Emergency Exit

It was dark when I woke, shaken conscious by Jennifer’s good hand. She was hissing swear words. The windows were so dark they may as well have been a painted backdrop. Night extended silently over fields forever.

We weren’t moving, the engine was as dead as the view, but two figures up front were. Their dull outlines crept closer, illuminated by the odd spotlight of a passenger’s phone. They weren’t the police. Metal jangled. It was the driver and … the dark outline of a cowboy hat looming.

‘Jennifer Lewis,’ said the Cowboy. ‘Time to come home.’

His voice sounded singsong. Like he was a primary-school teacher, not a mean man with a hat. Maybe he was trying to make Jennifer feel relaxed? Whatever the reason, she’d been right. His tracking skills were on point.

What happened next wasn’t me being decisive. Or friendly. Or anything other than really tired. Jennifer dropped her parcel into my lap, its corners hurting my testicles a bit, and gripped my hand and whispered, ‘You’ve got to help me. Please. Carry this.’

I tripped along behind Jennifer as she pulled me in her wake. The package was wedged against my chest, pinned there with my free arm. People slept on either side and only stirred when the Cowboy and the driver started shouting and drumming their feet up the aisle after us. We ran, Jennifer’s baseball cap flying off her head, bouncing against my shoulder and dropping into the darkness behind.

Honestly, I didn’t think we’d jump from the emergency exit at the rear of the bus … not until we actually did.

‘Stop, kids!’ called the Cowboy after us. ‘You’ve nowhere to go!’

But he was wrong. The emergency exit cracked and whined as we fell through into the night. And we were instantly struck, not by a car – the coach had stopped in a lay-by – but by the sudden cold. It was like jumping into an Arctic lake. I guess.

‘My coat,’ I whimpered, but Jennifer was having none of it.

It was lucky that we’d tumbled into a ditch instead of a chasm or reservoir or alligator pit. But tumble we did, down and away from the bus’s red and white rear lights.

Down here, the darkness was more silver than black. You could see the pencil outlines of everything. Somewhere, behind clouds, the moon shone. I tried to stop my teeth chattering – half nerves, half freezing.

‘Jenny, honey, this ain’t no game. Come home.’

The words echoed through the night like a gunshot. ‘Home,’ the Cowboy had said. And that made me think about Somerset and made me realise that it wasn’t only the Princess and the coat on the bus but also my phone and wallet.

‘Your English friend doesn’t need all this,’ he tried. ‘Can you hear me, amigo? I’m here to help. Don’t listen to Jenny’s stories.’

And it was as if Jennifer could read my mind because as I was about to call out she, with two hands, wrist magically healed, covered my mouth and pulled me into a kind of hug that might have been sweet in different circumstances.

The Cowboy would find us out here in this ditch. All I had to do was nothing again. I wouldn’t be snaking Jennifer and I wouldn’t be committing to the obviously stupid action of staying with her. This cowboy man would let me get back on the bus and everything would be fine.

Just wait until his torchlight strikes.

Under a thousand white pinpricks we could hear everything – super-hearing – the scuffed boots of crocodile leather or snakeskin or whatever it is cowboys wear getting quieter as his shouts became more distant because … you wouldn’t believe it but … he was heading the wrong way.

What’d happened to his immense tracking skills?

‘Quit licking my hand,’ whispered Jennifer.

I felt the words emerge from her chest before I heard them. She removed her fingers from my mouth.

‘I wasn’t,’ I hissed back.

‘You still got my package?’

I pushed it into her. She grunted. I’d lost all feeling in my nose. It was terrible.

‘It’s cold,’ I said, my lips so frozen they felt like dead sausages.

I struggled to stand.

‘Wait.’

Jennifer grabbed at my shirt and pulled me down. And in one … two … three … the bus’s engine coughed into life.

Another voice, the driver’s. He spoke about a schedule, about paying customers, and added, ‘I saw them on the road. Heading towards Marshfield.’

The returning Cowboy grumbled an unhappy-sounding response as a hand found my collar. And it held my collar down. And I tried with all my strength to break free but it was like I was pinned by adamantine. I wasn’t worrying about whispering now; I was worrying about being lost in the middle of the freezing nowhere. And without a coat. Mum would be doubly mad. Hypothermia. They get it on Duke of Edinburgh hikes.

‘No,’ I whined. ‘Please. I’m not American. And my nose is so cold.’

The coach’s headlights drew a crescent over us. Its engine purred into a higher gear, propelling the Greyhound to LA with all my stuff, including the hopes and the dreams, and without me.

My body trembled. I was about to shout, but the words caught in my throat as the Cowboy, still there in the darkness, spoke in a growl.

‘I’m leaving, Jennifer. This is your final chance. Let’s not allow things to get unpleasant. You know I’ll find you in the end.’

Her grip loosened, but I didn’t break free. The Cowboy’s words had paralysed me. They say there’s a tiny part of your brain that hasn’t evolved since we were lizards and it was that part, not my logical human brain, that froze my limbs, shut down my mouth.

Another engine fired up. Tyres coughed over stones. And so the Cowboy drove off and away, searching for our shadows in all the wrong places.

All I had left was my passport, still in the pocket where I’d shoved it back in Chicago, a useless Greyhound ticket, and a really heavy feeling about the epic-sized trouble I was now in.