If Lewis Baker had known, he wouldn’t have taken the job. Which is nonsense. You take a job when you can get it.
Not that Lewis doesn’t enjoy driving. But the number 15 is a nightmare. He first thought it was a particularly scruffy guy who’s often on the 15, but he changed his mind about this. The smell is like… it’s like all the mouldy tickets that have ever been dropped under bus seats, blended with shoe sweat, damp jeans and diesel fumes. If the odour were decocted, Lewis thinks, it would form a thick, grey liquid.
Lewis speaks to Portia in the depot, as everyone else seems to avoid him. ‘Must be a factory or one of the farms – maybe they’ve got chickens or something,’ he says.
The depot assistant smiles and carries on working.
Perhaps it’s the bus itself. On the first warmish day of the year, Lewis opens the driver’s window, but the ming neither waxes not wanes. He apologises to some of the passengers as he issues their tickets.
Lewis begins to note bus registration numbers. Sometimes he’s asked to cover other, stench-less routes with random vehicles from the fleet. He’ll identify the stinker buses and put in a request for them to be shared among the routes. He’s new, but why should he get lumbered with the honkers? As if in response to these thoughts, the mirrors on the route-15 buses appear murkier, more mud-spattered than usual, the glass dimmer. He stops the bus to rub at the mirrors with a paper hanky. Then he buys a roll of extra-strong kitchen paper.
He asks Portia for a refund, for the cleaning goods.
‘Naw,’ she says and shakes her head, ‘that won’t do it, though you’re getting closer.’ She looks up at him. ‘You need to be more on the ball, son.’
Sleep starts to escape Lewis. Shift work always takes its toll, but now every pan which is rattled in the flats upstairs runs through his bones, each footstep is a bruise.
‘Portia,’ he says early one morning, ‘this is ridiculous. The smell’s giving me a sore head, and I can’t eat or sleep properly thinking about it. Will you tell me what’s going on?’
‘Perhaps there are more things under the sun than we care to consider, Lewis.’
Did Portia just tap her nose?
Now he’s in his cab, jotting down the registration number with a tightness across his chest. XZ HEP1673 is rancid, but only on the 15 route. Elsewhere it smells – comparatively speaking – of roses. The same bus. It’s an identical story with the other vehicles. He tosses his mobile into his holdall and rests his forehead on the steering wheel. He has a nine-hour shift ahead.
When Lewis straightens up, the windscreen is blanketed with dust, as if the industrial estate next door noiselessly exploded while he his eyes were closed. There are islands in the filth where flies have been squashed and tiny red drops have run and tapered their way through the grime.
He gets out of the cab, his heart echoing at the top of his nostrils, kitchen roll in one hand, spray gun in the other. In the low light of the rising sun, he swivels his head to make out faint lines in the muck. They look like they’ve been scored by a finger, before yet more grunge has been deposited. It takes him a minute to work out what the lines form. It’s a ‘B’ and an ‘M’. Back-to-front of course.
‘This is dangerous,’ he yells at Portia the next day. ‘It’s not just me, it’s the lives of the passengers. If I can’t see where I’m going…’
‘It’s haunted.’
‘What?’
‘The route.’
‘Wha..?’
‘You should have worked that out by now.’
Lewis parks the bus outside a corner shop in a small town so that he can buy large-pack cleaning supplies. All day his mind flips through possibilities and impossibilities alike. Is this the effort of a rancorous hit-and-run victim, or a vengeful customer (maybe the bus had failed to stop, they hadn’t got to the hospital in time to say goodbye, and had then thrownthemselves under the wheels of the next service)? Or is it a driver, some valient person killed ferrying the often very ungrateful passengers of the 15 route?
That night, instead of trying and failing to sleep, Lewis perches on the sofa with a two-litre bottle of ginger beer and Google. There are no records of deaths anywhere on the route that he can find, which doesn’t mean there haven’t been some. Lewis knows search engines are asbiased as they come, and the Joe ordinaries like him, if they behave themselves and can’t be used to teach a lesson, or give a laugh, are as good as invisible.
Towards four am, however, he stumbles across it. Drives into it almost. To his credit, among the blend of emotions there’s a yelp of shame.
The next day is a rest day yet Lewis Baker is early in the depot.
‘Bernadette Murray.’
Portia sits back in her chair.
‘She lost her job, cleaning the route 15 buses. They were cutting back, weren’t they?’ He leans over Portia’s desk.
‘You’ve been up all night, Lewis.’
‘She topped herself.’
Portia sighs then takes a swig of tea. She rolls her lips around the liquid, swallows. ‘None of the unions did anything, you know. Too old to get another job, too young for her pension. And no-one ever thinks of cleaners.’ The depot assistant puts the mug down and clasps her hands. ‘But you got there eventually, Lewis. First driver to make the effort. That’s what gives us hope.’