Behind him, somewhere in the darkness of the bus, he heard whimpering and laboured breathing. He didn’t look over his shoulder. He was afraid of what he might see without the protective glass of the TV screen.
First things first.
He nudged himself along the seat, careful as a full pint glass. The windscreen was partly gone and he could feel glass in his hair, but that could be dealt with later. Future Richie’s problem, you might say. For some perky nurse with a crisp uniform and manicured nails, if he was lucky. But, then, when had he ever been lucky? Look at him now, for fuck’s sake, almost buried alive. He needed to get himself up on the seat and into the tunnel of light just above him, up where life was still going on.
The movement of his belly against the steering wheel rocked the bus and he held his breath, sucking in as hard as he could while every takeaway dinner of the last few months paraded along in his mind’s eye. Heaving himself up was out of the question. Instead, he held still, like he used to as a child, frozen with fear that if he moved, something terrible would happen.
If he just kept his eyes on the light ahead of him. That was the thing. That would get him through. As long as the light was there, so was he. Hold tough, Richie-boy. Wait it out.
Sirens woke him, screaming into his dreams, leaving no room for anything else.
‘Hello?’ A helmet filled the hole, shining a torch into Richie’s face.
‘Hello,’ he shouted, through a thick throatful of tears.
‘Hang in there, we’ll get you out,’ the helmet said. ‘How many of you are there?’
‘Eight, I’d say, but I couldn’t swear to it.’ He lay back against the seat, limp with relief.
Above him, he heard shouts and the distracting sounds of machinery. His father had always had a bit of a soft spot for farm equipment and what he didn’t know about them wasn’t worth talking about, or so it seemed to small Richie. He wasn’t a man for games, his father, but sometimes, if the Sunday sermon was dragging on, he would tip his head to listen to a tractor passing outside, then put his lips to Richie’s ear. ‘TE20’, he might whisper, or, if his eyes were bloodshot, simply ‘Massey Ferguson’, and it would feel like the two of them against the world. The rare contact of his father’s lips on his skin made it memorable, even if that skin was only his ear. His lughole, his father called it when he had drink taken and swung at Richie. But, on Sunday mornings, Saturday night’s threats of clatters round the lughole were a whole week away again and it was easy to forget the shouting and be on his father’s side again.
‘Hey!’ he shouted into the gap, then, ‘Hey! Hey! Hey!’ until the man in the helmet reappeared. ‘I can smell petrol,’ he said. Hearing his own voice say it loosened the knot inside him and his bladder, renowned in the Tap Tavern for its manly record of four pints had and held, let go of its burden.
The helmet disappeared, the machinery stopped. In the endless silence, he strained so hard, he was afraid he would hear the priest of those long-ago Sundays. Years it was since he’d been to Mass, but hadn’t he the years put in before he quit? If the Almighty was picking names to fill out some of the cheap seats above in heaven, Richie’s name might well be on it. Somewhere down the bottom, granted, but still there.
‘Sir? Sir?’
How long had they been calling him? ‘Yes.’
‘Do you think you can climb out?’
‘I don’t know. I can try.’ It was the decision of a split second, not to tell them about the rocking when he tried earlier. Survival instinct or deliberate oversight? Try as he might, later on, to parse his thoughts, there was no pinning it down.
‘Try now, please. We need to get you out before we can get our team in past you to the others. If you can get out onto the front of the bus, then we should be able to pull you up.’
Such words to hear! Words to lighten his legs, and up he got.
He wobbled his way out of the seat and looked at the small gap in the shattered glass of the windscreen. With one hand, he pushed in his belly and squeezed through. It was a difficult ask, like trying to get a sausage back into its skin. Behind him, he heard the sound of crying again and, this time, knowing freedom was only an arm’s length away, he risked a glance over his shoulder.
A young woman was crawling slowly up the aisle of the bus, her hand held out to him.
‘Please,’ she said. ‘Please.’
In front of him, two arms waved him forward.
‘Please.’
He looked from her face to the arms above him. The last move he made rocked the bus; if she climbed up here with him, it could upset the apple cart entirely. But she couldn’t weigh more than seven or eight stone. He lost half that much the last time he and Sandra tried to make a real go of things. When he gave up the Guinness and the full-fat butter and the two of them went walking together in the evenings with Buddy.
He took her hand and helped her through the glass and out onto the bonnet with him. The bus shifted slightly, but it was no more than a kind of gentle grumbling.
‘Thank you. Thank you.’
He nodded, his head at an awkward angle, his chin raised to clear the top of her head as he shuffled her past him towards the waiting arms. They were so close, he could feel her shaking through her clothes, heat coming off her in waves. It might have aroused him, if circumstances were different, if he couldn’t feel the coldness of the piss seeping through his trousers. She slipped through easily enough – another wobble – then two sets of arms reached down for him.
* * *
Richie opened his eyes to find the two guards looking at him. He cleared his throat. ‘That was about the size of it,’ he said. He shifted around on the hospital trolley to get more comfortable. ‘The men above pulled and I pushed. Then they brought me straight to the hospital here.’ No need to mention that it took three men to haul him out.
The guards nodded and closed their notebooks. One glanced at the other and cleared his throat. ‘You’re absolutely sure there was nothing unusual about any of the passengers getting on?’
‘Unusual how?’
‘Perhaps someone had a large gear bag? Or seemed unduly agitated…?’
Shit, Richie thought. They knew he let Crazy May on for free. But she hadn’t been on the bus when it crashed, he realised with relief. ‘No. Nothing like that,’ he said, with confidence.
‘That’s all for the moment, Mr Murray. If we need anything else—’
‘You’ll find me in the Bahamas.’ He made a grand gesture around him at the walls of Accident & Emergency, but the joke fell flat. What in the name of God was wrong with him that he had to make stupid jokes at a time like this? No wonder some people didn’t give him the time of day, they could smell the try-hard on him.
They left the door slightly ajar and he could hear the busy sounds of the ward. It was very quiet earlier on when he was whisked past the waiting room, still strewn with the debris of the night before. Crumpled cans of Red Bull, blood-stained tissues, torn magazines and, inexplicably, a single shoe. They’d settled him on a narrow trolley in what they called the ‘treatment room’. Good job he wasn’t a man for panic, or the name alone would have drawn out worse than piss.
‘The doctor will be with you shortly,’ the paramedics had told him and left before he remembered to thank them. His mother, God love her, would kill him, if she could recognise him.
He wondered where they had taken the woman. She weighed next to nothing in his arms. He took off his trousers, stiff and stale, and looked around for something to put over his greying boxer shorts. He was peering into the boxes on the shelved wall when the door opened.
‘Are you all right there?’ asked the doctor.
‘I… ah… my boxers were wet, so I was looking for something to put over me,’ he said.
The doctor stuck his head out the door, ‘Can I get a towel in here, please? And some clean scrubs?’ He came back in again, ‘Right, let’s get you checked out. Can you tell me what happened?’
Richie went through
it all again while the doctor listened. The disappearance of the road under the bus. The falling. The dust and the coughing. Trying to move and not to move. The smell of petrol. The winch and the woman.
‘You’re quite the hero, Richie,’ the doctor said, as he pressed and pushed, seemingly at random. ‘Big breath now, please.’
‘Ah no, sure she was only a little thingeen,’ Richie said, pleased.
While the doctor went about his business, turning and twisting him up and down like a pig on a spit, he rolled the word around in his mind. A hero, he said, Richie-boy, and who wouldn’t warm to that?
Wouldn’t it be the price of Sandra to see him hailed on the TV after telling him he was smothering her, that she would rather die than spend another night under his roof. She needn’t think that she could just swan back in either. She walked out on him and he wouldn’t forget it. In the middle of all that mess at work, what’s more. When he could have done with her standing by him. His mam would know no better, God help us, she hardly knew her own name any more. The lads over in the Tap, they would get a kick out of it all right. ‘Richie, the hero.’ He’d get some doing from them, mind you, but there would be a few pints stood and a bit of respect at the back of it all.
The woman herself, and why not? He remembered again the feel of her in his arms, a fragile little bird, she might like the idea of a strong man. A few less of those victory pints with the lads – switch to the vodka maybe, it was better for the waistline – and walk the mile home after. Sure, in a few weeks he’d be slim, trim, and brimful of energy, as his old mam used to say. He had a little wink with himself at how he might use up some of that extra energy.
‘Is the woman all right, do you know?’ he asked the doctor. Maybe she had internal injuries or was dead already. Jesus, how sick would that make him, lying here thinking about her and half-wishing he was on his own.
‘We’re not allowed to give out information except to family,’ the doctor said, snapping the file back onto the end of the bed. ‘We’ll get you down for a chest X-ray shortly.’
Shortly turned into an hour and eventually a vacant young lad pushed a wheelchair in the door of the treatment room. He had the jerky movement of the cartoon puppets Richie used to watch on Saturday mornings growing up, while his mam cooked his dad’s special weekend breakfast as soundlessly as she could.
‘X-ray?’ the orderly asked and waited while Richie climbed in.
Out on the ward, people were walking and talking and pagers bleeped. Somewhere, a woman screamed in fits and starts and Richie wished she would stop. The TV in the waiting area was tuned to a news programme and he recognised the square in Kilbrone. They were showing the bus crash.
‘A rescue team at the scene is meeting with county engineers to plan how best to evacuate the remaining passengers. No numbers have been confirmed yet,’ the news anchor said. She leaned forward to let the camera peek down her blouse into the dip of her tits, in such a way that it might be a hundred people or none at all, for all the notice anyone would take of her words. ‘The bus driver and one passenger were winched to safety early this morning after claims of a petrol leak led to fears of fire. A spokesman for the fire service says there is no immediate risk of fire but refused to comment on whether that initial rescue was, in fact, a mistake.’
From hero to mistake inside one hour. Good man, Richie-boy. Why did he think it could ever be different?
On the way back to his room, they queued for the lift with another orderly. An older man, the very spit of that comedian his mam used to love, especially at Christmastime. What was his name, again?
‘Awful about the crash, isn’t it?’ the man said. ‘Terrible. Them poor creatures.’
The man’s voice was enough to jog Richie’s memory: Niall Tóibín, that was the comedian’s name. Richie wished he had a tape recorder.
‘This was the driver.’ Richie’s own orderly finally stirred himself to speak.
Richie was surprised he had picked up on that much, he seemed like the type to have trouble remembering which direction gravity went.
‘Would you go on out of that! Jaysus, how are you, lad?’
Niall – as he would be evermore in Richie’s head – peppered Richie with questions. He was the kind that would repeat the story in the locker room and again over the dinner table with his wife. He had the slim physique of a man who had someone at home making sure he had his five-a-day. Richie could nearly picture the pair of them, reading the obituaries out loud to each other over their granola and shaking their heads in morbid glee, treating the In Memoriams with the reverence that Sandra’s friends held for royal wedding spreads in Hello magazine.
‘You must have got an awful shock, all the same. I don’t know how you did it, climbing out like that, and dragging that poor woman with you,’ Niall Tóibín continued. He eyed Richie for confirmation he had his facts right.
‘It was nothing really.’
The light dimmed a bit in Niall’s eyes, so Richie added, ‘In the heat of the moment, I mean. Sure, you do what you have to do.’
‘Say no more. A man does what he has to, all right, but—’ he leaned in towards Richie, ‘’Tisn’t every man would do it.’
Richie ignored the apparent contradiction in the man’s logic and settled instead for a kind of reluctant-hero grimace, the kind he imagined Peter Parker might wear.
‘I believe herself is doing fine. Hardly a scratch on her,’ confided Niall. ‘Although they’re keeping her in for a few hours’ observation, same as yourself.’
Do you hear that, Richie-boy? She was here. Surely he would meet her, after everything that happened. He couldn’t assume he was owed anything, mind you.
‘Thank God!’ he said.
‘Where are you taking him?’ Niall demanded as the lift pinged its arrival.
‘The treatment room in A&E for now,’ shrugged the young lad, who either didn’t notice or didn’t care that he was party to what must surely be a major breach of patient confidentiality. But then he didn’t seem like the sharpest knife in the drawer. One wave short of a shipwreck, wasn’t that how the song went? Great karaoke number, that one. The finest he was, Freddie. God love the poor fucker.
‘I’ll pop in later and let you know how she’s doing,’ promised Niall. ‘You saved her life; you’ve a right to know.’
Richie took his new smile for another spin as the lift doors closed. Niall had a touch of romance in him, it seemed. A love of black-and-white movies, maybe, or a bit of ballroom dancing with Mrs Niall of a Wednesday night.
His mood lifted further when he got back to his room to find a nice plate of corned beef and cabbage waiting for him, with sponge cake for dessert. No matter that it was cold, the white sauce congealing on the side of the plate – everything tasted better when he hadn’t made it himself.
* * *
‘I’ve someone here wants to see you,’ Niall’s voice announced from outside the door.
The tea trolley had come and gone and time was starting to hang heavy again. The television was no good. It was all footage of the crash, interspersed with the front of the fire station and – inexplicably – the untouched town square, and he was afraid to hear what they were saying about him.
‘Here he is, the man of the hour.’ Niall pushed open the door with a theatrical flourish. There was definitely a touch of the community theatre about him. Richie could see him playing the barman or the landlord in some little annual play. Then, there she was. In a wheelchair of her own, her neck in some kind of brace and the hair still sticking up on top of her head where the dust thickened and raised it up. He wondered if he should tell her but, mercifully, thought better of it.
He didn’t know whether to get off the trolley or shake her hand or what, but she was up and out of the chair and over to him – oh-ho, Richie-boy! – with her eyes shining and her arms around him. He went with it, closing his eyes against the unfamiliar sweetness of being on the receiving end of a hug. Soft git that he was.
‘I thought we
should say thank you together,’ she said.
‘Thank you for what?’ he said, still doing his reluctant-hero bit. Would his cheeks produce some kind of endearing modest flush, he wondered, or would it be hidden behind the broken veins? ‘Anyone would have done the same.’
‘Not thank each other,’ she said, her tone a soft disapproval. ‘We should give thanks.’
Richie looked at Niall, who was busy lifting up the seat of the empty wheelchair and patting it back down again. ‘Excuse me?’
‘To Allah. For saving us,’ she said and suddenly the shiny eyes looked a bit mental and she was standing far too close. Easy does it, Richie-boy, you’ve been down this road before, hit the crazy pothole more than once in your life. Humour her, that was the only thing for it.
‘We were lucky to be at the front of the bus, all right,’ was the best he could manage.
‘There is no luck.’
Richie nodded dumbly. He had no words for this kind of situation. In the doorway, Niall had moved onto polishing his ID card, clipping it in and out of the plastic sleeve with all the intensity of his mam when she was waiting on the last bingo number for a full house.
‘What is your name?’ she asked.
‘Richie. Murray. Richie Murray.’
‘I’m Alina O’Reilly.’
The mother must be Middle Eastern. The father wouldn’t be the first Irishman to like his women exotic.
‘I suppose a quick prayer would do no harm,’ he said helplessly.
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