Another bus was coming along the street. Miss Flint cried, ‘That’s our direction.’ Davy didn’t hesitate. He scooped up the briefcase, and George, and ran. When she got on, they were behind her. Miss Flint spoke to the driver, ‘End of the line, for myself and the boy. How much?’
The bus abruptly cut out. The driver frowned, turning the key, flicking switches. But the bus played dead.
‘You see? It’s you,’ Davy told her. ‘We can’t get out of here if you don’t calm down.’
The driver glared at him. ‘Mind your sass!’
Miss Flint took a deep breath. Then another. The bus started itself up again.
Shaking his head, perplexed, the driver said, ‘OK, bub, where to?’
‘End of the line,’ said Davy.
The driver wheezed the doors shut and pulled away from the stop. They lurched their way down the aisle and sat on the long bench seat at the very back. Davy put George on his lap so he could look out. ‘You can’t get anywhere without us,’ said Davy.
Miss Flint stared blankly. ‘He can’t see me. No one can.’
‘We have three days to get you to your place of . . .’ Davy couldn’t remember the word.
‘Embarkation,’ she said.
‘That’s your house,’ he said. ‘At least, I think it is.’
He stared out the window. They’d cleared town and were on the open road. Oil derricks were scattered across the cracked earth. Their pump arms rose and fell, rose and fell. George’s warm body was a reassuring weight on Davy’s knee.
Miss Flint couldn’t leave the world without his help. Davy turned his head and gave her a wry smile. He, Davy David, who’d never been needed before, was needed now in the most amazing way. ‘This is why you hired me,’ he said. ‘It’s why you waited for me to come back.’
‘What’s happening to me?’ she whispered.
‘Something wonderful,’ he said. ‘Don’t be afraid.’
The day was advancing when the bus rolled into the depot. The first day of Miss Flint being dead. The first day of Davy’s new paid job, of him and George shepherding her soul to – where exactly? To her old childhood home by the sea, yes. But what would happen when they got there?
Davy had been pondering that during the several hours they’d been twisting through the countryside. And during the rest stop, when the driver had a smoke and some of the passengers bought barley coffee from a woman who’d pitched her tent where the bus pulled off. Riding on a bus, having money in his pocket to buy coffee should he wish to – these things were new to Davy. As was the fact that people acknowledged him, with a smile or nod or a few words while they stooped to fuss over George. Dogs, he was discovering, were a great leveller. And George was a friendly kind of dog.
Miss Flint stayed on board. He didn’t want to leave her, he was nervous she might disappear. But she reminded him that George needed a break and agreed to sit by the window so Davy could keep an eye on her.
Otherwise, she was inclined to silence and he let her be. She had to work out how she felt about becoming dead. Davy had his own thoughts about the world and its whys and wherefores. His ideas weren’t hidebound, he always adjusted as he went along.
He wondered if this kind of thing went on all the time. Whether the world was full of people becoming dead. Sitting in libraries and cafes and walking the streets, desperate for the living to see them, to hear them, to help them on their way. If that was the case, he might have had an inkling before. Surely someone would have mentioned it. Still, it was hardly a subject for casual conversation. Donna from the library, who’d been so helpful, she’d be good to talk to. He didn’t think she would be surprised if he were to tell her.
‘Why am I getting younger?’ said Miss Flint.
‘I don’t know,’ Davy said. ‘I just don’t know.’
He took the folded page from his jacket several times to study the painting. The warrior and his great hound were the subjects, not the body laid out on the rock. The only light fell upon their faces, all else was shadowed to a greater or lesser extent. It was their eyes, their following eyes, which gave the power to the piece. He tried to read what they seemed to want to tell him. They were unafraid. With the darkness of the forest all around, concealing any number of unknown dangers, they remained steadfast. They knew their duty. Maybe that was it.
He stared at Miss Flint when she wasn’t looking. His fingers itched to draw her new face. ‘Do you have any paper in your briefcase?’
She nodded and waved a hand for him to help himself. As Davy clicked the case open, he suddenly recalled the bottle of pills, still in his pocket. She wouldn’t be needing them now. He tried to sneak the bottle back into the case but she saw. She raised a questioning eyebrow.
‘I thought . . . maybe I could talk you out of taking them,’ he said.
There was a whole pad of writing paper. Davy took two sheets and filled them with tiny sketches of her face.
When the bus drew into the depot at the end of the line, they were the only three passengers left. Huffing a relieved breath, the driver gathered his coat and bag. ‘Last stop! You and the pooch, off off off,’ he called to Davy.
The depot was a tin building among an isolated clutch of sagging warehouses and workshops. Half a dozen buses were parked inside. As they rolled into the last available space, the only person there, the woman in the tiny dispatch office, was putting on her coat.
‘Hup hup!’ The driver was clearly in a hurry.
As they got off, Miss Flint, forgetting she couldn’t be heard, said to him, ‘We’re going west. When’s the next bus?’
The office woman had turned off the lights and was locking the door. She’d been just about to pin a police poster on to the bulletin board, but now it would have to wait until after the holidays.
The driver called to her, ‘Looking like a rose, Violet.’
Violet waggled flirtatious fingers at him, mincing along in her high heels, bulging and jiggling in her too-tight skirt and flowered blouse.
‘She schedules all the shifts, so I keep her sweet,’ the driver told Davy. ‘Cigarettes. Perfume. A little brandy.’
With some difficulty, Violet hoicked herself on to a bicycle. Hanging her purse on the handlebars, she pedalled off unsteadily down the road, calling, ‘See you later, Bert! Save me a dance!’
Bert clutched at his heart, watching her go. Davy repeated Miss Flint’s question.
‘No more buses tonight. You picked the wrong day to travel. We’re knocking off early, it’s the depot Christmas party tonight.’ Bert winked. ‘Don’t tell the boss. Wherever you’re going, you’ll get there quicker walking.’
While they talked, he’d been turning off the main lights and shooing them out. He began to pull the doors to.
‘Knocking off early!’ said Miss Flint. ‘This is just the kind of thing we have to put up with nowadays. Don’t tell the boss, indeed. The man’s dishonest. I’ve a good mind to write a – We need to buy a car,’ she said suddenly.
‘A car?’ said Davy.
‘Of course. It’s obvious. I should have thought of it before. Ask him where we can find the nearest car dealership.’
Davy was annoyed he hadn’t thought of a car himself. She had plenty of money in the briefcase, he’d seen it there. He ran to help Bert pull the doors to. ‘I need to buy a car,’ he said.
Bert locked up with a key from a crowded ring dangling from his belt. ‘A car? Sure you do. I’ve heard about you eccentric millionaires, you like to ride the bus disguised as twelve-year-olds.’ Chuckling at his fancy, he walked over to a brown van with its side caved in.
Davy, Miss Flint and George followed him. ‘No really, it’s for a friend,’ said Davy.
Davy was about to open the briefcase when Miss Flint hissed, ‘Don’t let him see! And don’t call him sir, he’s not a sir.’
Davy pulled her aside. ‘Maybe not, but he’s the kind of guy who knows people. Didn’t you hear him? Cigarettes? Perfume?’
‘You mean a dealer in s
tolen goods.’
‘We need a car. We can’t be fussy,’ he said.
Bert opened the driver’s door with a well-aimed kick and a heavy thump. As the door sprang open, six cartons of cigarettes tumbled out, with wrappers marked Import Duty Due. ‘I uh . . . found them in an alley,’ he said.
Miss Flint crossed her arms and gave Davy one of her lemon looks.
‘Sir, I have money,’ Davy said. He took the roll from his pocket, his half-wages in advance, secured with a red rubber band.
The sight of the money seemed to galvanize Bert. ‘I might know someone,’ he said. He leaped to his feet, hastily bundling the cartons back into the van, and opened the passenger door with another hefty kick. ‘Young man, your chariot awaits.’
The van belched off in a greasy cloud of black market diesel, with the three of them plus George wedged in by boxes of illegal cigarettes and perfume and crates of contraband French brandy.
Miss Flint’s dark look predicted murder and worse. ‘We’ll be in shallow graves by sunset, you mark my words,’ she said to Davy, forgetting she was already dead.
Back at the depot, the police poster sat on Violet’s desk. It seemed that the barman from the New Inn had given a good description to the police sketch artist. For the boy staring out from the poster was clearly, recognizably, Davy.
Contrary to Miss Flint’s predictions, they’d not been murdered. But they had been fleeced. Chewing on a toothpick, Bert’s friend Vic sized up Davy, not bothering to hide his glee at being handed such a turnip. With a flurry of winks and nudges to Bert, he showed Davy the vehicle on offer. It was an ancient motorbike with a rusted sidecar.
Miss Flint made things worse by badgering him to make a deal. ‘Offer him half. Tell him he’s lucky to get anything for it, tell him you’ll walk away. Go on, speak up.’
But as Davy opened his mouth, Vic pounced. ‘The price is the price. I don’t negotiate, I don’t discuss. Take it or leave it, sonny boy.’
‘And to be waved off with handfuls of your own money, well!’ Miss Flint’s voice scathed Davy from the sidecar as he parped the motorbike down the drive. She’d complained non-stop as she climbed in with George. ‘Handfuls of it, mind. Merry Christmas, indeed! I’ll Merry Christmas them.’
George knew the kind of villains they were dealing with, she said. The dog had taken an instant dislike to Vic. He’d growled throughout the humiliatingly brief transaction and barked at him as Davy counted the money into his hand.
‘I’ll take it straight to the nuns for the orphans,’ Vic smirked. ‘It kills me to let her go, she’s a sweetheart, runs like a dream.’ He tapped the fuel dial. ‘And I’m throwing in a full tank of gas, because I’m a sweetheart too and it’s the season of joy.’
It was early evening and dark when they drove off. The single headlamp wavered a dim path ahead. Run on a dynamo, the uncertain hammer of the engine produced a timid, wavering light.
Davy got on with getting to grips with driving while Miss Flint carried on complaining. Luckily the rattle of the bike meant he couldn’t hear her. He saw her fling her arm left and made the turn just in time.
West, they had to keep on heading west. He’d get Miss Flint to her house, come what may. The business of gathering souls wouldn’t wait for latecomers, Davy felt certain of that. He’d got them transport. It wasn’t princely, it was a wreck and they’d been cheated, but they were on the move and that was all that mattered.
Bert the bus driver sat alone at a corner table. He brooded into his beer, plotting various revenges on Vic for cutting him short on the motorbike deal.
The depot Christmas party was a noisy riot of revellers shouting over the deafening blast of recorded music. Violet was leading a conga line of drivers and mechanics around the Lodge. As they passed Bert’s table, she broke off to a chorus of dismay.
‘Bliss,’ she said, easing off her shoes. ‘Why so gloomy, Bert? You didn’t unload something on the kid? And don’t give me that look, I know you.’
As he complained about Vic, she began to frown. ‘What would you say he looked like, that boy?’
‘Normal. Nothing special.’ Bert shrugged. ‘Brown hair, medium height. Kind of starey eyes. He talked to himself, that’s the only thing. Not to the dog, to the air.’ He waggled his fingers spookily.
‘Talking to himself,’ breathed Violet. ‘The sign of a guilty conscience.’ She hurried her shoes back on. ‘He’s wanted by the police, Bert. I saw. They sent a poster.’
Bert’s eyes popped in alarm. ‘No, Vi, no police, please. It’s my busy time of year. Hey, a bottle of brandy for your mother. No charge.’
Violet stood, head high, the very model of justice. ‘You may not have a conscience, Bert, but I do.’ She swished through the swing doors to the entrance lobby where there was a pay phone. She bounced back five minutes later. Seating herself back down with a virtuous shimmy, she said, ‘They’re sending someone over right away.’
Sometime around midnight, the motorbike began to cough. Miss Flint suggested they might be low on gas. The fuel dial indicated full but when Davy tapped it, the arrow sank to empty. They were passing some woods. He rolled them off the road into the trees. The bike sputtered to silence.
‘I expect that villain we bought it from tampered with the gauge,’ said Miss Flint. She shooed George out and clambered from the sidecar. She was forced to fold and unfold her legs, like a stork. From being pretty much bent in half when she was ancient, Miss Flint’s back had straightened and it turned out she was fairly tall. ‘This really is the most inconvenient vehicle,’ she said.
Davy got off the bike, saying, ‘How come you can’t just walk through things? Like in The Ghost and Mrs Muir?’
‘It may come as a surprise to you, Mr David, but the movies are not a reliable guide to the laws of physics,’ she said.
As she turned to face him, Davy took a step back.
Miss Flint was now much younger than sixty. By the pale light of the moon, he could see her hair was no longer streaked with grey. It was long and thick and, so far as he could tell, golden in colour. The skin of her face was smooth. Her figure was trim. Around her eyes, on her forehead, there were a few lines but that was it.
‘What is it?’ she said.
Davy swallowed hard. ‘It’s happened again,’ he whispered. He quickly tipped the left-hand mirror so she could see.
Miss Flint went very still. She touched her mirror image with a tentative finger. Slowly, wonderingly, she felt her face and hair. She looked down at her body, her legs and her feet.
‘Is this the laws of physics?’ said Davy.
‘I don’t know.’
‘How old are you now?’
‘I’m not sure. It was so long ago I knew myself like this. Forty, maybe a bit less.’
‘Will it keep happening? Will you go on getting younger? Where will it stop?’
‘You stop!’ she cried. ‘No more questions. I don’t know. How can I know?’ She went walking off among the trees, hugging her arms around her waist.
Davy kept an eye on her as he fiddled with the fuel gauge. He saw her stoop to pick up a fallen pine cone and bow her head for a long moment as she realized she could not. It seemed like prying for him to watch, so he looked away.
George snuffled about the ground, nosing up the needles. He’d had a meat patty at the cafe that morning and, on Miss Flint’s advice, a bowl of water. Davy wondered if he needed to eat more than once a day. And he realized, with a pleasant shock, that George was his dog. ‘I’ll have to get you a collar,’ he said.
The fuel arrow had settled firmly on empty. Davy gave up and took in his surroundings. He’d never been in a wood before. Most of the trees in Brownvale had been killed by drought. There’d been his graveyard yews, of course, but they were gone now.
Then, to his astonishment, he saw Miss Flint sitting in a tree. Perched comfortably on a branch, she smiled down at him, calm as could be.
‘How did you get up there?’ he said.
‘I don??
?t know.’ Miss Flint frowned. ‘I was just remembering how I used to love to tree-climb and how long it had been and thinking this one would be a cinch and then I just . . . found myself here.’
Davy ran to climb one too, while George barked at him from below. They sat on their respective branches, legs dangling.
‘Deciduous.’ She was examining a dry leaf still clinging to its twig. ‘Acer campestre, field maple.’
‘I never climbed a tree till now,’ Davy said.
‘Miss Elizabeth Flint was far too grim to climb trees. Lizzie Flint used to. But she hasn’t been seen for many years.’
‘Do you think we’ll see her soon? Sorry, that was a question.’
‘Never mind.’ Miss Flint sighed. ‘If I carry on like this, it’s a certainty we’ll see her.’
‘Do you think there’s a scientific explanation?’
‘There must be. I want to know. My fleshly being no longer exists, so I’m not made of ordinary matter. Am I anti-matter?’ She shook her head. ‘I’m not even sure what that means. It would take greater minds than yours, mine and George’s to work it out. And I’m sorry, that was shocking grammar, but I don’t care.’
‘Don’t you . . .’ Davy stopped.
‘Go on.’
‘It’s just, if I was you, I wouldn’t care about what or how. I’d want to know why. That’s what I’d ask myself. Why.’
The night was clear of clouds. The stars dazzled. ‘That’s Cassiopeia, that W there,’ Davy said. ‘You see? The daddy-long-legs, that’s Andromeda. And there’s Perseus, just above. The one kind of like a bird. See its wings?’ Davy might never have been inside a classroom but he’d gleaned bits of knowledge from library books. Miss Flint seemed surprised that he knew so many constellations.
‘I always meant to learn my way around the night sky,’ she said. He pointed out one or two of the lesser known ones and she repeated their names. ‘If I happen to find myself up in the stardust, I’ll blink down at you,’ she said. After a moment, she began humming, then singing, quietly, ‘You do something to me. Something that simply mystifies me . . . I used to like dancing,’ she said.