And then, on Christmas Eve, there came the sound of a car pulling up on the drive and Annie stood at the front door, staring blankly at the wreath that Michael had hung from the knocker. Holly and Ben were with her; both looking so much older now, so changed from the last time he’d seen them. Of course, it had been more than six months. And when he’d been working, there had been days when he’d looked for his children and seen nothing but snapshots out of time; Holly’s hair turning brown overnight where once she had been an angelic blonde; Ben moving from wide-eyed infancy to young boyhood in one smooth, irrevocable step.
Annie was wearing a black coat that made her look older than she was. Her smile was bright as he opened the door; it slipped as she saw him.
‘My God!’ she said. ‘What happened to you?’
Of course, she was overreacting. He hadn’t changed that much, he thought. And the children – she must have primed them to look at him the way they did; as if he were a stranger.
But he was eager to show them the house. The fruit of all his labours. He realized that this was the moment for which he had been waiting; he wanted to see their faces when they saw the schoolroom; the nursery; the rocking horse on the landing; everything he had put into place ready for their arrival. The weaver-bird makes his nest in the hope of attracting a suitable partner; when the nest is completed, the female flies from one to the other, inspecting the handiwork of the prospective candidates, then makes a decision and chooses one, leaving the rest to start again, or to seek out a less discerning spouse—
‘My God. The work you’ve put into this place. I heard it was practically derelict.’ The words were encouraging enough, but Annie’s voice was oddly subdued. She duly admired what he showed her. Michael grew more expansive; told her the history of the place; pointed out the detailing in the plasterwork, the cornices; listed all the jobs he’d done and everything he meant to do next. The children followed them through the house, keeping close to their mother. They seemed impressed by the nursery; but Ben was afraid of the rocking horse and the china dolls with their rows of teeth. Holly declared it ‘creepy’ – a word that Rob had also used – and suddenly he understood that Annie didn’t like the house any more than the children did.
‘Of course I like it. It’s beautiful,’ she said, but her voice lacked conviction. ‘It’s just a little—’
‘Creepy?’ he said.
She shrugged. ‘It’s like a haunted house. Those dreadful old portraits everywhere. How can you bear to have them around?’
He realized she was talking about the photographs of the Lundys. It almost made him laugh to think that she could find them unnerving. He tried to explain, but sensed that she was conscious of the passing time. She checked her mobile repeatedly.
‘There’s really no reception here?’
He shook his head. ‘I think it’s the trees.’
She shivered. ‘How can you bear it, Michael? And it’s cold – so very cold—’
‘Is it?’ Michael was surprised.
‘And all those funny noises—’
The sounds of an old house settling; the mellow creak of floorboards; the moaning of water in lead pipes; the tick-tick-tick of a grandfather clock made from an oak tree that had been young when William Shakespeare was a boy.
‘I know what an old house sounds like, Michael. This is something different. I tell you, I keep hearing voices—’
He smiled. ‘I had no idea you were so imaginative.’
She took his arm. ‘Come home, Michael. The kids have missed you. I have too. Come home, and we’ll try to work things out. We can make a fresh start. Just give up this place, and come back home—’
He looked at her blankly. ‘This is my home.’
The first step is acceptance.
They left soon after; leaving their gifts unopened under the Christmas tree. Night fell. It brought more snow. Michael sat in the library and smoked. The scent of tobacco filled the air, mixed with the scents of pine needles and woodsmoke from the parlour. He poured a brandy from the decanter on the library table; then moved into the parlour, where the fire had been lit, and sat down on the sofa and waited for something to happen.
Once more, from the kitchen, came the scent of baking. It warmed his heart; it had been so long since he had eaten a home-cooked meal. He lit a branch of candles and turned off the electric light. It looked so much nicer that way; the flames striking sparks of reflected light against the Christmas baubles; the shadows warm and intimate. From the playroom he seemed to hear the voices of his children: Ned’s raised in excitement; Emily’s murmured warning.
The grandfather clock struck midnight.
Michael smiled. ‘Merry Christmas,’ he said.
And, closing his eyes for a moment, he laid his head back on the sofa cushion and listened to the sounds of the night: the tapping of branches against the panes; the crackle of logs in the fireplace; the footsteps that crept almost soundlessly across the polished parquet floor, pausing a moment by the tree; the furtive tearing of paper; the childish giggle, stifled at once—
Shh! You’ll wake Papa!
Then the sense of someone beside him; sitting down on the sofa; resting her head on his shoulder and slipping her small, cool hand in his. He could smell her perfume now, like violet and sandalwood; could feel her breath against his neck like the tiniest of breezes, and through his half-closed eyelashes, was that the glint of sapphires, the tiniest crescent of white gold clasped around a slender wrist?
The first step is acceptance, they say. After that comes healing. What Michael hadn’t realized was how these things mirrored one another; so that salvage could turn to salvation; that a builder might himself be rebuilt and that, in simply letting go, a man could reach further than he’d ever dreamed—
A home is not bricks and mortar. A home is made of those things that endure when the bricks and mortar are gone.
Michael opened his eyes at last.
‘Hello, my darling,’ he said. ‘I’m home.’
Muse
For many years, my local railway station has had a café just like this one. I love it: the ancient cream cakes, crusty with age; the chipped mugs; the ominously sticky carpet; the greasy bacon sandwiches; the inexplicable surliness of the man behind the counter. It is a creative hotspot somehow; whenever I visit, I come out with an idea for a story. Now refurbishment threatens, and I sense that its days are numbered. But so far it has survived intact, like a time capsule from the Fifties. Perhaps some minor deity has the place under its protection …
SOME PEOPLE LIGHT scented candles. Some pray. Some walk the city streets at night, hoping for inspiration. With me, it’s bacon sandwiches and a mug of sweet tea at the café on Platform 5 of Malbry railway station, with my laptop balanced on my knees and the sound of the trains clattering by.
Some places are just like that. Inspirational, I mean. Maybe it’s something in the air, or a ley line running underneath. It doesn’t look like much from outside. A faded sign that reads STATION CAFÉ, flanked with a painting of two masks, one comic, one tragic, and a musical instrument that might be a lyre. The artistic motif stops there, however. Inside, a sticky countertop; a grill; a glass case displaying a row of pastries that might have been fresh when Lloyd George was last in Downing Street. A shelf of thick ceramic mugs; a clock with a cracked face; a tea urn as big as a Dalek; a cat; a dozen small tables and wobbly chairs; a lingering reek of cigarettes.
Yes, people still smoke on Platform 5. Complaints have been made, but as far as I know, nothing as yet has been done to prevent it. The regular folk have their own café, that sells paninis and root vegetable crisps and nutritionally balanced sandwiches with the calorie content clearly marked on the wrapper. These people have little to do with the Station Café. In fact, they hardly notice it. The only people who come here now are smokers, trainspotters, the homeless, the disenfranchised – and people like myself, of course, who come here for something more than just a cup of tea and a floury bap, or a surly nod from
Fat Fred, the fryer, or a place to get in out of the rain and smoke a crafty fag.
It took me some time to understand. I have a studio at home; a desk with a blotter; a telephone. In my narrow field I have achieved a certain celebrity; you’ve seen my books in WH Smith’s; you might even recognize my face. I tell myself I don’t need to write in some greasy spoon that smells of smoke and hasn’t been swept since the carpet was laid. But the truth is, I do. God knows, I’ve tried. But this place gets under your skin, somehow. It must be something in the air.
My wife, Jennifer, thinks I’m crazy. Worse, she suspects I’m playing away. Who with, I wonder? Fat Fred, perhaps? Or Brenda Baps, who slices the bread and has to be fifty, at least, I guess, with a face like a Class 40 and an arse like a piano stool? Jennifer knows nothing about creativity. When buying books, she always looks at the author photo before she even reads the blurb. Her idea of literature is the type of novel in which middle-aged women reinvent themselves through plastic surgery, or jolly Afro-Caribbean families win over gangs of hard-bitten Cockneys with nothing but jerk chicken and a positive mental attitude. The ideal reader, in many ways. But she has no idea where it comes from – this it that takes hold of words on a page and brings them into sharp relief – no more idea than I have, in fact, after all these years of searching for that elusive pot of gold.
Jennifer believes in the Muse. Well, I’ve worked at this game for thirty years, and I’ve never seen hide nor hair of one. Not a swirl of drapery, not a lute string, not a phrase of celestial music. Just little glimpses on the road: a smile on the face of a stranger, a certain light in the evening sky, a dandelion growing between the cracks in a city pavement. And over the past five years there hasn’t even been that. Just a desert in which words stretch out like cactus shadows towards a bleak horizon that never gets any closer.
But over the past eighteen months or so, things have changed. The desert has bloomed. Here, of all places, at the Station Café on Platform 5. I’m not the only one to have noticed it, that special gilding in the air. It draws others, too: furtive people with Moleskine notebooks and an air of vague bewilderment. Poets, mostly, I’ll admit; but also the occasional novelist like myself, or some artist with his sketchbook, or some harassed writer of TV scripts, searching for perfect dialogue. They all come here, to this decrepit café that most people barely notice, and that Malbry council have been planning to close and replace with a proper waiting room, with wipe-clean chairs and neon lights and a vending machine that sells Diet Coke and Thai chilli crisp-bites.
There are too many things wrong with the old place. Things that new legislation has banned: the smoking; the dubious hygiene; the failure to provide adequate nutritional information. The absence of a wheelchair ramp; the presence of the Platform 5 cat in an area where food is served.
‘It’ll never happen, though,’ says Fred, as he scrapes bacon bits out of the pan and adds them to my sandwich. The bacon bits are the best part, and the bacon is fried in its own grease, thereby ensuring maximum saturation of the soft white roll. The result is something that would make any nutritionist tear out their hair; yet, with the judicious addition of a dollop of brown sauce, served on a chipped and dubious plate (no Health and Safety on Platform 5), and accompanied by a large mug of strong tea, there is something magical about it, something that has fuelled the first hundred pages of a novel that, when released from its bonds, may turn out to be the best thing that this old writer has ever achieved—
Perhaps I do believe in the Muse, after all. A man who believes in the magical properties of a bacon roll can surely believe in anything. Is it the bacon? The brown sauce? The bap? Or is it Fat Fred, who, surly at first, has warmed towards me over the months, finally becoming the one to whom I turn in times of crisis?
Fat Fred knows nothing of syntax or style. But he does know plot, with the instinct of one who has watched many, many people come and go, and in the twitch of an eyebrow or the shrug of his meaty shoulders he can convey approval – or not – of the stories I casually run past him.
Then there’s Brenda, whose special task it is to slice the baps for the sandwiches and whose impeccable sense of timing ensures that toast always arrives hot and luscious with half-melted butter, and which, combined with a spoonful of strawberry jam (from the container, home-made), can change the course of a cloudy day and make it feel like summertime. Her manner may seem rather sharp at first, but she can be won over quite easily with a smile and a gesture of goodwill, such as returning the tea mugs and empty plates to their place on the counter for washing-up – which task is performed by Spotty Sam, a cheery youth of seventeen whose relationship with Brenda and Fred reflects enough casual hostility to reinforce my assumption that these ill-assorted people are somehow related – although I have never dared to ask.
Eighteen months of being a regular, of arriving at eight o’clock sharp and leaving only at closing time, have earned me a certain amount of goodwill. But there is a tangible exclusion zone around these people; something more than just aloofness, or the need for privacy. It’s not that they are special, in any way. In fact, they are almost caricatures: the fat man; the tram-faced woman; the boy. In all this time I have learnt almost nothing about them; where they live; their interests; what they do when they’re not working here.
But today is special; one of those days when events conspire to reveal something more. The air is April in a jar; the sky, a mythical shade of spring. My new book is nearing its climax, requiring just one more ingredient before the alchemy is complete. And all the trains from Malbry are cancelled – some kind of problem on the Manchester line – which means that the Station Café is almost deserted, except for one of our regulars – a local poet (recognizable by that Moleskine notebook and the floppy hair that seems to come as standard in poetic circles) – and a couple of elderly train enthusiasts counting carriages at the end of the platform.
I take my usual seat by the door. I order tea and a bacon bap. Brenda looks tired and distracted; Fred is nowhere to be seen. The Platform 5 cat, a tabby, slinks behind the counter, where I suspect there is food, in blatant contravention of Health and Safety regulations.
Brenda makes the sandwich and brings it over to my seat. It’s not quite as good as the ones Fred makes, but it’s good enough all the same, hot and just lightly toasted enough to caramelize the sugary bread.
‘Fred not here, Brenda?’ I enquire. I always return my crockery. This, I feel, gives me the right to ask such a personal question.
Brenda gives me a measuring look. ‘He’ll be about here somewhere,’ she says. ‘Things to be getting on with, like.’
I realize that it is the first time I have been to the Station Café and Fred has not been behind the counter. Things to be getting on with doesn’t seem sufficient reason, somehow, for such a dereliction. Sam, too, looks preoccupied, a world away from his cheery self; he lurks behind the counter, wiping a glass in a perfunctory fashion and casting occasional glances out of the window at the track with its continuing absence of passing trains.
‘What’s going on?’ I ask him.
Sam gives me a comic look. ‘Dunno.’
I lower my voice. ‘Don’t give me that.’ The café is almost deserted. The poet with his notebook is sitting too far away to hear; besides, he is lost in his own world and will not emerge till lunchtime. ‘There’s something wrong. Fred isn’t here. And you two look like a wet weekend. So what’s the problem?’
Sam shakes his head. ‘Them suits from Head Office. We got a letter. They’re shutting us down.’
‘The council’s always saying that,’ I tell him. ‘We’ll start a petition.’ Fact is, they’re always threatening to close down the café on Platform 5; but no one ever believes they will. The place is a part of the station. You can’t imagine it not being there.
‘It’s not the council,’ Brenda says. ‘It’s our Head Office. They’re calling us home. Cutbacks, they’re telling us.’
‘Your Head Office?’ I’ve always assumed th
at the Station Café stood alone. It certainly doesn’t look like a chain – so who are the suits from Head Office?
Brenda gives a little shrug. ‘I don’t suppose it matters now. You’ve always been a good customer.’ She casts a disapproving glance at the floppy-haired poet, who will spend all morning sitting there, nursing a lukewarm cup of tea, then shoot off without a goodbye or even returning his crockery. ‘If you must know,’ she tells me, ‘we’re not really what you’d call a strictly legitimate business.’
‘I’m not sure what that means,’ I say.
‘It means,’ she tells me patiently, ‘that all good things must come to an end. We’ve all been here on Platform 5 since practically for ever; keeping our heads down, making do, not attracting attention. We’ve really enjoyed working here. But now, with the recession and that, we’re being pulled back to Head Office. They don’t have the means to allow us to work on these personal projects any more. We have to rejoin the rest of the team, and that means closing shop, I’m afraid. By the end of the week at the latest—’
‘By the end of the week?’ I say. ‘But what about my manuscript?’
I try to explain my predicament. How, for some ludicrous reason, over the course of the past eighteen months my only inspiration has been here, in the café on Platform 5; how those greasy bacon sandwiches and giant cups of builder’s tea have been my only lifeline. If it closes down now, how on earth will I finish my book?
Brenda looks at Sam and sighs. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Well, that’s a shame.’
I try to explain my delusion in terms of simple psychology. Writers are superstitious folk, constantly under pressure; relying on personal rituals that rarely make sense to anyone else. Some can only write in a particular font, or at a particular time of day, or in a particular place—
A Cat, a Hat, and a Piece of String Page 16
