It was a beautiful day in late spring. The sun was warm, the breeze cool and the air clear. Stanley walked away from his bus toward a small beach-side cafe a hundred yards east of where he'd parked up; a nice cup of tea his reward for a service well done. He'd take his time, give it a half hour - no, forty five minutes - to be on the safe side. He knew his passenger was being well cared for. He needn't worry about that.
He smiled to himself as he sipped the sweet milky tea, feeling good about how it had all gone so well; the first day of his retirement venture: Stanley's Dream Travels.
The Daimler 5 cylinder CVG had been waxed and polished and looked like it had just rolled off the production line. A fantastic bus, an original 1946 model, completely re-upholstered since being saved from the scrapheap just a few years ago. Now it was Stanley's pride and joy, his raison d'etre in his old age.
From where he was sitting he had a good view of it, the complimentary red and cream paintwork gleaming in the sun as if new. He smiled to himself again. It wasn't only the bus that he had to be proud of. For Stanley knew that inside the bus at that very moment, for his lucky passenger, a dream was indeed coming true, and it was coming true because of him.
What made this knowledge extra pleasing was the fact that it nearly hadn't happened at all.
Only a couple of hours earlier Stanley had been standing, feeling slightly disappointed, beside the bus's back-end at the embarkation point, looking relaxed in his driver's garb of unofficial blue denim, his full white hair neatly combed, bakersfield moustache a color to match. He was ready for the off. But no-one was around. Nobody waited to climb aboard, no-one it seemed wanted a ride.
The bus' Victory Gardner engine ticked over, purring like an old lady cat.
Stanley hobbled over toward the driver's door to the driver's cabin. His right knee was troubling him and age was catching up on him. But he accepted the wear and tear of an active life. In fact he was proud of his advancing years.
He glanced at his watch. Time to go.
Still nobody appeared.
'Oh well' he said 'If not this time, then maybe the next'. He opened the door and was about to climb into the driver's cab when he heard the quiet of a female voice.
'Where does this lovely old bus go to?' it said.
Stanley turned and saw a pretty-though-plain woman, face bereft of make-up, hair tied back with a black hairband, dressed in a dour shapeless knee-length skirt and a plain loose-fitting grey t-shirt. Her age could've been anybody's guess, from somewhere between thirty-five and fifty. It wouldn't be unfair to believe either. Perhaps early forties, thought Stanley.
'Where does this bus go to?' he re-iterated. It was a good question, one that made him pause for thought.
'Well, that depends on where you want to go' said Stanley after a moment, quite truthfully.
He looked at her while she contemplated his answer.
She certainly isn't beautiful he thought as he clocked her pale skin, although, he mused, she might've been once-upon-a-time.
'Erm ... well ... I ...' said the woman, a little flustered, unsure of where she really did want to go.
Aha! A little flustered. Stanley smiled. He knew just the place to take her.
'Well my dear, hop aboard Stanley's Dream Travels and let's see where we end up, eh? And after that I'll make sure to bring you right back to where we started, Ok?'
She smiled. Stanley was a charming old man and the old bus looked charming too; charming, comforting and safe. Stanley's suggestion 'Let's see where we end up, eh?' echoed through her mind.
'Yes. Yes, ok ...' She said, making up her mind, and hurried around to hop on board. For the first time in a long time Sally Jones was feeling a sense of adventure.
***
Sally settled onto a seat a third of the way from the front. At first she barely noticed the world outside as Stanley drove through the non-descript streets of town. Being pre-occupied with the marvelous interior of the old Daimler her imagination had let loose on an age before her time. Her mother and father must've ridden on busses like this, she mused, imagining the bus full of people back in the day dressed in 1940's and 50's attire. She could almost hear their chatter, almost smell their Woodbines and John Player cigarettes.
Eventually though the outside world did catch her eye as town gave way to countryside; farms, fields and rolling hills, and trees in fresh leaf anticipating the joy of full summer about to flower in a matter of a few short weeks.
Sally felt good, better than she had in ages with brief thoughts of her own happy life of halcyon golden summers flickering over the fulfillment she no longer felt. But she didn't want to acknowledge that part of her - the down side - not now she was enjoying herself.
But then the sky outside darkened. The landscape changed and her emotions changed with it. She looked out the left side window. A dark brooding ocean formed in her vision through the thinning trees and began to swell menacingly close to the shore-line road they were travelling on. She felt confused and lost. Where was Stanley taking her?
The brooding ocean was as dark a sea as she'd ever seen. She didn't like it. It was angry and intimidating. The more she looked the more it rose and roared. It reached out like a giant hand that scared her to the bone. Then, just as it looked like it would engulf the whole bus - and her - suddenly receded with an evil hissing sloosh. If she were honest (and without a reason not to be) being the only passenger on board, with no-one there to help allay her fears, she felt frightened.
Frightened, vulnerable and alone.
She was alone.
She turned her head, stoically facing front again, trying not to look at the sea, fighting off her fear, trying not to think all the thoughts that were crowding her mind, thoughts that tumbled and fell like a glass flute slipping from her hand as storm clouds formed over crumbling cliffs further ahead in the distance; thoughts of why her life had turned sour; her broken marriage, subsequent divorce, loneliness. Yes, she admitted, a frightening loneliness. She saw herself all too clearly; dour, middle aged and unwanted. The future - her future - looked nothing but forlorn and grim.
She cried.
For a few brief seconds she allowed the tears to fall then told herself to pull herself together. Silly girl. We're perfectly safe. Look, the storm's behind us now. And it was.
She fumbled in her bag for a tissue just as the bus came to a slow halt.
She dabbed her eyes, feeling rather than seeing Stanley clamber down from the cab - but looked out after him anyway.
'Just got to stretch my legs for a minute ... won't be long' Stanley called out cheerily, just enough so that Sally felt comforted. 'We're almost there' he added almost as an afterthought.
Sally wondered what exactly was going on. And where exactly was 'there' going to be? She looked about and didn't recognize anywhere. And the ocean stumped her. The menace outside had dissipated. But surely, she thought, we didn't live this close to the coast?
But at least the sea outside was a calmer sea than before.
In fact, the more she looked the more it became a lovely shade of turquoise, smooth as glass under a warm blue sky. She scanned around for the storm clouds she'd seen ahead but there were none. Not a single cloud. Not anywhere.
Suddenly Sally felt more composed and actually, yes, quite happy again. But not only that, the lovely view instilled a curious inquisitiveness in her, a long-abandoned dormant feeling that felt ... exciting!
She scrambled like a teenager over to the left side window, scanning from right to left and back again with unforeseen sunshine in her soul, watching the ocean lazily lapping at the sandy shore nearby, seeing a rabbit run across the road and disappearing through a hedge, spying a house across the street that lay nestled in a small copse of Ash trees. Everything enthused her.
Ash trees, she thought.
Ash; the tree of life. Ygdrasil the Norse people called it. The tree of procreation.
How do I know that, she wondered. She couldn't remember ever having known that.
For some reason the house held her eye more than the trees. And she knew why; subliminally, immediately, consciously. It was the scaffolding, the scaffolding that clutched and scaled the side of the building like a baby being held by its mother.
Scaffolding!
Something so basic, so elemental, so strong. And so hard.
A feeling.
A movement held her gaze. A subliminal thought flashed through her mind. There on the scaffolding was a young builder looking seriously handsome. Sally stared in awe, gazing at his firm body working in the heat of the day. The subliminal thought gatecrashed her psyche; a repeated one, a guilty one - of her neighbour Mrs. McGill's son, now a strapping twenty year old, himself an apprentice builder and not too unlike the man she was staring at now.
The guilty feeling aroused in her a sensual longing she didn't want to admit to. And the results were the same as when she'd looked at the neighbour's boy when he'd been doing some neighbourly repair work on her house last week; she touched herself.
Stealing glances from a safe distance, private and unobserved, she'd rubbed herself through the fabric of her dress, gazing at the now fully grown man she'd known since he was a boy, gazing at his chiselled torso, his manly pecs, at his abdominals straining with his exertions, at his well developed biceps, his triceps, at his strong muscular thighs, at perfectly firm buttocks enclosed in dirty khaki shorts.
Her breaths had come in short gasps. Her touch instinctive and barely conscious at all. Still, she had slowly become aware of it and knew she should stop. And here she was doing the same thing now.
She admonished herself. She was on a bus for goodness sake. Frustration would only fuel her life's disappointment. She fought a tormented battle with her response, desperate to control the fermenting desire of a sexually frustrated woman that was threatening to run away with her, just as it had done when looking at Mikey from next door.
Yes, she admitted to herself, a sexually frustrated woman. How long had it been? Three years? Four? And more to the point how long had it been since the sex had been good, if it ever had?
