The Bus on Thursday
by Shirley Barrett (Allen and Unwin $33) Reviewed by Felicity Price
The first half of The Bus on Thursday is so pacey and funny and irreverent and wild, it’s unputdownable. Eleanor Mellett discovers a lump under her armpit and suddenly we’re on a hilarious, self-deprecating ride through a mastectomy and replacement, chemo and hormone drugs, with understandable anger and depression on the side.
In any other writer’s hands, it could easily have become maudlin but, as one who’s been on the breast cancer journey, I was cheering Eleanor on and relating to her zany, profane and wicked humour.
Australian writer Shirley Barrett brilliantly captures the isolation, the fear, the sense of loss at losing not just a piece of yourself but a piece that has become synonymous with sex appeal and attraction.
After the treatment, though, with no job, no close friends, no money and no fiance any more, she walks out of the cancer support group in a huff because they (quite rightly) object to her pity party in David Jones (she tried to return two old underwire bras because she falsely claimed they could have given her cancer). Increasingly, then, it becomes harder to relate to Eleanor’s passive aggressive, often downright offensive, behaviour.
A job offer, teaching at a small one-room primary school in the Blue Mountains,
sounds ideal – clean air and a simple stressfree country life – what could possibly go wrong? Talbingo, however, has more than its fair share of weirdos and dark secrets for a country town, population: 241.
The humour, always on the dark side, becomes even blacker as Miss Barker, the missing teacher Eleanor is replacing, is revealed to be much less than the goddess her pupils believe and her disappearance looks increasingly like foul play.
Meanwhile, the local priest carries out a sudden exorcism of Eleanor’s supposed cancerous demons, the local Women’s Auxiliary decoupage workshop turns against her and accuses her of stopping Miss Barker’s spirit from crossing over, and the Adonis-like local vacuum cleaner salesman fulfils all Eleanor’s rampant desires, leaving visible love-bites and possibly even a baby.
But in a town where nothing is as it seems, it all becomes a bit too much and too whiney. Eleanor’s anger becomes allconsuming. She hangs up on her mother and on her friends, she cuts off contact as punishment for non-existent slights, she overreacts, she yells a lot and swears unnecessarily, even to children.
The Bus on Thursday is an unsettling mixture of rom-com and thriller (it’s sold as Bridget Jones meets The Exorcist), with an injection of the paranormal, but it’s not really working as a whole.
Just the same, it’s great fun to read and I devoured it over a weekend. As Eleanor’s world becomes increasingly bizarre, we’re left wondering if she is actually the only sane person in town, or is she paranoid? Is there a killer on the loose and will she be the next victim, or is she really possessed by demons metastisising her cancer? Don’t expect the unexpected ending to provide the answer in this very unusual, very twisted, strangely compelling book.