Lilac Bus by Maeve Binchy Page B

lookout for anything of that order so as he never went home empty-handed.
    He was the only one of the bank porters who came from the country. The rest were all Dubliners: they used to laugh at him and say there’d have to be an official inquiry as to how he got the job. But they were a very good-natured lot, and there was great chat all day as they manned the doors, or wheeled the big boxes on trolleys where and when more money was needed or had to be put away. They delivered letters and documents up and down the street. They knew a lot of the customers by name and they got great Christmas presents altogether.

    The Lilac Bus had started just when Mikey had needed it. His father was getting senile now, and it was hard on poor Billy and Mary to have the whole business of looking after him. But it would have been a long way to come back without Tom Fitzgerald and the little minibus that dropped you at the door. Imagine having to get yourself to the town by a crowded train, packed on a Friday night and maybe not a seat, and then after that to try and organise the seventeen miles home. It would take all day and all night and you’d be exhausted.
    His old father was pleased to see him sometimes, but other times the old man didn’t seem to know who he was. Mikey would take his turn spooning the food, and combing the matted hair. He would play the Souza marches his father liked on the record player, and put the dirty clothes in the big buckets of Dettol and water out in the back. Mary, who was Billy’s wife and a sort of a saint, said that there was no problem to it if you thought of it all as children’s nappies. Into a bucket of disinfectant for a while, throw that out, into a bucket of water a while and throw that out and then wash them. Weren’t they lucky to have space out the back and a tap and a drain and all. It would be desperate altogether for people who lived in a flat, say.
    And the nurse came twice a week and she was very good too. She even said once to Mikey that he needn’tcome back
every
weekend, it was above the call of duty. But Mikey had said he couldn’t leave it all to Billy and Mary, it wasn’t fair. ‘But they’d be getting the house: what would Mikey be getting?’ the nurse had pointed out. Mikey said that sort of thing didn’t come into it. And anyway, wasn’t it a grand thing to come back to your own place.
    The twins told Mikey that there was never any fighting when he came home and Mikey was surprised.
    ‘Why would there be fighting in this house?’ he asked.
    The twins shrugged. Phil and Paddy were afraid of being disloyal.
    ‘Sure you couldn’t be fighting with your poor old grandfather, he would never harm the hair of your heads,’ Mikey said.
    The twins agreed and the matter was dropped.
    They loved Mikey around the house and he had a fund of jokes for them. Not risky ones of course, but ones they could tell anyone. Gretta even wrote them down sometimes so that she’d remember them to tell them in class. Mikey never told the same one twice; they told him he should be on the television telling them one after another with a studio audience. Mikey loved the notion of it. He had once hoped that he might be asked to do a turn for the bank’s revue butnobody had suggested it, and when he had whispered it to that nice Anna Kelly, she said she had heard that you had to be a member of the union to be invited, that only members of the IBOA were allowed to perform. He had been pleased to know that, because otherwise he would have felt they were passing him over.
    He had his doubts about the Lilac Bus when he arrived the very first Friday. Tom Fitzgerald had asked them to be sure not to wave any money at him, because the legalities of the whole thing were what you might call a grey area. He did have the proper insurance and everything, and the Lilac Bus had a passenger service vehicle licence, but there was no point in courting disaster. Let them all give him the money when they were home in