“Whatever Violette wants you to do, forget about it,” Bish said, eyeing her with a warning.
“What did I do?” she asked.
“I’m just angry, okay?” Fionn said. “I’m allowed to be angry.”
“’Course you are,” Bish said.
“And I can’t even fucking walk away when I’m angry!” Fionn shouted.
Bish looked at the younger girls in the back seats, worried that Fionn’s mood would frighten them. But they only looked sad.
“I told them about the other bus,” Bee said. “How the bomb was meant for the French kids and not us.”
“I love the way I get the blame for making him cry,” Violette said.
“I thought you were hassling him before,” Bish admitted guiltily.
“I’m just trying to convince him to go to his school dance with a hot girl so his dumb bitch ex–best friend’s girlfriend will see what she’s missing.”
“‘Dumb bitch’ is a terrible term, Violette,” Bish said, discreetly pointing to the impressionable three in the back seats.
“She broke his heart. If I ever meet her, I’ll punch her in the face.”
Fierce Violette was back.
“There was this magician kid on the French bus,” Fionn said. “Every time we were at the same campsite he’d do these tricks.”
“Patric,” Lola reminded everyone.
“He’d be dead if the bomb had been on his bus,” Fionn said. “He sat four seats from the front. So would Marianne. So would that girl with all those plaits. So would at least the next five rows. Because their bus was packed and ours wasn’t. I keep wondering why this happened to me, and now I know why and I’m angry, because I can’t regret it. Because if I do, all those kids would be dead. The boy with the magic tricks would be dead.”
Charlie started up the van and put on his indicator. For the next hour they talked about Michael Stanley and Astrid Copely and Mac and Serge Sagur and Lucia Ortez, whom they had never met but whose name they’d never forget. Bish had seen his first dead body at the age of twenty-five, six months into the job. These kids had experienced it far too young.
Fuck it, he was going to have to speak to David Maynard about getting all the kids of the tour together again. It was what the principal extraordinaire was good at.
His phone beeped with a text from Saffron telling him to look at Sadia and Katherine’s blog. “Who’s got Internet access?” he asked.
Everyone. Couldn’t manage to grab a spare set of clothes or shoes but they all had their technology.
“You two at the back: look up your mums’ blog,” he ordered them. Lola had it on her favorites page so was first to find it.
“Your dad wrote a piece, Eddie,” Manoshi said.
A surprised Eddie reached over and took the iPad. Bish watched him study the screen.
“Eddie? Are you okay?”
Eddie nodded.
“What does it say?” Fionn asked.
Eddie swallowed and started reading what was written.
“My eldest son Jimmy was killed in the Brackenham bombing when he was eighteen. It was how my wife Anna came to meet Noor LeBrac. A need to understand why our boy had died. My wife’s relationship with Noor introduced us to our second son who means everything to me…”
Eddie started crying and Violette leaned over and gently took the iPad out of his hands and continued to read. When she cried, Bee took over and by the end everyone had read it aloud and Bish felt like crying himself.
53
An air of tranquility had hit the bus by the time they reached Yorkshire. Bish welcomed the sensory overload of the landscape. Perhaps days without alcohol had opened him up to everything. Drystone walls lined with flowers, the fluorescent fields of rapeseed. It was functional beauty. Cottages advertised free-range eggs, black-faced sheep dotted the hillsides, farmers collected silage for the winter. A cyclist or two and seasoned walkers with sticks signaled that the cove was close by. Violette was alone in finding it too picture-perfect. Her farm in Coleambally, she said, was a different sort of beauty. More savage. Bish heard the homesickness in her voice. He didn’t want to think of Eddie and Violette separated. He didn’t want to think of any of these kids being apart. He wished he could drive them around the countryside for the rest of their lives, keeping them all safe and less lonely.
Ten miles out of Malham, Bish knew he had to let Grazier in on where they were. He was hoping they had at least a forty-minute head start. That Violette would get the chance to complete the journey she had begun all those weeks ago. So he took a chance and sent a text, and then sat back and enjoyed the rest of the drive.
They arrived in Malham just after 2 p.m. After parking in the village, they secured Fionn in the wheelchair and set off to the cove, a mile down the road. Violette led them, glancing back more than once at the sound of voices in the distance.
Bee nudged Bish and pointed to Violette, a silent order to catch up.
“She won’t want me walking alongside her, Bee.”