Botanica - 7- the Chariot
Since the librarian in her Role Playing as a giant rodent had eaten all the Twinkies that I had bought for my Nan, I went back via the Twinkie store when I left the library and bought the last half dozen that they had.
It was still raining cats and dpoodles so I had to wade through a heap of deep water to get to the bus garage. I hadn’t been totally sure that the buses would be running so it was with so much relief that I managed to get on a number seven that was just about to leave for Beverly via Lagoon Road which was the nearest stop to my Nan's cabin.
Everyone crammed into the shaky old rustbucket and slushed through the city under the darkening sky and I would say that there was a surprisingly cheery atmosphere on the bus. It seemed that some of the passengers were celebrating their boss being transferred to another office and were pissed as parrots. The couple in the seat in front of me, a young woman in a green lycra pants suit and a young man in a white Fred Perry shirt were all over each other and were getting more innappropriately passionate by the minuteuntil they were spotted by a woman in a purple business suit who swayed over from a different group of people who had been partying at the back of the bus and started laying into thet lovers with a handbag and using some very unladylike language. I gathered she was sort of married to the young man in the Fred Perry shirt and he had told her that he had to go to Knoxville that evening for a meeting of the Ancient Order of Buffalos... to which he had obviously not gone.
I would like to say that this sort of thing is completely unheard of on the Beverly bus ... but of course it isn’t.
What did make it unusual and a lot more frightening was that the driver of the bus soon joined into the fray because when the woman in the green dress screamed after being hit by the handbag swung powerfully by the woman in purple at her head, the driver had recognised the voice of his long term girlfriend who had told him it was her sister’s birthday and they were having a girls' night out and going to the pictures and then for a curry and not to wait up. He stomped to where she was sitting in front of me then accused her of being a lying cow and then she punched him right between the eyes and he fell, instantly unconscious, to the floor of the bus.
This all happened very quickly but as an Occupational Therapist in Training, I know exactly what to do in almost all circumstances. I know that concussion is always serious and there were a variety of other injuries had been and were taking place but most of all I couldn’t help noticing that in the rush to rescue his girlfriend from a potentially lethal handbag attack, the driver had not parked the bus which was still trundling along what was luckily, at that point, a fairly straight stretch of road. There was obviously only one responsible thing to do and I ran up the aisle to the front of the bus, climbed into the driver’s seat and grabbed the wheel with both hands.
That was the easy bit as it was fairly self-evident how that bit worked, but the rest ... I was not too sure of. The brakes for one thing and there was another factor ... the water was rising fast and we were in great danger of getting cut off by the overflowing creek. The casualties really needed to be in A and E without delay so I figured out which was the accelerator and, ignoring all the screaming from behind me, put my foot down to the floor and we hurtled along between the dark hedges.
Even in the complete darkness of the unlit road, I did spot the junction coming up and managed to find the brake and stamp on it just in time to bring the bus to a shuddering halt just inches in front of a big old hawthorn tree. There were bumping noises and a lot of swearing from the back of the bus but they should have been grateful because it really could have been an awful lot worse.
There were three roads at the junction but none of the signs were very helpful as some joker had painted over them and put Heaven, Hell and Fairyland. There was nothing to indicate and nobody to ask which road was likely to lead to the nearest hospital with an A and E department ... So - what would anyone have done? I took a guess.
How was I possibly to know that “ Fairyland ” would turn out to be the name of an Amusement Park
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