by Greg James
A freezing gust of wind rushed down the platform into Rebecca, making her hug herself and wish for warmth and home. There was stew in the fridge, some nice chunks of veg and lamb. Mix in a little red wine. That would bring the flavour out.
She saw the lights, heard the honk of its horn, and took a step back, away from the edge. She was a good few feet from it but it was a gesture she always made. To vehicles, to people, to any form that might consider her to be getting in its way. I don’t like to get in people’s way, she thought, as the train ground to halt, hissing hotly at her.
The doors clunked open.
Rebecca didn’t get on board, not yet.
There was something off about it, the train. It wasn’t cleaner than the others. There were the graffiti scrapes on the windows. There were the flickering yellow-white lights. There were seats with lining that had seen better days, foam slithering out like escaping flesh. Still, to her eyes, bobbing like goldfish in the thick lenses of her glasses; there was something not sitting right, she could feel it in her stomach.
The train hissed again. The whining tone that came before doors shut pierced her eyes. A cry of distress. A lonesome childish wail.
Rebecca was inside the train. The doors clunking shut. It was warm in here. It was empty too, of people, of their unforgiving stares.
Rebecca smiled and sat down.
Her hands were no longer shaking. Looking at them, lying limp in her lap, she willed them to twitch and judder. They did not. The motion of the train was soothing. It was a cradling feeling, that rocking, rollicking, bumping-thumping sensation, as it went through the dark and the tunnels. Lights darted by, made into amber fireflies by speed. Rebecca bounced lightly on her seat, feeling its aged springs creak. She bounced again, it creaked, she giggled. The train was going faster, she was sure. She could feel force tugging at her heartstrings, momentarily, as the outside world whistled on by. She bounced once more, giddy as a child on a fairground ride.
“To be a child again.” she said to herself.
It all went so fast, like this train, her life. So many years yet they all feel so short, so little, so insignificant in the end. All those thoughts, ideas, memories and momentary loves lost. Like those lights outside, those orange flickers flashing past, gone, so quickly. All about them was that darkness, that endless night, it was permanent and eternal. It did not need the lights but they needed it. Otherwise, she thought, how would we know them? What light would guide us?
Looking out of the window, her nose touching its cool, scratched pane, Rebecca asked a question to the darkness, “What light’s guiding me? Am I following one? Tell me, please.”
The darkness kept quiet. The train honked and hooned, suddenly gushing into another tunnel. Rebecca jumped back from the window, from the jolt coursing through her. The air pressure change as the tunnel swallowed the train.
Was that it?
She sat back in her seat, sinking into it, feeling a shaking pass through her. One that kept itself inside, not showing in her hands. She was catching her breath, blinking her eyes. It was spreading, that shaking. Into the lolling, unshapely ovals of her breasts. Out to her fingertips, stumpy and sausage, not a trace of elegance or soft femininity was incarnated in her fifty-year flesh. I’m all the bad bits, she thought, the leftovers nobody else wanted.
The lights of the carriage, yellow and infectious, were no longer flickering. They were winking out. One by one. This happened sometimes but not like this. Going out in order, following a sequence. No, she thought, electrical failure, that’s why the train’s jolting, why I’m feeling this shaking. The train’s going to go off the rails, go up in flames, I’m going to die in a crash. She grabbed at the seating with her fingers and found it tacky. Soiled, peeling from her skin as she tugged her hands away. Rubbing them together, she felt a slight glueyness. She sniffed at her palms. Recognising the scent, she wiped her hands roughly on her skirt, her face twisting into knots and creases.
“The things people’ll do in public.”
The train was still in the tunnel, deep inside, a long way in. How much longer until we come out, she thought, the other side. Her hand fell onto the seat as she leaned forward to peer out of the window. There was that tacky texture, her face already twisting in on itself as she felt it.
There was something else. The seat was warm, pleasantly so. I ought to take my hand away, she thought, get up, sit meself somewhere else.
She didn’t.
Rebecca let her hand lie there though; feeling a searching heat tease its way across her palm, radiating out to her wrist and fingers. A warming web, growing, sending sensations up to her elbow. She sat back down, square on the seat. Feeling it get warmer. Letting it trace its way from her tingling hand, up through her arm to her throat, to her chest. The heat was a colour, same as the lost lights. Amber, it was, a sort of dull-bright.
The lights in the carriage were all out now. She was alone in the dark, warm and safe in the train, in this tunnel’s ancient womb. She closed her eyes, letting the umbra-born fingers touch her. Making her fingers rake across the seat, now sweating, becoming wet as well as warm. She undone a button, or it did, something soft and heavy was leaning against a breast, making the nipple bud until it was achingly hard. Her tongue traced the rough insides of her mouth, imagining another tongue as eager and exploratory for it to entwine with. There was something moist at her bare throat. Her skirt was being lifted; rucking back over her unbecoming thighs to reveal her rough, grey-threaded mound; a glistening grove of untouched brambles. She was gnawing at her lips, the inside of her mouth was coppery from molar bites already made in the flesh. Her eyes were tight shut. Her fingers dug into the moulting stuff of the seat, sunk in – until they tore out something hard.
The brakes shrieked. There was a jolt, not the one she wanted.
Oh no, she thought, can’t be.
It could not be but it was.
The train was slowing down; the lights were back on, they were out of the tunnel, the rhythm faltering, receding, leaving her. Everything was steadying itself back into the stillness of the world. She bit down hard on her bottom lip, tasting a bead of blood. There were tears in her eyes. She looked down at her hand, it was shining with something wet and prismatic. The wound she’d made in the seat was closing.
This couldn’t be happening, this can’t be happening. Not now, to me, after all of this waiting. My whole life waiting, waiting for this moment, this time – and now it’s gone. Passed. Over. There was a voice inside her, bitterness undefeated, and it told her she should have expected nothing more, perhaps even less.
The train stopped, hissing, doors open.
“But I don’t want to go.”
More hissing, harsher and harder.
“You can’t make me.”
A great groan; old, prehistoric with rust, passed through the carriage, making the windows shake. She uttered an incoherent sob in response. Then, Rebecca, dishevelled, hands shaking once again, disembarked, out into the cold of the world. The train pulled away, its hiss was curt and made her angry. She looked around. It was a station – could have been any station – anywhere. As cold as before. As overrun by the night as before. As empty too. Streetlamps cast bright shadows and mice scuttled in and out of nooks and crannies to drink at the running patches of afterglow. Rebecca shuffled across the platform and sat down on a bench. She gazed up and down the tracks wistfully, looking for those tell-tale lights, for another train. She sighed.
Hours later, she was still there, on that bench, looking down the shimmering oil shine of the tracks, listening out for that awaited sound. The platform, the station, she couldn’t leave them. Not like this, unfinished; that beautiful ache dulling and dispersing, a disintegrating web spreading across her lower abdomen and down her thighs into her knotty knees. That ache should have become a blossoming, an outpouring; a cry from the heart of her, a hot seed-shower of creation.
Nothing else like it in the world.
I just have to wait.
She walked up the platform and down the platform, whistling through her thin teeth into the endless night. I’m staying, she thought, I’ll get on the next one, whenever it gets here. It’ll get here. It must. It has to.
“I’ll wait as long as I have to.” she shouted.
She’s still there, you know. Sometimes, you can see her. Other times, you can hear her. Waiting, waiting; always waiting for a train that never comes.
Christmasland
It must be the bus, thought Maureen, as another jolt of wheels on slick tarmac sent varicose pain lancing up her legs to gnaw at her hips and the base of her spine. She was used to the pain though it usually rested as a constant ache in her calves whilst she shuffled from table to table at Pedro’s; the greasy spoon café where she worked.
It was an easy thing for the doctor to say she could get surgery. It was an easy thing for him to put her on a waiting list, sit back, smile, and tell her it was going to be all right. He got paid to do these things and he was never left waiting when something was wrong. She could smell it in his rich cologne and see it in the smooth, pressed lines of the powder blue shirt he wore under his white doctor’s coat. This was a man with money and those with money do not worry, nor suffer with their pain for long.
It could take her years to come off the waiting list and actually be seen by someone. She barely had enough money coming in each month to keep things going. She couldn’t afford private care and was old for a mum; forty-five when Charlie was born, when Matthew left her.
It wasn’t just younger men who ran out on their fiancées and wives. He’d not been cheating on her, and somehow that hurt more. The only reason he left was their son; the child he didn’t want. Infidelity was meant to be how these things happened, but not in her case. No, she had to be hurt by something far worse; emptier and more bitter.
“I can’t do it. I’m sorry, love. I’m too old for a son. I can’t start being a father now.”
He’d walked away from her hospital bedside, leaving her to scream, cry, beg, and then bring Charlie into the world alone.
Bastard.
Little Charlie – he was the light of her life. All of the clichés and then some came to mind. After a shitty day on her feet in the café, he’d make it all go away with one of his smiles, by running up and grabbing at her jeans with his little hands. The marks left by his grubby fingers seemed to take forever to come out in the wash but Maureen didn’t mind. They were made by him, her little man, and she loved him so much.
Another violent jolt of the bus. Maureen hissed through her teeth as it stopped and made her way to the doors. She stepped out onto cold, wet pavement and made a moue with her lips as the pain’s teeth bit deep into her calves once again.
Varicose veins. Surgery. Easy for him. Too much money. Not enough sense. Bastard.
The carrier bags in her hands weighed a ton as she made her way down the narrow street towards the Chamberlin Estate. She wanted to get Charlie away from it one day. There were always used needles and soiled condoms to be found in the stairwells. The lifts reeked of shit and urine. He didn’t seem to see it – that was the joy of having a child – but he would one day and she didn’t want him spoiled by it; the world’s ugliness. She felt it might ruin him completely if he came to understand what it all meant. Though Maureen wasn’t sure there was much meaning in the filth that inveigled its way into most people’s lives. We see too much sometimes, she thought, we stare too long at the cracks and what’s caught in them.
She stopped walking and put the carrier bags down. Her arms were aching as much as her legs. She’d just catch her breath and be on her way again. Charlie would be home soon. He was getting big now; old enough to catch the bus on his own. With her legs being as they were, it was a relief that he could. Without a car, Maureen knew she couldn’t keep as close an eye on him as parents were meant to. A part of her wanted to think it was all nonsense, that too much molly-coddling would spoil the boy but another part of her knew the world wasn’t a safe place. Something had changed in its nature since she was a little girl. She couldn’t put a name to it but it scared her deeply.
Thank god for Charlie though. He took the fear away.
Maureen touched a metal square in her pocket. It was a paint set, not an expensive one but it would get Charlie started. The school said that his art classes were where he really came alive and that he had a lot of talent. She smiled, imagining the look on his face when he unwrapped it on Christmas morning. The sight of his eager hands at work, the smiles and hugs he would give her. Yes, he was her light and despite everything she was looking forward to Christmas, just the two of them together.
There was a slight movement in the corner of her eye. Maureen followed it to an empty driveway that led into a dilapidated yard. She passed it every day and had never really paid it much attention. There was a single-storey brick building in there. Its windows were darkly barred and a dirty, peeling sign was mounted on top of it: Welcome to Christmasland.
Maureen was sure it hadn’t been there before and they couldn’t have put it up in less than a day. She picked up her bags and walked towards it. No workmen were that bloody fast, not these days. The closer she came, the more she saw it was brand new, mostly. The mortar between the bricks was still glistening and moist but the windows were not. They were grimy and the thin bars over them were heavily mottled with rust. The sign looked to have seen better days as well. Old windows and an old sign on a brand-new building – why?
It looked like it belonged on a building site. There was nothing to suggest it had a thing in common with the Father Christmas grottos in shopping centres or the festive markets in the parks and by the river.
Movement again, and this time she saw it was inside the building. Maureen used her sleeve to scrub away some of the dirt from one of the windows. The glass was wired. The dark cross-hatched lines before her eyes made her wonder why there was so much being done to keep a Christmas attraction so secure. She glimpsed something hanging from the ceiling inside, slowly swinging back and forth. The shape was soft, dark and heavy but she couldn’t see what it was exactly. There was too little light for that.
Time to go home, she thought, stealing a last glance back at Christmasland.
It was getting dark with evening and, as the streetlights came on, a light ignited inside the building, vaguely outlining the object hanging from the ceiling. More than one light came on, and they were all different colours; blue, orange, red and green, flickering on-and-off in irregular sequence. Maureen turned away sharply, grabbed her bags and walked towards the Estate. She’d seen what the hanging object looked like, to her eyes.
Charlie would be home by now. She hoped he would be.
It was getting too dark outside for young boys and she needed some light.
*
Maureen leaned over Charlie and kissed him goodnight on the forehead.
It had been a long evening and she was tired. She loved him very much but on Christmas Eve, every child has too much energy for an adult to cope with for long. The pain was burning intermittently through her calves as she padded out of his room and closed the door. The television sat silent in the corner. The old radio murmured and muttered away to itself, occasionally hissing as obscuring clouds of static passed by. The essentials were what she spent their money on these days. The telly and all the channels you could get cost too much so they spent their evenings listening to the radio instead, with Charlie chatting away as he drew and drew in his sketchbooks. It was like things had been when she was a little girl, she thought, everything coming full circle again. Not enough money to go around. Enough for what was needed, no more, no less. There wouldn’t be turkey for Christmas, just breaded chicken from Iceland. Tomorrow, she thought, he’ll be painting not drawing. Things would change and be better, just as they should be on Christmas Day. The radio suddenly cleared up and she made out a few words creeping through the white noise.
‘ ... god bless us ... everyone … ’
*
Maureen didn’t sleep well. The wind was up. There had been reports on the news of a Christmas storm coming in. She shut the window against it but even with the duvet over her head, she could still hear it braying away until all hours. A window blew open somewhere in the flat. She was on the borderlands between dreams and waking when she heard it. Behind her eyes, she saw a creature that was not Father Christmas riding bitter, northern winds. It came in through an open window. She could hear the dry rustling of its old skin and the leathery sound of its feet. It was searching for something to eat, a child, nice and warm, a slice of tender Christmas meat.
“Charlie!”
She was awake, her slippers were on, and she was slamming the door to Charlie’s bedroom wide open. The winter wind was blowing in through the window, turning the room’s shadows to black ice.
“Mum ... wassup?” He was in bed, pawing at his eyes, blinking at her, yawning. “Wha’ happened?”
Maureen closed the window and then closed her arms tight around him. Charlie returned her embrace as she said, “Nothing. Nothing happened. I love you, sweetheart. You know that? You’re the light of my life.”
“I love you too, Mum. Don’t worry, it’s only the wind. Everything’ll be all right in the morning. It’ll be Christmas Day.”
“That it will. Good night, dear.”
“G’night.”
She lingered for a moment as he laid down and wriggled under the duvet, which was adorned with various colourful superheroes. Maureen couldn’t help thinking how, without the light, the illustrated empty smiles and white eyes were not reassuring at all. She closed the door, returned to her own bed, and tried to sleep though the wind continued its hollow song outside. Not safe. For some reason. Not safe at all.
Charlie ...
*
Christmas morning came and Maureen awoke.
