I have experienced many different flavours of fear on my journey around this horrifying county, but there’s been one type I’ve long been avoiding. People here speak of it in hushed tones. They try to avoid it in any way possible, even if the only alternative is buying a second hand car and driving around at 120 miles per hour while screaming. I am, of course, talking about The Bus.
I have experienced similar horrors before. In London there is the underground, and even, so I’m lead to believe, another form of train that roams above ground and chases across the scorched countryside beyond the M25. I have travelled by plane, a civilised form of transport if ever there was one, but I have heard tales of a cheapened version, fat women crushed into cramped interiors by the thousand, black bin bags full of duty free and sick clasped in their clammy fists. I even went on a ferry once, when researching the cyclopses of Wight. I was still unprepared for the trauma of the bus.
The day begins at the bus stop. Located on the edge of town, marked only by a sign hidden behind a tree, a queue begins to form. The queue is shapeless and bloated, barely even a queue at all. Am I supposed to remember the order in which we arrived? Is it just a free for all? Am I expected to fight my way into the coach when it arrives? I look around me, hoping to ask advice from my fellow travellers, but all of them are of such a sullen and disgusting disposition I hesitate. My hesitation develops into a full silence, and becomes too large to be broached. Instead I wait.
And wait. Despite the timetable saying the bus will arrive at 8:47 am, that moment comes and goes unmarked. I look at the people around me. Am I to be trapped for eternity with these? I can feel a fear tugging at my intestines and I want to turn and run, but professionalism keeps me from abandoning my post. I will catch this bus, even if it kills me.
At 9:03 am the bus finally arrives. I hang back, letting the more experienced travellers fight it out for position. I am still no wiser as to the organisational principles by which position is decided, but it all appears peaceful enough. Perhaps the delay in the arrival of the bus is designed not to infuriate but to pacify. Anger can only last so long before it turns to ash.
Finally I step onto the bus. A thrill as I cross the threshold. Now I am no longer outside, I am Inside. I am on the bus. It is a dream come true. And like all good dreams, soon it will turn to nightmare. “A return to Chelmsford, please mate,” I say, handing him a pristine twenty pound note fresh from the cash machine. “Haven’t you got anything smaller?” I haven’t. “I haven’t,” I tell him. He sighs, eventually snatching it from my hand. £13.40 in five pence pieces is returned to me as change. I stare at them as they clatter endlessly out of the machine. I stare at him but he’s not looking back. If he wasn’t protected by perspex I’d throttle him until he was dead. I have to content myself with labouriously opening my wallet and putting the change into the correct hole as slowly and as awkwardly as possible.
This has no effect. The driver just pulls off without even waiting for me to finish. Flustered I try to pick up the money as quickly as possible but most of it slips through my fingers and spills all over the floor. I bend over to pick some of it up but this leads to the coins in my wallet falling out to join their comrades on the floor. I stand up, breathe deeply, attempting to steady myself and calm down, but the bus lurches its way round a corner and I am flung haplessly into the back of an unamused man. I decide then to abandon the change and make my way to the safety of a seat.
I stumble my way down the length of the bus and collapse into one of the seats near the back. There isn’t much leg room, but at least I don’t have to sit next to anyone. I sit as close to the window as possible, and rest my forehead on the glass. The condensation cools my brow and obscures my view of the outside world, making everything an indistinct blur. Whenever the bus stops, its chassis begins to rattle, and the vibrations are amplified by my skull, causing my teeth to shake and the inside of my ears to itch. I fall into a torpor, the snorted conversations of teenage boys around me receding from my awareness. Greyness begins to envelope me, and I fall into a reverie, fantasizing about gunning down everyone inside, one shot at a time, remorsely, their apathy aiding me in my pursuit of their destruction. I walk slowly up the aisle, each footstep falling on another of my scattered 5 pence pieces, and when I reach the front of the bus I shoot the driver in the face. The bus veers into a layby just outside Danbury, hitting the kebab van that sleeps there. Everything bursts into flames.
The bus pulls into central Chelmsford at 9:53 am. We all file emotionlessly off the bus, each of us robotically thanking the driver for doing his job. I realise that it isn’t fear I am feeling, it is disgust. My journey is at an end.
Jeff Randall is Essex Terror’s senior correspondent. He has moved away.
