1

The Bus Driver

At 15:42:46 that Sunday, a fly landed on the bald patch of moderately successful investment advisor Michael. It was right on schedule.

Her eyes criss-crossed from watching the landing, Michael’s eight-year-old daughter shrieked with excitement. A few hands clapped at the back of the tent. A gentleman with a productive nose and a handkerchief to match cleared his throat. He swallowed something that was meant to come out and pointed at his watch.

“The man got it right.”

Across the table from Michael’s bald patch, John Predict’On attempted a smile for his audience without interrupting his preparations for the next subject.

There was the issue of not knowing who it was going to be.

He smoothed out the velvet tablecloth that was stretched out on the wooden tabletop before him, and livened up the intermission with the usual announcement.

“Don’t forget, you may still be able to contribute your little donation to my Box of Future Donations, ladies and gentlemen, here to my right and to your honourable left – big, blue, you can’t miss it.”

“I’m colour-blind,” said the man with the cough, “and poor.”

On the other side of John Predict’On’s table, the eight-year-old was neither.

“We should give him loads of money, Daddy!” she blared out.

The fly now departed, the investment banker whose daughter always told everybody what her daddy did for a living without being asked, remembered the second part of the prediction – John Predict’on insisted on calling it prophecy – that the fly would leave behind 0.43ml of fly excrement.

“Well, darling,” Michael said, wiping the top of his head with a damp handkerchief that had been handed out from the audience, “I will admit the fly stunt was rather clever, but remember Mr John couldn’t predict you anything worthwhile.”

“I have explained,” John Predict’On reminded him, “this is not a personalised service …”

He stopped, seeing that the father was more interested in taking photos of his own scalp, and then zooming in with a vigilant eye. The girl listened intently.

“It’s like this, Ruby,” John recommenced.

“Rachel!”

“Rachel, sorry. As I said, it’s just things that will happen. Luckily, some happen to the people who are here right now; for instance –”

“Fine.” Rachel cut him short. “Then why do you charge per person?”

The investment advisor suddenly re-emerged from antiseptic stasis.

“That’s Daddy’s girl,” he said, ruffling her hair.

John Predict’On glanced at the two snake hands of a grandfather clock. He closed his eyes and rotated his arms a few times, humming something indistinct.

“We’d like a go,” said a woman who’d slept through most of the performance.

She nudged her dormant husband awake.

“This is not how it works, madam,” John said, hands in the air. “In fact, I think I’ve exhausted my powers for today.”

“You better not,” replied the woman. “We put moneys in the box.”

The elderly gentleman with the nose and the watch waved his finger at her.

“She hasn’t actually! But I might. If you can give me this week’s lottery draw.”

John Predict’On gestured to dispel the suggestion that he might be one of those dabblers in the arts of lottery seeing. No point explaining to them that if the development of the maths-of-all-things could exert such precision on the weekly draw, there would be no more lottery.

“Tell me if I should get a job,” interrupted one of the toothless morning drinkers who usually loitered in front of Baljit’s Best Beverages.

“What should I do about my wife?” asked the husband of the woman who’d put moneys in the box.

John Predict’On grabbed hold of the edge of his table. Those professionals were a very different type of company, he had explained before. They claimed to possess the level of accuracy required for guessing lottery draws, and proved infinitely more accurate at disappearing off the face of the earth by the time you could ask for a refund.

“You gave a woman and her child a falling pile of lifebuoys in Clayford last week,” the woman protested.”

“I can’t comment,” John replied.

“You can’t say you didn’t. That was my sister-in-law and her son.”

“Ladies, gentlemen,” John pleaded, but his half-call lingered in the air before vanishing altogether.

Saying something about a written complaint, the woman pulled her husband out of the chair. Because of his natural preference for the sitting posture, he landed with both knees on the sandy floor, his cries loud enough to wake up Benzinho.

The one-legged dwarf saw it was time to winch away at his interlude music box. John Predict’On’s gazers understood that the musical interlude was not something they wanted to see through.

Once more, John Predict’On was alone inside the tent with the smell of hot damp.

“There you are,” he heard Mr Juno say. “We need to talk contract.”

“What contract?” John Predict’On asked.

“Exactly.”

The owner of the travelling fair, Mr Juno, was the head of the Flying Turks aerial acrobatics ensemble, although he wasn’t really Turkish and his body shape didn’t evoke flying. His name wasn’t really Juno either. Just like John’s last client on that day, he suffered from alopecia. Because of his size, fat rolled around his cranium in waves and curls like a full head of gelled hair that bulged in angry human faces depending on how he contracted his facial muscles.

People paid good money to see this in the first tent by the entrance.

Mr Juno walked over to John’s Box of Future Donations. He gave it a light kick, in as much as his abdomen allowed him. He prodded it. Finally, he picked it up and shook it, listening.

“Easy box – no money. No money …”

“Easy box?” Benzinho said from his corner.

“Banknotes and cheques?” John ventured to suggest.

“No money – no contract,” Mr Juno corrected him.

From his tone, Benzinho gathered it would be a good idea to clear the space, which he did, creating enough of a draught in his wake to bring down the signpost nailed to the tent’s wooden frame. It advertised John Predict’On – Precise and Nice Foretelling in small print, beneath the tent’s main, capitalised act, which Mr Juno promoted under the mysterious label of a skill – Organic Snake Eating (snakes not harmed). The parenthesis had been John’s paintbrush job at Mr Juno’s request. “Big houses, big cars, big scruples,” Mr Juno used to say about people in the suburbs.

“That not necessary,” he added, when John attempted to pick up the signpost. “Why you lie to me?”

“Beg pardon?”

“Yes,” said Mr Juno. “You were never in the Future Union whatsit. I checked with your colleague from before.”

John Predict’On took a step back. His lips quivered with the droplets of an answer. A plaster strip was going to come undone on someone’s knee the next day in the Southern Hemisphere. Mr Juno didn’t look interested.

“What colleague?”

“Name don’t matter,” Mr Juno said, inviting someone into the tent with a nod.

A tall, middle-aged man in jeans and a chequered shirt walked through the tent flap behind Mr Juno. He would have looked like he didn’t belong there, had it not been for a rainbow-striped poncho biased towards the indigo side, and a dark, pointy hat, dotted with half-moons and stars. The glass fishbowl he carried suggested two things: that it was meant as a cheap crystal ball replacement, and that the man was John J’s replacement. He beamed at John J and even waved a little bit.

“Yeah, well, I don’t know whom you spoke to,” said John Predict’On, “but there’s a waiting list. Pre-membership is a long process.”

“Ow, ow, ow,” Mr Juno lamented, shaking the Box of Future Donations. “I knew you good only for care homes.”

John Predict’On shook his head. He was shaking a little. Predicting the future for the elderly and vulnerable, most of whom couldn’t remember the prophecies from one second to the next or didn’t have much of a future to speak of, paid as badly in cash as it did in professional pride. And that was before Mr Juno’s commission.

“Are you sending me back into care homes?”

Mr Juno didn’t reply. The stranger that had come in with him placed his crystal ball on the table and raised a hand in front of a genial smile. John Predict’On checked his watch. His eyebrows accordioned against each other.

“I really need to go,” he apologised. “Sorry I lost the key to the Box.”

Mr Juno pouted. From his pocket he produced a shiny key that had all the signs of an unused spare. He brandished it in John’s face.

“See? You lose, I find.”

He proceeded to unlock the Box. The fat on his head gathered into two teary eyes crying sweat down his temples, as he weighed two crumpled banknotes in his palm. He crumpled them further until they could be flung in John’s face.

“Please stop put your own money in here. Embarrassing.”

**

“Tweer-leeng. This vehicle is about to depart. Tweer-leeng.”

What with redundancy on the back of driverless technology looming more aggressively than ever, a more pessimistic bus driver would have worried that no one down at the depot had bothered to reboot the automated voice.

But not John J Harris.

Eternity had incorporated him in its own mosaic of quiet roads, regular passengers and 15 mph straight lines. His electronic jingle impersonation via the PA system got better every time.

“This bus is L4. Next stop – Acacia Gardens. Tweer-leeng!”

The soothing red line of bus driving: always on time or late, never early.

The driver replaced the microphone, selected DRIVE and checked the wing mirror. Snuggly peace reigned between stripy necktie and the green bus logo at the top left of the slipover vest. All a reassuring polyester.

“Oi, driver!”

This was not one of the regulars.

It couldn’t have been the lady who lugged cabbages in a wheelie trolley on Tuesdays and thanked him for stopping on request although to do so was his job. Nor was it the couple who called him John J, although they only ever said anything if they wanted to complain that someone had taken their preferred raised double seat on top of the left rear wheel arch.

“Oi, driver, hello!”

Such was the life of a local bus driver that even the new face no one had seen before was someone everyone on the bus thought they’d seen before. Although a woman’s voice, it sounded too young and too gritty to be coming from the lady who liked listening to the local news on a hand-held solar-powered radio.

John J and the retired proofreader who took until Wednesday to finish reading Monday’s free paper looked at each other in amused complicity over the head of the man with the bow-tie who always attended a Thursday bridge club – not least because they knew he had once asked the woman with the radio why she didn’t use headphones, on which occasion he had learnt, after a few cross yells, that they were bad for your hearing.

The driver pulled over between two parked cars and opened the middle doors. He waited for the calling passenger to get off, yet no one stirred. The cabin mirror confirmed this. Just as he was about to turn to his passengers, he caught something out of the corner of his eye. The movement wasn’t coming from inside the bus, but from the pavement. Someone was knocking on the front doors. John J pressed a button, the hydraulics hissed and another one of those common, never-seen-before faces stepped in.

Except that this face bus driver John J Harris had seen before. The man appeared taller under his pointy hat, speckled with half-moons and stars, than earlier in the day, when he had walked into John J’s tent behind Mr Juno. The passenger removed the hat so it wouldn’t get knocked off against the low ceiling of the bus.

“That’s a nice surprise,” he said to John J as scanned his travelcard.

The poncho was gone, probably stuffed in the medium-sized rucksack slung over his shoulder, which also betrayed the shape of a concealed fishbowl.

“We didn’t get to catch up at Mr Juno’s,” the passenger said.

John J made no reply. The same loud woman who had called out at the driver a few moments before broke through the awkwardness.

“Oi, driver! I thought it was you!”

She stood up, dragging a small child after her.

“Two hours and back from Clayford, we did. Them lifebuoys were supposed to fall …”

John J set the bus back in motion, keeping his eyes on the road.

“They were locked inside a boathouse, they were!”

The woman breathed down his cheek. The child was crying. On the solar-powered radio there was news of someone from Blackley Manor, only five miles south, who had spent three weeks teaching transcendental meditation to farm pigs.

“But the lifebuoys fell over, you can rest assured,” the man with the pointy hat said.

The woman gave him the once-over. Then returned her attention to John J.

“You two friends?”

“It’s an honour,” the new passenger explained, “just to have Mr Harris predict something for you.” Winking at John J, he added, “You can rest assured things happened as foretold, and if so, of what importance can it be whether they were witnessed or not?”

“Because I wanted to see it,” the woman’s son blurted at him.

The stranger granted the boy a pitiful smile.

“Don’t look at him like that,” the mother said. “If it’s important to him,” she said, pointing at the driver, “don’t see why it should be any less to us. Here …”

She swung something from her pocket. A second later, the man was looking at a screen displaying a colourful news headline in bold letters.

SOOTHSAYER FOUND UNCONSCIOUS IN GERMANY SAYS HE TRAVELLED 2000 MILES TO WATCH TWO AIR MOLECULES COLLIDE

A furtive glance from the driver caused the bus to steer too close to the kerb. The woman met the move with an expletive, to which she added the observation that they had missed their stop, and anyway, if he wasn’t a charlatan, John J Predict’On Harris was a freak and should stick to sideshows and not drive a bus.

John J checked the brakes and the bus stopped as a cabbage rolled down the aisle from the shopping trolley two seats back.

“There’s no talking to the driver,” the retired proofreader reminded the woman and child as they got off and out of John J’s life.

The driver nodded, his eyes on the road. The owner of the cabbages mumbled at the retired proofreader and the face gleaming from the front cover of his Monday newspaper.

“They should put up a sign against bringing Mike Leek’s socialist rag on the bus,” she said, and laughed at her own idea.

A political debate started over whether someone wheeling cabbages should speak against socialism. The owner of the radio reprimanded both sides for disturbing Stave Spotters in Brahms Week. The new passenger could now talk to John J without being overheard.

“Paragon, remember?” he said. “The Great Paragon of Paraguay … uzedh to do deh accent … Mayan poncho … no?”

John J grabbed the wheel. He kept his frown on the road.

“Mr Juno used to send us to care homes, right?” he went on. “John Predict’On! John J Predict’On Harris, right?”

John J stared ahead. He took advantage of a red light to scrutinise the one named Paragon of Paraguay. Paragon scrutinised the driver ID tag clipped onto the lateral sun-blind curtain. It was made from the same dotted fabric as John J’s regulation slipover and tie. The bus circumvented a parked car in the gentle lullaby of pneumatic suspension. Brahms emanated from a transistor radio somewhere at the back.

“The J always got me confused,” Paragon said. “Niche, I remember. Your speciality was a sort of miscellanea – would you say –”

“Can I help you?” John J interrupted him.

“I’m sorry. After all, you can rest assured I’m not much of a Nostradamus myself, if you remember.

“I don’t.”

“Well, at least those people listened. Those who could still hear.”

John J clicked the gear selector and pulled out onto Green Way without a word.

“Anyway,” said Paragon, taking off his hat and reaching into it for a handful of leaflets, “might as well show you this. You’ve got maths-of-all-things experience and great customer manner. Even with a day job,” he pointed to the steering wheel, “there are part-time positions. Patches you up from pay cheque to pay cheque, if you know what I mean.”

It didn’t take John J long to know what the papers were. They spoke highly of the Quantum Theory of Observed Futures and the maths-of-all-things basis of prescience, but the print quality hailed from times before either of those had been accepted as legitimate theories. He sneered.

“Let me guess, more back-alley stuff. For a modest fee they tell you what to do with your next week.”

“Harsh,” laughed Paragon.

John J wasn’t laughing. He hesitated, overtook Postman Fabian on his bicycle, and finally said it.

“Do they write messages at the bottom of recyclable coffee cups?

“No, you see –”

“I’m not my dad.”

They drove in silence past Baljit’s Best Beverages. The winos who hung out by the entrance were already incapacitated for the day.

“Rest assured I’m aware of the bad press,” Paragon said.

“And I’m aware I’m happy driving my bus.”

Paragon studied the leaflets as if he was seeing them for the first time. He deposited them in the till tray dating back to the era of cash ticket purchases.

“By the way,” he said, still looking at the papers, “you forgot to foretell the next stop.” 

De Merevoix Gardens was one thing John J had forgotten. The other was to reduce speed before the junction with Green Way where the rose bushes marked the exit from residential private parking. He compensated with a wide swerve past a car that was pulling out. The manoeuvre chucked the bus over the kerb by Baljit’s Best Beverages. The heavy-consoled cabin sticking out over the front wheels dragged the bus into a hardly controllable swing which sent a spurring message to Baljit’s loyal customers, who thus regained running form and abandoned their bottles uncapped, while Postman Fabian was left crouching for his life between Baljit’s customer bike racks and the shop wall.

Hearing the final pneumatic brake hiss, the postal worker opened his eyes and waved at the bus driver. They knew each other well. John J Harris used to give him free rides when it was raining.

Inside the bus, the rolling cabbage had made a comeback at the front of the vehicle, as did a flying pair of glasses, most likely a possession of the Thursday bridge player. Brahms Week faded into an advertorial for a community hedge-trimming competition.

John J waved at Fabian as he reversed. He checked his mirrors. Afternoons in residential quarters were quiet like that.

“I drive a bus,” he articulated, stressing every word.

“Do you do lottery numbers?” asked the member of the Thursday bridge club. “Just an idea. If you dabble in that, bridge moves must be a cinch.”

John J stammered. He punched the gear selector. They were moving again.

“I –”

“Rest assured, buddy,” said Paragon, striking up momentary complicity with the bridge player. “It was just an idea. You drive a bus.”

John J nodded. He plucked the microphone from its stand and rubbed it with his thumb until his finger started hurting.

Paragon exhaled a melancholy sigh.

“I really don’t get,” he said, “why the Union makes admission so difficult for some.”

“Tweer-leeng,” John J said through gritted teeth. “Tweer-leeng!”

John J took his hand off the steering wheel enough to fling the leaflets from the tray into Paragon’s face. Paragon waited for another stop to pass. He crouched to pick them up.

“Because,” he panted, “if you do change your mind, you can pick one of these up at the Congress on Saturday … Quick pint after, maybe?”

 “Tweer-leeng!” John J shouted into the microphone. “This vehicle is about to depart. Tweer-leeng! This bus is the L4 line. Next stop, Clarence Gardens.”

“Won’t be needed,” said Paragon. “I’m off here.”

A relieved exhalation whizzed through the AP system. A lady’s voice inside a winch radio said trimming hedges competitively wasn’t as easy as most people thought.

It wasn’t until Paragon’s hat, bagged fishbowl and all had disappeared behind a rhododendron bush that John J noticed the laminated white envelope on his paperwork ledge. Paragon’s flyers were one thing. This envelope was quite another. He picked it up, examined it attentively and ripped it open at one corner. He stopped and stared through the car whose way he was blocking in the narrow gorge of Laburnum Grove. He slapped the envelope down and picked it back up. He ripped and kept ripping.

When he was done, he pushed himself through the doors that he’d forgotten he’d shut. They bounced off his shoulders and stayed open like they’d been warned. The other driver, probably a school-run mum, gave a shy couple of honks.

John J staggered out onto the pavement, a shiny piece of card marked FWU in his trembling hand. “Wait,” he called to a Japanese rosebush by the side of the rhododendron. “I think you made a mistake.”

The bush said nothing. A perfume of perfect desertion lingered stronger than the scent of the Japanese rose next to it.

John J returned to the bus. He studied the rolling cabbage as if it’d suddenly stopped belonging to the bus floor. He sat down, secured the handbrake and contemplated the card that had come out of the envelope.

His stiff shirt collar was tightening around his neck like life around a thirty-five-year-old still living with his father. A button popped and he was breathing, finally breathing.

“Anything the matter, driver?”

John J stared through the electronic time display. Never early. Always on time or late. Sometimes too late.

Best hedge trimmer crowned, five more minutes until The Mystery History Quiz. A set of windscreen wipers were going to suffer a two-second offset somewhere up north. It didn’t matter.

After four and a half years’ driving the bus that had marginally missed him, John J “Predict’On” Harris had finally come to a crossroads.