight. She jumped up, grabbed the luggage rack and stood up on the back of the seat.
‘You’re stepping on my pigtail,’ complained Matilda.
‘Then move your hair!’ yelled April. ‘Why anyone over the age of five would have pigtails is beyond me anyway. Isn’t one ponytail enough? Or are you trying to look like an infant so that people don’t realise you’re evil?’
April used her free hand to pound the skylight with her fist.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Fin.
‘She’s getting off,’ said Loretta. ‘She has been very clear and consistent on that point.’
‘Sir, April is being disruptive!’ Matilda called out to Mr Lang.
‘Sit down, Peski,’ snapped Mr Lang.
April ignored him and kept hitting the skylight.
‘April, are you having a panic attack?’ asked Loretta kindly. She really did enjoy having April as a sister. She had never been lonely as an only child. But she was undoubtedly having so much more fun since the Peski kids had moved in next door.
If Loretta had ever dreamed of being part of a larger family, it would have been one like the Peskis. They were loud, chaotic, angry and accident prone. She loved them. So when April was distressed Loretta was genuinely concerned. ‘Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s very common for celebrities and high powered executives to get panic attacks because of the pressure of their jobs. But if you are having a panic attack you should probably try to understand that your brain is telling you irrational things and you are not really going to die of lack of oxygen.’
‘Yeah if we’re going to die, it’ll be because of lack of seat belts,’ said Fin.
‘Get back in your seat!’ bellowed Mr Lang from the front of the bus.
April grabbed the luggage rack with both hands, braced with her foot and swung her other leg up to kick the skylight hard. The latch sprang open and the skylight flipped back.
Matilda screamed, ‘Aaaaaggghhh!’
‘Oh wow! She did it,’ said Loretta impressed.
Neil was quick off the mark. Neil was the Cat Lady’s grandson. He was an unremarkable stoic, potato-headed boy, but he did have one extraordinary feature – he was deeply in love with April. Unfortunately for him, April was too angry to have noticed. This was what he had been waiting for – a chance to rescue her. Neil climbed up onto the seat Matilda was sitting on, much to the horror of Matilda who scooted out of the way, squashing Fin into the window. Neil stretched up and tried to grab the back of April’s sweater vest but he wasn’t tall enough.
‘Come on, April,’ said Joe. ‘You’re going to get hurt.’
‘I’d rather die than spend another second on this deathtrap,’ announced April. She used her freakishly stron
g arms to brace herself as she slid her legs out through the hole in the ceiling.
Negotiation was clearly not going to work. Joe realised he couldn’t ignore the escalating situation any longer. He had to do something. Joe squeezed past Loretta, jumped up and grabbed April by the waist, pulling her legs back into the bus.
‘Let go!’ cried April, still hanging on to the luggage rack with her hands, so her legs swung back and forth. Joe swung with them, lost his grip and landed on Loretta’s lap.
‘Oomph!’ said Loretta. Joe had been able to grab hold of the seat back to take most of his weight, so Loretta wasn’t hurt. ‘This bus riding is way more exciting than I imagined.’
All of a sudden there was a screeching of brakes and the bus lurched to a halt. Several students smacked their heads on the back of the seats in front of them. April lost her grip on the skylight and collapsed in a heap in the aisle.
‘We’re here!’ announced Mr Lang, opening the bus door with a pneumatic hiss. He bounced down the steps out into the desert.
Joe, Fin and Loretta looked out the window. They were in the middle of nowhere. The bus had pulled up in a flat dirt area that was apparently supposed to be a carpark. The red dirt was broken by a few tufts of grass and rocks. It would have been unremarkable if it were not for the surreal fact that randomly placed about this desolate landscape were lots of great big dinosaurs. It didn’t look like any sort of organised theme park. Just as if someone had twenty-seven huge dinosaur statues that they had abandoned in the desert, then in a token attempt to make it look official they’d put in a litter bin, a street lamp and a tired old picnic table.
‘Are you sure we’re in the right country?’ asked Dad as they cleared customs and stepped out into the grey bleak drizzly weather. Dad and Ingrid had lied when they told the kids that they were going to the city for a few days. They had another destination in mind altogether. ‘There are seventeen countries in the former Soviet Union, how do you know this is the right one?’
‘Shhh,’ said Ingrid.
‘Why?’ asked Dad looking about. ‘There’s no one listening.’ It was early in the morning. Most of the passengers on the plane they arrived on were transiting to another city.