The Tannoy crackled to a stop and a frightened silence fell over the top deck.
"He's a bit fucking harsh, isn't he?" whispered the bald guy.
The engine spluttered to life, sending rolling bug-a-lug vibrations through the windows and seats. Leslie waved conscientiously from the pavement as the bus backed out of the loading bay and into the street.
Maureen was looking calmly out of the window, chewing the first chocolate toffee of the night, when she saw him. Vik was striding up the road to the bus station, his leather coat flapping open, checking his watch and walking fast. He had come to see her off. Maureen stood up, forgetting herself and dropping the bag of sweets to the floor. She banged her fists on the window and shouted, "Oi," but he didn't see her. She banged harder, turning, her eyes fixed on him as the bus sped away up Cathedral Street. He was a little licorice strip on the pavement and the bus station receded to a strip of light below a black hanging sky. Vik had come to see her off. The bald man stuck his face through the headrests again. "I know," he said, smiling kindly. "I hate the Pakis too."
"He's my boyfriend," said Maureen.
Uncomfortable at his faux pas, the bald man sat back in his chair and puffed out his chest. "Aye, very good anyway," he told his sniggering pals. "I was just trying to be nice."
The road was clear. The bus rumbled through Blackhill, passing the chimneys of Barlinnie prison. They passed the fire-blackened flats of Easterhouse, boarded up with fiberglass, and the driver dimmed the lights to let the passengers sleep. A hush fell over the cabin as the lights slipped past the window. They turned south at the Crosshill Junction, a knot of lanes and slip roads in a bed of gentle hills. A spired church and cemetery sat on a summit, an angular protestation against the soft, snow-covered countryside. Vik had come to see her off.
As the bus warmed up Jokey began to give off a strange smell, like dirty hair and stale cheese mixed together. He was fighting sleep, nodding off and jerking awake again. After one particularly vigorous convulsion he turned around in the aisle and shouted, "Cunts," at the men in the backseat. The bald man reached his hand through the headrests and patted Jokey's shoulder. "Steady, Tiger," he said, and Jokey surrendered to sleep, nuzzling his elbow into Maureen's soft side.
The driver who had packed her bag into the boot came up the shuddering stairs offering sandwiches and taking orders for cups of tea. Someone on the top deck started playing with a Game Boy – Maureen could hear the tingling, mindless tune. She realized suddenly that the music was coming from her pocket. She took out her pager, nervous that it might wake Jokey.
Message is
hope you are
well lot*
of love Leslie
She had been working her way through the sweets and reading the paper for an hour or so before the smell of Jokey became so distracting that she gave up. She looked out of the window at the dark countryside. They were crawling uphill, out of a deep glen. They were so high that Maureen lost perspective but then the wind shook the windows and scattered the mist below. An old drover's road appeared below them, paralleling the burn, a wavy pencil line through the foot of the hills. At the mouth of the glen stood an abandoned cottage, souvenir of a wild and lonely time. Vik had come to see her off but she was glad he had been too late. She wouldn't have known what to tell him. She was on the edge of her life, trapped on the spur by all the big questions.
She leaned her head on the vibrating window and thought of Ann standing in a cold office in her underwear, letting a stranger take pictures of her tired body, bruised and battered by the want of drink, as if her addiction were trying to scratch through her skin.
The announcement and the rush of cold air from the stairwell woke her up. The bus had stopped in a car park. Hidden behind the rows of freight lorries were the bright lights of a service station. Jokey's pals woke him up and told him to come on. His smell had accumulated in his anorak while he slept and as he reached up for the back of the chair the stench escaped through the sealed neck in an ardent gust. Maureen waited until he was well down the stairs before getting up herself, stretching her stiff legs and running her tongue over her fur-coated teeth.
The cold was a shock after the nuzzled warmth on the top deck. She lit a fag in the windy car park and followed the stream of passengers to the service station. The backseat men headed to the restaurant for hot food with Jokey at their heels. Maureen went to the newsagent's, looking for something to buy. The sandwiches cost a fiver and the crisps only came in ludicrously big bags but she was in a shop in the middle of the night and felt she had to buy something. She chose an A-Z of London and a spiral-bound notepad to write things on. She went back to the bus, smoking another fag as she strolled across the windy car park, looking out for the nice driver, the one who had packed her bag in the boot. She checked the cab but he wasn't there so she scouted around the bus and found him hiding in the dark shadows at the back, smoking. He nodded to her briefly, trying to shake her off.
"How are ye?" she asked, smiling.
"Aye," he said, and went back to kicking the dirt.
"Can I show ye a photo of someone?"
The driver was intrigued. "What for?"
"My pal went missing and I think she took this bus."
"Ah, well now"-he looked wary-"we get a lot of people on the buses, ye know."
Maureen took out the photocopy of Ann's face, holding it up in front of the driver so that it caught the light from inside the bus cab.
He looked at it for a moment. "She had yellow hair and a red face," said Maureen. "Smelt of drink, a bit."
He looked at the picture and was surprised that he remembered her. "That's amazing," he said. "Up and down she was, just before Christmas."
"Up and down?"
"I seen her a few times. I remember because she was up and down every few days and sometimes she'd keep her bag on her knee, a big bag." He drew a one-foot square in front of him with his fag-free hand.
"When did ye last see her?"
"Months ago," he said. "Start of December. I remember because she was on the way up and got off the bus for the break and never got back on again."
"She got left at this service station?"
"Aye, well, across the road." He pointed to a covered walkway bridging the motorway.
"Was she just too late?"
"Don't know," he said, wanting to be alone in the dark with his cigarette.
Aware that she was running short of time, Maureen fumbled the Polaroid out of her pocket. "Did ye ever see this guy with her?"
The driver shrugged, looking at the picture, getting impatient. "I wouldn't know, hen."
"Listen, thanks," said Maureen. "Thanks a lot."
She backed off, leaving him to his break, and climbed the stairs into the cab feeling elated. Liam had been right. Ann was up and down and she might have been running for the loan sharks, she might have been running for Hutton. But if she was running for loan sharks she would only have carried the bag one way, not up and down again. She stretched out, enjoying the whole of her seat while she could, before Jokey came back.
The engine started softly, shaking her awake. She opened her eyes to see Jokey falling into his seat like a malodorous avalanche in an anorak. They were pulling out of the service station, leaving the big lorries and the bright lights and sliding along the slip road onto the quiet carriageway.
It was five a.m. and the gray monochrome was broken only by the red taillights of overtaking cars. The land was very flat: they were in the middle of a plain so vast the edges were beyond the horizon. Farmhouses and tiny hamlets flashed by. They passed a small set of horse jumps in a paddock and then sudden banks of the motorway came up, enclosing the road. They passed a village, then through a town and into the country again. The towns began to blend together, meeting at their thinning outer edges, closer and closer until they were tumbling over one another, houses and houses and houses blanketing the shallow hills.