Let's Meet on Platform 8

by Carole Matthews

  It was horrifying to find out how easy lying became, once you started. The lies took on a life of their own, and one little lie built on top of another until you had a huge shaky column of lies and you had to build another even bigger column next to it to support it. It was the same basic principle he was trying to teach Jack with Duplo play blocks and with considerably less success—except that with big, brightly coloured building bricks rather than people’s lives, it was infinitely more simple and didn’t hurt so much when they all inevitably came tumbling down.

  ‘Then leave your job.’

  ‘You know I can’t do that. I’m handcuffed there.’ Jamie rubbed his eyes. ‘They pay twice as much as anyone else would for the equivalent post.’

  ‘You could take a pay cut. We could manage.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. We certainly couldn’t manage. There’s the Alien mortgage on this house, the car, the de rigueur and consequently extortionate school that our off-spring attend and are likely to for the foreseeable future.’

  ‘You wouldn’t want them to grow up to be vandals with pierced noses and hair like hedgehogs?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t—no more than you would want to drive round in a clapped-out Metro and shop at Kwik Save.’

  ‘And there are your golf-club fees to consider.’ It was said in a tone that was sharper than was absolutely essential.

  Jamie nodded hesitantly. ‘Point taken.’ It wasn’t exactly the price of tees to belong to the most prestigious golf club in the area. ‘But then, you wouldn’t want me playing golf on a municipal course with apprentice electricians with pierced noses and hair like hedgehogs, would you?’

  Jamie walked to the fridge and poured himself a beer. He saw Pamela stiffen and ignored it. ‘Besides, there’s no guarantee that another job would require any fewer hours or that the trains would be any more reliable. We’re talking about something here that is totally out of my control.’ More lies. See? Easy.

  ‘Couldn’t you drive in?’

  ‘Is that what you want for me—spending two hours each way in a traffic jam? At least on the train I can read the paper.’ And see Teri.

  They had been meeting every morning for a few weeks now. He caught the 6.25 from Milton Keynes, stopping at Leighton Buzzard before arriving at Euston at 7.16—given a bit of luck and a following wind…and no signal failures at Watford Junction.

  It got Teri into work far too early, as she only had a five-minute walk from Euston, but she said she didn’t mind because she enjoyed their chats together. Yes, they had actually broken the unwritten First Commandment of commuting— Thou Shalt Not Chatter Animatedly To Thy Fellow Commuter, particularly on trains before eight o’clock.

  To prolong the agony of parting for a few extra minutes, they had a quick bland coffee together at the End-of-the-Line Buffet before Jamie left to do battle with the Underground trains. More precisely the Northern Line to Leicester Square and then change to the Piccadilly Line for Covent Garden.

  The tube was a nightmare at the best of times, but after eight o’clock in the morning it was enough to make a grown man weep—hence the early start which sometimes caught the larks on the hop. It didn’t seem so bad to be squashed against sweaty bodies at the end of the day—besides, he didn’t have much choice. But to start the morning like that was more than a human being should be asked to bear.

  Jamie worked on the far side of Covent Garden, away from the tube station, behind the trendy bijou shops and craft stalls that sold clothes no one would ever dream of wearing, scented candles in dubious shapes and clocks made out of scratched sixties records that had failed to become hits. The office was one of those impressive-looking Victorian buildings that are nothing more than glorified rabbit warrens in which you freeze from October to April and swelter from May through to September.

  In the summer, the walk to the tube from the office involved doing battle with forty million Japanese tourists and sundry jugglers, fire-eaters, street entertainers of infinitely variable quality, break-dancing robots, living sculptures of Hollywood legends and Simon the Oracle—a pleasant chap who told you exactly what he thought of you for a small donation. At this time of the year the journey was relatively free from enterprising hazards, and as a result the journey was five minutes shorter. These things matter when you are a commuter.

  These things mattered more when he had started to arrange to meet Teri in the evenings too. Not every night. That would be ridiculous—and difficult to organise. Just a quick drink to fortify the heart and gird the loins before subjecting oneself to the mercy of British Rail. Nothing more. Perfectly innocent and understandable. Unless you were Pamela.

  Jamie pushed back from the table. ‘I’m going to bed.’

  ‘What about MacTavish’s walk?’

  ‘I’m giving us both a night off. He can go and pee on the bushes in the garden. He does it when we’re not looking anyway.’

  ‘I’ll be up soon. I’ll just clear away first.’

  Pamela was quieter with the pans now that there was no one to make a point to. Which was just as well, because she had given herself a headache with all that purposeful clattering. If it had been the children making all that noise, she would have shouted at them.

  MacTavish skulked back in warily and, as Jamie suggested, she let him out into the garden. He took the opportunity to chew on his punctured ball and run round the garden with it clamped between his teeth like the frisky young puppy he now wasn’t. Pamela stood at the back door and watched him scampering carefree across the lawn, growling under his breath as the fronds of the pampas grass—an unwanted leftover from the last occupants that they hadn’t got round to digging up—wafted in the gathering wind. It was times like these when she wished wholeheartedly that she was a dog. All you had to worry about was where the next bone was coming from and hope that someone would remember to give you your Bob Martin’s conditioning tablets regularly.

  She didn’t know what was wrong with her just lately. The necessity to do the right thing weighed on her like the heavy, constricting blankets of a bed that hadn’t been updated to the liberating joy of duvets. It was such a hard job bringing up children the right way these days. When Pamela was young, the pinnacle of creative stimulus was piano lessons. Now, if you wanted your children to be socially rounded and properly integrated human beings, they had to have a fuller social programme than Ivana Trump.

  Jack was just three and he attended two Mother and Toddler swimming sessions per week at the local leisure centre, one session of Tumbling Terrors, two hours of Mini Musicians—which was always a frightful experience resulting in severe Advil abuse—and three mornings a week at nursery school. Add to that Francesca’s dance classes, baton twirling, Brownies, horse riding, ice-skating, music and swimming lessons, and there was precious little time left to do anything for herself.

  And that was without all the birthday parties—’ jelly-flinging affairs’ Jamie called them—of which there seemed to be at least one each week. Last Christmas he had bought her a sticker for the car saying Mum’s Taxi Service, which showed a cartoon car slumped on its front end with its wheels falling off. She hadn’t found that the slightest bit amusing, perhaps because it was she who was on her knees, rather than the car. And her wheels were definitely in grave danger of falling off.

  Taking a part-time job had been Pamela’s way of reasserting herself as a human being with a life of her own. It was hardly demanding, but it gave her some extra money and she liked the work. Jamie had been all for it—but then he would be. It had meant not the slightest alteration to his daily routine. She was the one who raced around like ace Grand Prix–driver Michael Schumacher on a good day, charging from one appointment to another with military precision. If she ever dared to complain to Jamie, all he said was that if she was finding it too difficult to manage, she should give up her job. This made her all the more determined to cope. Work was the only sanctuary she had. Her husband just didn’t understand.

  She whistled to MacTavish, who came in
reluctantly, looking back longingly at his ball and wearing the same expression Jamie did when he came through the door. She could be so hard on Jamie sometimes—it must seem as though she never had a good word for him. Which she rarely did. It was just that he was a typical man. He worked hard, but other than that he took his family responsibilities all too lightly. He didn’t worry if Francesca only got silver stars instead of gold, although Mrs Rutherford could be very moody sometimes and had her favourites. Pamela sighed deeply. No, he left all the worrying to her.

  Jamie lay on his back and stared at the ceiling while Pamela spent a long time in the bathroom. When she got into bed, she curled against him in a position of penitence. She was warm and soft and smelled of toothpaste and soap. It made him feel terribly guilty and ashamed.

  ‘I don’t mean for us to argue,’ she said.

  He patted her thigh the way men do when they’ve been married for ten years. ‘I know.’

  ‘Couldn’t you look for a job locally? There are lots of big firms moving out of London to Milton Keynes.’

  ‘I’ll think about it.’ He pecked her cheek. ‘Goodnight.’

  She pecked him back. ‘Goodnight.’ They turned off their matching frilled Laura Ashley bedside lights in unison.

  ‘Jamie.’ Pamela spoke softly into the darkness.

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘What is an Alien mortgage?’

  Jamie sighed. ‘It’s a huge unseen monster that is completely indestructible and kills the occupants of the house very slowly from the inside out.’ He turned away from her and moulded his pillow to his face. ‘In the bank no one can hear you scream,’ he muttered under his breath.

  Chapter 6

  They had been on the train for nearly half an hour and the doors were still open. Jamie checked his watch for the third time in as many minutes. ‘This isn’t going anywhere in a hurry.’

  It was a rather obvious statement, Teri thought, given the situation. ‘A fire causing signal failure at Watford Junction’ the muffled announcement had said. It was the third train they had been on so far, running from platform to platform like worried sheep, and none of them had moved. Because of the fire, the staff who were due to drive the trains were stuck on trains themselves—somewhere in that never-never land of ‘farther down the line’.

  ‘Why don’t we go and grab something to eat?’ Jamie suggested.

  Teri nodded her agreement, hiding her surprise. They’d only known each other a few weeks—a month or so at the most—but it was the first time he had suggested going to eat together. Most men she had known would have wanted you in bed within two days, and then, equally quickly, would have dumped you. She hadn’t had the slow smoulder build-up experience before; most of her exes had been from the crash-and-burn school of courtship. This was taking some getting used to.

  Their relationship—and the term should be applied loosely—consisted so far of a quick coffee in the morning—nearly every morning—and an equally quick something more alcoholic nearly every night. It wasn’t nearly enough. Even the mornings probably wouldn’t happen if she didn’t make the supreme effort of getting a train nearly an hour earlier than she needed to, just to spend some time with him. Clare told her that she was insane and that no man was worth missing an hour’s precious beauty sleep for. Mind you, she was a fine one to talk; she was usually up in the middle of the night to get to the airport on time for an early-morning flight. She insisted that it was merely devotion to duty rather than mindless devotion to someone else which made all the difference. And she was probably right. The things we do for love.

  Was it love, though? It was certainly deep and lustful infatuation, and that would do for starters. But were the feelings returned, or was this likely to be her forty-second bout of unrequited love since leaving The Sacred Heart of Jesus Primary School? She had carried a torch for Michael Lacey that burned steadfastly despite his continued rejections and refused—until she was twenty-three and saw him again in Safeway’s with a wife, two children and a not inconsiderable beer-belly—to be quenched.

  Once she was in love, it was hard for her to remain objective. This was a difficult one. He seemed keen to see her on the train et cetera, but that was about it. The only benefit to this dawn reveille—apart from the obvious one of seeing Jamie—was that it was gaining her an enormous amount of brownie points with her boss, the difficult-to-impress Richard Wellbeloved, who was stunned that she was not only in before him in the mornings now, but that she was also quite cheerful too.

  ‘There’s a little pasta place just outside the station which isn’t bad. I can’t remember what it’s called. It’s next to the transvestite shop and that, well…’ He paused. ‘I suppose it tends to overshadow everything else.’

  She wondered briefly for the second time whether he might not be a pervert. He had seemed very at home buying pantyhose. Perhaps this would explain his reticence at becoming involved. Perhaps he was just using her as a cure? A bit of therapy as he decided whether to go through with a Gender Reassessment Programme. Both she and Clare had dated people with worse problems in the past.

  In the event, the restaurant was imaginatively called The Pasta Place—a nice little haven of minimalist monochrome, an oasis in a bleak and dirty street that had nothing else to offer but its proximity to Euston Station. Unless, of course, you were a transvestite—in which case the shop next door, Terrific Transformations, with its array of size-twelve stilettos, falsie bras festooned across the window like bunting and the promise of he to she transformations in under two hours would be infinitely more appealing.

  There were two men eating alone, faces buried alternately in pasta or the Evening Standard, and a young couple giggling and holding hands while they spooned food into each other’s mouths. Jamie and Teri ordered quickly—penne carbonara for Jamie and spaghetti Bolognese for her—less cream, less cheese, less fat, less than interesting. A cheapish, goodish bottle of Valpolicella and some garlic bread helped to stave off hunger pangs until the real food arrived.

  They talked aimlessly of the weather and the state of the world in general before the waiter—a man with the strongest Italian accent she had ever heard, who had probably lived in Bethnal Green for the last twenty years—placed two steaming bowls of pasta in front of them.

  ‘Bliss.’ Jamie inhaled deeply. He picked up his fork and lunged at his food.

  ‘Enjoya!’ the waiter instructed.

  ‘This is wonderful.’ Jamie smacked his lips and spooned in some more.

  Teri tried hers more daintily, but agreed that it was, indeed, wonderful.

  ‘You don’t know what it’s like—’ Jamie pushed some more carbonara into his mouth appreciatively ‘—to eat food that you can’t spell your name with.’

  Teri paused with her fork to her mouth and frowned. ‘What?’

  ‘I said,’ Jamie repeated between chews, ‘you don’t know what it’s like—’ He stopped mid-sentence.

  She put her fork back in her bowl. ‘To eat food that you can’t spell your name with,’ she finished for him.

  Jamie waved his hand. ‘It’s a long story. You had to be there to get it.’ He drank his wine self-consciously.

  ‘I bet you did.’ Teri leaned across and pressed her face as close to his as two intervening bowls of pasta would allow. She tapped her fingernails on the table menacingly. ‘Are you going to explain, or would you like me to guess?’ she hissed.

  Jamie’s face had gone red, and it wasn’t just the steam from the bowls of pasta. Guiltily, he looked round at the other diners, who were eating their pasta and pizzas blissfully unaware of their confrontation. He lowered his voice. ‘Like I said—it’s a long story.’

  She took a swig of her wine and clanked the glass on the table. ‘You’re married, aren’t you?’

  Now they were aware. They all sat bolt upright, and most of them turned so they could hear better.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jamie.

  ‘I knew it! I bloody knew! Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘
It never seemed to crop up.’

  ‘We’ve been chatting away for the last few weeks discussing everything under the sun! We’ve even progressed from talking about the extortionate cost of our season tickets and the soul-destroying inequities of commuting with British Rail to black holes and EU directives on Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy—and all the time I’ve been the one with the mad cow disease.’ She didn’t know if it was the red wine or the anger, but something was making her cheeks feel very pink. ‘Didn’t it seem worthwhile mentioning somewhere along the line that you had a wife?’

  The waiter from Bethnal Green leaned on the bar and started polishing a glass that already gleamed in the overhead spotlight.

  ‘I didn’t think I needed to.’ Jamie raked his hair back from his forehead. ‘I just assumed I looked like a married man.’

  ‘And what do married men look like? Do you think you’ve got Keep Off— Married Man stamped on your forehead in invisible ink that only single women can see?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Jamie admitted. ‘It’s not something I’ve thought about.’

  Teri was in full flow now. She took a swig of wine to lubricate her throat. The man at the table next to them slunk down in his seat and raised his newspaper higher.

  ‘I never go out with married men! It’s an unwritten policy of mine. I’m a very principled woman.’

  She thought guiltily of her one illicit date with Clare’s ex-husband, Dave, when he wasn’t Clare’s ex-husband but had been her best boyfriend. It had been a disaster. As it deserved to be. Dave had tried to manhandle Teri in the car park at the isolated country pub he had taken her to before they had even got near the artificial beams and the horse brasses. It was shortly after that that she had become very principled. She vowed to be nicer to Clare when she got home.