Spring Tide

⁶ Transients

There was a delicious, agonising goodbye in Ellie’s car, with gentle hands, and moonhoney, and lips still warm from the night, but at last reluctantly they had to heed the honking taxis and the shouting man.

The car door closed. Space and time opened up between them. Thomas watched Ellie rejoin the stream, waved and blew kisses, then turned to hurry into the station, feeling for his ticket in his jacket pocket.

‘I really must catch this train,’ he’d told her. ‘I wish I could stay longer with you, I truly do, but I need to be there for this meeting.’

And yet, when it turned out he’d got the time wrong and that his train was already pulling away, he found he didn’t care that much about the meeting, or mind that the hour and a half he now had to wait would be on his own when it could have been with Ellie. He phoned his work to apologise – really it was no big deal at all – then bought some coffee and sat on a kind of gallery above the platforms, under Victorian arches of iron and glass, with four or five big intercity trains beneath him, lying side by side beneath their power lines like metal whales.

What could be better than the solitude of a railway station at half past 9 in the morning, he thought? It was beautiful as a cathedral, but a cathedral whose god was real and performed miracles many times in every hour. It was a temple of power and speed.

The caffeine lit him up, transforming his veins into branching fingers of contentment. He watched the pigeons, the electric trolleys, a giant electric advertising hoarding that changed every ten seconds: girl – car – beach – cartoon rabbit – girl – car – beach – cartoon rabbit…

Another train came hissing to a standstill right below him. For two seconds it just stood there, and then suddenly, all along its flank, doors slid simultaneously open to disgorge a crowd of people with bags, suitcases, baby buggies, bicycles, who began at once to hurry towards the city. In poured another crowd, equally keen to get away.

For some reason, the image came into his mind of a great sphere hanging up there at the mouth of the station where the trains came and went. One side of the sphere was in sunlight where he couldn’t see it, the other within the shadow of the station roof.

10.58! Jane jumped out of a taxi with a badly packed bag in her hand. Oh for God’s sake keep the bloody change then, you crook. Which bloody platform? Which bloody train? Why don’t they fix that bloody departure board? God damn it if I have to sit around here and wait for the next train I swear I’ll bloody kill someone.

She was angry. She was riding a great red horse with teeth of steel and people had better stand back because it could bite and kick and shoot out gamma rays from its hell-fire eyes. Platform 9! Okay, now run. She’d finally done it after threatening it so many times that she herself ceased to believe in it. She’d ditched the bastard, she had crawled out of the hole, she’d let the red horse loose from the catacomb where it had champed in the darkness for so long. And, look, it was twelve feet tall, strong as a tank, lethal as a bloody bomb.

‘Hurry up please, miss, we’re about to go.’

I am fucking hurrying, you stupid man. I am in fact running as you may possibly have observed.

And don’t call me ‘miss’.

God will you look at this shower in here with their smartphones and their bloody tablets.

Where am I going to sit?

Miss. Patronising git. Miss. What does he know about my marital status? Mind you he’s right. I am single now. I’m bloody single and that’s the way it’s going to stay for a long long time.

No, mate, I am not going to sit by you, you look as if the art of washing is one that you have not yet mastered.

No, madam, you may be very nice, but my red horse doesn’t like you and I fear it might bite your big soft ears.

Single!

No, certainly not you, your reverence. Anyone who munches sandwiches with their mouth open like that should be doomed for all eternity to sit alone. Nor you either, kind sir. I make it a golden rule in life never to sit with people who look at my tits and visibly salivate.

The train began to move as she passed on to the next carriage.

Settled at a window seat facing forward with a whole table to himself, Thomas checked his phone. It was odd, now he thought about it, that it had never occurred to him to do this during all the time he’d been sitting on that gallery watching the trains. It was even odder that, after making the call to work to say he’d be late, he’d set his phone to silent.

Sure enough, there were three separate messages from Ellie.

‘Missing you but VERY happy.’

‘Can’t wait till the weekend.’

‘I love you SO much, Thomas, I can hardly stand it.’

He looked down at them coldly. It was impossible to deny it any more: that thing that always happened had happened again. He’d really believed it wouldn’t this time, he’d really believed that this was a different case entirely, but it had happened. He could remember having feelings. He could remember having very powerful ones as he said goodbye to her outside the station, but now, looking down at her texts, he felt… what? Embarrassment. Guilt. Shame. And something else that could almost be called revulsion.

He’d foolishly encouraged another sentient entity to transform itself into the excited bundle of hope and need that had sent him these three texts, no doubt hoping to provoke a similar excitement in himself, and to elicit texts in return in a cycle of mutual affirmation. But the idea of their having become a couple now just seemed distasteful and bizarre. She was a stranger to him, as much of a stranger as the various other passengers who were settling themselves down in the carriage around him, stowing bags, opening laptops, fiddling with phones. All that had happened was that she had briefly worn that mask he sometimes handed out: the Object of Love, the Object of Desire, the One Who Is So Like Me that I Need Not Be Alone.

That stupid mask. When King Midas embraced a woman she turned to gold, but, for him, it was the other way round. What had briefly seemed golden became… well… just this. No wonder he’d silenced his phone. Since he’d called his office to say he was going to miss the meeting, he’d really not thought of Ellie at all. Well, he’d not thought of anyone. Why would he, when he’d been so entirely content by himself?

Oh lord, he thought, this is terrible. I’m going to have to call her now, aren’t I, and say this was all a mistake?

He could see the hurt he’d cause. He felt pretty badly about it already, and knew he’d soon feel worse, but he was still somewhat cushioned. For there were few places in the world that seemed safer and more comforting to Thomas than a train that was about to leave the station.

Perhaps I’m just not cut out for this whole relationship business at all, he thought. It really wasn’t as if he ever acted cynically, or ever set out deliberately to deceive. He wanted to experience love, or thought he did, and so he sought it out, persuading himself over and over that he’d really found it.

He thought of the sphere, that great sphere he’d imagined hanging there at the mouth of the station. It was supposed to stop, that was the thing. You were supposed to choose one side and let the other go. But he didn’t know how to make that happen. The side he thought he’d picked just kept turning until it had disappeared from sight, and a new blank face turned towards him.

The train, the long clean train, which at first had seemed such a haven, suddenly felt oppressively warm. Thomas stood up to take off his jacket and, as he did so, Jane came into his carriage from the one behind it. The train jolted as she came alongside him, in the way that trains do as they are getting into their stride, and the two of them tottered and nearly fell into one another.

Both laughed, and each of them looked appreciatively, just for a moment, directly into the other’s eyes. They were a good-looking pair.

Perhaps a woman like this would be more his type, Thomas found himself thinking. A bit spikier than Ellie. More challenging. A little less comforting warmth, but much more fire.

He looks interesting, Ellie said to herself. And then she thought: I could just turn towards him and start chatting him up right now, if I felt like it. I could flirt outrageously if I wanted to. There’s nothing to stop me. I’ve got no ties any more. I can do whatever I like.

Later, when the train had been under way for twenty minutes, Thomas went to the little lobby at the end of the carriage to find some privacy for his difficult call.

‘It’s all moving a bit too fast for me,’ he’d decided he’d say, selecting a well-used phrase from the standard lexicon. ‘I just think we need to pause a bit and take stock.’

That would be enough for the moment, wouldn’t it? It would buy him some time and prepare the ground as gently as possible for more. And, after all, he couldn’t be sure that this wasn’t really the case. Maybe they were moving too fast. If the sphere could turn once, perhaps it would come back round again in due course, and maybe even this time come to rest? Who could say whether how he was feeling now would prove any more permanent than how he’d felt in Ellie’s car?

Perhaps this sudden coldness I feel is really just panic, he said to himself. Like people freeze up after accidents and things like that. They go numb, don’t they? They know what’s happened but they can’t experience it, because it’s just too much to process. Which wasn’t so different, now he came to think about it, from a computer freezing when you asked it to do too many things at once. If he and Ellie slowed down a bit, and he felt more in control again – who knows? – those feelings might all come back.

It was always a bonus, if the things you said were actually true.

But none of these thoughts stopped him, as he took out his phone, from leaning forward a little so he could see, through the glass door and down the carriage, the red-haired woman with the fiery eyes.

Jane saw him look at her and turned away. Her initial elation had already faded. It no longer seemed to her, as it had done only a few minutes previously, that anything was possible, or that somehow, magically, she had ended an alliance that had lasted more than two years, and yet escaped the price to be paid in loneliness and grief. And what had seemed, when she entered this carriage, to be the elation of freedom, now looked in retrospect more like hysteria or shock. A kind of dazed blankness had replaced it now, but grief would soon follow, she knew: bitter, unremitting grief, cold and hard like stone. And then for a long time, for many months quite possibly, she’d have to beat like a prisoner on that cold implacable wall.

There was a ditch running along beside the track. It was separated from the railway by a single low wire, hung between concrete posts. She watched the wire numbly as it disappeared into clumps of vegetation, emerged briefly, and disappeared again, sometimes for many yards at a time. But that bare grey metal always came back in the end, running along by itself next to the train.

When Thomas made his way back down the carriage, his face was taut. He resumed his seat without even glancing at Jane. Ellie had wept and shouted and called him names. He turned to the window, but didn’t even register the world outside.

After a time he noticed his own reflection. It was very faint, almost transparent, a wispy, insubstantial thing that was barely there at all.