I was one of the youngest workers. I hated the job, the old men who smelled of roll-ups and sweat, the acrid air of filing-dust and rust, the sinus-sting of spray-paint that hung in the thick air, the machines that shuddered and punched panels from sheets of steel. The sheds churned with the thought-destroying thump of the presses, like the noise of an endless summer storm, its sound condensed and released by the high whine of pistons. Everything around me was black and brown and shades of grey, drained of any sensation other than the slam of the safety barriers and the shake of steel sheeting that vibrated through the soles of your boots.
I wasn’t stupid. I didn’t think that working in this place was all there was to life. I sensed - but had no way of knowing for sure - that the world beyond the factory was filled with mysteries. I had been growing increasingly restless at home. I lay on my bed, listening to the strikes and reprisals of my parents’ conversation, and felt that somewhere, away from the odour of unused rooms and beeswaxed sideboards, away from the bitter tang of factory metal, there were beautiful girls who laughed and threw themselves recklessly into the arms of boys the same age as me. I wasn’t going to be like Mickie, getting drunk and chasing old boilers around pubs all night. I was going to make something of myself.
I was not alone in my dreams. There were four of us; Dougie had thick square glasses and worked weekends in a hardware store, saving every penny he earned for plans he had no imagination to realise. Mickie was skinny and blond and never took off his cap, and went on about girls in a voice that cracked like someone skating on thin ice. Chris wore his hair in a perfectly greased quiff, and spoke in an attempt at a refined voice. His clothes were always perfectly ironed. He was too worried about what other people thought to ever let himself relax, and insisted on calling us ‘fellas’, ‘Hey fellas. I’ve got a great idea,’ as though he was in one of those youth films from the sixties that now look as though they come from another world, Planet Politeness. But of course it was the sixties, we were teenagers, and none of us had a clue about the corruption of time.
It was Chris’s ‘Hey, fellas, I’ve got a great idea,’ that started it. His idea sounded hopeless, especially as we had only seven days to go before the start of our summer holidays. Dougie and I were on a fag break, sitting waiting for Chris, when we saw him driving toward us through the rain, and at that moment we realised dreams were possible, and our world turned into Technicolor.
Chris had heard that London Transport might be willing to sell one of their old Routemaster buses, and managed to persuade them to let him have it on the condition that we did it up, because its seats were slashed to bits and its engine was knackered. And it was my idea to have some of the blokes at the factory overhaul the engine and convert the interior into something more liveable, so that it ended up looking like a double-decker caravan, even though we kept the red exterior and the number and destination board proclaiming it to be a Number 9 heading for Piccadilly.
Suddenly we had a chance to fulfil our dreams, and there was a way to escape the troglodyte days of the English summer. We no longer had to make do with the bandstands, chip-shops and smutty-postcard racks of the South Coast. We would fix up the bus and head for the South of France, where the sky was wide, the sea was warm and the promenades were filled with the promise of sex.
We only managed to get the bus roadworthy by paying mates to work late, so that by the time we were granted our licence we were almost broke, but we were so determined to escape that nothing was going to stop us. On a drizzly Saturday morning we headed for Calais with some half-baked idea that we might even get as far as Greece before having to turn around. Mickie thought if we proved the journey was manageable to the bus company they might allow us to take fee-paying guests on charter trips, but we hadn’t thought any of it through. It just seemed possible; everything is possible when you don’t know the drawbacks. Opportunity can present itself to innocents just as much as it can to corrupt old men, and we had an advantage: we were the young ones.
It seemed that the sun began shining at Calais, and as the bus laboured to leave the hills of the town we saw only empty sunlit roads ahead, tarmac dappled in cool green shadows of the trees. We didn’t reach Paris until dusk the following day (the bus’s top speed was none too impressive), and went bouncing off to meet girls in the bars of Montmartre. We didn’t get to meet girls; we attempted conversations with a few, but they couldn’t - or wouldn’t - understand us, and in the process we became paralytically pissed, probably due to our overexcitement at being somewhere new. The first real way you can separate yourself from your parents is by choosing who to have sex with. It’s an act of rebellion, and even betrayal; that’s why it’s so easy to be a coward and behave badly about the whole thing.
That night we slept like the dead, sexless and still innocent, in the bus, and left for the South late the next morning, nursing beer-and-brandy hangovers. It was a beautiful journey. The roads were less crowded then, and you had time to look around. Just outside Avignon, where the distant walls of the gated city could be glimpsed, we saw a pretty young girl seated in a red MG with a steaming radiator, and stopped to help her. The car was old and the seals would be hard to repair, so I suggested that she came with us. We could phone ahead for the parts, I explained, and Chris would replace them for her on the way back. The girl, Irene, agreed so readily that I knew she had her eye on one of us, but which one? She had bobbed black hair and black eyeshadow, a short pleated skirt and white kinky boots. She was so at ease in our company that she made us look like children.
By the time we reached Marseille, I knew she fancied Chris, and that night, stopping on the road to St Tropez, I was sure she would sleep with him. Dougie was the most put out, and sulked until we took him drinking in a bar that played samba music and was filled - for some reason I now forget - with loud Brazilian girls. They laughed at everything, downing as many drinks as we did, and then picked us off like sharpshooters attacking targets.
The one I took back began to undress me while we were still in the street. We made awkward, squeaky love on one of the bench seats upstairs in the bus. She freed me from more than my parents; she freed me from England, and all of my embarrassing, desperate memories. I can’t remember ever being happier. In the morning she left with her shoes in one hand and a kiss blown lazily over her shoulder.
On that first morning after my fall from innocence, everything looked different: the sky was an angry blue that hurt the eyes, the air was pungent with wild lavender and the sea was filled with whining white motorboats. As we set off towards Nice, Mickie worked out routes that avoided heavy inclines, bypassing the dramatic bulk of the Massif d’Esterel because the bus overheated easily. We avoided the lire-ravaged scrubland surrounding St Raphael and Fréjus, staying mostly to the main roads, but there was a point where the throb of the engine began to exacerbate our hangovers, so we took to a turn-off through the pines, firs, olive groves and mimosa trees looking for a spot where we could buy a beer and a baguette.
Three of us were no longer virgins. Only Mickie was left, and suddenly it looked like he was the odd one out. He grew nastier as the day progressed. It was as though we were in on a joke that he wasn’t being allowed to share.
The sharp morning air felt electrically charged as we sat in a meadow waiting for the bus’s radiator to calm itself. Dougie talked about what he wanted to do with his life. He had no intention of staying in a hardware store for ever, selling locks and drill bits. He wanted to go to art college and learn how to paint. He had started drawing, and had been encouraged by the sale of a picture. Mickie liked working at the depot, but saw it as a temporary job, something to do before he discovered what really interested him. I wanted to be a musician. I’d traded some time in a recording studio and was in the process of putting together a demo tape, but work always got in the way. Chris wanted to set up a business of his own in the city, something to do with owning a chain of bars. He’d worked out a business plan of sorts, and was on the lookout for investors. B
y the time we hit the road once more, we had sorted out the rest of our lives.
‘So you don’t mind what you do so long as it makes you rich.’ Chris and I wound each other up whenever we discussed the future. It was that stupid argument you have about keeping your scruples once you were rich and powerful, as if you had a choice.
‘I’ll still have principles, obviously,’ he replied, resting his arms on the great black steering wheel and taking his eyes from the road to look at me. ‘If you give up what you believe in, you’ll be poor anyway.’
‘Nice sentiment,’ Dougie agreed. ‘I only hope you manage to keep it.’
‘I don’t want to turn into my dad,’ said Mickie, ‘pissed all the time and talking about the good old days, like there was some kind of magical time when he didn’t behave like an arsehole.’
‘If we all unite with a single political conscience, the young have enough energy to rebuild the world,’ offered Irene in one of those general French statements calculated to annoy everyone. But there were riots in Paris that year, so I guess she was just expressing a widely shared viewpoint.
‘You’re forgetting one thing,’ Dougie pointed out. ‘The young lack power and money, and once they finally have them, they don’t want to change the world any more, they want to keep it all for themselves. The rich get away with murder.’
Before we could move on to eradicating hunger in the Third World, Irene reminded us that she wanted to visit Grasse because she had heard they made perfumes there, and she wanted to buy some bath salts. According to Mickie’s map the road was too narrow, the bends too sharp for the bus to handle, so we turned around and coasted onto a long flat road that cut between two plains studded with ochre rocks, lined with rows of dark cypresses. For a while we saw scattered farmhouses in the distance. Then there was nothing but meadowland and woods.
It was as we entered the tunnel of trees that the mood changed. The sunlight was fragmented here, and the black tarred road, frayed into earth at its edges, was shadowed in wavering green. The air cooled and for the first time I noticed birdsong, not along the road itself, but beyond it, back in the sunlight. It was my turn to drive. Chris and Irene were sitting upstairs. Mickie and Dougie had finished their card game and were staring vacantly from the windows when the engine started to noisily slip gears. The bus coasted on to the lowest point of the road and I knew it would not make the next rise. We came to a stop in the deep green shadows and I put on the handbrake.
‘What’s happened?’ called Dougie, springing up into the driver’s cabin.
‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘It feels like we’ve gone into neutral. Take a look under the bonnet, would you?’
Chris and Irene came down from upstairs and watched as Dougie stripped off his shirt and slid beneath the bus. After a couple of minutes he emerged, wiping grease on his jeans.
‘There’s a small rubber grommet that holds all the gear cables together,’ he explained. ‘It must have perished, so that when you shifted gears it broke and the cables came loose.’
‘Is it fixable?’ I asked.
‘If you can find me a length of flex I can tie the gear cables together temporarily. It’ll be fine so long as you don’t put it into “park”. If I can find a truck garage in Nice I’ll probably be able to find a ring of about the same diameter. Maybe I can make a temporary one.’ He climbed back under the bus to take another look. The mistral tugged at the high branches above our heads. The wind in the trees made a strangely melancholy sound.
‘Did it suddenly get cold?’ Irene hugged her thin arms. Chris came over and wrapped a sweater around her shoulders. ‘It’s going to be dark soon. Look how low the sun is.’
‘Nothing to worry about,’ I promised cheerfully. ‘If Dougie can’t fix it we’ll get a lift from someone.’
Who?’ asked Irene. ‘We haven’t passed another vehicle in at least an hour. There’s no one around for miles.’
‘Don’t be such a worryguts,’ said Mickie, swinging around on the platform pole. ‘There’s bound to be someone along eventually.’ He cocked his head comically, but there was nothing to be heard except the rasp of crickets. Dougie’s legs stuck out from under the bus. Every once in a while there was a clang of metal and he swore. Finally he emerged, smothered in thick black grease.
‘I’ve managed to tie the cables up, but I don’t know how long it will hold.’
‘What did you use?’ asked Chris.
‘I found a packet of rubber johnnies in your bag.’
‘You’ve been going through my stuff?’
‘You haven’t used many of them, have you? It said “Super Strong” on the packet. Let’s hope they’re right.’
A pale mist was settling across the plains like milk dispersing in water. We set off carefully, determined to change gear as little as possible. ‘How can we best do that?’ I asked Chris, who was driving.
‘Stick to this low route, I guess. It looks flatter, but if anything comes the other way they’ll have to go off-road to get around us.’ Tree branches continually scraped the roof of the bus. We crawled through a number of derelict villages, past peeling stucco walls and dry fountains, and the road became even narrower.
‘We could get stuck and not be able to turn around,’ warned Mickie, scrutinising his map. ‘This road isn’t even marked.’
‘What else can we do?’ I asked. ‘If it gets too much, we’ll have to stay here the night and walk to a town in the morning.’
‘You’ll be lucky. There’s fuck-all for miles around.’
The bus crept around a tight bend into another tunnel of trees. ‘What’s that up ahead?’ I pointed to the side of the road. A dusty silver Mercedes saloon was badly parked there. I could make out some movement in the shadows.
‘What?’ Chris peered through the windscreen. ‘I can’t see anything.’
‘Neither can I,’ complained Dougie.
‘You need your eyes tested. It’s got English number plates.’ A sticker on the boot of the car read: ‘Come to HOVE’. There was a straw hat on the back window ledge, the kind Englishmen buy when they go to France in the mistaken belief that it makes them look sophisticated. I nudged Chris’s arm. ‘Pull over. It’s our lucky day.’ He pulled up the brake handle and left the motor idling.
‘I’ll go and talk to them.’ I jumped down from the rear platform and ran on ahead. Evidently the two men inside had not heard me approaching, because they looked startled when I knocked on the window of the car. The driver, red-faced and pot-bellied, wearing a blue striped shirt that was too tight to adequately contain him, jerked his head around and studied me with unfocused eyes. His face was broken-veined and double-chinned. He collected his wits for a moment before partially lowering the electric window. The other man was grey-haired and thin, with a prominent sore-looking nose and a sharp Adam’s apple, who remained hunched over the back of the passenger seat with his arms extended to the floor. A cool blast from the air-conditioned interior fanned my face.
‘Yes, what is it?’ he asked in English, as though answering the door to an unexpected neighbour.
I’d been about to ask him for help, but from what I saw it looked as though the situation might be reversed. The overweight man looked angry and frightened. Clearly my intrusion wasn’t welcome.
‘You’re English,’ I said stupidly, as if this made us all part of the same club. I peered across at the other man, who now raised his head. He looked ill, or drunk, or both. A livid gash across his cheek was speckling blood onto his yellow T-shirt and the seat back. Both men were in their late forties. Having caught them doing something they didn’t want anyone to see, I could only ramble on with my original request for help.
‘We’ve broken down and, well, I was hoping you might be going near a village where I could call out a mechanic, and get him to fix—’
‘I don’t know, hang on.’ The fat man turned to his companion, who was struggling upright in the passenger seat. ‘Michael, this chap wants a lift.’ He gestured impatiently at
the man’s head.
Michael looked in the wing mirror and hastily wiped his bleeding face with an oil rag. ‘No, we’re not going there,’ he began in some confusion. ‘Fucking hell, Sam, can’t you deal with it?’ He turned back to me. ‘Now is not a good time, kid, so piss off, will you?’
Sam, the overweight driver, shifted uncomfortably in the driving seat. ‘Look, I’m sorry, we’re a bit tied up and, ah, can’t really help you.’
Their attitude annoyed and puzzled me. They were the ones in the brand new air-conditioned Mercedes and they couldn’t even give me a lift? ‘It’s just that I think we’ll be stuck here all night if I can’t get a lift to a town,’ I explained, ‘because no cars have been past for—’
‘What part of this conversation didn’t you understand, you little prick?’ shouted the sickly man suddenly. He writhed about in the seat and kicked open the car door, storming around to my side. He made a grab for my shirt, but I ducked back. As I did so, I saw that the rear passenger door was open. A large material-wrapped bundle on the back seat seemed to be slowly sliding out of the car and into the ditch at the side of the road. Something smelled bad.
The fat man manoeuvred his way out of the car and pulled his partner aside. ‘For Christ’s sake, he’s just a kid, leave him alone.’
I stared back at the moving bundle, half in the car, half in the road. There were brown leaves and arrowhead-shaped pine needles stuck to it, and it had begun to make a low gurgling noise.
I looked back along the avenue of rustling cypress trees, but the others must have stayed on board, and it was now too dark to see even the outline of the bus.
‘Go back to your vehicle, pal. There’ll be someone along soon. Just forget you saw us, all right?’
‘Sure, no problem.’ I backed cautiously away. I didn’t want trouble. These old guys looked burned out and messed up about something, and I really didn’t want to know what they’d been doing. Secret cruelties occurred in lonely spots like this.
Dark Terrors 6 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology] Page 3
