‘Or touch,’ Gillian suggests.
‘Or tongue,’ adds Julie.
And Deborah feels it again: that mix of vicarious prurience tinged with jealousy. She is glad to hear Marianne disparaged but at the same time wishes Julie had witnessed her wearing huge granny-pants, off-white from a thousand wash cycles, on top of a bush like a burst couch. As it is, she is left with this discomfiting feeling of being somehow smaller, being somehow left behind.
Oh, make up your minds, ladies, thinks Marianne, having overheard every giddily overexcited word. Why is it that every girl who’s had more sexual experience than you is a slut, and every girl who’s had less is a square? Chalk another one up to Catholic education. Nah - probably the same across all denominations, just as long as they’re British.
Marianne had readily identified Deborah Thomson and Gillian Cole as projecting-insecure-bitch material within a week or two of starting at her new school. It was hard to say, therefore, whether she had opted to generally disregard them before or after they decided that their clique should ostracise her. What she does know for sure is that her ignoring them has bothered them a lot more than them ignoring her. The crucial difference was in the practice: her ignoring them has consisted of, well, ignoring them; whereas their blanking her seems to be rather a theatrical undertaking. And nothing says you’re ignoring somebody quite like going out of your way to tell them about it.
‘Okay, my turn,’ says Gillian. ‘Caitlin.’
Must be calibrating the sexual-experience barometer, Marianne reckons. Had a few hits towards the racier end and now they need to balance up by zeroing in on a bookish L7.
‘You kidding?’ Yvonne asks. ‘She’s never got off with anybody.’
‘How far do you think she would go, though?’ asks Deborah.
‘Good-night kiss and no tongues,’ Yvonne says with a glib confidence. ‘Doesn’t matter. There’s no way any of the boys would be interested anyway.’
Rocks allows himself a second lingering look at wee Caitlin, seeing as Dazza seems happy taking his time about his own assessment. He then turns to look across Kirk and waits expectantly for Dazza’s verdict. They both nod at the same time, laughing again.
‘Doesnae score high on the plausibility scale, though,’ Rocks concedes.
‘Ah, see, you never know, though. Sometimes it’s the quiet ones that surprise you. But purely hypothetically? Fuck aye, I would. Probably a tidy wee bod underneath there, no’ like some of the chip-shop casualties you see. If it was on offer, I’d be in about her like a dug with a bucket of mince.’
‘Seriously?’ Rocks says, hoping it doesn’t sound like he might be seeking advance approval in the unlikely event that he and Caitlin were to hit it off.
‘Well, I’m not saying she’s top of my wish-list, but I thought we were just playing what-if. I’ll tell you this, though: give it a year or two, and out of all the girls in our year, Caitlin could well be one of the ones you’d most want to be going out with. Just because she doesnae say much doesnae mean she’s got nothing to say. Lassie like that, folk never notice what’s there.’
Rocks thinks of Dazza getting off with Katherine Gelaghtly at that party; it was rumoured that he even shagged her that night. It was only when Rocks saw her in Geography the next week that he realised he’d been in her class for months without noticing her. The Katherine that showed up every day in school and the Katherine who had turned up after the Halloween disco were two very different girls. No wonder Dazza has taken a while to get his head round the idea of this game, and why he’s taking so long to answer each time. Dazza’s instruments of appraisal are far more sensitively tuned, and his plausibility gauge is set very differently to Rocks’.
Rocks still knows how he can really test him, though.
‘Okay, I’ve got one: Rosemary.’
They both glance down the aisle, and for once, Dazza’s verdict is instant.
‘You’re taking the piss now,’ he says.
Caitlin watches Rosemary climb to her feet and grip the seat back for balance as she takes a few paces down the aisle. She’s got that glower about her, a look of determined disapproval and simmering indignation that anyone meeting her for the first time would be alarmed to learn is actually her neutral expression. She can do happy, but it’s a forced happy, a dutiful, affected, ‘Jesus says I must be happy’ mugging that’s actually more intimidating than her frown. She has a crucifix round her neck, and umpteen Christian badges on her jacket: Pro-Life, SPUC, Silver Ring, True Love Waits and, of course, that bloody fish. The Silver Ring and True Love Waits buttons make Caitlin smile every time. They really ought to be accompanied by a more honest third badge, saying: ‘Chance would be a fine thing’; or maybe simply: ‘As if’. It’s hard to imagine anyone less interested in sex.
Caitlin has heard it remarked of some girls that they were thirteen going on thirty. She would have said Rosemary was seventeen going on forty-five if it wasn’t that Rosemary had already been forty-five for a good few years before she ever turned seventeen.
Rosemary makes her way forward a couple of rows, then leans over to talk to Deputy Dan.
‘Mr Guthrie, sir, would it be all right if I got out my guitar?’
Fuck no, thinks Kane, before turning to share an appalled look with Heather, who puts a fist in her mouth and bites her knuckles.
‘That’s an excellent idea, Rosemary,’ Guthrie replies. ‘Singing some hymns would be most appropriate,’ he adds, with a look to Blake for encouragement; or is it just to check the priest isn’t wincing too?
‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, steady the buffs,’ Kane says quietly to Heather. ‘Can we not have a vote on this?’
Guthrie gets to his feet, offering to help Rosemary take her guitar down from an overhead rack. Kane seizes this moment to send a what-the-fuck? look across to Blake, who holds up his palms in an apologetic gesture of helplessness.
‘Keep it light, though,’ Guthrie advises. ‘Something to raise our spirits.’
Rosemary unzips the PVC carry case and removes her six-string, placing one foot on an armrest and supporting the guitar on her raised knee. Then she starts to play, at which point there really is an outpouring of religious expression.
‘Oh, Glory be.’
‘For Christ’s sake.’
‘God almighty.’
‘Mother of God.’
‘Christ on crutches.’
‘Jesus fuck.’
Rosemary strums a few bars, then launches full-throated into a hymn.
‘It’s me, it’s me, it’s me oh Lord,
Standing in the need of prayer.
Not my brother or my sister, but it’s me oh Lord,
Standing in the need of prayer.’
Bernadette joins in with gusto, as does Maria a split second later. Caught in the epicentre of this beamer-quake, Caitlin wants the ground to open up. She feels her cheeks burning, wants to leap to her feet and yell: ‘I am not with these people.’ She stares at the floor with her head down, too mortified to make eye contact with another human being right now.
‘EVERYBODY, it’s me, it’s me, it’s me oh Lord,
Standing in the need of prayer . . .’
‘Standing in the need of singing lessons, more like,’ says Deso.
‘Do you think if there was a God, he’d want to listen to that pish?’ Adnan asks.
‘Christ, why could it not have been her that Barker stabbed?’ Beansy moans.
‘Fuck it,’ says Radar, climbing over Adnan.
‘Where you going?’
‘I can take being without my Nintendo, but this violates my fuckin’ human rights.’
Radar starts moving down the bus, looking out the window rather than at Rosemary in order to allay suspicion. She wouldn’t notice anyway. She’s so into her hymn that she even has her eyes closed.
Adnan pictures him as only a faint outline: STEALTH MODE POWER-UP ENGAGED.
Radar whips the guitar from Rosemary’s hands and immediately turns around to block her,
keeping his body between her and the instrument. With little room to manoeuvre, it’s like trying to keep a beachball off someone in a phone box, so he offers it towards the nearest person, which turns out to be Caitlin. She can see the resignation in his face the moment he makes the usual wrong assumption about her being with the God-squadders, by which time the guitar is in her grasp.
‘Thank you, Caitlin,’ says Rosemary, reaching out expectantly and also making the same wrong assumption.
Caitlin turns round and instead offers it to the first outstretched hand. It’s that Goth girl, Marianne, who Caitlin finds a bit scary, but she smiles conspiratorially as she takes possession of the guitar, and it feels like something is shared in a moment of mutual complicity.
Marianne, in turn, passes it on to Cameron. He steps into the aisle and stands up with it, striking a pose. Behind him, Adnan can see Rosemary still trying to wrestle her way past Radar, with Guthrie getting to his feet once more at their backs. He’s wondering if there’s any way of getting one of these windows open so that Cam can lob the thing right out. As it stands, it’s only a matter of time before it’s restored to Rosemary’s keeping, amid another loud reminder of how they’re all ‘a damp disgrace’.
Rosemary gets a foot around Radar’s shin and draws upon the good Lord’s strength to trip him to the ground, administering the sacrament of a sensible shoe up his arse as she stomps over his sprawled figure. Cameron gets an eyeful of this and suddenly decides the guitar is a hot potato. Fortunately for Cam, Deso must have remembered his asbestos gloves, because he gratefully takes hold of the neck and pulls the box across the seat back. Standing up with one foot on his seat and the fret-board gripped in his left hand, he lets rip with a finger-flashing classical intro of a virtuosity and accomplishment so unexpected that even Rosemary pauses in her tracks.
Deso clocks Adnan’s look of astonishment.
‘It’s what you play when you don’t have Nintendo,’ he says, then breaks into a strum, nodding to emphasise the beat until people realise this is a cue to clap. Beansy cottons on first, then Cam, then everybody joins in, which seems to further restrain Rosemary, who just waits with her arms folded to see and hear what will emerge.
‘I want my hole, I want my hole,’ Deso sings, and is immediately joined, with ecstatic enthusiasm, by everyone to the rear of the bus. Everyone except Rosemary, obviously.
‘I want my hole-i-days.
To see the cunt,
To see the cunt . . .’
Guthrie comes lolloping up the aisle desperately, trampling poor Radar in his panicked urgency to stem this sudden onslaught of musically accompanied damp disgrace.
‘To see the cunt-a-ree.
Fuck you!
Fuck you . . .’
Rosemary all but falls on top of an appalled Liam Donnelly as she leans back to let Guthrie charge past. Liam loses his normally unflappable studied poise as he flattens himself against the window away from Rosemary, looking like he’s afraid uncool is contagious.
‘For curiositee,
I want my hole,
I want my hole . . .’
Guthrie has always looked like a heart attack waiting to happen, and Adnan strongly suspects the day could be upon them. Deputy Dan has forever been inclined to take daft weanish behaviour too seriously, but he’s outdoing himself today by way of disproportionate response. They’re singing a stupid song that’s been a teacher-baiting staple of bus trips since primary school, one that most staff have always had the good sense to ignore. Who knows what’s going through that increasingly ruddy head of his; must be something about underlining his authority ahead of reaching what he suspects will constitute an uncomfortably informal environment. And talk about closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. They’ve already belted out the ‘cunt’ and ‘fuck you’ lines - what more is he hoping to prevent? A shaming rendition of ‘The front of the bus, they cannae sing’, perhaps?
He’s got Deso in his sights now, though. Adnan images it: danger level in the red, a proximity detector pulsing concentrically, ETA running down in milliseconds. It’s reading around 0.657 when Marky suddenly leaps up from his seat, having made a slightly disquieting discovery.
‘Fuck, my arm’s on fire.’
Fizzy has to duck as Marky starts flailing his burning sleeve in an attempt to beat out the flames.
‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ Guthrie says with a gasp, spinning on his heel and grabbing hold of Marky in one unbroken motion. He takes him down like it’s a wrestling move, getting him on to the floor and smothering the flames by lying with his chest across Marky’s arm. There’s a huddle around them, everybody leaning in to see. A little smoke emerges from somewhere around Guthrie’s neck as he lifts himself up to check that the fire has died.
‘Are you all right?’ he asks Marky.
Marky just lies there looking a little stunned, and it’s anybody’s guess whether this is more down to the shock of the conflagration or the force and rapidity with which Guthrie resolved the situation.
‘Markus, are you all right?’
Marky nods, holding up his jacket sleeve. It’s all black and melty, the outer layer collapsed and shrivelled. He stares at it in an entranced daze, then his eyes widen as his features suddenly become sharply alert.
‘Fuck!’ he yells.
‘It’s okay, stay calm,’ Guthrie says. ‘Just take a moment.’
‘Naw, look, for fuck’s sake, the fire,’ Marky insists, a panic across his face as he extends his arm.
‘It’s okay, it’s out now,’ Guthrie tells him, taking hold of his wrist and restraining him from his attempts to get up. ‘We’ll get this off and make sure you’re not injured.’
‘I’m not talking about my arm. The fuckin’ bus is on fire!’
At which point everyone looks along the line of where Marky’s outstretched arm was actually pointing, and sees that the curtains next to Fizzy are indeed now well ablaze.
‘Where’s the fire extinguisher?’ Guthrie shouts.
Father Blake has reached it even as Guthrie speaks. He wrenches the canister from its strapping on the wall and bounds down the aisle, already spraying water towards the curtains before he reaches the fire.
It’s the sudden leap into action from Blake that belatedly alerts the coach driver to precisely what is being wrought upon his vehicle. A glance in his aisle-view mirror presents a sight he cannot quite believe, which is why neither can he help but physically turn to confirm with the naked eye that, yes, the St Peter’s kids have indeed set his bus on fire.
His eyes are only off the road for a second, but it’s long enough for the vehicle to start drifting just as it is coming into a bend. He overcompensates on the wheel as he returns to facing the road, causing the bus to fishtail as the sideways momentum is instantly brought into conflict with the forward drive.
Back in the rear section, the lurch has a whiplash effect, pulling everyone first one way then the opposite. It tosses them all towards the right-hand side, a section of which is now wet and smouldering.
Marianne, having been leaning into the aisle, is sent sprawling back across her double seat, giving her an extreme close-up view out of the window. Due to the sudden uncontrolled change in direction, the coach’s forward momentum is pulling against the efforts of the engine and the traction of the tyres to drag it sideways towards the grey metal crash barrier. This previously substantial-looking steel restraint suddenly appears to consist of two flimsy-looking waist-high rails, about to face off against the mass and energy of a three-metre-high coach, and beyond this barrier she can see a five-hundred-foot, high-gradient slope down to the shores of a loch.
There’s a percussive hiss of brakes and a scream from the engine as the driver drops the gears and ups the revs. The side of the bus scrapes the barrier with a foil-meets-fillings shriek and a shower of sparks, then from close to the front on the other side there sounds the most hideously dull and solid bang, the sound of the bus colliding very hard with something that did not giv
e.
The bus comes to a sudden halt a fraction of a second later, the resultant jolt banging a few heads on seat backs and thus partially obscuring the sound and vibration of a second exterior impact. Sounds like it came from above.
There’s a moment of complete silence, not even the sound of the engine, which has either stalled in the final stop or been killed by the driver. Nobody says a thing. It’s like they all need a second or two before they can re-engage with anything or anyone.
Then an adult voice asks if everyone is okay. It sounds to Deso like it’s somewhere in the distance; can’t tell if it’s Guthrie or Blake or even Kane. He hears a few responses, each gradually getting closer, like they’re being faded up as his surroundings come back into focus. He puts a hand to his forehead. It took a bang but it doesn’t feel sore. He looks up, sees everyone slowly reanimating: those sent sprawling picking themselves up, others just doing the same as him: a quick once-over to confirm nothing’s amiss.
Then Deso sees Radar, still prostrate in the aisle, covered in tiny pieces of glass. He’s lifting himself up from the floor, glass tinkling to the ground around him with every movement, and as he raises his head he becomes aware of blood running down his face. He puts a hand to it then looks dazed and uncompre hendingly at his darkly smeared fingers.
He pats his hair, dislodging further fragments of glass, and finds more blood pooled up there.
‘Jesus . . . Radar,’ Beansy says, frightened.
Radar kneels on the aisle floor and continues to pat his scalp. ‘Not mine,’ he says, with a very gentle shake of his head.
That’s when he glances up, as does Julie, who screams.
The overhead skylight panel has been shattered by the impact of a deer’s head, which is now jutting through the aperture, staring into the coach with its dead-black sewn-button eyes.
‘Euh, that’s bowfin’,’ suggests Cameron.
The deer’s head is lolling at an awkward angle, still connected by an evidently broken neck to the rest of the animal. Father Blake takes a step underneath it, helping Radar get to his feet. It’s still a hypnotic sight in its staggering incongruity, something of a bad Photoshop job about it. Deso is trying to imagine the caption when the head suddenly jerks and he just about shites himself, in common with probably everyone else. Another rivulet of blood is disgorged from somewhere down the beast’s throat and runs out of its mouth on to Father Blake’s head, after which the deer is still once again.
Pandaemonium Page 6
