Her throat was sore too, tickly, and she thought she was coming down with something.
The man interviewing her was very nice. He said it must have been traumatic for her to see the incident on the bus and then to learn what had happened. He thanked her for getting in touch and then he asked her to talk him through her journey home that day, starting with leaving work. What time had that been? Did she always get the same bus?
Emma explained, and described where the bus had got to when the three chavs got on. Except she said ‘the three of them’, not wanting to sound rude. He asked her lots of questions about who said what, were those the actual words? Then it dawned on Emma that they must have the CCTV of it all but without any sound. They could see who did what but not who said what.
The man got even more interested when she told him about the names they’d called Luke, the racist stuff, and again when they’d made threats about the knife. Who did they say had a knife? Was she sure? Did she see any knife?
It was clear in her head, like a film trailer, but as she remembered it all, she also caught the cold, sick feeling inside. Frozen, not wanting to do anything and look stupid, just wanting it to stop.
‘It was really, really scary,’ she said, needing to explain. ‘No one knew what to do. They were so horrible,’ she said, ‘really aggressive.’
The man nodded as he wrote.
‘Then Jason came downstairs.’ Saying his name like she knew him, had some connection. But he was just a stranger on a bus. She described the scuffle, felt herself blush, flames in her cheeks as she repeated the swear words. And she described the chase along the pavement. She had to say it in little short bits because she felt like crying. She felt small then, and wrong, and she wanted him to go.
He read back what she’d said and asked her to sign that it was a true record. He told her she might need to give evidence in court. God, no! It was bad enough telling him just sitting in her own place; it would be ten times worse in front of a load of strangers.
The officer got a diagram out, a plan of the bus, explaining it was the exact same layout as the bus Emma had been on. He had some small Post-it notes too. He asked her to write on the notes all the different passengers so he could see where everyone had been. Emma quite liked doing that. It reminded her of the diagrams people had to include for some of their claims, where they had to describe the damage from a leaking dishwasher or what had been broken in a robbery or destroyed by fire: broken window, all our DVDs melted or carpet ruined, and underlay. Laura once had an old man ring up in a state because burglars had gone to the toilet on his rug (number twos) and he didn’t know if he should include it on the form as it wasn’t a very nice thing to have to put.
Emma wrote the labels: Old Couple, Asian Man, Woman 1, Woman 2. Students, 1, 2, 3, 4. Mother and Baby. She put Large Man instead of Rugby Player. She set them out neatly. Put herself opposite Luke.
He asked her at what point the verbal insults had turned physical.
‘Well, they pushed Luke back into his seat as soon as they got on,’ she described. ‘Then when he hit him, actually punched him in the head, that was when Jason had come downstairs; I think he saw it and that’s when he got involved.’ She felt a wash of shame. ‘I didn’t know it would end up like that,’ she said. ‘No one was saying anything.’ Her cheeks were boiling. ‘I didn’t know.’
He spread one hand, palm up. ‘How could you? These things are so unpredictable.’
I might have got killed, she reminded herself. If I had said anything, they might have come after me with the knife. I might have been dead now. She thought of her parents getting the news, standing by her grave. She had been telling herself that over and over. She was just a girl, a fat girl who wouldn’t say boo to a goose. How could she have said anything? But whenever she put herself back there, or heard the name Jason Barnes, saw the bits on the news, or the pictures in the papers, she didn’t feel relieved that she’d sat by and done nothing; she just felt ashamed.
