Settling To Hear Matthew

(This is taken from my blogger: http://sofaofyourdreams.blogspot.com/)

Caroline moved her eyes across the landscape. Her eyes went from the vending machine tucked logically against bricks across to the window of the ticket office which no longer gleamed and was barred with iron. The door to the office was open and Caroline went through and bought a week ticket from the man behind the glass and she went through another door to the platform. The platform was covered in other women and men. It was 7am Monday morning. Mostly the men wore dark warm coats and carried black bags with laptop computers inside. Mostly the women did the same but their coats were thinner and they didn’t say anything about it. Caroline weaved to the spot she had come to prefer from making the same decision for six years. Sun came down onto the tracks and Caroline watched the graffiti on the bricks low down by the rails. Something about the graffiti had changed since the week before. She saw it all the time.

A man in a dark warm coat was talking on a mobile phone close by. He spoke while he looked at the floor and walked around in a circle with dramatic strides. Caroline looked at the man and thought, those strides are for me, I know about you old man.

A lot of men made strides for Caroline in their own ways. Many more looked at Caroline and some of those men were on the platform too. A voice said onto the announcement system that a train would be right on time for all of them, striders and lookers and the rest. The train rolled beside the platform and Caroline aligned herself to a doorway before it arrived. Six years. I know where you’ll be.

She was first to step onto the carriage and found a seat between two dark warm coats. They shuffled and adjusted as she sat. She pulled a tatty book out of her bag and thumbed through the pages and the train picked up momentum. She looked at the page from Friday. The book was thick and full of things far from a train carriage on Monday morning and the train hit speed. Somebody coughed and two people spoke quietly. ‘Well if they don’t want to be prepared for all the possibilities, I don’t see how they can expect us to stay on side,’ a man’s voice said.

‘Oh absolutely,’ another man said, ’and believe you me, I’ll be voicing all of this to the board this morning. There are millions of pounds at stake.’

‘That’s very settling to hear Matthew.’

Caroline looked hard at the page of the book. It was about a man who had travelled to Africa in the nineteen twenties to work for his father and had fallen in love with a servant woman twice his age. She scanned the same sentence over and again but it would not clarify in her mind. Matthew and the other man kept talking. She looked at the sentence. The train slowed to another platform.

Caroline heard the doors uncompress and slide open. The platform was behind her and the carriage was already crowded, all the seats were taken. Sounds of more people getting onto the train and more dark coats began to clutter the aisles towards the automatic doors. A teenage boy got on the train with the others. He hobbled on crutches and stood against a handrail at the end of the gangway. Caroline watched him juggle the crutches to one arm and put his weight on the handrail. The boy looked about seventeen, and wore a white silicone jacket with zips and logos. His right foot was in a plaster cast with a trouser leg rolled up above it. He looked down the carriage once then out the window then pointed his head at the floor.

She brought her book back up and looked again at the sentence she had left on Friday. She tried to concentrate. The train started to move and a voice came from the man sitting next to her. ‘Would you like to sit down lad?’

The boy looked over. ‘Oh yeah alright,’ he said. His voice was thin and hard.

The man got up and grabbed the handrail that came up from the floor in the middle of the aisle. He was a middle aged man with a moustache speckled with grey hairs. The boy hit the seat heavily and carried an impression of the cold air outside and Caroline felt it. She tucked the end of her thin dark coat under her legs and adjusted herself on the seat and went back to looking at the sentence. Matthew and the other man had paused their conversation while people climbed on the train, and they started again now as the train moved again. The man with the moustache braced himself against the motion against the handrail.

Some minutes passed and Caroline looked at the sentence and thought about the boy next to her. He felt small next to her compared to the other man with his shoulder against hers. His plastered leg was crossed over the other and stretched into the gangway. She felt like he was looking in her direction and she looked up from the book. The boy was looking at her. ‘Want to know how I got this?’ he said. Caroline saw the pink rings around his eye sockets, his eyebrows pushed up and lips pushed together inwards and to the side.

‘Erm, sure.’ Caroline said to the boy, ‘what happened?’

‘My mate ran me over.’

‘What?’

‘Yeah. But I’m out now.’

Caroline looked at the boy’s plastered leg. ’Goodness! Why did he do that? Not on purpose?’

‘Dunno,’ the boy said, and turned his head away.

‘Oh,’ Caroline said, then waited, then leaned back again in her seat. She thought about if there was something else to say. She looked again at the book.

‘Can you lend me a pound?’

The boy was facing her again. ‘Can I?’ she said.

‘Yeah, can you give me a quid? A pound.’

‘Erm, I suppose . . .’ she said. She looked around the carriage. The people were there and looking in all directions, everywhere but towards her and the boy. The hush of bodies and iron tracks racing below. The conversation between the two men had stopped. ‘What . . . what’s it for?’ she asked.

‘Got to get the bus and get fags n’ that.’ The boy was looking her now and pushing his lip to the side again.

‘Oh. I suppose, then . . .’ she pulled her bag round onto her lap and fumbled for her purse. She took out a pound coin and gave it to the boy. ‘There.’

‘Nice one,’ the boy said, then turned away again.

She sat still and looked at the side of the boy's face and the boy's plastered leg. The train was slowing down. She sat back and opened the page of the book, and closed it again. The train pulled along a platform and the boy exhaled loudly and got up and balanced on a crutch. He picked the other off the seat and went down to the doors. People parted to give him space and he went off the train.

The man with the speckled grey moustache sat back down next to Caroline and the train began to move again. The man who had been called Matthew started talking quietly again to the other man. Caroline looked around the carriage then looked again at the sentence. She read it.