4. THE HEART ATTACK

In France, and driving his coach...

Albert Tench drove the coach off the ferry when they reached Calais as if he’d been driving coaches off ferries all his life. But he hadn’t. He knew that. It came as a bit of a shock when he discovered that he could.

After all, strange things had happened ever since Christmas day and that first ride on his new bike, and this was the first one involving driving anything more sophisticated than that bicycle.

“I’m a fat, middle-aged man with grey hair and a beard,” he told himself. “How come?”

He didn’t know how come.

“And I’m driving a modern coach like I know exactly what to do, but I know quite certainly that I’ve never done anything like it before,” his thoughts mumbled. “How come?”

And he didn’t know how come that either. In fact, he concluded that he didn’t know very much indeed. But he did know his name.

“I’m Albert Tench and I’m thirteen,” he announced into his driver’s microphone.

His voice, a raspy kind of cigarette and whisky fume voice, echoed round the coach.

He didn’t know that the microphone did that, and he shrunk inside himself as he set himself on the right side of the road for driving in France and joined the stream of traffic heading inland.

“I must keep personal thoughts to myself,” he thought, and accidentally said that into his microphone too.

What he wasn’t aware of because he was too involved with his own confusion was that a murmur of voices was trying to sort his loud speaker announcements into some kind of order so that they made sense. After all, that’s why the driver used it, to keep his passengers informed of this and that, and make sense.

Inside, he was a knot of confusion yet somehow he was driving perfectly correctly for a coach driving through France and on its way to…

“Where are we going?” he asked both himself and that microphone.

“If you don’t know that then we’re all lost,” sneered a voice two seats behind him.

“Skeggy!” joked a second voice, this time immediately behind him.

“How do you know my Albert?” asked a third from half way down the coach. And it was the voice. One that he recognised, as a teenage tease, as a daughter aged ten and as an elderly passenger on his coach. It was Miranda Tinkle, and the very thought of her name filled him with almost total confusion.

How did he know her Albert? How could he answer that? How could he know himself? But then, her Albert wasn’t the fat man sitting behind the wheel of her holiday coach, it was a kid with a new bike on Christmas day. And on other days, he recalled, days when she’d been the only kid he could play with unless he wanted to go along to a football match with the other boys, and he never wanted to do that. Even back then he was different. Even back then he hadn’t liked the gang things the lads always did together. Even back then he’d preferred the company of Miranda Tinkle.

“Albert’s a friend of mine,” he replied, hoping the deception would kill the conversation stone dead.

Maybe he should play some music through the coach. That would take their mind off Albert Tench. The first song on his player was the enigmatic Whiter Shade of Pale. That should give them something to think about other than Albert Tench.

But maybe not.

“Albert’s dead,” she said, now just behind him because she’d moved forwards and was sitting next to the old man who’d joked about going to Skeggy.

“I’m sorry, love,” he said, quietly, meaning it.

“He was a good friend of mine,” she continued, “and you don’t make stupid games of good friends who died too young,” she added, pointedly.

That voice, he could hear it like he’d heard it all his life. And in his mind’s eye he could see her eyes, her beautiful eyes, the windows into her soul. That’s what he’d said a bit sloppily when they’d been on the swings at the park and he’d spotted her knickers when she reached the top of her swinging arc.

“He died?” he asked, knowing he had but needing a way to steer the conversation onto safer ground.

“You heard her, driver,” grunted the jester sitting next to her. “She said he died, so he must have died. When did he die, lovey?”

Albert heard her shuffle as she turned to face the other.

“It was a long time ago, sonny,” she said quietly, “it was back in the olden times, you might say. It was Christmas and he had this new bike, but the road he went on with it that first time was no place to learn about a new bike with drop handlebars! But he went down it, like the big head he was...”

“Showing off, was he?” asked the sonny, sympathetically.

“Aye, he might have been, though you wouldn’t have said he was usually a show off. Or he might just have lost control, brakes being all different from what he was used to, and all them gears...”

“Lads can be too brave sometimes,” grunted the man, “when I was a lad I was like that. Did things before I knew how to. Courted danger with every breath I took! But I grew up. I changed my ways. I got a girl and wed her, and she made sure I wasn’t daft any more.

“Albert couldn’t have wed me,” sighed Miranda, “’cause we were young, too young, thirteen, I think. It was no age for him to die, no age at all.”

“It’s a long time to be remembering a lost love,” acknowledged her new companion, “A lot of years to feel sad through.”

“I’ll be back to my seat, then,” grunted Miranda, “we’ll be stopping soon, I expect, for the driver to have a break.”

“I’ll share a cappuccino with you when we stop,” said the man, “that’d be nice!”

“Then we’d best make it two cappuccinos, one each, for hygiene reasons,” replied Miranda tartly, “though I’d have shared one with Albert if we’d heard of the stuff,” she added quietly. But Albert, sitting and holding the steering wheel and sweating, heard her. And maybe it was those whispered words or maybe an unhealthy lifestyle eating unhealthy meals at unhealthy times, but Albert became aware of a sudden and crippling pain in his chest, not ther sort you get with indigestion, not heartburn, but something far more excruciating, and he guessed what it was.

He swerved to pull the coach into a side road leading towards a lay-by, but he swerved too hard and sent it into a patch of bushes. He jammed on the brakes and it lurched to a standstill, and then there was silence. Nobody was hurt. He might have been in the throes of a heart attack but he’d saved the lives of his passengers.

But Albert Tench was far from alive as his heart gave one final thump and he found himself, in that instant, leather in hand, sloppy expression on his face, and standing at the top of a ladder, grinning to himself as the lady the other side of the glass winked at him and pulled her nightie over her head, and off.

© Peter Rogerson 04.05.19