The End of the Line

The wave

Your lips are telling me you love me and that you’ll be home tomorrow. I watch your legs briskly walking away. With decisive steps, you mount the train steps and the doors slide shut. When you sit at the window, I think perhaps it is so you can see me one last time; but when the train pulls away, you are already checking your messages. I raise a hand and wave to your bowed head. Is this gesture to catch your attention? Look at this tableau: your wife waiting on the platform, hand half raised.

As you depart, an announcement crackles over the speaker: Do not board the train on platform 31; it is returning to the sidings.

I look to my left and see an empty train; glancing up, the small black and white sign, number 31, swings in a breeze I hadn’t even noticed. And for a moment, I know just how it feels: this train, destined for the sidings, waiting for no one. 

Taking sides

A train pulls into platform 32, filling the space left by yours. People spill out. The doors are programmed only to open on the platform’s side, the others stay shut. There is only one exit which opens; you can press the button, and press again, but the other doors just won’t slide open. 

People are forced to take sides. My mother says I made my bed and need to lie in it. She is on your side. Her prim looks, stern reprimands and even gentle cajolery remind me that my side is next to yours. At night I think, whose side am I on? I lie facing the window, sensing the solid wall of your back; your arm a buttress near my own. We are on two different sides; we could wave to each other from our battlements, if we ever turned to face each other. 

Blank faces

Faces peer anywhere but at me. Down into their phones, up at the signs: exit A, B, C… I have drawn blanks: no names on any of these slips are for me. The platform stretches ahead and my feet walk me to its far end. Just behind, people pass through the barriers and exit the station, making their onward journeys. I stop at the end of the platform, staring out to where the tracks lose their orderly way, bisecting and merging. How do trains find their way? How do they know which way to go?

There is one trainspotter here. He does not wear an anorak and has no little jotterbook. He has a kind face where the lines of age criss-cross his cheeks. Happy for company, he tells me about the tracks. I learn some are “Single turnout,” diverging one rail track into two directions; others are a “Diamond crossing,” intersecting two tracks; while a “Crossover” connects two tracks laid side-by-side. I nod and thank him for this information; a neat order for the clashing lines I see before me and we fall into silence. 

Every merge, every diverge is an opportunity, but a chance too for confusion, chaos- crashes even. Crossings are often cross places, although here before me, they seem peaceful enough; perhaps they too are letting sleeping dogs lie. 

Lies

The old man with the criss-cross face picks up a scuffed thermos and pours out a black tea and offers me the plastic cup. It too is scoured with scratches, the scars of the years. It makes my hands look almost young, almost new. He smiles as I sip the scalding liquid. As trains arrive and depart, he tells me how he often comes here to watch the trains he used to take with Joan, his wife. How they’d taken their honeymoon at the sea, and left from platform 19, just over there. And later, family holidays in the countryside as camping in the local woods was all they could afford. Platform 12, right over on my left. Other journeys: to visit the kids at Uni; then the suburbs where they moved to; the retirement home; the hospital; the church with its graves. From this station, you can take nearly any train to go there, he tells me, it’s the first stop on most services. 

I finish the tea and he pours me more; I take little burning sips as he goes on with his tale.

How, for a time, he’d just got on any train that came along. How often he didn’t even buy a ticket, just rode a train a few stops, got out and rode the next one back, hoping, even if just for a second, to glimpse from the window the person he used to be: making purposeful journeys to purposeful places, to see people who gave purpose to his life. 

A purpose to life.

One, then two, then three raindrops fall into the tea, cupped in my hands. A trio of radiating circles ripple out, little waves. I look up to see the clouds, but the sky is blue and the old man is taking the cup and giving me a handkerchief. It is old-fashioned, cotton trimmed with lace and hand-stitched in the corner is a little pink “J”. Oh no, I couldn’t, but he presses it up to my eyes and I lose all sight of the world for a while. 

When I open my eyes his lined face is still there, looking at the ever merging and diverging tracks before us. He seems to speak to the passing trains, as if they might pick up his words and carry them away. A message regarding time, and knowing when it’s the right one to end the lie and say goodbye. 

Standing at the end of the line, I follow his gaze along the endlessly crossing tracks; I peer into the distance and try to see the place where the lines no longer cross, where the way lies clear.

The end of the line

Another train pulls alongside your platform, number 32, hissing slowly to a standstill. Of course I do not expect you to alight with the other passengers. I know you won’t step down and take me in your arms; won’t whisper sorry into my hair; won’t breathe in, like I am the scent of the sweetest flower. I close my petals on this pain, thanking the old man for his tea, his company. 

Slightly awkwardly, it is so damp after all, I try to return his handkerchief, but he presses it back into my hands. I am about to go, join the others walking to the barriers, exit this scene at last, when he nods at the train, waiting beside us. It will leave in 8 minutes, he tells me, and is the same train as the one you took nearly thirty minutes ago. This is the direct train to Lancaster, scheduled every Friday to depart at regular intervals, for those wanting to escape the city and relax at the Lakes, enjoying a romantic break away. 

Breaking away

I know. How could I not know? Work is work until it becomes pleasure. The pleasure of waiting dulls to a pain when it comes again and again and again. Platforms where I wait, trains you take; a moment of connection followed, inevitably, by break after break after break. 

I hug him then, the old man, looking out at the tracks of his life, and board my train. 

Yes, the time has come. I will board this train, make this journey, alight at the place I always knew was waiting for us: the end of this line. Taking out the handkerchief, I will create a new tableau when I wave it beautifully, decisively, this little white flag, not of surrender, but of defiant farewell.