The Lilac Bus

by Maeve Binchy

  It wouldn’t take her long to find a proper outlet in Dublin. It must be done well away from the shop, Chris and Karen must never know.

  She felt as strongly about this as her husband had felt that Andrew and Jessica must never know.

  She felt the old quickening under her heart. It would be exciting to be back in the business again after all these years.

  KEV

  Kev thought he’d never get away from the Pelican. The Pelican was in one of those good moods, very rarely seen of late, where he’d ramble on about people known only to himself. There was a cast of thousands in the Pelican’s stories and the same people never appeared twice. Kev listened attentively because if you missed the bit where your man came in one day and your other man was already in there and your old fellow came out the other door then you lost the whole grasp of it, and the Pelican might easily snap some kind of a question at you to make sure you were on the ball.

  Kev was only afraid of the Pelican; he was terrified of some of the others. But even though the Pelican was not the highest in the terror stakes Kev would have let the Lilac Bus go to Rathdoon without him rather than risk insulting this man whose big hooked nose was the cause of his name. You didn’t mess with the Pelican, Kev didn’t know much, but he knew that much.

  Fortunately the Pelican was hailed by someone more interesting and Kev was released; he sprinted round the corner. The bus was almost full. But he wasn’t the last. Mikey Burns was rubbing his hands: oh please may he not have any quiz games tonight. Mikey was perfectly nice when he quietened down, but all this ‘I say I say I say’ like one of those comics on a music hall show on telly. And he was no GOOD at it, that was what was so hopeless, he always laughed in the wrong place. It would have been nice to sit beside Celia; that’s what he liked best: she’d address about five civil sentences to him and then she’d leave him to his own thoughts, as she looked out the window. Or Rupert, he was a quiet fellow too, and not toffee-nosed or anything. Rev’s brothers Bart and Red were always surprised that he didn’t seem to know Mrs Hickey better. They were mad about her: in fact his Da was always saying that they’d go over to her place and dig her witch’s brews in the garden and her lavender and her forget-me-nots and they wouldn’t dig their own potatoes like men. Mrs Hickey was nice enough, but she had a disconcerting way of looking right through you when she was talking, as if she didn’t want any small talk. Neither did Kev of course want any small talk, but he didn’t want that dark intense face with those X-ray eyes looking at him either. He always got the feeling that she saw just a little bit too much.

  Kev worked in security, well not real security with helmets and coshes and alsatians and vans with no hand signals. More like being a porter really or a commissionaire but it was called security. When anyone phoned down to the front desk to ask if a letter had been delivered by hand or if a visitor had arrived Kev answered the phone with the words, ‘Hallo. Security?’

  Once he had got a phone call from his father asking him to bring down boxes of some new potato crisp that had been advertised on the television and the place was going mad looking for it. Kev’s father had been so entertained by Kev calling himself security that he had threatened to telephone every day just for the sheer pleasure of it. Kev had told him anxiously that they had been told to keep personal calls down to the minimum. But he shouldn’t have worried, his father wasn’t going to waste good money on hearing the same joke over and over.

  Bart and Red didn’t know what he came home for every weekend. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to see him, they were just as happy that he was back as not. But why every weekend? That was what would fox you. And he didn’t even go to the dance on a Saturday night. And he didn’t have a crowd to drink with in Ryan’s; he’d go in and out for a couple but he wouldn’t have a session there. The Kennedys had little or no conversation with their Da who had a cigarette in his mouth and the radio on full blast from morning to night. It was unlikely to be for company.

  Kev knew that he was a bit of a mystery to them. And to Tom Fitzgerald who had explained that the bus only made a profit if he could be sure of his seven passengers on a Friday. That’s why he could do it so cheaply. You agreed to come on the bus every Friday for ten weeks, or if you couldn’t you’d send someone in your place – not to Rathdoon of course, but part of the way or as far as the big town seventeen miles from home. Or if you could find nobody you still paid for your seat. That way it was half the cost of any other bus going that route and what’s more it brought you to the door. Kev was getting out of the bus before ten o’clock and saying goodnight to Nancy Morris who only lived across the street. He was home in Rathdoon safe. He would take a big breath of air and let it all out in a long sigh of relief. Tom often looked at him puzzled, and his father would nod welcomingly over the radio and tell him it was just coming up to the news. A mug of tea might be handed to him and a slice of shop cake cut. They had never known any other kind of cake, Kev and his brothers. Their mother had died long ago and even Bart, who could remember her, never knew her when she was well enough to make bread or cakes. When the news was over his father might ask had it been a hard week and were there any savages with crowbars in. He said there were more cases of violence in Dublin than there were in Chicago and he would never set his foot in the city again without an armed guard. Kev had tried to argue with him in the beginning, but now he didn’t bother. Anyway, nowadays he was beginning to think his father was right.

  Nobody at work knew where Kev went at weekends: they all thought that he was some kind of lay monk or something and that he went to do good works but part of the goodness was that you didn’t talk about it. The kind old Mr Daly, one of the nicest people Kev had ever met, would shake his head in its uniform cap full of admiration.

  ‘I don’t know why they give out about the younger generation,’ old Mr Daly would say, ‘I really don’t. There’s that young Kev who works with us in the front hall, and he’s off giving soup to winos and praying in front of the Blessed Sacrament, and teaching illiterates to read. Gone out of here like a bow from an arrow at six o’clock and we never hear hair nor hide of him until Monday morning.’

  Kev had never told one word of this fabrication to Mr Daly or to anyone else. But having heard it, and seen that it was accepted he let it pass. After all if anyone came nosing around and asking questions, wasn’t it better that old Mr Daly and John and the others thought he was with the Simon Community or the Legion of Mary rather than knowing he caught a lilac-coloured minibus as regularly as clockwork and sped out of Dublin and all its danger every Friday night.

  Just suppose for one sickening minute that Daff or Crutch Casey or the Pelican came round upset over something, well there was nothing they could be told. Nobody knew where Kev went at weekends.

  He had always had this secrecy, even when he was a young fellow. He remembered Bart telling a total stranger in the shop that their mother was dead, that she had died in the hospital after two months and a week. Kev would never have given that information to a woman who had come in to buy bars of chocolate and ice cream for the children in the car. No matter how nice she had been, no matter how much she had praised the three young lads serving in the shop because their father was out getting the shed at the back built to hold the gas cylinders and the briquettes. Kev would have told her nothing and put his arm in his mouth which was a great way to stop having a conversation. But Bart and Red would tell anyone anything . . . Bart even told about the time when Kev was seventeen and he had tried to get Deirdre Morris, who was the much nicer sister of Nancy, to come into a field with him and swore it was to show her a nest of small birds.

  Deirdre Morris had thrown back her head laughing, pushed him over so that he fell in the mud and had gone home laughing. ‘A nest of small birds – is that what they call it nowadays?’ Kev was shocked. To admit to such a lustful thing and even worse to admit to such a defeat. But no, Bart thought it was a scream, and that time that Deirdre had come back from America married with a baby calle
d Shane, Bart was still able to laugh over it with her. And Red was the same, a demon dancer and he’d tell half the country their business, and about how they should have got an agency for tarmacadaming the place but his Da hadn’t moved quick enough and Billy Burns had got it first. Kev told nothing. But then Kev had much more to hide.

  Celia arrived just after him and the doors were closed. They were off. Round the corner and through the open door of the pub he could see the Pelican holding a pint in one hand and a rolled up newspaper in the other. A rolled paper was a great thing for making a point, for emphasising something. And that was the Pelican’s style. Emphasising things.

  Mikey was unfortunately in top form tonight: tricks with matches and a glass, have them rolling in the aisles in a pub. Didn’t poor Mikey realise that it was only drunks that suddenly started doing match tricks in a pub, or lonely people, or madmen. Not ordinary people unless they were all in a group of friends, and if you had a group of friends why would you need to do tricks anyway? He was explaining how to weight the matchbox; Kev looked out the window and saw the housing estates outside Dublin flashing by. Old Mr Daly said to him that any day now Kev would find himself a young woman and they’d save for a house in a place like that and there’d be no knowing him ever after. People like Mr Daly and Mikey knew nothing about the real world. There was Mikey going on about how you weighted the matchbox deliberately with a twopenny piece in it and it always fell over on the side you’d put the coin in, so you could bet someone that it would always fall on the side you said. Kev had looked at him vacantly.

  ‘I bet you Bart or Red Eddie would love a trick like that,’ Mikey muttered. Kev knew they would. They had the time and the peace of mind to enjoy it.

  Kev never told Mikey that he was a porter too in a way. Well security really, but it was the same field. He never told any of them where he worked, except that it was in the big new block. You could be doing anything there, literally anything. They had civil servants and they had travel agencies, and airlines and small companies with only two people in them, they had a board in the hall with a list a mile long of the organisations who were tenants of the building. Kev just said he worked there; when anyone asked him what he did, he said this and that. It was safer. One morning he was standing there in his uniform and he saw Dee Burke coming. She was going with some papers to a solicitor on the fifth floor. Mr Daly phoned up and announced her and Kev had sorted furiously on the floor for something so she didn’t see him. Later he wondered why. It couldn’t matter whether Dee Burke knew that he worked at the front desk of the big new office block. She hardly thought when she went to buy her cigarettes at the Kennedy shop that their youngest son was the chairman of some company up in Dublin. He didn’t even want her to think he was in a clerical job. Why hide then? Wiser. Like not walking on cracks in the road. No reason but it just seemed the right thing to do.

  Of course in a way it was all this secrecy that had him where he was. If he had been a different type he’d never have got into this mess at all.

  It began on his birthday, he was twenty-one. It was an ordinary working day. His father had sent him a ten pound note in a card with a pink cat on it. Bart and Red Eddie had said that there would be great drink in Ryan’s next Friday on account of it. Nobody else knew. He hadn’t told Mr Daly in case the old man might get a cake and embarrass him; he didn’t tell anyone back up in the house where he had a room. They kept to themselves a lot and if they heard him saying he was twenty-one they’d feel they had to do something for him. He didn’t tell anyone up at the pigeons either. In the lofts they didn’t have time for birthdays and such things. So that day nobody in Dublin knew that Kevin, youngest son of Mr Michael Kennedy, shop proprietor, and the late Mrs Mary Rose Kennedy of Rathdoon had now reached twenty-one. He thought of it a lot all morning and somehow it began to seem over-important to him. Other people had records played for them on radio programmes, other people who were twenty-one had cards, lots of them, not just one. Dee Burke had a party in a hotel – he remembered hearing about it just a couple of months back; Bart and Red had been invited and Bart said he couldn’t get into a monkey suit but Red the demon dancer had hired one and had a great time. And even his own brothers had bits of celebration. Bart and all his pals had a barbecue down by the river; those were before every Tom, Dick and Harry were having barbecues. They roasted a bit of beef and ate it between doorsteps of bread and it was gorgeous, and there’d been great singing and goings on. And when Red was twenty-one two years back there had been a crowd of them who had all come to the house for a few drinks and a cake then they’d got into a truck and driven off to the dance. But nothing at all for Kev.

  It got in on his mind. He made an excuse to Mr Daly and said that he wanted to go out the back for a half an hour. He didn’t feel well. Mr Daly was so concerned that he immediately felt ashamed. Those were the days before he had been a regular disappearer at weekends, before Mr Daly had assumed that he was an unsung and uncanonised saint.

  He sat out in the loading area as it was called, a place where vans could come with deliveries of paper, or messengers on those big motor bikes with speaking handlebars could leave their machines. He took out a cigarette and thought about other fellows his age and wondered why he had been so anxious to get away and why he had ever thought it would be any better. Four men were loading a van efficiently. A fifth was standing leaning on a crutch and staring around him idly. Into the van were going sanitary fittings, hand-basins, lavatories, small water heaters. Without haste but with commendable speed they loaded.

  Kev dragged his cigarette. They must be getting new fitments somewhere upstairs, that looked like a big contract. Wait. He hadn’t seen any of them come through security, and everyone had to come to the front desk. Even if they went straight out the door again and were sent round to the loading bay. The rules said desk first.

  His eyes took on the merest flicker of interest but it was enough to alert the man with the bent leg leaning so casually on the crutch.

  ‘Not wearing a cap, didn’t notice him,’ he said out of the corner of his mouth.

  A big man with a beak-shaped nose paused momentarily and then slid from the human chain which was stacking the fitments. He strolled over to Kevin whose stomach knotted in fright. He realised like a shower of cold rain coming down his gullet that this was a Job, these were five men taking fitments OUT of the new building, fitments that would turn up again in houses all over the city. He swallowed hard.

  The Pelican walked slowly: he didn’t look a bit furtive, nor did he look worried.

  ‘Can I have a smoke?’ he asked casually. Behind him the loading continued regular as clockwork, innocent as anything.

  ‘Yes. Um,’ Kev handed him the packet.

  ‘What are you doing with yourself here?’ The Pelican’s eyes narrowed.

  The question was perfectly polite. It could have been a gentle enquiry of any fellow lounger on a summer morning. He might even have added something like ‘on this fine day’. But he hadn’t. The Pelican and all of them were waiting to know what Kevin would say and Kevin knew that what he said now was probably going to be the most important question he ever answered in his life.

  ‘It’s my twenty-first birthday,’ he said. ‘And I got annoyed sitting inside there in Security and nobody knowing, so I thought I’d come out here and have a bit of a smoke anyway to celebrate.’

  There was absolutely no doubt that what he said was true. You didn’t need a lie detector or the experience of years with truth drugs to know that Kev Kennedy had given a perfectly accurate account of why he was there, and something about him made the Pelican believe that there was going to be no trouble here.

  ‘Well, when we’re finished here maybe we’ll buy a drink at your lunch hour. A fellow shouldn’t be twenty-one and have nobody know.’

  ‘That’s what I think,’ Kev said eagerly, averting his eyes from the biggest and most barefaced theft from the building where he was meant to be part of Security. It seemed to be wi
nding up now, the convoy were closing the doors and getting into the van.

  ‘So, what is it? One o’clock?’ The Pelican’s nose was like a scythe so large and menacing did it appear, and his eyes were like two slits.

  ‘It’s a bit difficult at lunchtime, you see I only get forty-five minutes and I suppose you’ll be moving on out of the area,’ Kev’s face was innocent.

  ‘But where would you like your birthday drink then and when?’ There was no area for argument in the proposal, only a small margin of latitude for the time and place.

  ‘Well, wherever you like of course, and at about six. Is that all right?’

  Kev was eager. The Pelican nodded. He named a city centre pub.

  ‘We’ll give you a drink each, and as you no doubt saw there’s five of us, so that’s five drinks.’

  ‘Oh, God, that would be great altogether,’ Kev said. ‘Are there five of you? I didn’t notice.’

  The Pelican nodded approvingly. He swung his way back to the van and in beside the driver who looked like a champion wrestler.

  ‘Six o’clock,’ he called cheerfully out the window.

  It wasn’t discovered until four thirty. A lot of offices on the sixth floor weren’t occupied yet. Some people just assumed that the bathrooms were being refitted, and sighing had gone to other floors. It was only when one of the secretaries said she was getting dropped arches and told Mr Daly that it was an extraordinary thing to think that brand new cloakrooms should be redone within three months that any kind of alarm was raised. The broad-daylightness of it all staggered them. The guards were called, the confusion was enormous. Kev had difficulty in getting away by six. He was ninety per cent sure that they wouldn’t be there. They could be walking into a trap for all they knew. How were they to know that they were dealing with Kev Kennedy who never told anybody anything? They might have assumed he would have plain-clothes guards drinking pints of shandy all round the pub. But just in case. And just in case they came back and dealt with him. After all they knew where he worked, he knew nothing about them.