The Lilac Bus

by Maeve Binchy

  ‘Yes,’ Kev said.

  ‘Before Red fell so much in love that he can’t think of anything else, he and I were going to go up there one day on the excursion and try and sort it out, whatever it was.’

  Kev gulped with gratitude at the thought of his two brothers taking on a heavy gang like Daff, the Pelican, Crutch Casey and their team.

  ‘What did YOU think the problems might be?’ he asked nervously, fishing to see had Bart any notion of how bad things were or was he still in a world like the playground of the infants’ school.

  ‘I thought it might be a girl you got into trouble, but it’s going on too long for that. I thought it might be a debt – you know, poker or the horses – but you don’t seem to have any interest in either.’

  Bart’s big innocent face looked puzzled. Kev drew a long breath. Well it seemed that Bart could take on that much anyway. What about the next step, could Bart listen to the story that had begun on his twenty-first birthday a year and a half ago, or would he run for the guards. Kev didn’t know. Bart was shaping a stick and tying a bit of string round it.

  ‘Here,’ he said to Kev. ‘Let this be yours: I’ll beat you any day with my one.’ They threw the sticks over the side and rushed across to see them coming through. Kev’s stick was in front.

  ‘Would you beat that?’ Bart seemed surprised. ‘I’ve been up here practising and I thought I had the shape of stick that ran best with the flow.’

  Kev began to tell him, in fact once started it tumbled out of him: a mixture of names and commodities, Crutch Caseys and microwaves, Daffs and cut glass, Pelicans and Axminster carpet. Kev had no starring role the way he told it, his only stroke of genius had been to go home every weekend on the Lilac Bus to avoid even more major crime in the city at weekends. He was in now and there was no getting out. Bart must know that, they’d all seen the films, they knew the plot. If Kev said to Daff that he’d had enough, thank you, he couldn’t answer for the consequences but he knew it’d be awful. He didn’t think they’d beat him up: they never used violence, he said almost pleadingly to Bart. But they would punish him. They’d send the guards round to his house or to work, or they’d send a note to Mr Daly accusing Kev of giving the tip-off about the cloakroom fittings that time. It was a nightmare: he was in it for ever.

  He hardly dared to look at Bart during some of the confession, and once or twice he gave the odd glance and got the feeling that Bart was half smiling. Maybe he didn’t understand the hugeness of it all. Once he was almost certain he got a smile and Bart had hastily put his hand over his face.

  ‘So now, you see I’m caught entirely,’ he ended.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Bart said slowly.

  ‘But it’s not LIKE here, Bart; you don’t know, they’re different to us. They’re not our type of people.’

  ‘But they must have thought you were their kind of person otherwise they wouldn’t have pulled you in,’ Bart said.

  ‘But I TOLD you how that happened. I’m not a thief by nature, I’m fairly happy to work for my wages. Not very, but fairly. I’m not any good as a criminal.’

  ‘No I don’t mean their type as a thief, you’re secretive like they are. That’s what they liked about you – you’re not a blabber about who you know, what you do: that’ll make them think you won’t blab about them.’

  ‘Well I don’t – haven’t until now, that is.’

  ‘So that’s how you get out if you want to. Tell them you’re in with another lot now. No hard feelings, handshakes, pints all round, and that’s it.’

  ‘Bart, you haven’t any idea . . .’

  ‘But you see, you keep up this hard man image with them except once or twice when you’ve had a fit of the shivers. You never try to talk them out of it, or discuss what they do with the stuff. They probably think you’re a silent pro and someone has made you a better offer.’

  ‘They wouldn’t have such a high regard for me as that.’

  ‘They must have a very high regard for you if they let you in on all their jobs. No, leave them as you joined them, with no chat, no explanations except the one they are owed. That you’ve got a new scene.’

  Bart talking about scenes, Bart saying that these gangsters are owed an explanation – it was like the end of the world.

  ‘I don’t think I’d be able to go through with it.’

  ‘You were able to join them, that was harder.’

  ‘And should I give them back the money?’ ‘Give them WHAT?’

  ‘My share, I mean, if I’m not staying on like?’

  ‘Your share. You have it still?’

  ‘Of course I do, I didn’t spend any of it, in case . . . you know . . . the guards and everything and a court case and I’d have to give it all back.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘It’s upstairs in the room.’

  ‘In Dublin?’

  ‘No here, back at the house. Under the bed.’

  ‘You’re not serious.’

  ‘But what else would I do with it, Bart? I carry it with me home and back each weekend in a parcel with my clothes.’

  ‘And how much is it at all? Your share?’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s about four thousand, two hundred pounds,’ Kev said with his eyes cast down.

  Eventually he raised his glance and Bart was smiling at him with pride.

  ‘Isn’t that the direct intervention of God?’ Bart said to him. Kev would never have seen it like that; however confused his relationship with God was and however non-personal it had become, he couldn’t imagine that the Almighty was delighted with such a sum of stolen money arriving under a bed in Rathdoon.

  ‘This solves all our problems,’ Bart said. ‘When Romeo back there went courting Majella the only fly in the ointment was would we have enough to build on a bit at the back. We were afraid it would get a bit crowded with us all on top of each other, and we saw the very thing we wanted, a kind of ready-made extension that they dig foundations for and then sort of plant on top of. Do you follow?’

  Kev nodded nervously.

  ‘But Red and I were afraid you were in some kind of financial trouble and we’d better not get ourselves too far into a loan. But here you are, a millionaire. Now we can go ahead, and if you’d like to contribute a bit . . .’

  ‘Yes, well of course I would but don’t you think if I’m getting out of their gang I should offer them the share back?’

  ‘What kind of criminal are you at all?’ roared Bart. ‘Won’t they know immediately you’re a ninny if you start a caper like that. You’ve got to consider that your wages, your share of the deal, now you’re meant to be going on to a bigger one, you eejit: you’re not meant to be giving them conscience money.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And there’s no way you can give it to the carpet people or the lavatory makers or the microwave people . . .’

  ‘I wasn’t in on the microwave – that’s this weekend.’

  ‘See?’ Bart felt this proved some point. ‘So what are you going to do with it, wouldn’t building up the family home be as good as anything?’

  Kev was astonished. No blame, no lecture, no accusation. Sheer hard practical advice, as if he knew the kind of people that Daff and the Pelican were. Because when you thought of it that was EXACTLY the way to go about it. And then he need never see them again.

  ‘I’ll give it all to you tonight, Bart,’ he said eagerly. ‘Where will we say we got it? Like if anyone asks?’

  ‘You’ll keep some of it, put it in the post office, but we’ll say nothing to anyone, like you’ve been doing all your life. We’ll get in touch with those people about the extension on Monday. What could be more natural than that country eejits like us would have money in a paper bag under the bed, they’ll only be delighted – no VAT, nothing.’

  Kev was stunned. Saint Bart, in the black economy.

  ‘And thanks to your very generous donation, we’ll be able to get the bigger extension, and there’ll be plenty of room if Majella produces a b
rood of Kennedys.’

  A stone fell off the bridge and into the water and Kev Kennedy didn’t jump at all, and his eyes didn’t widen with anxiety.

  RUPERT

  He bought a packet of mints because Judy Hickey had told him last week that he reeked of garlic and much as she loved all good herby smells she didn’t want to sit cooped up beside a porous sponge of garlic for three hours on a small minibus. Funny, Judy: if he had met her in Dublin, he would never have suspected that she came from home. She wasn’t a Rathdoon sort of person. He had told her that once and she had retorted that neither was he – a thin, pale, artistic young Protestant: what could be more unlikely?

  But she was wrong. There were handfuls of Protestants in every town in the West; they were as much part of the place as the mountains and the phone boxes and the small beautiful churches with hardly any attendance standing dwarfed by the newer Catholic churches which were bursting at the seams. No use explaining that to Judy, trying to tell her that she was much more unusual, dark and gypsy-like, living in a small gate lodge at the end of the drive from Doon House, growing herbs and working all week in a health food shop in Dublin. In another time she’d have been burned as a witch without any discussion, he had once told her. Judy had said gloomily that the way the country was going it could happen yet, so he shouldn’t joke about it.

  He smelled of garlic because he had eaten a very good lunch. He always did on a Friday; that was because he wouldn’t be back again until late on Sunday night when it was the wrong time to have a meal. So Friday lunchtime was the only opportunity they could get to have anything approaching a relaxed weekend meal before he went back to Rathdoon for the weekend. Of course there was the rest of the week but it wasn’t quite the same, as there was work next day, and anyway there was something about a weekend that gave you more time – more anticipation. He hated not having his weekends in Dublin. He hated going home on the Lilac Bus.

  Rupert had never had an argument with his father in his whole life. And he could remember only three differences of opinion with his mother. Those went back to the time he was away at school and she had written three times to the headmaster to receive assurances that the beds were aired. He knew nobody else in the world who had such a relationship with their parents. Everyone else fought and forgave and loved or hated and stormed and railed or became fiercely protective. Nobody had this polite courteous distance based entirely on gratitude and duty. Nobody else who felt such irritation couldn’t express it.

  They didn’t really need him, that was his whole point, and he wished them well, but he didn’t need them either. So why should the pretence be kept up? It made it so much harder on all of them. Not only on Rupert – but maybe it was a little harder on him, he felt, after all their lives were ending. His hadn’t really begun and couldn’t begin as things were.

  There hadn’t even been a row when Rupert had decided to give up his law studies. He had been apprenticed to a firm in Dublin, begun his lectures with the Incorporated Law Society and at the same time read for a degree in Trinity. It wasn’t a superhuman load – a lot of people did it easily – but Rupert never took to it. Not any of it. The bit he liked best oddly was the office. He was quite happy doing the clerical work, the part that Dee Burke, who worked there now said she hated. Rupert had made few friends in Trinity which surprised him; he thought it would be like school, which had been fine. But it was very different and he felt totally outside it all.

  He had come home the weekend he knew he had failed his First Law with a heavy heart. He hadn’t tried to excuse himself, he just apologised as if to a

  kind stranger, and his father accepted the apology as if it had been given by a kind stranger. They had sat one on either side of the table while his mother looked left and right at whoever was speaking.

  Rupert said it was a great waste of his father’s money and a disgrace to him in his profession. His father had brushed these things aside: heavens no, people often failed their first examination, there was no cause for alarm, some of the greatest lawyers claimed that they had never been showy scholars. No need for any regrets, it should all be written off as part of sowing wild oats, part of getting your freedom. Next year it would be more serious, head in book, down to it, wasn’t that right?

  On into the night Rupert had talked, saying that he wasn’t cut out for it. It wasn’t what he wanted. He didn’t believe he would love it when he was in his father’s office: he didn’t love the office he was apprenticed to in Dublin, he only liked the more mechanical parts. He couldn’t get interested in the theory of the law or the way it was administered. He was so sorry it had turned out like this, but wasn’t it better that they should know now rather than discover later. They agreed logically that it was. They asked him what DID he want. He didn’t know, he had been so sure that he would like Trinity, and like studying law, he had never given it much thought before. He liked thinking about the way people lived and their houses and all that. But wasn’t it going to be very hard to try and get accepted to study architecture? his father wondered. He didn’t mean study it, he didn’t know, Rupert said desperately. He would get a job, that’s what he’d do. His parents didn’t understand this: they thought you had to have a degree to get a job, the kind of job Rupert would want. When he found the position as a junior in the estate agent’s they said they were pleased if that’s what he wanted. They didn’t sound displeased, they sounded remote as they always had been.

  His father was remote when he told Rupert that the time had come to get someone else into the office and that if Rupert were absolutely sure that he didn’t intend to come into the profession he was going to offer a position to David MacMahon’s son. Rupert assured him it would be fine, and got only a minor start when he realised that young MacMahon would have to be offered a partnership and the name of the office would be repainted to read Green and MacMahon. Once or twice they had asked him whether he had thought of coming back to Rathdoon and setting up his own little auctioneering business. There must be plenty of sites being sold and garages and people liked to keep things local. ‘It might be no harm to get in before Billy Burns sets one up, he’s started everything else in the town,’ his mother had said, but firmly and politely he had assured them that this was not going to happen. He left them in no doubt that his plans involved staying in Dublin. This had happened on the day his mother had said that she wondered whether they should put a new roof on the house or not. Sometimes she felt that the one she had would do for their time and wasn’t that all it would be needed for . . . ? Rupert had answered her levelly as if she had been asking no deeper question or making no last desperate plea. He talked of roofs and the value they added to houses and gave the pros and cons as he knew them, bringing himself no more into their plans than if he had been asked by a passing tourist.

  His mother asked a bit coyly once or twice if he met any nice girls in Dublin. She didn’t ask that any more. He must have given her some fairly firm answers, because he was only twenty-five, an age when you might be assumed to be still meeting girls. If people didn’t know that you never met girls, you only met Jimmy.

  Rupert’s throat tightened just thinking of Jimmy. They had met for lunch this Friday; it had now become a bit of a ritual. Jimmy had no classes on a Friday afternoon; they had found the boys didn’t study too well and had given them games or art or music. So Jimmy could jump into his little car and drive off to meet him. Rupert had noticed with an alarm mixed with pleasure that Dublin was becoming very slap-happy on Friday afternoons anyway, and not just in schools. At the office they did very little business and people seemed to be leaving for home – even if it was just the suburbs – earlier and earlier. If the noise in a nearby pub was anything to go by those particular workers of the world weren’t going to do much to change it when they got back to their desks – if they got back. Still it was nice for Rupert. He could take a long lunch hour with no questions asked. They had found a restaurant that both of them liked (not easy as they had such arguments about f
ood), and it was a very happy couple of hours.

  Jimmy insisted that he go home every weekend; it was even Jimmy who found the Lilac Bus for him. Jimmy said it was a pity that they couldn’t have weekends but it wouldn’t be for ever, and since the old man had always been so undemanding wouldn’t it only be right to go back to him now in his last few months? And it must be desperate on his mother waiting all week for him: of course he had to go. Jimmy wouldn’t even let him pretend he had flu, not even for one weekend. He was very definite about it.

  Jimmy was definite about everything, it was part of his charm. He never wondered about anything or deliberated or weighed things up. And if as it turned out sometimes he was utterly wrong, then he was equally definite about that.

  ‘I was all wrong about the man who invented those cats’ eyes for the road at night. I was thinking about somebody totally different. I couldn’t have been more wrong.’ Then he would go ahead with the new view. But he had never changed his view about Rupert going home at weekends; that was an absolute.

  Jimmy didn’t have any home to go off to on a Friday. Jimmy’s home was right there in Dublin. He was the youngest of six, and his two sisters and three brothers had gone exactly the way their father wanted which was into the newspaper vendor business. Some had pitches on good corners, others had roofs over their heads and sold ice creams and birthday cards as well. But Jimmy’s father was in the habit of saying gloomily, ‘There’s always one arty farty cuckoo in the nest, one who won’t listen to reason.’ Jimmy had been a bit of a pet when he was a youngster: they all encouraged him at his books, and then to university and into teaching in a very posh school. They made jokes about him being gay but it was never said straight out whether they believed he was or not. Anyone over-educated as they regarded him would have had the same abuse, the accusations of being limp-wristed, the mockery of his clothes, the vain search for an ear ring and the camp clichés from the television: ‘Ooh Jimmy, you are awful.’