Hear no evil

You wouldn’t think it would you? No, no, not in a million years. I didn’t, and I was wrong. All the other people didn’t, and they were very wrong. Maybe their mother knew, but I’m damned if she told me.

I had just sat back down on the coach after a brief stop in Carlisle, munching away at a bag of horrendously overpriced Doritos and enjoying my music when I sensed something. There’s nothing supernatural about this sense, it’s just feeling that everyone gets when there is someone just a bit too close to them. I turn round, and there he is. The middle member of this little trio is there, staring at me with his head in his hands and a monkey smile on his lips. I’m taken aback at first, but the thought that occurred to me was that kids can smell fear, so I smiled back and nodded. He grinned wider and disappeared. It was odd, I’ll admit, but I shrugged and settled into the window to grab some sleep before arriving home.

Halfway through my nap, I get that feeling again. Someone is very close to me, so I turn round and sure enough there he is again, this time chugging from a bottle of orange juice. I nod to him again and he grins back. I felt bizarre and awkward, as if I were the main character in some bad art house film. I offered him a Dorito and he took it unquestionably.

“I’m Johnathan,” I say, and offer him my hand. He shakes it, but doesn’t answer. “And you are?” He grins. “Right, so you’re not going to say a thing?” He laughs. “Fine then,” I say, and give him an earbud to my music player. He looks at it with wide-eyed shock before bouncing his head along to The Mars Volta and trying to hum to the erratic tune. I turn the music off abruptly and his eyes fly open and he’s begging me to turn the music back on.

At least, that’s what i think he’s doing. He doesn’t speak a word of English.

It’s not until later that I figure out that he and his family were Serbian, but the information at that point would not have been a great help to me. Soon after I turned off the music his two brothers came and joined him, and an interesting game of inter-lingual pictionary began where they would draw something and I would learn how to say it. They laughed at me plenty of times, repeating my failed attempts at saying “roller skates” in their language and they covered most of my notebook with scrawled, itchy pictures of busses, cars and clowns. They grew bored of my pens eventually though, so I taught them the nuances of high-fives and thumbs up and I beat them so many times at rock paper scissors that they started throwing wild-card weapons like dynamite and gun.

Now, looking at that picture up there and the other one down there, you wouldn’t think it would you? You wouldn’t think that three angelically smiling children could be the incarnations of something more sinister, something evil? Of course, I didn’t. I’m one of those annoying guys in a horror film that has a sword shoved through their skull right after they’ve lulled the viewer into a false sense of safety.

The kids, they get too much. They clamour for my attention, rifle through my bag, and try to steal my saved slice of lemon drizzle cake. I push them off harmlessly, managing to gently nudge away their hands every time they get close. But then they get bad. The laughing and hair pulling and nose tugging begins and face myself cornered in an onslaught of tiny hands with fingers like claws. I call out in vain for other people on the bus to help, but no one helps. I hear a snigger* or two from seats beside me and I manage to shoot the perpetrators a look before becoming engulfed my grabbing hands and screaming milk teeth.

Somehow I manage to pull myself out of the chair and onto my feet, with the littlest of the group hanging (literally hanging) off my hair. The mother notices and shoos them away from me with a barely apologetic smile. I retreat to my seat, lie back, and just as I’m about to drift off the oldest of the little bastards appears again with a devilish look in his eyes. As he prepares to lunge for me again I hold out my hand and manage to say “Prestana”, which I gathered over their attacks as “stop”. He cocked his head to one side and I gave him a high five again, then his brothers came over and I managed to snap one last picture before they disappeared forever.

God, I hate kids.

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*Oh my god, the language correcter on my browser is trying to suggest that I change “snigger”** into “nigger”! Firefox you racist bastard!

**It’s doing it again!