Day Two: Mystery

I woke up, shaken, disoriented.

"WelcomeaboardtheHeathrowExpresstobuzzbuzzbuzz..." suddenly mumbled out above me. It was light. When the metal hit me it was afternoon. Surely I had not lost a day. I tried to scoot upwards. I seemed to be smashed between two blue seats, and I was definitely moving.

Above my head I heard a voice. "You alright there, love?" I turned myself over, facing a kindly English woman who looked like she would be a kindly English Nana. She gave reason to the word Nana, which only prior had applied to my Great-Grandmother. I checked myself once-over, and was grateful I was at minimum, still fully dressed.

"Yeah," I mumbled back. She held me steady as I pulled myself up and got wind of my surroundings. It was the Heathrow Express bus. A bus I was overly familiar with in my last line of employment.

"Friends were nice to get you on. Said they were all worried you'd miss your brother's arrival," Nana was keeping a chat going, though her eyes suggested that my 'friends' were anything but. I felt my face, it was swollen. "Must've been a nasty accident," she said. I am sure she was poking at the reason I had most likely been hauled, bloody and semi-conscious, aboard a bus to the airport.

"It was," I said as I hauled myself to the bathroom in the back.

The light flicked on over my head and I sealed myself in. A quick check in the tiny mirror suggested that I had decided, on a whim, to bruise the left side of my face for fun. Outside of that I had everything that I was supposed to have on me. My trousers, my shirt, my jumper, but zero ID and cash. I wasn't going to be getting back on the bus to go home. This was a one-way trip.

Stumbling out of the bathroom I made my way back to Nana. Her wide eyes suggested she would miss every plane, train, or vehicle of transport to see me to the authorities if needs be. So I risked it.

"So who escorted me on?" I asked, no joking in my face.

"Well, a nicely dressed man, and what appeared to be a younger male, though he was just in his trousers and jeans," she trailed away, "He didn't look like a hooligan or anything so I don't think..."

"I'm fine. Just the bruise," I reassured.

"They said you had a few, took a fall, but that your brother was coming and if you didn't meet him your Mom would kill you. So alcohol poisoning or no, you were going to Terminal 5. They even gave me his flight and all that in this little envelope." She pulled a red envelope from a folder and handed it to me.

I pulled it open and noticed that there were things inside besides the flight information. I looked back at her. "Anything else they say?"

"No, no. You were in the seat when we started, nasty turn we hit. Why they didn't buckle you I have no clue."

Nana started to look more shaken. She was deliberating, I could tell. She was concerned for me but worried about her safety as well.

"No worries, ma'am," I said, mixing English and southern properly. "I have everything I need. I can find my way to my brother just fine. Honestly, I just don't know what got into me."

"No dear, I'm pretty sure you didn't."