Read Online Lilac Bus by Maeve Binchy - Free Book Online

Rathdoon where it would be nice and calm. None of them had understood the ins and outs of it but they all agreed. Mikey wondered if people like Dr Burke’s daughter and Mr Green’s son Rupert would fancy sharing a journey home with Mikey Burns the bank porter and the son of poor Joey Burns who before he lost his wits had been a great man for standing waiting till Ryan’s pub opened and nothing much else. But Dee and Rupert were the salt of the earth, it turned out. There wasn’t an ounce of snobbery between the pair of them. And Mrs Hickey, she was a lady too but she always seemed pleased to see him. Nancy Morris was thesame as she always had been since she was a schoolgirl, awkward and self-conscious. Nothing would get her out of that, she’d be an old maid yet. Celia Ryan was another fish altogether: it was a mystery she hadn’t married someone by now. She always looked as if her mind was far away, yet she was meant to be a powerful nurse. He knew a man who’d been in Celia’s ward, and he couldn’t speak highly enough of her. He said she was like a legend in the hospital.
    Nowadays he enjoyed the journey home, after he had got over his shyness of the first few runs. He would tell them a joke or two; they weren’t a great audience, not like Gretta and Phil and Paddy, but they did smile and laugh a little and didn’t it cheer them up?
    Sometimes he sat beside Celia and he would tell her tales of the world of banking. He told her of all the new machines, and the days of bank inspections, and how the tourists would drive you mad, and how in the summer you’d have a line half a mile long of Spanish and French students all wanting to change about £1 each of their foreign money. Celia didn’t tell many tales of the hospital, but she often gave him helpful advice about his own father, all in a low voice so that the others didn’t hear her talking about incontinence pads and velcro fastenings for clothes.
    But tonight it was the young Kennedy fellow sitting beside him. There was something seriously wrongwith that boy. His brothers Bart and Eddie were the nicest fellows you could meet in a day’s walk, but whatever had happened to young Kev he looked as if he had seen the Day of Judgement. You only had to address a civil word to him to have him leap out of his skin. Try to tell him a good story and he’d miss the point altogether. Mikey thought he’d teach him a few tricks that might be of use to him, to be able to do a trick in a pub. But the young fellow looked at him with the two eyes staring out of his head and didn’t take in a word of it. In the end Mikey let him be, staring out the window as if the goblins were going to leap out of the hedges and climb into the bus after him.
    Mikey nodded off. It was easy to sleep in the bus. The two girls behind him were already asleep, dreaming of fellows probably. Mikey dreamed that his father was well and strong again and had opened some kind of import and export agency in Rathdoon and that he, Mikey, was the manager and that he was able to give grand summer jobs to Phil and Paddy and Gretta delivering letters to people up and down the street. He often dreamed of the children. But he never saw a wife for himself in the dream. Mikey Burns had missed the boat as far as wives were concerned. Too nervous and eejity at the time he should have been looking for one, and now at forty-five he wasn’t the kind of forty-five-year-old that would be in the race at all. Better not make a fool ofyourself going to dances or picking up fast-knowing women in pubs and being made to look thick altogether.
    When they crossed the river and were really in the West they paused for the ten-minute comfort stop, and the half pint to open the throat a bit. Celia came up to him quietly and put an envelope into his hand.
    ‘That’s for the bedsores: it’s all written on it, keep him moving as much as you can.’
    ‘Aw Celia you’re terribly good, can I pay for this?’
    ‘Are you mad Mikey?