Are You for Real?

Every Monday to Friday the train goes through the small station. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays it briefly stops. On Tuesdays and Thursdays it inexplicably does not. As it is not my station I have never thought to ask why.

For several weeks now, there has been a woman standing on the platform with a small dog on a lead. Well, it would be, I suppose. At a station. She always wears the same clothes: a Barbour jacket with a sky blue scarf knotted around her neck. Skinny jeans. Tan leather ankle boots.

Perhaps she changes clothes in the afternoons.

She has long hair the colour of mink, not a shade you buy in a bottle. She is still quite young, not gone grey. The dog is a type of terrier, and somehow I know it’s a yapper. All terriers are. Although it never yaps at the station. He’s a bit minky too. In colour. His steady gaze matches hers.

The ticket checker comes down the aisle. He is one of three or four I see on a regular basis; chubby, a bit dishevelled. The sort who wipes his fingers on his trousers after eating.

Most people offer up their phones these days, their whole lives on them; bank accounts, bus, train and plane tickets - a high stakes gamble, really. What if you lose it? What if it gets snatched from you? Then you’re a nobody, and you know what? You sort of deserve it.

I always buy a paper ticket. People tell me that a season ticket would be cheaper but I don’t agree. It is only cheaper if you use it every day. Every time you are ill, or on holiday, or maybe if you get fired halfway between the purchase and expiration dates, the ticket becomes incrementally less of a bargain and so much more of a bad idea.

The checker is supposed to punch a hole in my ticket, but lately he hasn’t bothered. None of them have. I am a familiar face, a regular commuter, and I suppose they trust that I have my paper ticket, which is good to know. I wave it in his face anyway.

What is bad to know is that this woman seems to stand on the platform entirely for my benefit. I change carriages, but she seems to know exactly which one. I switch to the other side of the aisle but she preempts me by crossing the passenger bridge and stands on the other platform, the one without the café that sells scones to ramblers. It is a game, alright, but what are the rules of engagement?

And why am I her opponent?

This past week or so I have chosen to remain in my usual carriage on my habitual side of the aisle. The certainty of it is less unsettling than her unwavering ability to single me out.

And this past week or so she seems to be getting more upset. It slows down, you know? The train, when it goes through the station without stopping. No reason for it but a nod to politeness, I suppose. I have a clutch of seconds to observe her face before she is gone.

At first she was rather stoical, like a member of the King’s Guard: upright, staring straight ahead, (straight ahead always being me). Her grip on the dog’s leash was still quite loose, allowing him a little time to wander from one paving slab to its neighbour.

Each passing day the grip gets a little tighter and the dog is brought closer to heel. And then a few days ago a hand over her heart. A comfort or a distress signal? And her nostrils. I have noticed them flaring, a sign of hyperventilation. Or anger. Impossible to tell when you don’t know someone. But she never stops staring at me. I have even given her the finger before now, in passing, but nothing stops her stationary stalk.

Yesterday as the train passed she moved. She actually moved. She took a step back, not forward as I have been imagining. A step back as a pre-requisite, like a triple-jumper, to a forward lunge.

Someone once told me that at the point of death people forget everything. He was adamant that far from a rolling film of flashing memory, the brain accepts what is inevitable and quits the building, leaving the heart to manage quite alone. There is a flaw in his argument, of course. How could he possibly know that? But even so, when I saw her take that step back, still with the dog on the lead, I assumed that there would be a thump and that the train would stop a little further up the tracks. The whole vacant stare thing, I reasoned, was not directed towards me at all, but that in certain moments of passing or stopping, it just seemed that way. Thinking further on it, I had never seen her turn her head.

But there was no thump, and I was startled by that, because up until that point I was still trying to figure out whether she was dead or I was.

Today is a Friday, a stopping day. And things are starting to make sense now. The unclipped tickets, the attempts at conversation, the woman on the platform who is actually my wife, and that is actually my dog. I’m slipping away and all this time I’ve just been dying to see her.

My friend was right and wrong. The brain does not quit the building until the stubborn arsehole it belongs to has finally figured things out. I have not been making repetitive commutes. It is a Friday morning and it had always been a Friday morning. I had agreed to meet her at this station, one stop from my own, because she had wanted to take a walk around the reservoir with the dog.

But he was right about forgetting things for a while, and maybe that’s a kindness - because when I look at my wife now I fully recognise that she is mine, and that I am utterly heartbroken to have died on a train and left her to this circus of grief.

There is blood all over me, my hands, my paper ticket, and somewhere by the toilet door a stranger with a knife bangs his head against it, already rehearsing his plea bargain.

And I hate to leave on such a mean-spirited observation, but it does all go to prove why you should never, ever buy a season ticket.