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From earliest boyhood I have been fascinated by double-decker buses that crash into bridges. The fascinating result of such an event is, classically: the roof of the double-decker is jaggedly ripped off, looking as if some demonic footman has whirled around its oblong with an old-fashioned tin opener, but a gigantic one. Sometimes the top deck of the bus can be seared off altogether, left lying on the road behind, or in a field, perhaps with the astonished head of one of the passengers still biting a hand-rail. But people are rarely killed in these accidents, some of which are superbly mysterious. Because the same double-decker bus can travel the same route all its life, then suddenly be too tall for a bridge it has passed under ten times a day for twenty years. The bridge itself hardly ever collapses, usually taking no serious damage at all as the bus scalps itself charging through to the other side.
Had I ever been a double-decker bus driver, as was my foolish childhood wish, I would have driven about at night with the lights off, heading down black roads towards one low bridge after another, and always disappointed if I sailed underneath without incident. But, and here's the thing, if I found one that I knew for certain was too low, I would brake hard at the last instant, saving the accident for the next day. Because next day, with the tyres pumped up plump, I would diverge from my appointed bus route, ignoring the complaints of the sweaty passengers and take them on a mad ride to rendezvous with the low bridge, where, with a crash-smash and a celebration of plummeting sparks, I would lose my top-deck and all the cocky top-deck passengers up there. I can see myself at the wheel, ecstatic at the ripping, searing, paint-popping noise made by the accident, driving ahead double fast with my surviving passengers, on and on until I ran out of petrol or police marksmen shot me in my seat and I slumped forward dead with a chuckle. A harmless enough fantasy, in that I never was, nor could be, a bus driver, if only because I am a member of the royal family.
I mention all this as preamble to what now seems to me the culmination of this interest. I say interest, because I have never been obsessional about it, as I have about so many other things. Just a passing, but faithfully constant and lifelong, interest in double-decker buses crashing into bridges.
So three days ago there was such a crash, twelve miles from my residence, and the man who comes to clip the dogs' claws happened to mention it as he arrived, still shaken because he had almost been caught up in it, lucky fellow. Dropping everything, I had myself driven to the scene. But it was not what I expected.
The red double-decker was stuck under the bridge, three-quarters of its roof ripped off tin-opener style, rolled up behind like a thrown off tin blanket. The driver was dead, lying on his wheel - obviously very deceased, not sleeping, not drunk: dead. The passengers were standing or sitting on the road. No ambulance yet, but a doctor and two motorcycle police were at the scene. These were not, however, attending to the silent, shocked passengers, but were up on the railway bridge looking down into the torn-open roof of the bus. Because inside, filling the top deck, corner to corner, was a brain. A too long, too large, too oblong, giant human brain, its pinkish fluid wetting the windows and dripping from their cracks and breakages.
The whole area smelt of burnt rubber, as one would expect, but increasingly my nose found almonds. Or not almonds themselves, but rather the smell of almond flavouring for cakes, a smell reminiscent to me of old nurseries, of nanny's suitcase when the lid was flipped open, of linen wet with the drench of a child's fever, of inside empty cupboards which one thought were full. I say reminiscent to me, but no actual memories of my own were triggered: that's just what the almond smell made me think about at the crash site.
By the time I climbed up the steep bramble-clogged path onto the bridge, the ambulance had arrived below. The police and doctor were very surprised to see me. But the doctor, impertinently I thought, before I had leaned over far enough for a good look at the brain, said: "Do you know anything about this, sir?"
Did I, I wondered?
"No, don't think so. Is it alive?"
The doctor's grim nod was of a kind they give when you ask them if there is something horrid wrong with an elderly loved one and then they nod, just as he did then.
"So it's thinking!" called I, loud, as if in a noisy wind. But all was hushed, so why was I shouting? "I do wonder what it might be thinking about, don't you? Does anyone know how it got in there?"
It didn't seem they did.
This morning I had the brain installed in my old covered swimming pool, which has been pencilled in for demolition in every improvement I have planned on the estate for years, but somehow endures in its familiar place. My first wife used to swim there, naked, in the dark, on summer nights, moon or no moon. The brain is still very much alive and they tell me it seems healthy. Meanwhile, I have been warned - more impertinence - not to swim around it for danger of infection: it, not me! And always that same smell of almonds. I think, though I do not know why I think, that it is sad, deeply, irrevocably sad. But, even though I have enough sadness of my own, I can't wait for them to hook their gizmos up to it so that I can talk to it, which may take them years to achieve, they keep saying.
This brain is going to be my new obsession, the worst ever. Even if it doesn't turn out to be my special friend and confidant, I'll bet I have at least one thing in common with it: an unhealthy interest in double-decker buses crashing into bridges.
To blasted blue blazes with them: I'm going for a swim!
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