Meet Me at the Cupcake Café (31 page)

‘Oh no,’ said Issy, stopping dead in her tracks.

Pearl was grateful Louis was home with her mother, and felt her hand fly to her mouth.

Strewn right across the road, as if dropped from the sky by a bored child, the bulk of the number 73 – the huge, elongated, unloved bendy bus – lay smashed and on its side. It blocked the road completely, its true size suddenly laid bare, as wide as the height of the house, and as long as half the road; the smell of wrecked machinery was horrifying; smoke rose from the undercarriage, a mass of exposed metal and piping.

A cab with its roof bashed in had come to a stop, skewed at a crazy angle across a reservation. Behind it could just be glimpsed a dirty white Ford Escort that had ploughed straight into the back of it. And most ominously of all, several metres in front of the top right corner, as if hurled there, was a twisted, bent bicycle.

Issy felt sick, her heart pounding in her chest. ‘Christ,’ she could hear one of the laptop boys saying. ‘Christ.’

Issy felt in the pocket of her apron for her mobile phone. She glanced, light-headed, at Pearl, who had already found hers and was prodding 999 into the handset.

‘Quick,’ said the other man. ‘Come on! We have to get them out.’

And Issy glanced up, as if in slow motion, and saw the bus was full of people – shouting, waving, clawing people. Others were already running from shops, from the bus stops, from houses, to help. In the far distance, the first siren could be heard.

Issy picked up her phone again.

‘Helena,’ she gasped into it. She knew her flatmate had a day off – a precious day off – but she was two streets away.

‘Hmm?’ said Helena, obviously still half asleep. But within two seconds she was wide awake and pulling on her clothes.

At one end of the bus, people were hammering on the window; it didn’t seem to be breaking. With the smoke seeping out of the pipework, Issy wondered – everyone wondered – if the engine was going to explode. Surely not. But there had been stories about these buses catching fire, everyone knew it. Anything could happen. In the middle of the bus, a tall man was desperately trying to open the doors from the inside, above his head. One of the men from the coffee shop was already clambering up the side of the bus – what had been the roof, but was now the side – and other people were anxiously shouting guidance to him. From inside the bus Issy could hear screaming; the driver looked unconscious.

There was a scream from a woman halfway down the road. A young man – obviously a cycle courier, in skintight lycra, now ripped, with a huge walkie-talkie still on his hip – was lying, eyeballs rolling, in the gutter, his arm at a very strange angle. Issy looked over her shoulder and was relieved to see Helena tearing down the road at full pelt.

‘Over here!’ she shouted, then ushered Helena through. ‘She’s a nurse! She’s a nurse!’

Helena ran to the boy as the sirens grew louder.

‘I’m a medical student,’ volunteered a young man standing watching on the kerb.

‘Come with me then, sonny,’ said Helena grimly. ‘And don’t give me any cheek.’

Issy glanced around. Suddenly, she noticed a very calm, quiet figure. While everyone else was either stock still in shock or tearing about like a wild thing, the figure was approaching steadily from Pear Tree Court. It was the strange man from the ironmonger’s; the man who hadn’t even bothered to acknowledge them when they moved in. He was carrying an enormous metal box. It must have weighed a ton, but he hoisted it effortlessly.

Her eyes followed him as he headed towards the bus, knelt down by the windscreen away from the driver’s side, opened his box and selected a heavy mallet. Indicating to the panicking passengers inside to stay well back, he hit the glass sharply three or four times until it shattered. He then carefully selected a pair of pliers and lifted out the large, dangerous shards from the black rubber rim of the window frame. Then and only then did he beckon the people inside to come forward; first a screaming baby, which he handed to the person nearest to him, who happened to be Issy.

‘
Oh
,’ said Issy. ‘There, there.’

The baby screamed, her hot wet face buried in Issy’s shoulder, the great peanut shape of her mouth seeming oddly wider than her head. She had thick, straight black hair and Issy stroked it soothingly.

‘Ssssh,’ she said, and two seconds later the baby’s mother was out, her hands flapping and outstretched, the buggy twisted and discarded behind her.

‘Here you are,’ Issy said. The mother could barely articulate her distress.

‘I thought she was … I thought we were …’

The baby, back in the familiar scent of her mother’s arms, hiccuped and gulped and let out another experimental wail but then seemed to decide that the imminent danger had passed, and snuggled her damp face into the crook of her mother’s neck, peering round to gaze at Issy with huge dark eyes.

‘It’s OK,’ said Issy, patting the mother on the shoulder. ‘It’s OK.’

And as she could see other people clambering out behind her – some clutching their heads, some with rips in their clothing, all sharing a similar expression of shock and bemusement, Issy thought that it just might not be too bad … Nobody seemed to be horribly injured. Except for the cyclist – she glanced back, but all she could see was the wide form of Helena bent low over him, gesticulating at the young medical student. Her throat constricted. Whoever he was, he’d left home that morning without a worry in his head.

The bus driver too was still lying contorted across the huge steering wheel.

‘Everyone, get away from the bus!’ the ironmonger said loudly, in a tone that brooked no argument. The bystanders and rubber-neckers were hanging about the pavement, watching; no one seemed to know what to do for the confused commuters with their cut lips and twitching eyes.

‘Perhaps,’ said the ironmonger to Issy, ‘you might be able to make these people a hot drink. And I’ve heard sugar can be good for shock.’

‘Of course!’ said Issy, stunned that she hadn’t immediately thought of it herself. And she ran back as fast as she could to get the urn heated up.

By the time they started feeding tea and cake to the victims, five minutes later, the ambulances and fire engines had arrived; the police were ushering everyone away from the bus and had cordoned off the road. Everyone was absolutely delighted by the hot tea and buns Issy and Pearl had rounded up, and the bus driver, already beginning to stir, had been loaded into the ambulance.

Helena and the medical student, whose name was Ashok, had stabilized the cycle courier and been congratulated by the ambulance crew, who had grabbed a couple of cakes to enjoy once they’d delivered their patient to A&E. The survivors of the crash were already bonding, sharing stories of where they’d been on their way to, and hadn’t everyone always been sure that these bendy buses were going to cause trouble one day; the joy and luck that no one, it appeared, had been too seriously injured or killed made people quite voluble and a bit overexcited, like they were at a cocktail party, and everyone rounded on Issy to express their thanks. One or two people pointed out that they lived just round the corner and they hadn’t even known she was there, so when the photographer from the local paper turned up, as well as taking pictures of the shattered bus from every angle (the ironmonger had disappeared as smoothly as he’d arrived; Issy hadn’t even noticed him go), he also took a shot of her smiling with all the passengers. When the
Walthamstow Gazette
came out the following week the headline to part of their crash coverage was
LOCAL CAKES BEST MEDICINE
and after that, things started to change quite a lot.

Before that, though, there was the simple fact that the entire stock was sold out. Half they’d given away to the tumbled and bruised and shocked; half they’d sold to the nosy and curious. Either way, every crumb was cleared, the milk all finished, the big, unwieldy coffee machine was jarred into life – obviously, Issy thought in retrospect, it was made to be used all the time. It didn’t like stopping and starting, and who could blame it?

Exhausted, she looked over at Pearl, who was washing the floor.

‘Shall we go for a drink?’ she asked.

‘Why not?’ said Pearl, smiling.

‘Hey!’ Issy yelled to Helena, who was, uncharacteristically, mooning out of the window. ‘You coming for a drink?’

They went to a nice wine bar and the three girls relaxed round a bottle of rosé. Pearl had never tried it before and thought it tasted like vinegar, but she gamely sipped along, trying not to notice how fast the other two downed their glasses.

‘What a day,’ said Issy. ‘Cor. Do you think those people will come back?’

Helena raised her glass to Pearl.

‘I gather you’ve already seen the glass-half-empty side of your boss then?’

Pearl smiled.

‘What do you mean?’ said Issy. ‘I’m very optimistic.’

Helena and Pearl swapped glances.

‘Well, it’s not so much pessimistic,’ said Helena. ‘I suppose … timid.’

‘I’ve started my own business!’ said Issy. ‘That feels pretty optimistic to me.’

‘And you still think Graeme’s going to make an honest woman of you one day,’ said Helena, starting in on her second glass. ‘That’s pretty optimistic.’

Issy felt herself colour.

‘Who’s this?’ said Pearl.

‘No one,’ said Issy. ‘My ex.’

‘Her ex-boss,’ explained Helena helpfully.

‘Ouch,’ said Pearl. ‘That doesn’t sound too good.’

Issy sighed. ‘Well, I’m moving on now. Taking control of my life.’

‘Was he nice?’ asked Pearl, who didn’t feel in any position to tell people who they should and shouldn’t be taking back.

‘No,’ said Helena.

‘He was!’ protested Issy. ‘You just didn’t see that side of him. He had a sensitive side.’

‘That came out when he wasn’t summoning you by taxi halfway across town in the middle of the night to make him Super Noodles,’ said Helena.

‘I knew I should never have told you about the Super Noodles.’

‘No, you should have done,’ said Helena, helping herself to a packet of crisps. ‘Otherwise I might have been sitting here saying, “Oh yes, he is terribly handsome, you must turn yourself into a total doormat to get him back just because he looks like he should be in a razor commercial.”’

‘He is handsome,’ said Issy.

‘That’s why he preens himself in every polished surface,’ said Helena. ‘It’s brilliant you’re over him.’

‘Hmm,’ said Issy.

‘And have that banker to pash on.’

Issy shot a look at Pearl. ‘
Helena
,’ she said.

Pearl smiled back at Helena. ‘Oh, I know.’

‘I am not. And for your information, just because I don’t dribble on about it all the time, I do still miss Graeme.’

Pearl patted her hand. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘I know it can be hard to get over people.’

‘You?’ said Issy. ‘You look like you never worry a day in your life about that kind of stuff.’

‘Do I?’ snorted Pearl. ‘What, I’m completely sexless?’

‘No!’ said Issy. ‘I mean, you just seem so sorted.’

Pearl’s eyebrows shot up. ‘That’s right, Issy. Oh, and there’s Louis’s dad, Barack Obama, sending the helicopter to give us a lift home.’