AFTER THE CRASH

A school outing...

AFTER THE CRASH

The bus hammered along the country lanes as if it was running out of time, which it probably was, when it hit a brick or stone wall (it’s of little importance which) and just about everyone sitting on it was killed, some mercifully instantly but others painfully slowly. And Tony Vicars, who wasn’t killed at all though he might well have been, somehow crunched in his seat near the front.

Tony was dozing off, not noticing the excess speed the driver had chosen when navigating a series of right-angled bends. And Tony was smiling as he idly dreamed of Fanny Bircumshaw the girl who had accidentally bumped into his trousers with the sort of grin that only a teenage girl can muster as an apology, and incidentally set his own teenage heart lurching in the particular way he liked. That had been yesterday but it might well have been mere moments ago because at the very moment h imagined that she contrived the hundredth inadvertent contact the bus failed to negotiate a particularly nasty bend and Tony’s life migh well have ended, but it didn’t.

His mind slipped from a dreamy mode into total unconsciousness in which Fanny Bircumshaw was trapped along with him and in which absolutely nothing of any interest happened for quite a long time before a kind of light started shining.

The trouble was, the light was created inside his bruised brain and had nothing to do with whatever was happening in the area of a very crumpled bus and a broken wall. But the light came and went and told him its own story.

“I do love you, Tony,” whispered Fanny Bircumshaw, hovering like the angel he knew that she was all around him.

And he wandered down the road away from the smashed up bus with steam oozing from its radiator and a team of emergency firemen and paramedics struggling to contain a difficult situation, what with flames threatening to ignite leaking fuel and too many dead bodies for the ambulances that had arrived from the nearest hospitals. He glanced back and saw his own battered flesh being carefully taken to the one ambulance meant for the not quite dead.

“And I love you, Fanny,” he said to her, and held her by the hand, gently squeezing her fingers. “What are you doing round here?” he added, knowing the answer “you’re not on our bus.”

“I came to find you, Tony,” she replied, “when are we going to get married?”

He paused and gently pulled her towards him until he felt her fingers brushing against his trousers again, and shivered.

“Next week,” he said, determinedly.

“That’s good,” she smiled, “I’ll be twenty one.”

“And not still seventeen,” he whispered.

“Of course not!” she replied indignantly, “Are we going to live in a cottage by the forest and have a huge family?”

He looked at her, and smiled.

The priest had been right. He had suggested she would make the perfect mother, and look at her! She was carrying their first child, swollen like angels might swell if they were pregnant.

He was never aware that they transferred him to his old home, where his mum could wait for him to die because he didn’t know he was going to do anything of the sort. It never crossed his mind, which was swamped in shadows.

“To have and to hold until death do you part…” that priest murmured, smiling.

Tony smiled back. Ahead there was Fanny to plan for, and a tribe of kids to help her create. And somewhere down the lane a smashed up bus was being towed away and he was walking from it, holding the hands of his two sons as they looked adoringly at him. Somewhere, he had no idea where that might be, a light flashed and flicked and it seemed to him that another reality was trying to emerge from the ashes of a lost and forgotten past. But magic is never that real.

“Time for bed,” cooed Fanny Vicars nee Bircumshaw, smiling that wonderful smile of hers at their two youngest daughters.

And the little ones clambered up the stairs, young and perfect.

“Yes mummy!” they giggled in response.

“Time for bed,” he called, echoing the wonderful Fanny but calling the boys.

“Yes mummy,” the boys replied happily.

But I’m daddy…

“Time for bed, mummy,” he grinned.

But it wasn’t Fanny who replied. It was his mother, and she, too, was smiling as if the whole of life was a very special joke, and he scampered up the stairs himself towards her, in his short pants.

“Fanny called today,” she told him.

Fanny? Fanny who?

“She wanted to know if you’re still going on that school outing tomorrow? The one on a bus into the country? I told her you’d paid and of course you were… You wouldn’t miss it for the world, and any way you don’t want to have too much to do with that lass. They say she’s flighty, in a naughty way, and you really don’t want to have anything to do with a girl like that!”

“No mummy.”

What does a girl have to do to be flighty? Grow wings and flutter off?

“Bed at last,” yawned Fanny Vicars, “I’m ready, aren’t you, love?”

He grinned at her. “You’re always ready,” he said, “and to think a lifetime ago my own mother warned me that you were a bit flighty!”

“Did she, then?” Fanny giggled, “then let’s prove her right! Come closer to me, darling, and let the two of us see what’s what..”

The shock as the bus hit the wall shook every bone in his body and every cell in his head. But that was all right because Fanny was here. He wasn’t alone. He would never be alone.

He felt her as she stroked him gently.

There was something he had to do before anything else. He had to have Fanny written all over him so that the whole world would know, so he went to Martin’s tattoo parlour.

He’d known Martin since school, a boy who’d shone at art and anything visually creative

“That was fun, Martin, but it sort of hurt,” grinned Tony as he pulled his pants up, “thanks a lot.”

“Well, you wanted a tattoo just there marking your fiftieth anniversary, and now you’ve got one,” replied the artist, “but tell me, who’s this Fanny bird you need to have written all over your you-know-what?”

“She died,” he almost wept, “having our eighth baby. A boy, it was, making four of each. She was so lucky because that’s what she wanted.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” sighed the tattoo artist, “and to think you survived that bus crash!”

“It seems a lifetime ago,” he replied, “the bus was going so fast and the lane was so bendy… It had to happen. There was no way it couldn’t. And since then… I don’t know… I’ve been in such a good place, married with kids, and then she passed away…

“So sad,” he said, I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes, not for anything…”

He shook his head and watched as the wooden coffin was carried into the church on the corner by sober black dressed bearers.

“Poor old Tony,” he whispered to his wife, “he survived for what seemed a cruel long time after that drunken driver smashed his bus full of kids.”

“He fancied me once,” smiled Martin’s wife, “and I fancied him until it happened and he became a vegetable.”

“And you ended up with me and my little parlour, Fanny my love,” smiled Martin, “Poor old Tony… Still life’s what it gives us and that has to be that. Goodbye, old mate.”

Some flicker in the melting matter of the late Tony Vicars’ head might have heard and understood.

But it didn’t.

© Peter Rogerson, 17.12.24