Later
The train was
late of course—it always was when she had important meetings to attend, or so
it seemed to her. Rattling arthritically from Clapham Junction, she looked at
the drab houses, with her mouth a thin line, as the train gathered pace whining
towards Waterloo. In her mind were all sorts of jumbled thoughts, some good,
some bad. Usually her thoughts were carefully ordered, sorted by priority so
that nothing was forgotten. Today, though, like a pile of unwashed laundry, she
had simply allowed her thoughts to gather in a heap. It was the same on this
one day every year.
An angular woman, past forty and past caring, sat grimly by the
window opposite. A small girl, perhaps no more than six or seven, sat alongside
and watched her mother with wide eyes. The woman was trying to read a
newspaper, but the intermittent crawl and stutter of the train was distracting
her and she soon folded the newspaper on her lap, drumming the fingers of one
hand on its front-page headline.
“Nearly there, lovey,” she remarked
to the girl and patted her absently on the head. She caught the other woman’s
eye and smiled, finally turning her mind to the day ahead and its various
meetings - some important, others less so - and interminable paperwork,
although today would be different, with a jokey card on her desk, signed by all
her colleagues and a Curly the Caterpillar cake for their mid-afternoon break.
It was part of her office’s culture, disguising bad salaries and poor working
conditions behind the egalitarian inclusion of false bonhomie and cheap
birthday cake.
The older woman registered her smile by nervously returning it, then
blushed. “I’m late,” she confided. “Geoffrey will kill me. My husband. I’m
supposed to have met him, let’s see, ten minutes ago. Imagine!”
She thought about this for a few moments before concluding that the
older woman wasn’t being serious about being murdered and leaned forward
politely. “We’re all late.”
“Well, it’s not fair—is it, pet?”
She was holding tight to her little girl’s hand, the skin on her knuckles
showing up white. “What on earth is daddy going to say, that’s what I’d like to
know.”
“It’s often late,” she said to the
older woman, offering reassurance. “Too many trains, too few platforms.
Something like that.” She glanced at the window: a smudge of clouds had
darkened the sky and raindrops now smeared the glass. The train jolted and rocked
over points, transporting her towards her morning meetings.
The woman opposite was regarding her quizzically, as if their brief
exchange had made them allies. “Then I’m glad I don’t have to make this journey
every day, that’s what I say.” She sighed at her daughter, if it was her
daughter, and clasped her hand tight.
“Look,” she said. “We’re there.”
Suddenly, the other woman was all common sense and animation. “Get
your things together, lovey,” she ordered, and heaved a battered suitcase from
the rack. Grand Hotel, Majorca, she read on one label; and another, almost
completely faded, Bella Vista, Clacton. It was an old suitcase and the labels
must have come from a bygone age. She momentarily wondered who those travellers
had been, not this family certainly, boldly venturing to Majorca and Clacton;
how excited they would have been, thinking about her own travels, such as they
were. She liked it that the older woman still used a battered suitcase and
hadn’t peeled the old labels away. It proclaimed the special places that the
suitcase had been to, and of the people who packed it; and we’re all a little bit
moulded by the special places we’ve visited, she thought, not that she’d really
gone anywhere. A couple of trips to Spain when she’d been little, kicking and
screaming all the way to the airport. She momentarily tried to guess at the
older woman’s life: why she was on this train with her daughter, and why her
husband would be so angry. The woman gave only conflicting clues: expensive
trouser suit and immaculate makeup but carrying an old suitcase with fading
labels. She then saw for the first time that one of the child’s eyes was
glazed, and cobweb lines had bleached it a marbled white.
The girl was looking at her as if she was a kindly aunt whose name
she had temporarily forgotten, then scrambled for her mother’s hand before
jumping to the platform. The woman hesitated for a moment, her body angled
towards the barrier, anxious to be off.
“Thanks,” the woman said, and
shrugged.
“For what?” She was genuinely
mystified.
But the crowd had enfolded them, as a station announcer apologised
with practised familiarity for the late arrival of their service. She hurried
towards the barrier, and as she did so, caught sight again of the small girl
who had stopped and was looking back along the platform, her good eye wincing
at the sudden sound; her dead eye serene: a thunderclap, sharp and unexpected,
loud enough to set the pigeons wheeling and diving from the station canopy.
She hurried through the crowd and emerged from the station just as
her mobile phone pinged.
Happy birthday!!! she read, and her
heart skipped a beat, before realising that the text came from Maggie, an old
school friend who she hadn’t quite managed to shake off. She’d been
half-expecting a birthday message from someone else, and she frowned and
stopped and for a few moments watched the pigeons flutter back to their roosts
in the station canopy. Then she took a deep breath, looked at the sky, and
decided that the rain had stopped. She pocketed her phone and hurried on.
