Let's Meet on Platform 8

by Carole Matthews

  It might also help him to digest this dried-up school dinner. His first inclination had been to scrape it into the bin—or into the dog—and make himself a sandwich, but that would have been ungrateful. It was his fault he was late, and he would take Pamela’s punishment like a man—or a mouse, depending on which way you looked at it.

  Jamie spread ketchup over the rest of the _astard and began to work his way through it letter by letter. It was a well-known fact of life that tomato ketchup made even the most unlikely thing edible. That was why the children smeared it on chips, cabbage, curries and cereal, even Coco Pops. It wasn’t that Pamela couldn’t cook, it was just that recently she had taken it into her head that everything in the house had to be educational. And that obviously included mealtimes.

  These days, his wife wasn’t happy unless the children could spell with their food, or at the very least make a funny face—which tended to prolong the time spent at the table. Jack could already spell dog and cat with Alphabites. Give him a book or a pencil and he was stuffed, but food, that was a different matter altogether. Jamie was under the impression that it was Pamela’s aim for him to be the first three-year-old at the nursery to be able to read the baked-bean version of War and Peace. He had some way to go yet. But that didn’t stop her from trying.

  There had been one temporary moment of politically incorrect madness when Pamela had returned pale-faced from Toys “R” Us, Francesca triumphantly clutching a Barbie doll—’ because she was the only girl in the entire school who didn’t have one’. She omitted the fact that she had a computer complete with the latest software, jigsaws too numerous to mention, a tool kit—non-sexist household—and all manner of mind-expanding playthings. But all had been forsaken in favour of Barbie—the anorexic blonde-haired bimbo who made Pamela Anderson look positively deflated. Pamela— Duncan, not Anderson—feared she was failing in motherhood, and to make up for this brief aberration had turned all family meals into tutorials.

  At least the awfulness of his meal had distracted him momentarily from thinking about Teri. He should have stayed and tucked into Camembert and cheap brandy with her—at least then he would have felt his punishment justified. Why did he feel so wretched about leaving her alone with nothing but a bag of frozen peas for solace? He pushed his few remaining peas round his plate in sympathy.

  And her name—it slipped so casually off his tongue, as if he had been saying it for years. Teri. He wondered if it was short for something or whether her parents had been particularly trendy. He would ask her next time he saw her. Grief! What was he thinking of? There would be no next time. How many years had he travelled on that line without seeing her before? Still, he knew where she worked. He could casually orchestrate it so that he was walking by City Television offices just as she was going home for the evening—they were only just up the road from Euston Station. But perhaps she didn’t go home at that time every night; perhaps she was leaving early to go to the dentist or something. But then surely she would have mentioned it.

  He gripped the arms of his wicker chair. This was a train of thought that must stop—no pun intended. Why was he even thinking of wanting to meet her again? He was happily married—well, mostly—with two-point-two children, if you included Barbie. He and Teri had nothing in common with each other and no need to speak again. Commuting and communicating might begin with the same letters, but that was where the similarity ended. He had knocked Teri over—crass, but accidental—and he had done his bit and that was the end of it. And the sooner he convinced himself of that, the better.

  When he finally heard Pamela’s key turn in the lock, Jamie let out a heartfelt sigh. With any luck, Francesca would have done the business and would have sucked up to Mrs Rutherford enough at the last minute to get straight gold stars for everything. That could come close to letting him off the hook.

  The only thing that would massage Pamela’s ego further was if Francesca’s inspirational painting of ‘My Mummy’ looked vaguely like her rather than the abstract Picasso-style monster she usually managed to produce. Pamela would not be happy if she had green hair, white high-heeled shoes and was smoking a cigarette like she was last year.

  ‘Hello, darling,’ she shouted from the hall.

  Jamie shrugged and raised his eyebrows. Things were looking up. Then he remembered that his coat was still draped over the banister rail. That could well mean the end of the entente cordiale as we know it and the start of another Cold War. He heard his wife clip, clop across the parquet floor until she paused by the stairs. It was a technique the SS used in old films to menace prisoners of war who had thought to escape by rather overtly digging a tunnel while whistling loudly to cover the noise. The soldiers clicked along the corridors just before they were about to torture the prisoners without the benefit of modern anaesthetics.

  After a sufficiently significant and nerve-racking pause, Pamela marched into the kitchen.

  ‘I’m going to bed,’ she announced in clipped tones and promptly marched out again. She obviously needed time to think up a particularly hideous torture.

  Jamie ate the last of his bastard with a heavy heart. It seemed he could look forward to facetious Alphabite messages for the rest of the week.

  Chapter 3

  ‘So what else did he say?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Teri lifted her hands in the air and gestured meaningfully. ‘He just got in the taxi and went.’

  ‘Just like that,’ Clare said in disgust.

  ‘Just like that.’

  ‘You must be losing your touch.’ She flopped down on the sofa next to Teri, dislodging the carefully placed bag of once-frozen, now-dripping peas. ‘You, the same person who in her time has dated Billy Bunter and the Frog Prince—the one who turned from a prince into a frog—have freely admitted that you let the fittest man you have seen this century disappear in a taxi without so much as waving your PalmPilot at him.’

  ‘He said he had to go.’ Teri was getting irritable.

  ‘He might have been waiting for you to ask him not to,’ Clare pointed out. ‘Men like that sort of thing these days.’

  ‘He had me at a physical disadvantage. I wasn’t thinking straight.’ She kicked the bag of peas off her ankle onto the floor. ‘Besides, asking him not to go didn’t keep your dearly beloved David in the marital bed.’

  Clare looked stung. ‘That was below the belt, Therese Carter.’

  ‘I know, I’m sorry.’ Teri hugged a cushion forcefully. ‘It’s just that I could kick myself.’

  ‘I could kick you too.’

  Teri scowled. ‘That’s no consolation.’

  ‘So you don’t know where he lives or works or anything?’

  ‘He said he was in insurance.’

  ‘Riveting.’ Clare rolled her eyes. ‘You could crash your car,’ she said helpfully, after giving it some thought.

  ‘I think I’ll just stick to hanging round Euston Station looking nonchalant.’

  ‘Your intentions could be mistaken.’ Clare picked at the remains of the Camembert. ‘Still, you might earn a few pounds while you’re waiting.’

  Teri thumped her with the cushion. ‘He’s not like all the others. He’s nice.’

  ‘Nice? Nice! Nice is a banned word! Surely you can’t have forgotten the hours we spent in Mrs Bagshaw’s class discussing nice. “Nothing is naice, Clare”.’ She mimicked her former teacher’s cut-glass tones. ‘She could reel off a thousand other adjectives that were better than dear old nice. And I still can’t bring myself to write in red pen because of that woman.’

  ‘He is nice. He’s very nice! He’s the only man I’ve met who doesn’t act like Jean-Claude Van Damme on amphetamines. He’s sensitive and intelligent.’

  Clare continued unabashed, ‘He can’t be that intelligent if he walked out of here without fixing himself a hot date.’

  ‘He may not have fancied me,’ Teri mumbled.

  ‘What does that matter? You were still panting after him like a puppy dog when I came home. Surely he was br
ight enough to know he was onto a sure thing?’

  Teri glared at her. ‘I’m glad you think so highly of my morals.’

  ‘You never did know how to play hard to get, Therese. Look at Christopher Parry. You were all over him like a rash.’

  ‘I only went out with him twice, and I did have a rash.’

  ‘It just goes to prove my point.’ Clare smiled superciliously at her victory. ‘So you didn’t ask him anything else?’

  Teri tutted. ‘I couldn’t really.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I was embarrassed.’ Teri flushed.

  ‘Embarrassed!’

  ‘He kept looking at me—like looking.’

  ‘It’s a good job you’re not a private detective or an investigative journalist—you’d starve to death.’ Clare wagged her finger. ‘For goodness’ sake, you’re a new-millennium chick. You carry rainbow-coloured condoms in your handbag. What are you planning to do with them—blow them up and twist them into cute little poodles or giraffes once they’re past their sell-by date?’

  ‘Be sympathetic. I’m supposed to be your best friend. I have opened my home to you in your hour of need. The least you could do is pretend to listen to me in mine.’ Teri poured herself some more brandy from the bottle Clare had retrieved from the kitchen. ‘And, anyway, you don’t seem to be overrun with admirers at the moment, so don’t give me a hard time.’

  Clare groaned. ‘Working for an airline isn’t the best place for checking out talent. They’re all either married or gay.’

  ‘And what about David?’

  ‘Still terminally ensconced with the nubile Anthea. Still declaring that it’s me he really loves, but would I be prepared to accept the fact that he can love two women at the same time—and probably in the same bed, knowing David.’

  ‘Bastard.’ Teri threw back her brandy.

  ‘Bastard.’ Clare joined her.

  Teri refilled their glasses. ‘Here’s to nice men!’ The brandy was making her eyes water.

  ‘To nice men,’ Clare agreed. ‘Wherever they are.’ They both drained their glasses. The brandy was giving Teri a warm glow that made her feel slightly blurred round the edges like a bad photocopy. Amazingly, she couldn’t feel the pain in her ankle at all. It had gone clean away—just like Jamie. The thought was enough to make her reach for the bottle again. Perhaps another drink would help. She had found her nice man and she had let him go by mistake. If she wasn’t careful, she could become very depressed about it.

  Chapter 4

  ‘I’m just amazed that you happened to be walking past the office exactly when I was leaving,’ Teri said breathlessly. ‘Isn’t that amazing?’

  ‘Yes, a coincidence,’ Jamie shouted animatedly. ‘How’s the ankle?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Ankle!’ Jamie bawled, and pointed helpfully.

  ‘Better!’ she yelled back and gestured at her ear. ‘It’s the traffic.’

  Teri pulled her coat around her and they leaned into the chill wind that gusted a few tired and dirty leaves across Euston Road, walking along in an uneasy silence enforced by the noise of the rush-hour. She put her head down to stop the swirling dust blowing in her eyes. Her heart was pitter-pattering like stiletto heels clicking on a concrete pavement. She was keeping pace with Jamie—just about; he took long, easy strides that covered twice as much ground as she could. From the beat of her heart it sounded as if she were running a marathon.

  Teri had been stunned to see Jamie draped casually against the wall outside her office. In fact, she thought it was the closest she had come to suffering a cardiac arrest. Despite trying to engineer it to bump into him at the railway station, she hadn’t managed it at all and, apart from the physical evidence of a still green-and-purple ankle, was beginning to think that he had been a hallucination brought on by the stresses and strains of daily commuting. She’d been about to give up hope of ever seeing him again. Clare had given up all hope on her unequivocally.

  And now he was here. He was gorgeous. More gorgeous than she remembered—possibly because he didn’t look quite so harried this time. She risked a sideways glance at him and Jamie smiled in return. He looked suave and sophisticated, dark-suited under his light-coloured cashmere coat—brave for a commuter—and looked every inch the successful insurance company executive. His dress was immaculate—classic and traditional—but with a rakish cut to the clothes that spoke of a slight rebellious streak pushing against the bounds of staid conformity. The sort of man who wouldn’t look out of place modelling designer clothes for Esquire magazine. Executives at City Television wore jeans with loud Hawaiian shirts and had bald heads and long ponytails.

  They looked at each other and smiled occasionally along the route and did their best to ignore the entreaties of the hopeful homeless selling the Big Issue and the hopeless homeless already huddled down for the night in their sleeping bags.

  The stark concourse of Euston Station always seemed relatively peaceful in comparison to Euston Road, despite the hordes of miserable-looking people. At least you could hear yourself speak in there. It was a functional station building—that was the best that could be said about it—square, austere, but functional. Its architecture made no effort to mimic the ornate, Gothic romanticism of St Pancras or King’s Cross. Euston, it appeared, had been styled along the lines of a house brick—seemingly a popular style of architecture in the early sixties in London. Years ago it had been fronted by a small, scruffy park full of dossers and drunks and day-trippers. In its place there was now a bare plaza with half a dozen struggling trees, a smattering of concrete benches and a browning oblong of grass, banked on three sides by black-glassed office buildings.

  At the corner of the square stood a statue of railway pioneer Robert Stephenson, who died on 12 October 1859—and who must be gyrating in his grave at the current state of the British railways.

  Once inside, Teri and Jamie crossed the main concourse dotted with small and colourful merchandise kiosks and stood beneath the black departure display board which towered above them. It was doing more clattering than a demented pinball machine.

  ‘This looks ominous,’ Jamie stated flatly.

  Their train disappeared off the board—all stations to Milton Keynes being replaced by permanent-looking blanks. A passenger announcement began in the usual mix of English, double Dutch and mumble. ‘The late-running 18.07 for all stations to Milton Keynes has been cancelled. This unavoidable delay is due to signalling failures at Watford Junction.’

  Jamie’s shoulders sagged visibly and he looked at his watch.

  ‘This is going to be another free-for-all fight. Do you fancy giving the scrum a miss and going for a drink instead?’

  So what if she missed her Calligraphy for Beginners class at Vanwall Upper School? She’d long given up hope of ever needing it to write beautifully scripted wedding invitations. The best she could hope for now would be writing labels for jam jars when she eventually succumbed to her wheel-chair and joined the Women’s Institute.

  Besides, Mrs Jessop made the ancient craft of illegible writing seem so utterly unenthralling and tedious that you could actually find yourself wishing for death during her lessons. The fact that the class had dwindled from a relatively healthy nineteen to start with to a sickly four just after the start of the second term was possibly an indication that other students shared the same view.

  Mrs Jessop had been teaching calligraphy for twenty-five years, she proudly told them every week. Perhaps twenty-five years ago she had made it sound interesting. Teri wondered how many hapless souls had in previous years signed their twenty-nine quid away to be subjected to torture by italics and half-uncials without any intervention from the local education authority—who were presumably supposed to monitor the standard of teaching. The stoic remaining students were all of the same if-you-start-something-you-see-it-out-to-the-end-no-matter-what-the-personal-cost school of thinking. It was now a matter of honour that Teri should keep this lifelong vow no matter how hard Mrs Jess
op and her badly behaved waterproof ink bottle and interchangeable nibs tried to persuade her otherwise.

  Teri was sure the other three stalwarts could manage without her for one week. Her low-fat chicken tikka masala meal for one wasn’t going to come to any harm languishing in the fridge for a little bit longer either. The decision was made.

  Teri nodded. ‘I’d love a drink.’

  The only bar at Euston hovered high over one corner of the station, jutting out over the bookshop and the burger bar beneath it. It was faced in the same flat grey-coloured tiles as the rest of the concourse and, as such, was virtually indistinguishable from the public toilets.

  If you managed to get a window seat—a bit of a misnomer because there wasn’t actually any glass, just a window-shaped hole through which a constant draught blew—you could watch the disappointed sagging of the shoulders as the swarming commuters ground to a halt beneath the display boards. This was the point where they recognised that it was going to be a long night, and any hopes of an early dinner and a night in front of the telly were once again dashed.

  The pub was called Steamers, presumably through some clever marketing man’s bright idea of an allusion to the Golden Age of Railways, rather than to the fact that the only reason most people went to such an awful place was to get steaming drunk. Anyway, they could hardly call it Diesel Electrics or Commuter Cattle Trucks, could they? Where was the romanticism in that?

  The inside was an illusion of a bygone age, too. A sort of mock-Victorian fantasy had been forced to merge seamlessly with Star Wars. The stools were of the finest imitation tapestry, the lampshades crimson and fringed. Even the toilet doors continued the theme, respectively adorned with silhouetted ladies in crinolines and gentlemen sporting top hats and canes. Somehow the bank of fruit machines, the juke box and the plasma television screens detracted from the overall effect slightly. The prices made no attempt at nostalgia either—they were firmly fixed in the future.