Day 16

Dear Diary,

Anyway, here I am again, nice and rested and ready to pick up where I left off earlier. I must say, I slept like a drowned log last night but I’ll tell you more about that tomorrow. Don’t forget, in my narrative I’m still in yesterday and haven’t got to last night and why my sleep was so good. I hope I don’t make a regular habit of chopping my days in half like this, cuz I’ll end up all confused. Buses have good brains, but only so many of them and mine’s been around since the fifties.

Anyway, the last thing I wrote was where the mean, nasty biddy’d whopped Finian Da Fabricator in the head with her shopping bag and he fell over and knocked his head on the floor and took a nap. I apologise if it gave you nightmares, cuz it really was unpleasanter than watching a tripe enema performed on your mama.

After the old biddy’d done what she did, and after she phoned the call-centre a coupla dozen times to tell the operators what she thought of them and their behaviour last Saturday night at the disco (though how she came to know so much about that I’ll never know), she proceed to ring all the other old biddies on the route. Of course, by then, the operators had got in touch and told them the bus was gonna be late (they put it down to me having a dozen flat tyres, which I didn’t think was very nice, not with my tyres being brand new and all). That didn’t stop the nasty biddy (who, if she’d been my mother, I would’a kilt myself) from telling all the others all sorts of nasty, made-up stuff, about everyone else. Stuff she couldn’a known about, even if it had really happened, on account of her having been alone on the bus for hours and hours. It made my ears ring, I’ll tell you that much. Anyway, she said she’d tell them more after they were dropped off at Missus Barley’s Hair Mess, which is their local hair curling place, where Missus Barley dyes ‘em all purple and sends ‘em home with impossibly tight and frizzly old lady curls of the kind not seen since 1927.

It turns out that the nasty turd-faced biddy is addressed as Missus Milly Da Fardle by Finian Da Fabricator, though everybody else calls her Susan. I’m not sure about the Susan bit, seeing as how everyone I’ve known in the past who’s carried around that name has been both pretty and nice, two things which Missus Milly Da Fardle is definitely not. It also turns out she’s the mother of Fergal Da Fecker, which explains a lot and also makes me understand him better. The next time I see him, I’ll apologise for saying all those really bad things about him. With her as his mother, he can’t help being what he is, can her?

Well, after a coupla hours, Finian Da Fabricator regained his brain and remembered what he was supposed to be doing (I won’t tell you where he initially thought he was or what Missus Milly Da Fardle did for a living, on account of I’ve not got the right vocabulary. Having been built in the fifties). After he remembered and after she’d yelled at him again and poked him a dozen times with her umbrella, he started me up, ground my gears (for which I don’t really blame him, but for which I’ll get even later) and sped off. With, I’m proud to say, a squealing of the tyres and a cloud of black exhaust worthy of a race-car (a real one and not one of those kit jobbies). Within thirty minutes we’d picked up all the other old biddies and Finian Fa Fabricator had buckled ‘em nice and tidy two to a seat, or in the case of the Misses Purdy, three to a seat, on account of them being conjoined triplets. Only they insisted on being called Siamese triplets in the old offensive way, being as it made them sound exotic and not born and bred on the island like all the other inbreds.

When we got to the edge of town (not the posh town on the other end of the island where they only read broadsheets) Finian Da Fabricator pulled up and stopped in front of Missus Barley’s Hair Mess so the biddies could all go in for a purpling and a gossip. I’ll tell you here and now they were jumping up and down as high as their new hips would allow on account of what Missus Milly Da Fardle had to say about what she called Finian Da Fabricator’s drunken fainting spell. And when they disembarked (if I’d had my say, I would’a pushed ‘em out in a puddle and run them over and made the island a happier place), they little-old-lady-walked as fast as their zimmers’d let ‘em into The Hair Mess, after which Finian Da Fabricator started me up and drove off before any of them could remember they’d left their handbags and medication inside the bus (the ‘bus’ being me, in case you’ve forgot). At that moment I appreciated my driver’s sense of humour more’n ever. In fact, it was the first time I knew he had one.

As it turns out, the reason for Finian Da Fabricator’s undue haste in leaving Missus Barley’s Hair Mess was that Fergal Da Fecker had loaded a new batch of potheen into the fake petrol pump (the one next to the real one where owld Fingus Da Flatulator blew hisself up). Seems if you don’t buy some straight away it’s all gone, on account of potheen being the raison d’être of the island’s male population. By the way, I apologise for getting above myself and speaking Frenchified, which is something I didn’t even do when I was transporting really ancient people around the continent in the old days. However, I thought if I said the men on the island were nothing but drunks and wastrels, you’d think less of me. Us buses are sensitive when it comes to offending others by calling a spade a spade.

I’m gonna hafta chop up this day again, for which I apologise profusely. The reason for this is that Fergal Da Fecker made sure Finian Da Fabricator was unavoidably detained at the petrol station. Took him inside where I couldn’t see and did something. Was there nearly an hour and a half, which means we were late getting back to Missus Barley’s Hair Mess. What a disaster that was, at least for the ladies in the call-centre who had to take all those irate calls from the biddies. If I had my way, it’d be against the law for biddies to own mobile phones. They don’t ever know how to use all the unnecessary applications, and all they do is yell and say are you still there, Mary O’Grady?

But I’ll get to them tomorrow, Dear Diary. As I said yesterday, here don’t endeth the same day we didn’t end last time.