‘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.’