A Journey Home.

There is a man on a train, amongst men and amongst women. It’s mid-December, late in the evening and dark outside. His breath had been visible at the station as he waited, but it wasn’t any more, though he wishes that it were. It had amused him before. Let him believe that he could have been a dragon. He had never grown up. Always a child at heart.

He’d sat in front of a large, vulgar man who’d been left lingering from a previous town. Tried to ignore him, he’s still trying to ignore him. Not to be rude, out of preoccupation. He could be a good man. But there’s no way of knowing. A few seats away, alone at a table sits a brown haired, brown-eyed girl reading Lovecraft. She infatuates him of course, without need for provocation. Their eyes had met briefly and she’d allowed him a smile. That was all he needed, a glimpse at her cheekbones.

He watches her in short bursts, fearful of the potential consequences that could arise should she be given even the faintest sense of his eagerness. In time he finds himself looking alternately at both the fat, dribbling specimen slouched across the table from him in a half daze, and then to the way her long, glistening, red-brown hair a few feet away occasionally interrupts her reading, as if begging her to acknowledge its existence. Each receives his attention for no more than the briefest of moments, only one receives his concentration. The latter is definitely not the fat man. He thinks he’s afraid of the fat man.

With grim determination, he turns his quixotism out the window to the world outside that races past at a hundred miles an hour; he sees a tree, a tree, a tree, and a faraway field he imagines at one point or another to be filled by rabbits or deer. But his mind, in spite of these distractions, sees only the book in her hands, or the ill-fitting cardigan that hung by her knees, or the condensation that came with every breath she had emitted at the station. He wonders where she came from and where she could be going, his stomach aches every time the train stops and he fears she might get off. The fat man stirs in his peripheral vision. Her most subtle movements call to the center of his gaze. A voice in his head reminds him that he’s never even heard the girl talk, that it would be impossible for him even to ascertain whether or not she even has respectable oral hygiene. It’s a quiet voice, distant, manageable.

Soon, the fat man speaks. He’s loud and consistent, though he doesn’t say anything. Responses are simple; ‘I’m fine thank you’, ‘I’m on my way home’, ‘I don’t have a family just yet’. The fat man is satisfied. Conversation was a disguise for a sense of connection only the fat man experienced. In the meantime, the girl’s book had disappeared, presumably into her bag, and she now sat back in her chair gazing blankly at nothing in particularly, seemingly lost in thought. He wanted to talk to her but he didn’t want to scare her, and didn’t want to pass up any obligation he might have had to the fat man who could strike up a talk whenever he liked. She could leave at any moment and be nothing more than a fleeting desire, this girl that could so easily have been his lover, or his wife, or the mother of his children; this girl that he so quickly idealised.

He pulls out a copy of The Whitsun Weddings, wonders if he might uncover a similar tale to tell, somewhere in the back of his own mind. Soon notices without seeing it happen the disappearance of the fat man, not long before the disappearance of the girl. She stays in his head a while longer, like the image that remains when a screen is turned off. Gradually fading. Going. Going. Going. Gone. His mind absorbed by other things. Who had, for a moment, been his one true love, had failed to establish herself as even a lasting memory. Two men sat down in front of him. He tried to carry on reading. Not out of fear, out of love of the verse.

Both men are dirty, black in the face and covered in mud, splattered up their blue overalls. Look like tradesmen, manual workers- the strong kind. One is a giggling idiot with curled, orange hair, the other a bald, older companion, his shifty eyes darting with paranoia. They are both strange. Neither is clever. Curly watches him read through the incessant giggling. He knows it, without looking. If he put down the book, there would be Curly, staring and smiling like a stupid puppy. He wishes to be alone somehow. Maybe they’ll leave soon.

‘We’re on the run,’ says Curly and a trembling whisper. The bald man turns abruptly, suspects his friend won’t be taken seriously but remains nervous. ‘Stole a car,’ he goes on, ‘which is funny, don’t you think?’ The man concentrates on the book, blocking it away as the story continues. ‘Because, because- we ain’t got a car, see? We’re on the train. We’re running from a car job and we ain’t got no car!’ His giggling becomes a louder cackle, in spite of frequent nudges and jabs from his friend. Larkin’s words speak volumes. The giggling breeds fear.

Soon the two men disappear with the girl and the fat man. Their image lasts longer, and then fades. Another poem or two and it’s time he disappeared himself. He waits by the doors for a sign that it’s safe to depart. Takes a look back, presses the button, steps onto the platform. Nearly two hours have been given to getting him here. Two hours of his life that won’t be remembered. Getting from one place to another place- two hours are the void in between. He looks at his book as he wanders away. Thinks about writing it down.