The 662
By Sarah Davies
1993... The bus costs 16p one way to school. A 10p, a 5p and a 1p clenched in her fist. She’s a small kid - thirteen, scrawny. Shy, uncertain. Too-big blazer. Clompy sensible shoes on the end of stick legs. She ends up running for it most mornings because it comes at unreliable times and she fears it but she also fears missing it. Often she sticks out her arm and it sails past the stop as though she’s invisible, making her queasy with panic and sweaty from running all the way instead.
It’s not the driver’s fault. It must be the worst school run job in Merseyside. Probably they draw straws at the depot every morning for the Fencefield job - whoever loses has to do it. And probably quits the same day, never to brave a double decker again. Would explain why the 662 never seems to have the same driver twice. Sometimes drivers don’t know the way to the school and have to ask a kid. Sometimes that kid deliberately directs the driver miles off course - once onto the M62 - then scarpers to the back of the bus pissing himself laughing while the driver roars furiously from his cabin. Or a bunch of older lads at the back might let off the fire extinguishers and coat everything and everyone with foam.. the driver purple, spitting with rage.
“Sodding little BASTARDS! Right! Next stop COP SHOP!!!”
Drives everyone to the nearest police station. An hour and a half late = a hundred and twenty detentions.
Around the corner from school, there’s a sharp left bend down a narrow downhill road. Not a road for buses. Drivers slow to a crawl here, sensing it’s a risky manoeuvre. But however carefully he goes, there’s always a heartstopping second when the bus goes into zero gravity balancing on two wheels and if just one kid moves, the bus will crash over sideways and there’ll be carnage and death. Daily she goes numb with fear, readying herself for impact, often pressed against the plexiglass door of the packed vehicle, knowing that if disaster strikes her body will be crushed between the pavement, the shards of the emergency exit and a heaving mass of Lynx-scented school uniformed teenage flesh. Each morning, after the bus rights itself and careens down the home stretch to the school gates, the relief makes her dizzy - twelve seconds euphoria at the prospect of living another day - until the bus stops and the doors spring open backwards (occasionally trapping her arm or her ankle) and she’s shoved ignominiously off by the tide of grey jumpers and swinging backpacks. The crash never happens but every day she’s mentally prepared for it, and it means every school day begins with a brain-surge of adrenaline.
As her heart rate returns to normal and her blood begins to circulate normally again, she hurrytrudges to her formroom where her sweat stained, ciggie reeking form tutor, nicotine yellow patched mouth, will let her off missing the register if she’s lucky. If he’s in a bad mood she’ll get a warning and a few of those means a detention. His bad moods are unpredictable but maybe connected in some unfathomable way with his wife, someone no kid has ever met or got any idea about but who he tells jokes about on a good day. She doesn’t dwell on it because form time is over almost before she’s there and then it’s lessons.
School, on the whole, she reflected years later, was a practice run for a life where it wasn’t possible to keep up. A bell rang, you and two thousand other kids had precisely no time to navigate yourself from the depths of one massive building to some room in another massive building, the science block or the technology wing and a lesson that had already begun, where you had to catch up, late, hurry. Then just as you’d got into that, another bell and on to the next. Crowds again, noise, teachers shouting to police the throng and punish the most obvious lawlessness - smoking, minor assault, attempts to escape school grounds - everything else is passable, goes unnoticed in the raging teenage tide.
Many of these rushes between classrooms involved descending stairs in a tightly packed crowd, occasionally being lifted off her feet and carried briefly along by the press and chaos of the herd, her black leather shod toes dangling precipitously above the stepped concrete until the swarm of kids pulsed apart and her feet met solid ground again. There was a kind of art to this - find a handrail, hang onto someone’s bag, maintain balance, don’t look down. Despite Hillsborough only a few years before, in which kids from her city - her school - had lost family members, she never felt afraid in these crushes. It didn’t properly occur to her that a crowd could be dangerous. Individual people were frightening - boys who kicked footballs purposely at your head as you crossed a yard; the PE instructor who derided you for being useless; the creepy technology teacher with whom you made sure you were never alone; the terrifying, demonic authority of the maths teachers. But crowds were big and soft and cushioned - concealed you. You weren’t yourself, you were a part of something bigger. She liked melting into them.
The episode with Bishy was interesting though. It happened on the bus of all places. She’s blotted out most of those journeys - the memories of being transported like cattle, shoved and rammed by bigger kids - but this one, she remembers every detail.
For some reason she’s made it to the back of the lower deck and got a seat. Unusual - hers is the last pickup stop, every inch of the vehicle jammed by the time she gets on. But this warmish, sunny day, some kids must have walked to school - the bus is less packed. Of course the top deck is no-go, for weedsmokers and god knows what else, and the back isn’t very safe either - a place of status belonging to year ten and eleven boys, scary ones with number one headshaves and a cigarette smell. But because it’s free and near a couple of classmates she pushes through to an empty seat right at the back, so at least she’s got a few inches of personal space for the journey and won’t lurch around as usual.
Once sat, she has to keep still. No hope of getting a book out - she’s wedged in tight, pinned by older kids spilling out of the next seats, and pulling her bag from under her feet onto her lap means elbowing someone, out of the question. She tries to catch the eyes of the classmates, who see her and give small smiles but are themselves keeping still, concentrating on not attracting attention. So she grits her teeth, mentally folds herself inwards, and wills the next fifteen minutes to be uneventful.
While intently building an imaginary protective bubble around her, she becomes aware of some older lads (year elevens?), swinging like monkeys from the grab rails, laughing smuttily and goading one another. She hasn’t even got the gist of it before a huddle of them barrell down the bus aisle towards her. “Fuckin gw’on then, la,” says one. Another boy pushes through them, and comes to stand, tall and white shirted, blazer off, uncomfortably close to her. Alarmed, she recognises him: Bishy, short for Bishop, she doesn’t know his first name. She does know that in the complicated hierarchy of school credibility, he is a leader, a heartthrob. His nickname sums up his rep - somehow he’s achieved a level of respect where even teachers use it - the whole school admires him. Girls scratch BISHY 4EVA into hearts on their wooden desks, and boys want to be him, copy his hair, the way he does his tie. He seems above reproach, untouchable. There’s an air of badness about him, but he doesn’t look mean or hard, the opposite actually. A nice face, smooth, acne-free skin, glossy black curls, gelled but not wet-look or greasy. Dark eyebrows over brown eyes that laugh but ...not cruelly. And there’s a stillness about him that the other boys don’t have - a steady gaze, an assuredness.
“Alright,” he says. A greeting?
The bus is chugging grimly along in the morning rush hour traffic. He steadies himself by grabbing the back of a nearby seat, and bends down, bringing his face close to hers. Her chest seizes. What does he want? Why is he even noticing her, a skinny year eight? He must be at least sixteen. What comes next is unthinkable. He says it loud enough to be heard by everyone, but not rudely.
“Can I kiss you?”
She freezes, feels sudden nausea. Does he mean her? Her eyes dart, looking for help. Everyone’s staring. The classmates nearby are horrified - one’s mouth hangs open. What should she do? White hot panic, a whooshing water sound in her ears. His face is inches away.
“Er, yeah?” she manages.
It means something that he asked, but it hardly matters that she’s replied, there’s no way he could have heard her, mouse-like, over the thundering bus engine and the guffaws of the boy monkeys. There’s no real choice in the matter. Almost before she’s spoken his face is against hers and with a tilt of the head - her reflexes are dead, it happens before she can react in any way - he’s kissing her, low on the cheek - not her mouth, but near. His lips are full and his skin soft; freshly shaven, or maybe not yet growing hair. She inhales sharply and gets some of his warm spearmint gum scented breath. The sweet chemical tasting vapour, now in her mouth, feels obscene. She’s never been so much as looked at by a boy, let alone kissed. The most surreal moment of her thirteen years.
It’s over in seconds - it’s not a lingering thing. He straightens and retreats to his huddle of mates, smiling ambiguously, while she sits rooted to her seat, the volcanic flush of humiliation taking hold of her whole body. What just happened?? Her uncomprehending face searches the bus, and as though in response, she’s jolted out of her shock by a clap on the back, whoops and whistles. The other kids’ faces express a new, delighted interest in her.
“Ey baaaaabe!”
“Bishy’s gotta new giiiirlfriend!”
Someone croaks like a frog:
“Disheeee Bisheeee......” and everyone laughs.
Even as she struggles to parse the situation, the hot, sickshame sensation drains out of her. She tries a small laugh too. She gets to school without seeming to be aware of her own body or the physical effort of moving it. Suddenly, and inexplicably, she’s swimming. The day washes pleasantly over her. Kids greet her by name, thump her shoulder in the corridors. Friends buzz off the story in the canteen at lunch and girls she doesn’t even know come over to hear it, ask is she seeing him? Incredulous, she tells the truth - of course not. He doesn’t even know her name. She doesn’t understand it, but she floats along, unresisting.
It all dies down in a few days, and she barely ever glimpses him again. Not across the teeming ocean of school, not even on the bus. It quickly comes to feel like something that never happened, or that happened in a dream. Undeniably though, she’s been somehow seen, and it’s the feeling of having been pulled out of the water. A subtle shift: a small rearrangement of ideas in her head that she hadn’t really realised were even there. And she continues to hold on. She settles on the understanding that at best she’d been nothing but a prop in a dare or a bet, and she accepts that.
Much later though - years later - another, smaller part of her wonders. Whether he’d had some other, odder motive. Proving something. Testing something out?
Finally, perhaps innocently, she decides to imagine it as a kind of blessing... a chewing gum flavoured benediction. A butterfly out of chaos, an infinitesimal change in the direction of the wind.
THE END