The Bus on Thursday Read online

  I stood under the shower till the hot water ran out, vomiting up more frog spawn and leaf matter. Then I put on my pajamas and called in sick. There’s no way I can face another day of school today. Luckily Glenda wasn’t in yet, so I just left a message on the answering machine.

  I’ve tried to lie low over the weekend. Mostly I’ve just stayed in bed, obsessing about Gregory—in particular, about Gregory and Miss Barker. I keep trying to get the evidence straight in my head, but lately my head is just so muddled and confused. I mean, do I have any actual evidence? (A) Saunders reckons Miss Barker used to have love bites. (B) She wore a lot of floaty scarves.

  THAT DOESN’T MEAN FOR ONE MINUTE THAT SHE WAS ON WITH GREGORY.

  And then I remember my other piece of “evidence,” if you can call it that, which is what Gregory said in the Charger that morning when he was banging on about me lacking a moral compass.

  He said: “The other one was just as bad.”

  But what does that even mean? The other what was just as bad? Why did I immediately think he meant the other teacher, as in Miss Barker? And did I even hear him correctly? For example, I’m pretty sure me remembering or half remembering what he said would not be admissible in court, because basically it’s called “hearsay.”

  Of course, thinking about Gregory saying all those horrible things to me just makes me feel like shit. It’s very hard to feel okay about yourself when someone says such terrible things to you. I can barely even remember what he said, but I know that it was bad; very, very bad. I remember the words moral compass, and I remember the word systemic and the word intoxicated, and mostly I remember him saying, “The other one was just as bad.” But some part of my brain seems to have blotted out the rest of it. Whatever he said was so hideous that my brain just had to obliterate it, or else die.

  About two o’clock on Sunday the phone starts ringing. By which I mean the landline. Of course I just try to ignore it. I think it’s probably Mum, and I can’t bear to talk to Mum at the moment, because it means having to try to pretend everything’s fine, and she would see right through me in about five seconds. So I just let it ring, hoping Mum might think I’m out being busy and active and fulfilled in my new life. It rings out but then it starts ringing again, and this repeats every few minutes. Finally, I begin to think, Well, maybe something’s happened, perhaps there’s some kind of emergency. So I answer it.

  “Eleanor?” says this nervy little tremulous voice. “Have you forgotten?”

  “Who is this?” I ask.

  “It’s Daphne,” she says. I stay silent, but I have a creeping feeling going up my spine. It’s Little Sparrow, of course, the strange shrunken woman I met outside the church that time the Praying Mantis exorcized my demons.

  “Have you forgotten?” she asks again.

  “Forgotten what?”

  “The decoupage workshop is this afternoon. Remember the brochure I gave you?”

  I actually bark with laughter. Like that’s really what I want to do right now, Daphne. Decoupage things. Glue pictures for therapy and then cover them with varnish, like I’m in a sheltered workshop.

  “We thought it might be nice to decoupage a small box to give Miss Barker’s family, possibly for her ashes if they choose to cremate her, or just as a keepsake box to hold small, treasured mementos of her life,” says Little Sparrow. “It would be so much more meaningful if everyone who knew her contributed a picture or decorative detail of some kind.”

  “I didn’t know her,” I say. “I just found the body.”

  There’s a moment of silence on the other end of the line. “Nevertheless, you have a connection,” she says.

  I hang up on her.

  To be honest, I immediately feel bad that I did that. Poor Little Sparrow and her decoupage, trying to be helpful. She sounded so needy, almost pathetic. I picture her alone in the church hall, everything laid out in readiness. Would anyone show up? Maybe no one would show up. I mean, let’s face it, she was reduced to ringing me, of all people. Also, I feel bad about this habit I have of hanging up on folk. I need to stop doing that. I do it all the time, whenever things get uncomfortable.

  So I go back to bed, but as I’m lying there, I can’t get rid of this idea that Daphne’s all alone in the church hall, vainly hoping someone will show up. I feel so bad about it that I pull on my clothes, brush my teeth, and go over there. Sure enough, the situation is exactly as I imagined it! Daphne sitting all alone at a big table, surrounded by piles of Women’s Weekly and pots of glue and lacquer, bravely keeping herself busy cutting out pictures from the magazines. It’s heartbreaking. Nobody, not one single person in this lousy town, has shown up to her decoupage workshop.

  That fact alone should have given me pause. But one thing I’m noticing: I don’t seem to be too good these days at picking up on warning signs.

  The floorboards of the church hall creak as I enter, and this seems to startle her. For a moment I actually think she’s about to dive under the table. But then she recovers when she realizes it’s me, and she smiles up at me hopefully. She’s obviously surprised, even delighted, to see me and I feel good about myself for once in my life. It’s not hard to be a nice person. I should try it more often.

  Immediately she thrusts a pile of magazines at me, and a pair of tiny plastic scissors, the sort you might give preschoolers.

  “Let’s get cracking,” she says. “I’m just going through all of these to find anything that seems to resonate with me when I think about Miss Barker.”

  She licks her index finger and proceeds to flick briskly through a magazine, frowning occasionally if something displeases her. Suddenly she stops, rests her hand on a picture, and closes her eyes in concentration. Then she opens her eyes and sets to cutting. Her trembling little hands shake so much, she can barely manage her tiny scissors. I look at the picture she’s cutting out, and my heart sinks. She’s clearly a loony. No wonder no one has bothered turning up. It’s an instructional diagram illustrating how best to shape your eyebrows.

  I look at the pile she’s cut out already. There are pictures of Kim and Kanye and refrigerators and product shots of fabric softeners and deodorant and several pictures involving various ways to serve cauliflower. All hacked out haphazardly as if by somebody going cold turkey off their medication.

  She glances up at me. “Better get a wriggle on,” she says, in her wavering little voice. “We have a lot to get done this afternoon.” And she indicates the small wooden box, about the size of a box of tissues, which apparently we are to decoupage with pictures of Kim and Kanye and cauliflower bakes, etc. It dawns on me that I’m going to have to take charge here and try to steer the decoupage into something halfway appropriate, especially if this is going to be presented to Miss Barker’s family. So I open up a Women’s Weekly and set to work. I’m looking for flowers and laughing children and hearts and bows and ribbons. But once I start looking, I seem to be immediately afflicted with a variation of Daphne’s problem. The worst possible images seem to resonate with me. It’s not that they’re inappropriate exactly—they’re too appropriate. I find myself cutting out tampon ads and pictures of newborn babies and, wherever I can, I’m dismembering hands. I get particularly excited about a nail polish ad, because it offers such a perfect image of a female hand. It takes me ages to cut around all the fingers because I’m trying to demonstrate to Daphne that we need to take a bit of care here.

  When I’ve finished, I place the hand on the top of the pile of pictures. And Daphne falls upon it in raptures. “This is perfect!” she exclaims. “This is exactly what I’ve been looking for!” And she immediately seizes her glue brush and starts gluing it onto the top of the box. But she’s so trembly and rushed, she’s botching it up completely. The hand is too big, so she has to fold the fingers over the edge of the box, but in trying to do this, she’s causing all these creases and bubbles to appear. And everybody knows that with decoupage, there’s two simple rules: no creases, and absolutely no fucking bubbles. So then she�
�s trying to smooth them all out, but she’s so agitated that she tears one of the fingers. And given that the picture has taken me about twenty minutes to cut out so meticulously, I completely lose my shit. “Careful!” I practically yell at her. “You see what you’ve done? You’ve totally wrecked it!”

  Well, I feel terrible because she crumples completely. She’s literally a puddle on the floor. “I’m useless!” she’s blubbering. “I’m useless at everything!” “No, you’re not useless,” I say, and I go around and sit next to her and sort of pat her on her back, which is so bony it scares me, so I stop patting her. “You were just a bit rough, that’s all. I’ve done a lot of this craft stuff, and anything involving glue and paper, trust me, years of experience, you have to be super careful.”

  And now she sighs a fluttery little sigh and she leans her head against me, which is weird and freaks me out a bit but I gingerly place a comforting arm around her shoulder.

  “It’s just that I feel like I’m failing her,” she says.

  “Failing who?” I ask.

  “Miss Barker.”

  I get a little cold chill up my neck right there.

  “She’s stuck, you see. I can feel it. She doesn’t want to go.”

  “Stuck?” I say.

  “That’s what I feel. Either she’s confused or angry or maybe she’s left something behind, but she’s not going anywhere.”

  Meanwhile I’m staring at the hand on the box. I know exactly what Miss Barker has left behind, currently submerged in mud and eel poo at the bottom of the Pondage.

  “And I promised her,” bleats Daphne. “As soon as I heard that you’d found her in the Pondage. I said, ‘Miss Barker, I will help you transition.’ Because that’s what I do, you see. That’s what I’m here for.”

  By now, I’m totally wishing that I’d never got out of bed to answer that phone. (Why does anyone ever get out of bed? Nothing good can come of it.) Also I’m noticing that she seems to have the heating in the hall up super high, because the atmosphere is stifling, thick with glue fumes.

  “People don’t realize that spirits sometimes need assistance,” she’s saying. “But of course, after what they’ve been through, they’re terribly nervous. Not to mention disoriented. They sometimes require a firm hand. But in this case, nothing I do seems to make any difference.”

  I actually flinch when she says “firm hand,” and let out a kind of nervous giggle. Now she leans forward very close. I get the familiar whiff of eau de cologne and mothballs. Clearly Daphne must suspend herself in a wardrobe in between appearances.

  “I hope you won’t take this the wrong way,” she whispers, “but I think it’s you.”

  “Me?”

  “You’re the problem.”

  “Why?” I cry, immediately on the defensive. “What have I ever done to Miss Barker?”

  “It’s the children. She’s worried about the children. Because, of course, she’s devoted to them.”

  I stare at her.

  A drop of sweat literally falls off my eyebrow.

  She’s got me. She’s totally got me. I can’t argue this one.

  Because of course Miss Barker has every reason to be worried about the children. I couldn’t possibly be a less competent teacher. I’m never prepared. I’m always handing out the same old worksheets. Sometimes I don’t even check if they’re age-appropriate. The other day the littlies were up in arms because I gave them a worksheet on long division. I’m like, “Don’t be such babies, at least have a go at it!” Big mistake. Tears, threats, tantrums ensued. And the whole time, unbeknownst to me, Miss B. is wafting about in the rafters observing all this! Let me say, it’s a very weird uncomfortable feeling to know that ghosts, spirits, whatever, have been spying on you. And then complaining about you to anyone who will listen, namely Daphne.

  “You know what?” I say. “Tell Miss Barker not to worry. Okay, there’s been a few teething problems, but once I get them straightened out—”

  I stop with a jolt because I’m remembering that Miss Barker was on with Gregory.

  (Possibly.)

  (Maybe not.)

  (Probably.)

  (Most likely.)

  A horrible thought occurs to me.

  If Miss Barker knows about the worksheets, what else does she know?

  I’m creeped out. I actually shudder. The phrase “gross invasion of privacy” springs to mind. Just because someone’s dead does not give them the right to poke their nose into someone else’s business, and I say as much to Daphne. It’s my classroom now, so get over yourself, Miss B. And another thing: okay, I’m pretty used to copping the blame for everything in this town, but I’m buggered if I’m going to accept responsibility for Miss Barker rattling around groaning and moaning when she should just do us all a favor and skedaddle off to whatever celestial pastures await her.

  Well, Daphne is apparently not used to this kind of forthright talk, and from all the lip-trembling that’s going on, I assume she’s about to dissolve into tears again. But instead, she surprises me. I feel her tiny torso stiffen and she takes a deep shaky breath.

  “I don’t blame you for what you say, because you can’t help it,” she says. “You have a sickness. The cells of your body are turning against you.”

  Let me just take a moment to think about this.

  The rational part of what’s left of my brain says that Little Sparrow and Friar Hernandez have been gossiping about me, and what she said simply represents her extremely minimal understanding of cancer. But the irrational part of my brain (which is most of it) doesn’t like it at all. I think back to that doctor’s drawing of my stupid cells piling up on top of one another, and I wonder, Is that what the doctor meant? Are all those infinitesimal cells, unique to me, the essence of me, that go together to make me, now under instruction to terminate me? To self-destruct? To scuttle the sub and leave it rusting on the ocean floor?

  Am I so despicable a person that even my own body can’t stand me?

  I totally can’t afford to think like this.

  Of course, I got out of there straight away. I wasn’t hanging around for more insights from Daphne. Besides, it was literally six hundred degrees in there, like a hot yoga studio. Also, the fumes from her eau de cologne were making me nauseous.

  Once I step outside and the cold mountain air hits me, the queasiness subsides and I realize that I’m actually quite hungry. So since I’m up and dressed and out and about, I decide to go to the shop and stock up on my usual, by which I mean Coke, Jatz crackers, and a family-size block of Dairy Milk chocolate. I say hi to Janelle, but (am I imagining this?) she seems a little cool toward me. A little thin-lipped and judgy in her demeanor. I try to think what in particular she could be so frosty about, but I don’t think I’ve done anything especially terrible since the Parent-Teacher Night. Except find Miss Barker’s body in the Pondage. Surely these hicks don’t blame me for that?

  And just as I’m coming out of the shop with my supplies, I see this group of young people piling out of a couple of four-wheel drives. I guess they’re about my age or maybe a bit younger and clearly they’re just passing through, on their way back from the snow. And they all look so happy, like life is so good, and they’re clowning around and cracking up at some joke they have going. They pay me no attention; I don’t think they even really see me. But I just stop in my tracks and stare at them. They represent everything I want and don’t have. They radiate health and youth and happiness and good times and fun and laughter and friendship. And on top of the afternoon I’ve just had, the sight of them radiating all that fucking sunshine sends me plunging right into the abyss. Because I’ve been robbed of all that. It flew out the window the day the cancer demon came knocking at my door. Because somehow, through an unhappy combination of personal weakness, bad genes, bad living, and bad luck, instead of slamming the door right in the face of that hoary old devil, apparently I opened wide and welcomed him in.

  So I came home and cried for about three hours.

&nbs
p; Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to chuck out my antidepressants.

  Now I’ve cracked open a bottle of wine. I’m trying to devise a plan, is what I’m trying to do. I need to dig myself out of this abyss.

  Because I’ve been here before and it’s bad. In my experience, you have to treat it exactly the same way James Franco did when that giant boulder fell on him when he was canyoning. You have to do what it takes to get out, even if it means drinking your own urine and sawing off your arm with a blunt pocket knife.

  First up, ask yourself, where does the misery spring from?

  Is it this horrible job?

  Certainly it’s partly this horrible job.

  So why don’t I just quit? Why put up with all this crap? There is absolutely nothing to stop me packing up the car and hotfooting it out of here. I don’t owe anyone anything. I hate it here. Everyone is either mad or horrible. Those are the two options: mad or horrible. Even Gregory, and he is the best thing about this place, is mad and horrible—and besides, he was on with Miss Barker.

  Okay, let’s seriously think about this. I guess if I walk out, it’s safe to assume that the Education Department will never give me another job, ever. I mean, let’s face it, they’d only just started employing me again. But maybe I could legitimately claim mental health issues? I mean, I did actually find a dead body—surely that could justify an abrupt departure. And anyway, when I really think about it, do I even want to be a teacher anymore? I don’t think I’m cut out for it. I have no patience. I used to have patience, but I don’t anymore. I just seem to be in a permanent state of irritability all the time. Those whiny little voices make me want to rip my own head off.