The big red London bus knocked her flat. The front offside wheel smashed the pushchair and went over the two children. The old man went down, the shoppers, their bags and baskets flying. All down under the wheels of the bus.
“Carnage,” someone in the crowd said. Sobbing broke out at the memory.
Hysteria was in the air again.
“Crushed. Bits of stuff scattered across the road. And — blood.” A man with a hoarse voice, face white. He kept on about “Crushed” and “Bits of stuff” until the Welsh bobby asked him to shut up, people were going down like ninepins. Ambulance men were getting the driver out of the car that had made unusual entry into Jolly’s Sandwich Bar.
“Heart,” thought Butty, from the doorway, watching. “Shock.” It was only later that he got the story. Just now what surprised him was to keep seeing young Dickie right there amid the crowd, talking at times very animatedly to the policeman, and the publisher there, too, beside Dickie, and shoving a verbal oar in occasionally himself. Butty was puzzled. He could have gone over and joined the crowd, but he didn’t like crowds and anyway his cold made him feel anti-social. Roll on five-thirty.
But it was the crew of the bus that created the hysteria that was subtly changing into anger among the crowd.
“It was deliberate,” protested a decent-looking chap who was probably an accountant or a local government official. “Quite deliberate. The driver not only drove callously and deliberately into those people on the crossing, but he seemed to feel it was an enormous joke.”
“Joke?” The Bradford cop made his solitary verbal contribution to the occasion.
“He was laughing. Roaring his head off. Could hardly keep the bus straight. Sitting up in his cab howling away as if it was the funniest thing in the world.” One voice after another taking up the patchwork tale, creating a picture that shocked.
Even the Welsh bobby was set aback. “It was no accident?” They shouted him down. “And he drove away laughing?”
“Blood on his wheels,” someone said hysterically and screamed to draw attention to herself.
“Bits of stuff scattered all over,” said the man with the hoarse voice, getting it in again.
“Laughing his bloody head off,” Confirmation from all points of the crowd. Even Dickie could confirm it. And the publisher. Butty asked questíons later, when he knew of the publisher’s confirmation. In fact it probably started him off in his thoughts.
The Welsh cop was looking a bit dazed. This was something beyond his normal ken. Helplessly he stared round. Ambulance men were picking people up on stretchers. A police car came sirening through the shocked but excited crowd.
Dickie made a contribution: “The conductress. I saw her as I ran out. She was simply rolling around on the platform. Hanging on to the pole. Laughing so much I thought she’d fall off any minute. She was still shouting, ‘Plenty of room on top’!”
The crowd remembered then. A roar of utter fury went up from them, pressing round the police. The utter heartlessness of the bus crew incensed them, so that if they had fallen into the crowd’s hands at that moment undoubtedly they would have been lynched.
“Over them pore kids,” a woman said, then sobbed and broke down.
“Wheel right over them,” a man said quietly, face ashen remembering. The publisher nodded, feeling sick.
Police from the other car were pushing through the crowd. Some of the pickets from the industrial estate were there, banners waving above the crowd. BAN YOG 45, Butty read from a distance. “It’s a capitalist trick,” shouted one of the demonstrators. The Welshman, who had secretly voted Labour ever since he could say ‘Nye Bevan’ looked his scorn at this political solution to the problem perplexing him.
“Frank,” he said when the other crew came up. “Better get a call out for a bus, driver and conductress behaving curiously. Probably drunk. Mowed down some people on a pedestrian crossing then drove off at speed.” He turned to the crowd. “What happened to the bus? I mean, which way did it go?”
A pause. The crowd looking at each other, pondering. Then someone said, hesitantly, “Well, it sort of — well, disappeared.”
“What do you mean, disappeared?” The Welshman.
They looked at each other again, all those faces pressing close around him.
The man said, helplessly, “Well…just that. One moment it was there. The next it wasn’t. It disappeared.”
Too much for the Welshman at last. A snap of temper in his voice, his language un-policelike. “What the bloody hell are you talking about? A bus — disappeared? You mean, dissolved like smoke?”
Nobody would answer him. No one would confirm what he said. No one wanted to be told he was off his head by that caustic Welsh voice, yet they all looked at each other and all knew. They had seen it with their own eyes, they were able to tell themselves, just as they had witnessed the dreadful tragedy on the crossing, and then the car taking avoiding action as the bus swerved and Jolly’s Take Away Sandwich Bar suffering in consequence.
Somehow the hysteria was abating now. The street was almost solidly packed with people, and perhaps comfort came with crowdedness and fear went, though still some cried their anguish at what they had seen.
“Those poor bairns,” a girl-mother cried over and over again. “And their poor mother. I’ll never forget it. Never. Seeing her just before.…” They couldn’t stop her talking.
An ambulance pushed slowly along the road. The Welsh cop called out to the driver. “What’s the damage, Nobby? Killed, I mean. How many?” And the crowd waited in horror for the score.
Nobby looked vague. “Killed? I’ve got some shock patients aboard. Killed?” He shook his head. “I don’t know.” He drove on.
The police were moving the crowd now. A superintendent from the Ambulance Division could be seen along the road by the Co-op. The Welsh bobby took some names — Dickie’s first; even the publisher’s, curiously — then headed towards the zebra crossing.
The superintendent said, “It’s a to-do, Taffy, it’s a to-do.” A migrant from Yorkshire, affable behind gleaming false teeth, eyes happy at the turmoil behind their glasses. He said, cheerfully, “Everybody gone mad, or someat?” But it was good for trade.
Taffy stared at him. “Hasn’t nobody told you? I mean.…” He looked at the zebra crossing. A lot of people were gawking at it. “I mean, those people killed.”
The Yorkshire superintendent’s gleaming smile vanished. “Killed?” He looked round, quickly, as if afraid he had missed something obvious. “Who’s been killed?” Taffy recited — a mother and twins, some women shoppers, an old limping man.
The superintendent studied the cop for quite a long while. Then he said slowly. “Are you out of your mind? None of my men reported any killed. Now, they would have done, wouldn’t they, if there’d been any?” Vigor in his voice. “You can’t come the old mullarkey with Yorkshire folk, tha knows. Down to earth. Don’t get kidded. Go on, Tatty, show me where they are. Who’s been pullin’ thy leg lad?”
But a Welsh policeman was looking at the crossing for traces of blood. There weren’t any. He was looking for pieces of crushed pushchair the debris from flying shopping baskets. There weren’t any. And no corpses.
The publisher and Dickie came back some time later wth the full and incredible story. Both were curiously subdued, more remarkable in the publisher than in Dickie. They came in and sat down with that air of slumping which tells of mental exhaustion. As if, Butty thought, stunned. Not that he cared. He was feeling like death warmed up. Damned if he was going to hang on till the end of the afternoon. He’d take a MS home and read it in bed. Or not read it unless his head stopped aching.
He waited to tell the publisher of his decision, but the other two had started talking. Talking quietly, factually, deliberately Telling of events on the High Street, reconstructing it, and Butty had to listen and yet he wasn’t interested.