Day 124

Dear Diary,

Last time we talked, my mouth was hanging open and I was starin’ googly eyed at Beryl from Beryl’s Hair Parlour for Old Women, who was standin’ inside my custom-designed and hand-crafted 33-seat coach and fiddlin’ with her make up bag with one had and with the other holdin’ a lock of hair belonging to wot was left of poor Zombie Fartie after I’d took her outta my MegaTurboBlaster Clothes Drying Machine. And since less’n a second before The Reverend Doctor Paisley Pisser’d been standing in the exact same spot as Beryl and a’doin’ the exact same thing, only with his hand on a different place on her anatomy, naturally my mind was more’n just a little confused, as well as suspicious as fuck. And this is why I said, or at least I said soon’s I got my voice back and my brain’d clicked back into gear again, “Why Beryl of Beryl’s Hair Parlour for Old Woman, nice to see you again and I’m sure glad you wasn’t drowneded in the flood. But wot the fuck’re you doin’ here anyways inside the bus (which is me) and why the fuck’re you fiddlin’ with Zombie Fartie with your wore out fat fingers?” Well Beryl’s accustomed to answering direct questions with evasive answers on account of her three brothers is politicians and she wouldn’t know the truth if’n it hit her in the face like a dead mackerel, and besides she’s dealing on a daily basis with biddies wot’ll believe lies wot’d make a hustler wince if’n it comes outta the mouth of a beauty parlour beautician. So after she’d finished pretending to listen to my question, she smiled real confidential-like and plastered her cheesiest most sympathetic expression all over her face and lowered her voice so’s you knowed wot she was gonna say was something nasty about someone else. And then she said, “Why I remember your old mammy back at her confirmation. She were so pretty in her new dress wot her auntie’d made out of a potato sack and a coupl’a pieces of turf, and didn’t she look a treat on account of she had the ague and catarrh somethin’ desperate and there was rainbow buggers all down her face and drippin’ down on to the little flat biscuit wafer cookie wot was being shoved into her mouth by Father Brady O’ Flanaghan Murnaghan’s dear Ol’ pappy, Monsignor Brady Murphy O’ Flanaghan Murnaghan God Rest His Soul and you better genuflect real respectful when you says his name out loud. You never knowed him but he was the priest over at the Church of The Immaculate Septum on the bottom side of the island where it was built in the middle of the slums wot had folks livin’ in them wot needed to be redemptified but didn’t want to be redemptified no how not ever.” And believe it or not, Ol’ Beryl said all this exactly as I’ve wrote it down in one sentence all run together and without even taking so much as a breath from beginning to end. Anyways, it took me a coupl’a minutes to get it all sorted out in my mind, after which I cleared my throat like I knowed wot was wot and I says in the sorta voice wot makes a liar wee in his britches, “In other words, Miss Beryl of Beryl’s Hair Parlour for Old Woman, you’re after doing a job wot you ain’t been asked to do and then charging double for the extra time you had to put in to travel all this way and do it.” Whereupon Ol’ Beryl shrugged her shoulders like they does when they’re caught with their hand in their dead mother-in-law’s purse, and then she gived me a fuck you flick with one of her fingers. And after that and over the next few minutes, her mind bounced back ‘n’ forth between pretending she weren’t never been here at all in spite of appearances to the contrary and actin’ as if she was innocent as a new born babe right before he’s shat all over the midwife and peed a gallon or two on his mam as a thank you gift for her lettin’ him pound away on her velvet door for four days and seventeen hours. “Heavy labour” is wot they calls it I guess. I calls it somethin’ else, but then I’m only a bus and no bus’d get caught squeezin’ a baby bus outta his tailpipe not even if’n you paid him a billion euros and gived him a hand-wax. Anyways, I guess Ol’ Beryl decided it’d be a dumbfuck idea to say she’d never been where she was when I myself was here talking to her, on account of not even them two idiot constables wot used to run all the police business that there was back on the island when it still was a island would’a been tooked in, at least not without wot they calls corroboration from that Ol’ gangster, Old Wanger Nose, wot’d owned ‘em lock, stock and barrel and’d paid their salaries. And this reminds me, I wonder wot the fuck ever happened to Police Constable Humbert Da Elephant and his partner Police Constable Helen Da Barren, who’s what they use to call a ‘woman policeman’ back in the good old days when everybody knowed all they did was make cups of tea and serve the biscuits? Perhaps we’ll find out one day and perhaps not. Or perhaps it’ll happen next time we goes into Thelma O’Leary’s little falling-down café and orders the fish special, that when we cuts open the fish, instead of dry over-cooked sea trout, we’ll see the face o’PC Humbert Da Elephant starin’ out at us with his mouth open and a apple stuffed in it to make it more presentable. But that’s got fuck all to do with wot I was tryin’ to tell you, don’t it?

If’n you want to know the truth, I’m as lost as fuck. Let me think by myself for a coupl’a seconds… OH, YES, now I remember. I’d just stumbled over The Reverend Doctor Paisley Pisser bending suspiciously low over the naked and not yet re-beautified body of Zombie Fartie, and when I cleared my throat he turned around to face me with a guilty expression wrote all over his face. And if’n he ever had to reason to look guilty it was this time, on account of no matter how hard he tried to convince me it was him, The Reverend Doctor Paisley Pisser in person, I could tell it were not nobody but Ol’ Beryl from Beryl’s Hair Parlour for Old Women. And that’s when I felt my mouth open and words fell outta my face before I could stop ‘em. “Why, Beryl,” I demanded to know. “Wot the fuck’re you doin’ here and wot did you do with The Reverend Doctor Paisley Pisser?” And then while she were busy hemming and hawing, my mouth continued on slapping its gums and a’babblin’ more dumbfuck words’n I’d ever knowed I had in me. “Why oh why did you eat him, you greedy bitch and a whore to boot! I know The Reverend Doctor Paisley Pisser’s not a real preacher and I wouldn’a trust him with my kids if’n I had any, but even he’ was better’n a low-down beautician ‘n’ gossip wot’s about as far down on the scale of evolution as a TV presenter, only more intelligent. Why Oh Why you dumb fuckin’ bitch did you kill The Reverend Doctor Paisley Pisser and skin him alive and drape his skin all over you? Don’t you know it’s bad luck to kill and eat a fake pretend minister preacher man? And besides, for your information, I never did have no mammy wot went to no confirmation to one o’them special biscuit wafer cookies on account of I’m a fuckin’ bus, you imbecile twat and cu…” Whereupon Ol’ Beryl clouted me real good around my ear, or in this case my wing mirror, which made me realise I’d a’been babblin’ just like her. And I thought to myself, “Holy Jeezus Mother Shits a Brick!” I’ve got the verbosical diarrhoea just like her. And I had me a awful thought right then and there. Supposin’ she’d ate me just like she’d done The Reverend Doctor Paisley Pisser, and if’n she had, was this the end of everything?

Fuck fuck ‘n’ double fuck fuck. I gotta put away my pencil and catch my breath and look myself over and over to see if’n I’m still me. If’ n I am I’ll let you know by saying “so endeth wot I thought was the worst thing wot could happen to a bus, namely being ate by beautician for old biddies.” And if’n it turns out I have been sucked inside a fuckin’ slimy “incubus” or “succubus” after all, well never mind, on account of at least I can still write “bus” on my visiting cards, even if’n it’s not the “Community” variety. Why does I have a pain in the pit of my stomach and why was I ever built with such loving care by them good folks at Daimler Burlington all them years ago?