The Coach Crash

You are on a coach when the news about the crash pops up on your phone.

25 dead. 20 injured. You wonder if you could have been among the dead, or luckily, among the injured.

You look outside the coach window. Pastures are gilded by the setting sun. Long shadows of cattle, sheep, and horses amble on the glowing sea of grass. The other coach crashed on a winding mountain road in the depth of night. When you visited that province a few years ago, you marveled at the lofty peaks and cascading waterfalls in the day, didn’t think of how treacherous they could be after the sun set.

The last photo of the coach before its crash captured by a traffic camera shows the driver in a white hazmat suit, with a large mask that leaves little of his face exposed. The white front lights of the coach cannot dismiss the amassed darkness. They gaze at you like two hollow eyes. You flip your phone over. Raising your eyes, you see the brunette, golden and ginger heads around you. Some are leaning against the window, sleeping soundly. Some are nodding to one another, excited or relaxed in conversation. All those who died in the coach crash had black hair and black eyes like yours.

 Yet here you are in a remote country, back from holiday in another remote country. You have enjoyed bright sunshine, refreshing cocktails and tender scallops on the Mediterranean coast. Now you are among idyllic English pastures, while 25 souls of your homeland waft in the darkness of the mountains. Your family are still there, so they could easily have been on that coach.

You gag. It probably isn’t the news, since you always fall victim to car sickness, but rushing towards your throat at this time is more than half-digested food. It’s a long-repressed bellow against the repressive regime. It’s tear-fermented bile, tears you’ve been holding back since your grandfather was diagnosed of Alzheimer while you were unable to enter your home country. Your T-shirt, wetted by cold sweat, sticks on your skin. You shiver in the air-conditioned coach.

The driver of the crashed coach must have been sweating, too, but not cold sweat. He must have been stifled in the impervious hazmat suit and sultry summer air. Perhaps beads of sweat crawled on his forehead and stung his eyes. He couldn’t wipe them with rubber gloves on his hands, so he squeezed his eyes. Just for a second, he thought, a blink. Nothing will happen. But it was too late and he hadn’t had enough sleep. One second lapsed into the timelessness of death as he drifted into slumber.

Ding. You open your eyes like waking up from a nightmare. The sun has gone down, leaving only a slit of light on the edge of the sky. For a moment you don’t know where you are.

It is a message notification on your phone. Your French friend, who has been your companion for most of the holiday, asked if you had got home.

 Thanks for asking! Should be less than an hour now x. You reply, then smile bitterly. Have I got home? Home is where you can hear your native tongue on a coach, where you know you’d soon be welcomed by Mum with a steaming bowl of noodle soup.

The passengers on the crashed coach would never return home. They were taken away from home because they were close contacts, and because the existence of close contacts was a blot on the city’s “Zero Covid” plaque. Thus they had to be relocated to a neighbouring town in the middle of the night, when coaches were forbidden by law from going on the road.

They were numbers to be erased, eradicated.

You do not want to be a number. You do not want to be on that coach. That is why you are here, on this coach. Getting a flight back home is difficult and expensive, but not impossible. You keep saying you would go home when it becomes easier. Meanwhile your toddler sister has learned to ride a bicycle, your parents have had half of their hair greyed, and your home city has gone through three lockdowns. Or is it four now? It’s hard to keep count. 

It’s turned completely dark outside. With no beautiful scenery for distraction, you feel even sicker. All you can see on the window is yourself: frizzy hair, oily forehead, glasses slanting to the left. You do not want to see your distorted reflection, but it pulls you in. Chest heaving, brain coagulated, you press your forehead against the cold window. The eyes meet. No more running away.

You do not love your family enough to stay with them. Period. You remember what you learned in your philosophy class, Satre’s claim that feeling does not count without ratification by action, and you hate him for it. He deprived you of the right to say you love your family. Canceled flights and extended quarantines are only a coward’s excuses. You are willing to take the chance of a grandpa or grandma dying in your absence, and even, someone dear being on that coach...

Rage flares up in your chest and rushes all the way to your head, almost bursting through the scalp. It’s the damned Zero Covid policy. It’s not your fault. You gasp. Somehow, the anger is refreshing like a cooling ointment, alleviating the car sickness. You sit straight up, take a few deep breaths, and try to prolong this ephemeral moment of clarity so that you can rationally process the horrific news.

But phrases from the news brief whirl in your mind. 25. 20. Covid. 7-8 meters. Hillside. Early morning. Dead. Coach rollover. Rescue. Relocation. Quarantine. Survivors. Condolences. Families. Mayor. Ambulance...

They deluge what little rationality you have gathered. You feel too small and too alone to wrestle the morbid reality.

Have you seen the news? You message your Chinese friend who is also working in London. You both got a job here after graduation, not yet determined to immigrate, but out of a “wait and see” mindset.

Yeah..... she replies. She knows which piece of news you are talking about.

Yeah... you don’t know what else to say. A few months ago, you would have berated the government with utmost indignation, but there has been so many tragic incidents that you are too worn out to say anything. The two of you are still too small and too alone after all. But there is comfort in facing the same absurdity with someone as powerless as you. So you stare at the phone screen, knowing she is probably doing the same.

After a while she texts, Every time I see things like this happen, I don’t want to go back. 

Me, too... you reply, and immediately feel your face burning. After so many have died, all you can think of to talk about is your petty life choices.

You have looked at the phone for too long, and the vertigo creeps back. Seats slide to the right while the floor tilts to the left; you are sucked up and down. The whispers and chuckles in the coach sound drawled and shrill, making your head throb. English has become a strange language, something that presses the air out of you. You want to scream at the other passengers and tell them about the 25 dead and 20 injured, so they are torn like you. But they won’t be. They’d be kind not to bring up the bat-eating bullshit. You lay back, eyes closed, ears plugged, and found yourself in a spinning vacuum.

What was it like for those on the crashed coach, you wonder. You try to feel it, because that is the least you can do. Was it quick? One second they were taking off their jacket, complaining about Covid regulations, texting their families to say everything was fine, the next second they simply weren’t anymore. Or did their stomachs lurch and their hearts thrust as the coach spun over the hillside? 7-8 meters, it said in the news. How long did it take? The weight of the coach and the passengers would be essential for calculation. Yes, the weight of 25 dead and 20 injured.

In the news, there is a photo of the deformed coach on a trailer, wheels dangling feebly, the top of the coach, where the seats were, completely squashed like play-doh. Why haul this wreckage away? Let it stay right where it crashed, and build a monument beside it in the shape of a hazmat suit. When Covid is over, if it will ever be, let everyone passing by be reminded of what happened. 

Of course, you know no monument is to be built, but the mountains at least will remember. The waterfalls will sing elegies, and the wind will murmur a deeply buried tale.

Sometimes in ghost stories people struck by sudden death are not aware of it. You imagine that coach continuing to drive in the endless night, rejected by every toll station. The passengers ask, “When on earth are we going to get to the quarantine hotel?” The driver is not able to answer. None of them know how long it has been since they set out. For forever they keep imploring at every toll station, “Has the lockdown been lifted yet? Can we please go home?”

 “Wait until further notice” is the response every time.

Too much waiting. There has been too much waiting, wavering and wasting, for you and for everyone. Perhaps you shouldn’t wait anymore, because things would never return to “normal”.

The window is now dotted with city lights of all kinds of colours. The coach stops more frequently. Your flat is only miles away. After all, it will be nice to go home, or whatever it is. Your roommate will be there. Perhaps you two will have some instant noodles before your nightcaps, where you’d sit in the sofa like British old ladies, chit-chatting while sipping the red wine. Then you’ll feel better. You’ll lie on your soft double-bed hugging your dolphin pillow.

As you watch the street outside becoming more familiar, a man comes down from the upper deck and sits beside you. Breathing liquor, he squints and asks, “Are you from China or Korea?”

Five years in Britain and you are still getting this.

“Excuse me,” you take your bag and squeeze out to stand by the bus door. The bus bumps. You reel forward.

I’m from China, and if the coach is going to crash, perhaps I should go back and crash with everyone else.