Last Days of the Bus Club (22 page)

We passed through the gate to the pool. The water was the deepest dark brown from the tannin in the million or so fig leaves that had fallen in the autumn. Ripples and wavelets marked the disappearance of the myriad creatures who lived in its depths – frogs, toads, turtles, snakes, water-boatmen, pondskaters and so on. They could all see what
kind of crap was about to go down and had decided to make themselves scarce. Very wise, I thought.

I told the children about the toads, and added, perhaps unwisely – but I wanted these kids to have a memorable experience of everything – that the skin secretion from certain toads can work as a hallucinogenic and that some people lick them for this reason. This was a piece of half-baked information that had somehow come my way. I was banking on the idea that being city kids it was pretty unlikely that any of them would catch a toad, let alone lick it.

I was wrong. Just as I said this, a number of toads, up for an adventure, made their way up to the surface and started hanging out on the top step … and a certain Maya, who I had thought one of the more timid kids, grabbed one of them and held it up for everybody’s inspection. Given the poor press that toads get, and the fact that they are not the most endearing-looking of creatures, I thought she did pretty well. She gripped it gently but firmly as if she had been a toad-handler all her life. All the other kids gathered eagerly round her.

‘Go on, lick it!’ shouted Darren. ‘Yeah, lick it! Lick it!’ came a chorus behind her, loudest as always from the back. ‘No, you lick it,’ replied Maya quick as a flash, shoving it towards Darren’s face. Darren, who was having a big day, what with his first ever orange, took it and gave it a thorough licking. Funnily enough, the toad did not seem to mind at all.

‘Sir, I’m ’allucinatin’,’ he cried, wheeling around and making odd looping movements, while erratically rolling his eyes. Jim shot me a look, anxious and stern. ‘Pack it in, Darren. You’re fine. And put that toad back, Maya … and you too, Mustafa,’ he added. ‘This is not the way we treat
animals in class six.’ The man had eyes at the back of his head.

Soon Ana appeared, coming along the garden path accompanied by the dogs. The delaying tactics had worked well and she was wondering what on earth had happened to us.

‘This is Ana,’ I said. ‘My best friend.’ As I had expected, this occasioned some confusion, as the idea of your partner being your best friend is far from universal.

‘I thought she was your wife,’ somebody said. ‘Wot, aren’t you married, then?’

‘She is and we are, but we live so far from the known world, and there’s just the two of us, so she has to be my friend, as well.’

This seemed to satisfy them.

‘Ugh, wot’s that?!’ shrieked one of the kids pointing at Bumble and backing fearfully away.

Ana introduced the dogs, who were turning themselves inside out with the most ingratiating tail-wagging. Their craven and wormlike demeanour had the effect of immediately disarming the nervousness that a few of the kids felt about dogs. Bao and Bumble always do well out of occasions like this, as they get an awful lot of attention and, even better, they get fed at the table by the kids, something that we never do. Had the dogs been involved in the menu negotiations, they would probably have gone for the halal chickenburgers, though, rather than the omelette and salad.

Slowly, in a long line, we all wended our way up the steps to the house. Another surprise: this was not the sort of house that our new friends were familiar with.

‘Is this really your ’ouse, Chris?’ asked one.

‘It certainly is,’ I replied.

‘It’s really small,’ one girl observed.

‘Actually it’s a bungalow, innit?’ suggested another. ‘My gran’s got one just like this.’ Which surprised me. I hadn’t imagined that northeast London went in for vernacular Alpujarran architecture, topped with grass rooves.

‘Well, I suppose you’re right; it hasn’t got an upstairs. And yes, I guess it is rather small, but then there’s only the two of us, and we don’t take up that much space. And most of the time we live out here on the porch; the house is just a place to go and get things from.’

A kilo or so of crisps vanished in fifteen seconds flat, and then there was Ana’s exquisite home-made lemonade in a multicoloured selection of plastic mugs. There were cries of delight. It wasn’t fizzy, but it was fresh and lemony with mint and cinnamon and really like no other lemonade. It, too, disappeared in a matter of minutes.

At this point Ana laid out two enormous and beautiful omelettes – deep, deep yellow from the home-laid eggs and bursting with peas, onions, potatoes and mint. They were works of art. And to top them off was a huge salad bowl with the richest selection of salad leaves and herbs all gathered fresh that very morning from the garden, and garnished with the most dazzling array of petals – purple malva, blue borage, and bright yellow and orange marigolds. It looked so beautiful, it almost broke your heart. Amina, Rukhsana, Jim and I gasped in utter delight.

‘Eugghh! I’m not eatin’ that. You can’t eat flowers. Yuck,’ said one of the boys, as I had expected.

There was a mutter of general agreement. ‘Yeah, flowers are poisonous; everybody knows that,’ added another well-informed soul.

Somehow we managed to persuade the kids of the harmlessness, and even the desirability, of eating these particular flowers, and, helping ourselves to
tortilla
and salad, we adults went to sit at a distance with our beer and wine, leaving the kids to thrash it out for themselves. In the event the food made quite an impression on them, but they didn’t eat an awful lot of it, mainly because they were already so stuffed with oranges and lemons. Also they were pretty excited and wanted to get off and fool around on the farm. Jim, Rukhsana and Amina tucked in happily – it was a fine moment of respite after all their labours, first in finding the necessary funding and permissions for the trip, and then shepherding their gang of pupils to Spain.

‘Please, Chris, can we ’ave a go on the tractor?’

‘Please, Chris.’

‘Sure, take it for a run,’ I said. The teachers gasped in horror, as one.

‘It’s OK,’ I reassured them. ‘They’ll never start it.’

‘I bet we can,’ said Jessica. ‘I bet we can start it. What about a hundred pounds if we do?’

This was a cool kid. I looked her in the eye and said: ‘Make it a thousand.’

The teachers and Ana looked at me in consternation. Actually, if there was one moment at which the day started to take a slightly darker atmosphere, it was the moment of that injudicious bet. Of course, I was on firm ground: there was not a snowball’s chance in hell of their starting the tractor, even though the key was in the ignition. With the Massey Ferguson 135 you have to have the transfer lever in
the neutral position to get the starter motor to turn over; the stop button must be in, and I always leave it out when I turn the tractor off. If they did manage to fathom out those two anomalies, then there was probably not enough go in the battery to start it up. There wasn’t much fuel in the tank, either. But, even so, if there were by some chance enough battery and enough fuel to get the engine running, they would have to raise the heavy cultivator on the back, then switch over the hydraulics to raise the front end loader. Then, and only then, would they be able to move the tractor. My money was safe.

But Jessica galloped off shouting that I had offered them a thousand pounds if they could get the tractor going. They could share the money between all of them.

We adults were on to our coffee by now, and we sat in the warm sunshine and talked, while a strange quietness settled on the farm below. The whole gang of them were gathered round the tractor, pooling their combined knowledge of mechanics to try and get it going and thus clean up on the thousand quid.

They started to appear in twos and threes, confabulating earnestly in whispered tones.

‘We’ve got it going,’ someone said … but I knew they hadn’t, for I was listening with all ears and I hadn’t heard a thing. Then Jessica appeared on her own and in tears.

‘They say they’re not going to give me any of the money because I didn’t have anything to do with getting the tractor going,’ she snivelled.

‘Yes, but you brokered the deal. You’ll be the one who distributes the money … in the unlikely event that it comes to it,’ I assured her. Thus comforted, she dashed back down the steps to where the action was.

Somebody else came up.

‘It ’asn’t got any oil in it,’ he said. ‘We’ve ’ad to put some oil in it, an’ then we got it going.’

I suppose this should have sounded a warning bell, but I assured him that they had not got it going as, if they had, I would have heard it.

‘We did; we did.’

‘No, you didn’t.’

Only then did I start to realise that I was up against some pretty shifty kids, who would stop at nothing to get that money off me. I wriggled a little uncomfortably in my chair.

There was the sound of some excitement from down below, and a few minutes later a delegation arrived, muddy and ruffled and slightly malodorous, with the news that Mustafa had broken off the ignition key.

‘Well, bang goes your thousand pounds, then,’ I said. This wasn’t quite as bad as it sounded, as another one of the anomalies of the Massey Ferguson 135 is that you can switch on the ignition with the dipstick.

‘No, but we got it going before he broke the key. We put some oil in the tank and started it up. It didn’t have any, but we found a barrel marked “oil” and we put that in the tank and then it started.’

Being absolutely certain there were no barrels of oil in the vicinity and that none of the barrels anywhere on the farm were marked ‘oil’ anyway, I simply smiled at this. Clearly the kids were so steeped in subterfuge, they no longer knew where the truth lay.

‘That’s quite enough horseplay for now,’ intervened Amina, surveying the wretched state of their clothes and grimacing a little at the mucky farm odour they seemed to
give off as a group. ‘It’s time to wash your hands and get ready to head back.’

Luckily there was the trailer ride back to the pick-up point to distract the kids from their disappointment of ‘being robbed’, as they saw it, of a cool thousand quid. And with all the rumpus of the first ride, subdued just a tiny notch through tiredness, we carted them off the farm.

On the way back I went down to have a look at the tractor and inspect the broken key. There was an odd, yet familiar, smell coming from the vehicle that I found hard to place but which started me wondering, as I should have done earlier, about this ‘oil’ they had got hold of. I wondered some more for a while, and then I saw it. Next to the tractor was a white plastic drum that the kids had somehow dragged up from the garden. This was quite a feat, as it was actually a forty-litre drum, although by no means full. It was empty now.

For my Valentine’s Day present four years ago, Ana had given me, along with a little pot of pansies, a zinc bucket. The bucket was to pee in, and the idea was that I would pee in the bucket every day and in the evening pour it into a drum. Here the priceless urine would ferment and eventually become a fantastic nitrogen-rich (and impressively malodorous) compost activator. By this means I would be returning to the soil something of what we took out of it. It was a really wholesome sort of ecological scheme, and the beautiful simple ecological logic of it thrilled me. It had taken a long time to fill the forty-litre drum. Then I had hidden it in a shady part of the
garden to ferment before I poured it on the compost heap. It had reduced by half over the years and was by now an unspeakably vile, brown, thick, smelly liquid.

With some trepidation I unscrewed the cap on the fuel tank and sniffed at the contents. The Massey Ferguson 135 is powered by that miracle of British engineering, the Perkins three-cylinder diesel, an engine that will run for ever under whatever conditions of maltreatment you care to subject it to. I was dead sure the children would have been unable to start the engine before, but now I was absolutely certain; even the doughty Perkins would be hard put to start with a tank full of well-fermented piss.