The Bus on Thursday

by Shirley Barrett

I see a flash of something pass over his face. It’s so fleeting I have difficulty identifying the emotion he’s revealing, but I sense that it’s positive, so I’m momentarily extremely encouraged. It’s like for a split second I see a future for us, and it’s Gregory running through a house with a chubby, chortling baby on his shoulders and me laughing and calling out, “Mind the door frame!”

  But this brief hopeful vision evaporates almost instantaneously, because he turns to the Barkers and says: “I’m sorry. I have no idea who she is or what she’s talking about.”

  So I lunge at him. Specifically, I lunge at his wig, because I’m keen to expose his true identity, but he’s quick, and he dodges me. I try again, but he ducks behind Mr. and Mrs. Barker, poking his head up between them like a jack-in-the-box. And they’re all bewildered and confused, and Mrs. Barker is flailing at me with her handbag, and Gregory is meanwhile grinning at me from behind them. So I try again, faster this time because I’m getting angry, but at that exact same moment, Mr. Barker moves across in an attempt to deflect me, and I slam my closed fist into the side of his skull, skittling him. I mean, he literally spins like a top and face-plants into the gravel. It’s terrible.

  Again, another big blank around here. A memory lapse, a blackout of some kind. Mercifully perhaps.

  Next thing—how did I get here?—I’m in the classroom at school, and it seems I’m being interrogated by various senior figures from the Education Department, here to pay tribute to one of their own. I only know this because I ask them: “Who are you again?” They tell me who they are, and I’m like, “Why are you here?” And they explain that they have traveled here for Miss Barker’s memorial service, but I still feel really confused. “But what’s that got to do with me?” I keep asking. I feel if I ask a lot of questions it will somehow give me the upper hand. Too often I take the passive route. I just lie back and let bad things happen to me. This has got to stop if I want to get anywhere in life.

  “Well, we’re extremely concerned about you,” says a man with strikingly circular glasses. This is where I’m headed if I keep teaching, I think. Statement eyewear. “I suppose we’re wondering,” he continues, “if you didn’t go back to work too soon—after your illness, I mean. Because some of the parents have spoken to us, and they’re not very happy. Apparently you never mark anything; you never plan any outcomes. There have been reports of you swearing at the children. Also, there’s the rough way you dealt with Ryan today. Surely you’re aware of the guidelines concerning physical contact with students?”

  I nod vaguely. I’ve become distracted by the sight of Tommy, lurking innocently in his tank. Ha! I think bitterly. Am I somehow supposed to believe that that turtle’s been to church today? Good try, ladies.

  “Look,” says Statement Eyewear’s colleague, the fat one. She chooses to express her individuality in bold geometric patterns, like camouflage on a warship. “We understand that it’s a very difficult thing, stepping into the shoes of a teacher as exceptional and as loved as Miss Barker—”

  “Oh, Miss Barker!” I cry in my scary new voice. “Miss Barker, Miss Barker, Miss Barker! I’m sick to death of hearing about her. And btw, fyi, perhaps your Miss Barker wasn’t quite as wonderful as you think she was. I could tell you some stories about your Miss B. that would curl your hair.”

  “How dare you?” cries Glenda, rising from her seat at the back of the room. “How dare you cast aspersions on Miss Barker when she’s not here to defend herself? Well, let me tell you this, young lady—you’re not half the teacher she was, and nor will you ever be, blah blah…”

  I guess she went on in that vein. I can’t really remember. Again, I must have blanked out. Some small part of my brain seems to be shutting down. I’m sitting here and I’m trying to remember, but there are just these great gaping blanks all the way through, like there are literally giant holes in the webbing of my brain, I can picture it. I know that at some point through her tirade, I became aware of a heaviness in the pit of my belly and a warm seeping feeling in my undies. I guess that was when I started to cry, because I realized then that I must be bleeding, that I had my period, which of course meant I wasn’t pregnant after all—so much for the stupid dandelion leaves. Or maybe I was pregnant for about a minute, and now I was having a miscarriage. Either way, I was feeling pretty crushingly disappointed, and the last thing I needed at that moment was Glenda haranguing me. Because me being pregnant with Gregory’s baby was probably the one thin thread that was holding me together, my one sense of purpose and achievement. All gone. All washed away in the mucousy red fluid that was currently soiling my undies, and the back of my skirt, and also the green vinyl seat of the chair I was sitting on. So apart from me sitting there and bleeding and weeping, I have no real idea how that meeting ended. My guess is, taking Glenda’s lead, they all joined in giving me a well-deserved dressing down. Maybe they even sacked me, who knows?

  I suppose I have to pause here and take stock and ask myself the tough question: Is it my fault that these bad things keep happening? Have I brought all this upon myself, with my bad attitude and my negativity and my weakness of character? In all honesty, if I am being totally candid, I would have to admit that the answer to that question is “possibly.” It’s not like I haven’t had problems before in the workplace. I’ve definitely noticed that sometimes people don’t like me, by which I mean they take a dislike to me for random unknown reasons—often before I’ve actually even done anything to earn their dislike. Case in point: Glenda. But on the other hand, and it’s well documented in the annals of my work history, I am by nature very quick to fly off the handle. What I did to Friar Hernandez, for example. That was maybe a bit of an overreaction on my part. Honestly, when I think back, it looked like a shark had attacked him. I even thought for a moment that maybe I should apply some kind of tourniquet, but there was nothing really suitable to use and also I actually have no idea how to apply a tourniquet so I just left him. Anyway, I can’t think about that right now.

  The next thing I remember is I’m staggering home and I’m sobbing so hard I can barely see where I’m going. The reason I am sobbing, of course, is because I am bleeding, quite copiously, which I shouldn’t be, because I should be pregnant. So I guess what I’m experiencing is disappointment. Crushing disappointment combined with sheer disbelief and a sense of the absolute unfairness of it all. At some point amid the sobbing and the staggering, I realize that Daphne, the incredible shrunken woman, has fallen into step beside me. I have no idea she’s even there until she takes one of those mini-packs of tissues from her handbag and gives it to me. I’m super surprised. I’m also touched by the gesture so I thank her, and as I’m pulling out a tissue she says, in her nervy little voice: “Time to go.”

  “What?” I’m blowing my nose at this point, but I pause mid-blow to look at her.

  “It’s time to leave,” she says. “You can catch the bus.”

  “Bus?”

  “There’s a bus on Thursday.”

  “What day is it today?” I ask. “I’m losing track.”

  “There’s a bus on Thursday for those afflicted,” says Daphne.

  I stare at her. I’m wondering if I’ve heard her correctly, but perhaps my expression seems somehow sneering and derisive. Because now, like I’ve offended her, she veers off abruptly, crossing the road. A wave of irritation washes over me, not for the first time today.

  “Afflicted with what, Daphne?” I call after her. “With what am I afflicted?”

  But she pays me no attention, she just keeps going.

  I stand there on the corner, exhausted. Just physically and emotionally drained—not surprising really, given the day I’ve had. I find myself staring at the street sign—it’s bent at an angle, like something big has scraped against it. It seems significant somehow, but I can’t think why.

  So imagine my surprise when I walk in my front door and find Ryan sitting on my couch. In some ways, he’s the last person I want to see, but at the same time I’m glad of
some company.

  “Ryan,” I say, sitting down beside him, “I’m really sorry if I handled you roughly. Did I hurt you?”

  “Just a bruise,” he says. But he shows me his forearm, and there’s a great mass of horrible purple welts up and down it, like I’ve given him sixteen Chinese burns.

  “Oh God,” I say. “I seriously do not know my own strength. You see, I thought that you had somehow found Miss Barker’s hand, and you were bringing it into church.”

  “It was just Tommy!” says Ryan, smiling up at me. “Why would I bring Miss Barker’s hand into church?”

  “I know, it’s silly,” I say. “But that’s what I thought, anyway. I honestly thought Miss Barker’s hand was crawling after me.”

  “Like she was out to get you?” asks Ryan, his eyes shining eagerly.

  “Exactly,” I say. “It’s nuts, right?”

  We both laugh. And you know what? It felt good to have someone to share a joke with. Someone who doesn’t judge me like the rest of them. For some reason, I like this lumpy kid. I give him a jovial punch in the arm, but for some reason he stops laughing now.

  “Maybe she was out to get you,” says Ryan. “Maybe she’s angry.”

  Here we go again. Miss Barker and her unsolicited performance reviews.

  “Angry?” I say wearily. “Why would she be angry?”

  “She’s angry about what happened to her. Also, she’s jealous. She’s jealous of you and him.”

  Uh-oh. This is the first time we’ve ever touched upon this delicate subject. By which I mean the subject of Gregory, Ryan’s brother—Miss Barker’s fiancé in the fancy-dress wig.

  “She knows about me and Gregory?” I ask.

  “Of course she knows. And another thing,” he continues, “she’s jealous of you and me.”

  “But there’s nothing between you and me!” I cry, although suddenly, in the moment, I don’t feel a hundred percent sure about this. I’m trying to remember if something did actually happen between Ryan and me. I can vaguely recall some kind of incident on the couch, the same couch we’re sitting on now.

  “I’m just saying,” says Ryan. “If she was alive, she would probably be jealous. But she’s dead, so she’s not.”

  I guess around now I notice that I’m still bleeding so I go into the bathroom to try to staunch the flow, because it’s like, torrential; it’s practically biblical. While I’m in the bathroom, I notice the hole I punched in the wall the other day and it makes me feel sad all over again. So I punch another hole. And while I’m at it, another one.

  And suddenly, in the midst of all that, I remember something from the breast cancer support group I went to a hundred years ago, in my previous life. Specifically, I remember this woman, a little younger than the rest, a little quieter, a little less inclined to the hugging and the laughter. When it was her turn to share, she produced from her handbag an ultrasound image of a fetus. And we’re all blinking at it and thinking, Whoa, is that what we think it is? Why is she showing this to us? And she says, “I wanted to share with you this picture of my baby boy,” and then before she gets any further, she starts to cry. And for about five solid minutes, she cannot get another word out but she’s very insistently gesturing that we should pass the ultrasound around even though, in all honesty, there wasn’t much to look at. I mean, I’m not even sure how they managed to determine it was a boy. And then, very haltingly, she finally manages to tell us that she had to terminate this pregnancy when she found out she had cancer because she had to start treatment straight away, no mucking around. And she’s saying, “I’m sorry, I thought I was ready to talk about it, but I guess I’m not,” and now everyone else is crying too, you couldn’t help it. It was the saddest, saddest thing.

  It was her first pregnancy, and she even had the names picked out. He was going to be Harry Ellery Leo Parker. I always remember that because the initials spelled HELP. I don’t think she realized.

  I was the last one to get the ultrasound image, so I had to hand it back to her.

  “He’s really cute,” I said. “He would have been a cute baby. Did you realize his initials spell HELP?”

  She just looked at me like I was a mad person. (This was even before I brought up all the stuff about the underwire bras.) But my point is, standing there in my smashed-up bathroom, I guess I understand for the first time how she felt. Because you’re either growing a baby or you’re growing a tumor. You can’t do both.

  * * *

  “Hey, Miss,” says Ryan, when eventually I come out of the bathroom. He doesn’t mention the punching of walls and the wailing and stuff, though my guess is he probably heard it. “Can you keep a secret?”

  “Okay,” I say dully, sitting back down on the couch. My knuckles hurt. Also, now I look at them, they’re bruised and swelling.

  Ryan leans forward and whispers in my ear, “I do have her hand. Which is why I was late this morning.”

  Oh great, I think. This truly caps off the entire day.

  “I found it in the Pondage,” he says proudly.

  “And what exactly are you intending to do with it?”

  “I dunno.” He shrugs. “Keep it.”

  I try to remember what the Education Department guidelines might have to say about a situation like this. Dismembered Appendages. Have I seen that on a drop-down menu on the website somewhere? It feels like maybe I have. In any case, I need to be firm with him.

  “Ryan,” I say, “you can’t keep it. You have to hand it in to the police.”

  And he giggles at this: “Hand it in!” And I’m like, “No, stop laughing; I’m serious, Ryan. You have to hand it— You have to give the fucking hand to the police!” I’m actually yelling at him. I’m yelling at him so loud it takes me a moment to realize there’s someone banging on the front door.

  Banging very loudly on the front door.

  Can I say? A huge sense of foreboding overtakes me.

  I look at Ryan. He’s sort of stiffened. He’s all watchful, wary. He looks at me. I put a finger to my lips in warning, then, extremely cautiously, I approach the door.

  “Who is it?” I inquire, trying to sound unsuspecting.

  “Sorry to bother you,” says a voice on the other side. “Would you be interested in purchasing a vacuum cleaner?”

  I mean, for Pete’s sake.

  The gall of this guy.

  “No thank you!” I call back, casual as anything.

  Super quietly, I set about sliding the bolts across the door. Because something about what Friar Hernandez said to me has actually sunk in. The bit about me continually letting in visitors. It’s true. If someone knocks, my absolute knee-jerk reaction is—guess what?—I open the door. That’s how gullible and stupid and needy I am. For once I should actually say: “Get lost!” For once I should actually say: “You’re not welcome.”

  “I have a very special offer for a limited time only,” says the voice on the other side of the door.

  “Get lost!” I shout.

  You know how it feels? It feels empowering! I’m surprised at myself for having the gumption.

  Okay, so now things go ominously quiet. I listen warily, my ear to the door. I look at Ryan. He’s all tense, on the balls of his feet, poised to run. He cocks his head as if he’s heard something and immediately I think, Oh God! The back door! And I rush toward it, but I’m too late. He’s already in.

  It’s Gregory, of course.

  Surprise, surprise.

  He’s taken his silly wig off but now he’s holding a vacuum cleaner and a briefcase. Also, he has a look on his face. If I had to try to describe it in a court of law, I would say that his features had arranged themselves in such a way as to express his disappointment in me.

  “Eleanor,” he says, “you are not being very hospitable.”

  And then Ryan emerges from the lounge room, and this seems to piss Gregory off even more.

  “What are you doing here?” says Gregory.

  “She invited me,” says Ryan.

&n
bsp; “You invited him?” says Gregory, turning to me, all affronted.

  “Well, not exactly,” I say, which is true.

  “Then go home, Ryan,” says Gregory. “Your services are not required here.”

  Ryan is not very happy about this, but he skulks past us out the door. As he passes, Gregory cuffs him lightly over the head, and Ryan wheels around and absolutely decks him. I’m thinking, Attaboy! Gregory reels back against the broom cupboard, but only for a moment because then he spins around, leaps up, and kicks Ryan with both feet in the chest. Well, Ryan drops like a rag doll, but Gregory just picks him up by the scruff of the neck and boots him out the back door. Then he locks it, employing all twenty-three of Miss Barker’s various locks.

  “He’s a good kid most of the time,” he says, turning back to me. “Puberty. You know how it is.”

  Now here’s the thing. Being locked in the house with Gregory made me extremely uneasy. I admit to feeling super wary of the guy. He’s an oddball, a scamp, a mischief-maker. His teeth are strange. Also the way his earlobes join his head. Frankly I don’t know what I ever saw in him. Besides, experience has taught me that he’s inclined to behave unpredictably. So I’m edging back into the lounge room, but he just follows me with his vacuum cleaner.

  “We have a special offer for the mum-to-be,” he’s saying as he plugs it into the wall socket. “A complimentary carpet-buster deep clean—totally free and at no cost to you. It’s simply that we’re in the area and doing this as a word-of-mouth promotional.”

  He opens his briefcase then, and produces a small wooden box, vaguely familiar, extensively decorated with decoupage. He prizes off the lid with a screwdriver, and then scatters what looks like ashes all over the carpet. It takes him a while. By the time he finishes wafting it about, the carpet is inches thick with the stuff.

  “Did you know that eighty percent of waste vacuumed is actually dead skin and nose-pickings?” says Gregory. “Disgusting, huh? You don’t want Bubs crawling around in that.”