The bus driver rises in his bed and casts off the covers, plants a kiss on his sleeping wife’s messy locks. The adoption papers. Any day now. Is what he thinks as these fibres brush his lips.
In another suburb the family gather in the kitchen under the dome of light, buttery toast in hands and a second pot of tea. The car was packed last night by the father. The eldest girl, often surly, brought out a bag with a printed logo that she asked him not to squash.
The car sits under the struts of a shelter with a rippled roof.
The dog flicks between their legs as they file out of the front wooden door. The silent stick-like boys first. An aunt and cousin. The parents. And then the security screen door which is locked.
The father touches the wife’s shoulder which is a rare occurrence that makes her turn around. Thinking there is something on her shirt. And then, Oh, how long since our bodies have joined. And, this is not my fault.
The surly girl is wearing a hooded red top with netted inserts upon the shoulders. New runners. Eye makeup.
This will be a long shitty trip.
At the depot the bus driver drinks milky coffee and stares out at the bull-headed vehicles. The adoption papers. Any day now. Is all he can think. Good feedback. His wife’s eyes so wrought behind her glasses that bear smudges. She has suffered those looks across desks for so long, they are etches over her. Infertile woman. Barren.
He is sitting on the settee by the window, holding an Asian child in glowing light, a sleeping child. His wife calling out from the kitchen.
His bus shifts out onto the empty road with its wide lanes flecked with broken, streaming lines.
The winter light shears through the car. The aunt has had a monumental dream, with tiered darkened trees and a dampness, a wetness, coursing through shadows at their base. Grass against her shins. She searches for her son, there is a soundless running between trunks. The aunt thinks her brother’s marriage is all glimmer on the outside.
She would have given that boy away for adoption, but for the nurse who placed him in her arms. The father was a Scotsman; his letters had been torn into ragged pieces.
The boy has a knowing heart.
The car is quiet. The eldest girl buckles him in, feels their warm sides mingle together and his lilac breath when he speaks. They live in another city. Her aunt is a hard round woman with a loud voice in restaurants, over tables, that sends her parents into turmoil.
Her brothers are dozing.
The car is crammed.
The bus driver looks into the tall blackened trees of the grounds of the expensive boarding school. Lavish lofty trees and long grass, the iron spoked fence going for a mile. The hefty limbs of the trees go in all directions, some looming over the empty outstretched road with its spokes of low sun.
The father has forgotten sunglasses at the house so he performs a quick U-turn on the wide road to pass back at the house. He wipes the windscreen which has grown wet with their breaths.
At home, the dog is alert.
The bus driver is thinking of the names that have prevailed in his family. Herman, Tristan, Neville. His son will have none of these names. He will bathe in bright light.
The mother recalls a haughty, dismissive remark that the aunt made at the shops the afternoon before. She is her husband’s older sister, no word has ever passed her lips of the father of her child, a slight, blue-eyed boy who cries easily. She is glad her own sons have the company of each other.
Before the car pulls off again the girl sees her father’s eyes are fraught in the rearview mirror and senses peril, a precipice. She turns and there is the flat front of a careering bus. The boy turns, too, at the last instant before the metallic crack.
The bus rams the car, folding its rear into tinsel. The children are thrust forward, the seat dislodged, the back window fractures.
The parents’ arms in the wide front seat are flailing in the air.
There is no sound and then there is sound again. Wails and screams.
The father pulls them from the car but the boy’s eyes are a glazed blue with the pupils tremoring. He is lain on the ground.
The aunt and her brother crouch to the boy who lies on his side with a small trickle of blood from one ear.
It seems that a cottony fog has spun down around the others, erasing speech, making them into a clinging mob, but sending each one on a cold spasmodic journey into the trees, even the stick-like brothers who stare at their inert cousin, knowing he has reached the borders of this earth. These boys feel the largesse of the universe upon them, which will be plunged into them even as they are strong men with lithe spines, who will strain into women who will bear them gurgling children.
Other cars slash past and there is the lift of the sun, an ambulance hauling onto the verge.
The boy’s soul is released, travelling above the black trees, it is a quick flight. He watches the bus driver clutch the colossal searing in his chest and how his mother grabs the iron bars of the extravagant fence, lunging into them, the dense metal slicing her cheeks.
