The School Bus

The bus stalled as it struggled up Malabar Hill. We could walk to school faster. And sometimes we did, when the bus, awaiting retirement, refused to restart. I didn’t like walking, but it offered good thinking time. I liked thinking, then and now. Making memories and recalling them. Snapshots stored on previously blank pages. Perhaps, slides, waiting to be viewed. Sepia exposures. A projected spiral of time.

Nineteen small bodies clamber down overly steep steps, exiting the bus, emerging onto the verge and heading, in a snaking line, up the hill. Heat dampened clothes soon clinging to us. There should be twenty, but Harry is sick again. He’s often sick. I start thinking about Harry as I plod on. I try not to. I could have better thoughts, but in the moment you get what comes, don’t you? Probably shouldn’t overhear parents’ murmurings. Their voices run in my head, on repeat, like the gramophone when the needle sticks. Even the whiff of their cigarette smoke returns, invading my senses, accompanying the reliving.

‘A sickly child.’

‘Not suited to the climate, but I don’t think they have a choice.’

‘Only another year though, before he can be sent back home to boarding school. He turns eight soon.’

‘Can they afford it?’

‘Can any of us?’

‘True.’

‘They’re overfeeding him to compensate.’

‘Such a relief, not having those health problems to struggle with.’

‘It was a nightmare in the hospital the time we needed tonsils taken out. One of the babies in the ward had water on the brain. Head all swollen up … and the crying.’

‘Yes. Quite. A place best avoided.’

A lighter flicks and another cigarette flares into life. Puff-puff, fills the awkward conversation lull. There’s that stink of burning leaves again. No, not leaves. Leaves smell nice. Aroma. Wholesome. Woodsy. This catches in the throat and makes breathing a struggle. None of them notice. And Mummy’s voice fills the silence; sounding like The Queen.

‘Felicity’s impetigo is back again. Poor little legs. She’ll have to stay out of the pool.’

Visiting the pool is the best part of any day. That means lots more boring ones. I tune out the rest of their ramblings. Mothers chattering constantly. Meaningless stuff.

Although, I am invested in Harry going away, far away. Invested. I like that word. Learnt it from Daddy. He’s an accountant. It’s something you put in a safe place and keep checking, hoping it’s got bigger. Waiting for the postman each month bringing news of its progress. Reading newspapers about it. Not quite like money, but sort of. Anyway. Harry. Leaving couldn’t come soon enough for my liking. I’m glad he won’t be on the bus going home after school today. A year older than me, and might be sickly, he’s our apartment block’s bully. I’ve got bruises on my legs from running up the stairs when I get home, trying to stay ahead of him. Failing. Of course, he could be standing in the stairwell this afternoon. Waiting. There’s a word for that too – people who jump out and kill you in the jungle – but I’ve forgotten it. Mummy and Daddy were whispering about that yesterday. Harry’s one of those people. He’s never too ill to chase me. I think he’s making it up, being sick. Nothing more wrong with him than the rest of us. He just likes having everyone’s attention.

‘Poor little Harry.’ His secretly smug face, pleading with watery-blue eyes at parents and teachers. Growing alight in dark corners, when he’s pinching or kicking.

‘Sneaky devil,’ my sister calls him. 

I wish she was here. I miss her. Our parents sent her to boarding school last year. That’s how I understand about it. We all traipsed back to cold, wet, England, for three months. Mummy – wearing her new bow trimmed velvet hat and best jacket and skirt – left her in a big old house with lots of other nine-year-old girls. It’s far away from my grandparent’s house where we stayed, so we could hardly ever visit. She’d been dressed up to go; a grey skirt, white shirt, tie and green jumper. Addition of a felt hat, with a silly looking green tassel hanging off it, and a grey overcoat made up the school uniform. All two sizes too big.

‘To grow into.’

She cried and begged to leave. So I cried too. I always copied what my sister did. Until I couldn’t. I can’t even imagine being this far away. Distance between us. She wasn’t sick, so I’m sure she didn’t need to go back home. Grownups are confusing. I’m not at all sure they know what’s going on in our lives. Way more interested in what they think the servants might steal. I mean, who counts the cups of sugar as they go into the storage tin? And how many teaspoons going into their tea does that equal anyway? It sounds like the sort of sums they make the bigger children do. Perhaps that’s why they teach torturing arithmetic – about as enticing as Harry’s Chinese burns – so we’ll be able to check up on the servants when we’re grownups.

I don’t like arithmetic. I don’t think I’ll bother learning it.

And there’s that smell again. Perhaps it isn’t cigarettes. No one here is smoking.

‘Keep up. Keep up!’ My reverie of Harry ends abruptly. A reverie is a fancy word for thinking, you know. It’s useful, in case you’ve used the word, thinking, too often. You could use daydreaming, but maybe that's not a good word. Mummy tells me to stop daydreaming.

The smoky pong is explained. The bus gives a violent choking sound and grumbles back to life. A trail of black filth spurts out the back as it overtakes us and stops, idling at the top of the hill. I know what idling is, too. Teacher is always telling us to ‘Stop idling and get on.’ Teacher needs to have words with the bus, if you ask me. Which you can’t, of course – ask me, I mean – because you’re not really there. Or is it, here?

We reverse our exit and take our same seats again, too puffed to talk. It’s a steep hill. Mad, the way the bus only takes us for the easy bit of the drive.

I’ll write to my sister and tell her about today, tomorrow, when it’s the weekend. With no bus and no hill walking. There’ll also be running races this afternoon to report on. Last, is my designated spot. I can out-do everyone with reading and writing though.

Well, not everyone, I appreciate the finer point of that now. There are so many exquisite writers. But six-year-old me, in the mind-photo of us walking up Malabar Hill, I think that thought, as I become part of the photographic display, filling an otherwise vacant space. An exhibition I title: The School Bus. Straightforward. And there we were, all nineteen: on the bus; off the bus, as it belches pollution; walking after it, up the dusty road; getting on again and being driven to school. Late. Teachers filling the wait with another cup of tea. Did they count their spoons of sugar?

I don’t remember when Harry left for boarding school. I do recall, before that happened, moving to live at a different place. One with fewer apartments and a boy I fell in love with, living on the ground floor. What was his name? Why can I remember hated Harry and not this? It began with a J … Jason, Jeremy? Gerard. That was it. Before I turned nine and followed my sister to boarding school.

There were no more school buses for me. Swopped instead for cold classrooms, heated by radiators warming only their adjacent two feet; night-time dormitories, shared with five others, but lonely nonetheless, echoing homesick cries. Plates slopped with chopped cabbage and boiled potatoes; an aroma turning my stomach as time spins backwards and forwards. And no more boys. We made Our Own Trouble, nonetheless. Memories for a different photographic display. Colder. Framed against ice-blue painted walls.

The School Bus dominates. Vibrant. Curry spice, with its welcome heat curling around my old bones. A recurring exhibition. Only the dialogue alters.