Rose didn’t say anything as she stepped up on to the platform, but she stretched out her hand as if to offer a fare. Kit, slightly surprised by the gesture, extended her own hand to take whatever the fingers of the black glove were holding.
A single coin dropped into Kit’s open palm. Kit had never seen it’s like before; it was broader than an old 50p piece, thicker than a pound coin, heavy enough to have been cast in solid silver. It might almost have been a medal or a medallion rather than a coin, but it had no ribbon, nor any means by which it could have been attached to a chain. The side exposed to her gaze presumably corresponded to the “heads” side of an ordinary coin, but the head it displayed was horned and bearded like a goat. Kit was tempted to flip it over to see if the denomination marked on the other side was “1 soul” but the thought was too irreverent to act upon. The coin was obviously too valuable to drop into the slot in the fare box, so Kit put it in the pocket of her uniform jacket, just as she would have done if it had been a ten-pound note. Rose hadn’t waited for any change.
Stephen was sitting next to the door on the sideways-facing seat. It seemed to Kit that Rose favored the boy with a knowing glance as she passed by, but the whore wasn’t giving him any kind of come hither. Kit’s eyes—Stephen’s too, in all probability—followed her to the first of the forward-facing seats on the driver’s side, where she sat down as demurely as her costume permitted. Not until then did Kit turn to face the remaining ghosts in the queue.
There were four: two male and two female. They all looked as if they’d have qualified for OAP passes if they’d still been alive. They were all thin, all sunken-cheeked and all hollow-eyed, gaunt by nature if not by name. Unlike Rose Selavy, not one of them would have caught Kit’s eye if they’d been in an averagely dilapidated crowd of late-morning shoppers, even though they looked as if they had forgotten how to pretend to be alive. Maybe, Kit thought, they’d forgotten how to be alive while they still had years to go, and that was why they hadn’t taken full advantage of the moment when it actually arrived. She wondered momentarily why they weren’t at the railway station awaiting the services of a haunted train-driver, but the answer was obvious enough. Trains ran on tracks. Trains weren’t as versatile as buses.
The first of the four—an old man—gave her a copper coin that seemed just as exotic, if nowhere near as valuable, as the one that Rose had tendered as a fare. Kit barely glanced at it before putting it away, but she noticed that the exposed face displayed neither a head not a denomination; it bore the stylized image of a bird, perhaps a buzzard. The next in line—a woman—offered a silver coin, but one much smaller than the one Rose had given her, not much bigger than a 10p piece. The remaining man and woman offered coins the color and texture of brass, also quite small. One, at least, bore the image of a tree on the face Kit glimpsed, but the passengers were in a hurry to get aboard and they didn’t give her time to examine the fares too closely. She had all three coins in her hand before she had the opportunity to stow them in her pocket.
Stephen muttered something that sounded like “a collection of monks”, but when she glanced at him questioningly he said: “Edvard Munch. Norwegian painter. Did a classic hollow-eyed whore—and The Scream, of course.”
“Oh aye,” she said. “You can buy a plastic blow-up version. Nice party-piece, if you like that sort of tat.” Stephen looked a little hollow-eyed himself, and his blushless complexion seemed excessively white, but that was probably just a trick of the light. Considering that five ghosts had just filed past him to take their seats on the bus he was holding up well. He thought that he was dreaming. Perhaps he was.
Kit put the bus into gear and moved smoothly away from the stop. The fog was even denser now, and the light of the bus’s headlamps was reflected back by a slowly swirling vapor that seemed so oily as to be organic. Kit couldn’t see the pavement, but she could see the broken white line that ran parallel with it, and the solid line on the offside of the vehicle that marked the other side of the lane. It was obviously a bus lane; as long as she didn’t run into a black taxi she had it entirely to herself—any other traffic on the road would have to stay out of it, passing by to the right.
There didn’t seem to be any traffic in the outer lane, but Kit wasn’t sure that the appearance could be trusted, give the density of the fog.
Another six dead people got on at the next stop, tendering a bizarre assortment of fares which looked more like buttons and counters than coins. They were all round, but only two were metallic and they were so light that they had to be mostly aluminum. Two were wooden and two were plastic—but at least two bore images of goatish faces not unlike the one on Rose’s coin. One displayed a design that might have been a bat in flight, one a bunch of grapes, and one the head of a pike or spear.
This second contingent seemed distinctly less fresh than the first lot. Their clothes were filthy and ragged, but the parchment texture of the shrunken flesh clinging to the bones of their faces did allow them to retain a certain dignity of appearance and manner. They still had enough in the way of lips and cheeks to save them from manifesting the helpless idiotic grins that scoured skulls were compelled to wear, but they seemed too far advanced towards desiccation to be capable of tears, whether of sadness or quiet distress. They were all very thin; if they had not died of anorexia—and Kit could not believe for an instant that they had—then they had certainly become anorectic while loitering in the world they should have left for good.
“They aren’t screaming,” she said to Stephen, as she put their fares way.
“Neither is the figure in The Scream,” Stephen told her. “He’s clapping his fingers over his ears because he’s trying to shut out a scream uttered by the landscape that surrounds him: it’s the world, or maybe the whole universe, that’s screaming.”
Kit nodded slowly as the bus moved off. Was that, she wondered, how the ghosts had got stuck? Was it as simple as that? Had they simply covered their ears when the trump of doom sounded, refusing to heed it? Had they found the scream of the universe unbearable, and wrapped themselves up in some kind of defensive dream? But why was the universe screaming—or why did they perceive it that way? Was it anguish or rage, pain or despair?
Some of the second batch of passengers might have been homeless while they were alive, Kit thought, but most of them would have been the kind of people who routinely used buses. They were not exactly a representative cross-section of society, but they were not by any means its dregs, no matter what the likes of Mrs. Gaunt might have thought of them. Their clothes were worn, but not ragged, more Marks & Spencer than Harvey Nicholls but not without a certain stubborn quality. The ghosts had grown thin in death, starvelings slowly consuming their own spiritual substance—including substance they could ill afford to surrender—but they could still afford to pay their fares.
“How many more stops are there?” Stephen wanted to know. When Kit glanced back he met her eyes, but only for a moment. His gaze flickered sideways, as if he didn’t know whether to look for an answer from Kit or Rose Selavy. He was still convinced that he was dreaming, but either way he was no longer Even Stephen. He was as odd as he’d ever be, no matter where life’s highway might take him in the future.
“As many as there are,” Kit told him. “But they’ll all be request stops. If no one’s waiting, I can just drive on.”
“It’s cold out there,” Rose Selavy said, speaking in a curiously off-hand manner. “The shelters aren’t much protection. But they’ll just have to wait. There won’t be another bus through here for quite some time.”
There were eight more passengers waiting at the next stop, and their fares weren’t much more substantial than sequins. If any of the pearly flakes had designs inscribed on their surfaces they were too tiny for Kit to make them out.
Like the living, Kit observed, the dead distributed themselves about the window seats, not one of them wanting to sit next to someone else while there was still an empty pair to be occupied. Unless they were actually
travelling in pairs, Kit’s experience had informed her, people always preferred to sit alone; when that option was no longer open to them they meekly picked out the least intimidating partners, and then proceeded to ignore them completely, unless and until the person on the inside had to ask the person on the outside to excuse them so that he or she could get off. The dead had evidently conserved the habit; if the bus became crowded, every one of them would have the legacy of a lifetime’s practice to assist them in the duty of ignoring one another.
That knowledge made the fact that no one was talking seem much less ominous than it might have been. The dead, apparently, were not accustomed to travelling in pairs. They kept themselves to themselves. They were polite. They were probably lonely too, but hardly liked to say so. Kit could not imagine that anyone else on this particular bus was as assertive a haunter as Rose Selavy.
The gathering gloom now seemed utterly lightless. The yellow glow of the headlamps was avidly sucked up by the void ahead, which refused to reflect back more than a dull crimson gleam. The lane-markings were still visible, but they too seemed to be stained with red. Although Kit’s eyes were fixed attentively on the road ahead she sensed that Stephen was becoming restless. He was moving about in his seat, peering out of the window one moment and looking back at his fellow passengers the next.
“Where are we going?” he asked, again.
“I don’t know,” Kit admitted, “but wherever it is, I intend to get there. And back again.”
She heard him murmur “Shit,” and inferred that he had just pinched himself, as people who wanted to know whether or not they were dreaming were routinely advised to do. He probably pinched himself again, much harder, but he didn’t repeat the expletive. Instead, he said: “You are sure that you can get back again, aren’t you?”
It was one of those times when honesty was the second-best policy. “Trust me,” she said. “I’m a bus driver.”
“I don’t even know your second name,” he said, forlornly. “Mine’s Carraway, by the way.”
“As in seeds?”
“Not quite. Two rs.”
“Mine’s Miner,” she told him.
“As in bird or junior?”
“As in pit and Arthur Scargill.”
Stephen thought about that for a moment or two, applying his usual ingenuity to the revelation, and then said: “It could have been worse. Your Mum and Dad might have called you Clementine.”
“What makes you think they didn’t?” Kit said, though gritted teeth.
He must have thought about herring boxes without topses, but he must have thought about oh my darling too, and in the end he decided that now wasn’t the right time to explore the lyric any further. Maybe he thought there’d be time if they got back. Maybe there would.
The six new passengers who got on at the next stop were in a terrible condition, although there wasn’t a maggot in sight. Their flesh was so sparse that it hardly seemed to be holding their bones together, and probably wouldn’t have if their muscles and sinews hadn’t shriveled to wires and their cartilages to dried-up glue. They couldn’t walk like the living any longer; stiffness forced their gait into a curious parody of a dance. A cakewalk, perhaps, or a line-dance without the benefit of stomping cowboy boots. But in spite of everything, they still moved with a certain hauteur, a definite pride. All they offered as fares were fragments of ash, as insubstantial as snowflakes, but they tendered their offerings with all due solemnity, and she received them in the same spirit.
“The totentanz,” was the expert judgment of the art historian, delivered in a whisper as Stephen leaned towards her. “The dance of death,” he translated, because he understood that even though she wasn’t stupid, she didn’t know everything.
Kit remembered an illustration she’d once seen of a cross-section of society being led away by Death, tripping the dark fantastic as they went. She’d seen it in a TV documentary, and maybe something like it in some foreign movie, but it had seemed like a mere parody of a dance even then. And where was Death now, with his black cloak and his scythe? On holiday? On strike? Banished to Discworld? Or had he simply retired, collecting his OAP bus pass just like everybody else, exhausted by the demands of the twenty-four/seven world. He was surely here in spirit, if not in whatever he had instead of flesh, but he was no longer the leader of any kind of dance. He was just a silent passenger on the bus, who would have been carefully unheeded by his fellow-travelers even if he were sitting there like a holy terror with a black wig and kinky boots.
Bus drivers were supposed to keep their eyes on the road ahead whenever their vehicles were in motion, but Kit was struck so forcefully by these thoughts that she looked around at the silent figure of Rose Selavy, still clad in something that could pass for finery, or for her working clothes. She was only a symbolist joke, but what else was Death-with-the-scythe, when all was said and done? What was the whole, holy and hellish all-screaming, all-encompassing universe?
Kit turned back, guilty about her momentary distraction. Of course Rose Selavy wasn’t death personified. She was Eros C’est-la-Vie, not quite the opposite but near enough. Death-the-dancer had gone the way of God and the Devil, having been forced into the margins of belief by the bathetic quiddity of late-night shopping and travel by bus. Fate had moved on, creating openings for a new kind of driver—whose nature, if not her name, was legion.
It occurred to Kit, not for the first time, that she might have occasion to drive this route again, perhaps on a regular basis. The job was probably hers for the asking, if she wanted it—but she didn’t. She hadn’t let up on that part of the deal, and she’d seen nothing yet to make her change her mind.
She knew that the next stop would be the last at which any passengers would be waiting, because Michael was there, with seven others. These were in no condition for dancing; they could hardly walk unaided. They were the kind of people to which passengers already on the bus would normally have surrendered their seats, before retreating as far away as possible, but that wasn’t what happened this time because the bus was a long way from normality. Seven dead people who still had empty seats beside them—including Stephen and Rose Selavy—got up and came forward to assist Michael in getting the passengers aboard and seated, and they all, without exception, sat down beside them in the seats from which they had arisen. Even these were no mere skeletons devoid of all phantom flesh, but they seemed exceedingly frail, as if their bones might turn to dust at any moment. Their clothes had the texture of tissue-paper, but they were neat enough, and not unstylish, in a macabre sort of way.
Not one of the newcomers tendered a fare, or offered Kit so much as an apologetic smile, but when they were all safely seated Michael returned to the platform to offer Kit a coin that shone like pure gold. It displayed the face of an angel, but the angel seemed oddly pathetic, perhaps because he was weeping.
“That will cover all of us,” Michael assured her. “Do you mind if I stay here?”
“It’s against regulations,” Kit told him, pointing to the notice which declared that passengers were not permitted to stand forward of the point at which it was posted, and must not speak to the driver while the bus was in motion
“I won’t tell anyone if you don’t,” Michael assured her. “What would they do to you, anyway? You’re much too valuable to be fired.”
“True,” she admitted. “In any case, I really want to hear what you’ve got to say—if I can’t, I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to find my way out of the fog.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
“Death,” Michael said, in a soft voice that carried just a suspicion of bitterness, “is a lottery. It comes upon you on a whim, whether as a creeping attrition or a sudden shock. Perhaps there was a time when the dead of Western Christendom, forearmed by faith, settled down in their graves with their decaying flesh for company, patiently awaiting resurrection and judgment—but I doubt it. Faith of that kind was no more powerful than the ghost shirts the American Indians put on before they rode to their
fatal appointments with the rifles of the cavalry. Its profession was desperation, not conviction. I suspect that the dead were just as likely to get lost then as they were in my day, and as they are today.
“Nowadays, of course, the movies are more powerful as a source of imagery than the church ever was—but there’s no stairway to heaven, ascending into the clouds, nor any elevator down to hell. That kind of vision is no more use here than Dante’s. I’d like to be able to say that hope still has some use after faith has failed, but I can’t. If it’s true, it’s truth of a kind that I can’t see.
“The central fact about death, as viewed from life, is that it’s the end. Given the hope that it might be a new beginning too, it seems only one small step further to hope that it’s a beginning that will somehow compensate for the most obvious deficit of the world in which we live: its lack of moral order. In life, there’s no ready-made reward for the good, who are more than likely to suffer, and no ready-made punishment for the wicked, who are more than likely to flourish. That’s a prospect so appalling that the most natural thing in the world is to assume, or at least to hope, that death will balance the books by providing the good with a heaven and the wicked with a place of torment. What would be the point of life-in-death, is the argument of faith and hope, if it weren’t some kind of compensation?
“Materialism sees things from a different angle, in which life is life and death is death and there’s no room for confusion of the two. Consciousness, whether waking or dreaming, is just a by-product of the brain’s electrochemistry, so when the brain fails, consciousness falls into the void, annihilated forever. The loss is slight, given that a mind is always a ghost, and a self-deluding one at that, quite unable to interfere with the pattern of determinism in spite of its unshakable conviction that it possesses the power of will and the opportunity of choice.
Kiss the Goat: A Twenty-First Century Ghost Story Page 16
