by Cherry Potts
She stated: ‘Looking for a fellow traveller.’
Hair stood up on my forearms. The same line as the man.
Last week I was checking his profile when I saw its incarnation appear opposite me.
He was reading a book, leather bound. In a carriage of crystal-covered kindles and flickering screens it seemed deliberately affected. The leather had a whiff of formaldehyde. He looked, if not unkempt, then a little moth-eaten, the dust gathered in the folds of the black jacket and on the peak of a cap beside him. His eyes quivered, lips mechanically moved. Then gaze snapped up – startlingly light and intense – and caught me.
‘We’ve met.’ I said, ‘Well at least online.’
‘We have, haven’t we?’
That was it, he closed his eyes.
The train juddered to a halt, lightning had struck the line. The other passengers tutted and rolled their eyes, while the rain lashed the windows and the guard prowled the train – a vampire looking for a vein.
My companion flickered his reptile eyes and asked him,
‘Whither is this train bound?’ The guard swivelled round like a sceptical owl.
‘Yer what?’
I felt duty-bound to translate. ‘He means where’s it going?’
‘East Croydon, mate.’
‘Have you met anyone nice?’ I asked, to fill silence. He didn’t smile.
‘I’ve met you, and her,’ he indicated the black woman sitting a few seats away, looking directly at us while absently stroking her baby’s lifeless back.
I bet she was dreading being stuck here. Nowhere to feed a soon-to-be bawling child on this crowded carriage. But the baby was silent, and I realised with a lurch, unmoving. It was a ‘re-born’ – lifelike with its blue veins and mottled, screwed-up old-man face – distinguishable from the real thing only by its utter and complete silence. I tried not to stare. And couldn’t understand why others weren’t staring, had no one noticed? Then she slowly turned and met my gaze directly.
Had the trains always been populated with these freaks?
I remembered a quote from Freud: about the uncanny. ‘A class of frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.’
‘Though nice,’ he said, ‘is not a word I care for.’
‘I’d better go,’ I said.
‘Where else do you have to be?’
He patted the seat next to him.
I felt sudden comfort and an odd feeling of ‘belonging’. I sat beside him, absorbing his strength, like a plant absorbs light.
My life is divided into BC and AC – before and after commuting. Before I applied for jobs, replied to emails. Today I discover, amazingly, I am shortlisted for interview, they have been trying to call it says. I press delete. I don’t have time for an interview, still less a job.
Nor friends – I swipe past texts and missed calls, until they dwindle to radio silence.
My fellow travellers. Exiles from work, society. From life. We travel but never quite arrive.
I sometimes wonder if the guard realises we don’t alight at the terminal. If he does he never says anything – but then I wonder about him too.
We have nothing in common with civilians, as we call them, the commuters with a desk waiting for them, with their prattle and purpose.
One cannot bear too much reality. And so we prefer to remain with our own kind.
How many are we, I wonder? I imagine us spreading through the veins of the network, beyond to the Midlands and the North like barium meal on an x-ray. One day I’ll travel beyond my commute and discover more of my tribe.
But first, I have a train to catch.
At Sky’s Edge
Helen Slavin
In the village there were only a handful of people who knew of Sky’s Edge. They were all women. They all hoarded the secret.
In September there had been that trouble with the railmen, come with sleepers and sledgehammers to drive the way through from the City. They had maps and sextants and measuring, but the land had the measure of them.
They stayed at Hind’s Hill Farm and the farmer’s wife had pocketed their gold gladly. It was the dairy maid, Nora Wheatear who had shaken her head.
‘The bog is hungry,’ she’d warned and the railmen had been amused. She was pretty with her white skin and her black hair.
The bog drank them in like best bitter.
In October a man had come to the Inn, asking the way to Sky’s Edge.
‘There’s Top Edge and Far Edge?’ the landlord suggested, indicating a painted map framed on the wall above the hearth. It was more picturesque than topographical. The man, soaked from the rainstorm raging outside, sank a little at the news he had taken such a wrong turning.
‘Pint of your best.’ He watched the liquor poured, then downed it fast.
At the hearth, Kitty Bloodstone knitted. Socks or some such. The needles clicked like bones.
On the road once more, the stranger found the rain had waited for him, that the paths he took twisted at his ankles or were impassable and flooded out. He was all ravelled up with cold by the time he found his way to the road that reached the Town.
In November there had been that spooked horse wandering riderless by the mill. It was Martha Dreadnought had found the lost rider all spinny-headed at the crossroads. They’d put him on the waggon to Town. Martha kept the horse safe for the rider, but he did not return.
December turned up bareboned and white with frost. The women of the village who knew, the ones who held the secret in baskets and crocks and candleboxes, waited for the moment. Day struggled with night. The Dusk was coming.
There ought to have been preparations, a gathering of lace or linen, some stitching and embroidery to embellish a gown here, a stocking there. Instead the work they busied themselves with was on account of others. The Ladies who were coming to the Hall demanded beadwork, and baking. The silks that came in through the gates of the Hall were cut and pinned to the forms of others. Boots were fashioned from kidskin, gloves from silk velvet, blankets were woven in the mill for the carriage rides. Silver was polished. Crystal ware and crockery was dusted off.
In the dairy the cheeses were ripening, the butter thickened to yellow gold. Cream cooled in the wide dishes on the sill.
May was his Lordship’s newest acquisition. A froufrou delicacy of young womanhood with thousands a year and coal rich estates in Wales, if her father didn’t outlive her. There was a chance, after all, his Lordship’s first wife, Lady Catherine had died young, the child coming before its time and taking her with it.
‘May’s strong. A brood mare,’ had been her father’s recommendation as they shook hands on the nuptial deal. A bargain, for May was light and wild, where Catherine had been serious and sour.
She was not to be tamed, this May, but his Lordship relished the challenge.
‘Come.’ Her grandmother had taken her to one side, a small sitting room at her Chelsea home, lined with books. ‘You need to learn of women’s ways, my dearest.’ There were herbs and liquors in a cabinet. A notebook of measures and recipes and May was a keen and clever student. None of her grandmother’s recipes called for a kitchen, May understood that with a wry smile.
May and her Lordship had come out of London and driven a long and bumpy road. The towns had given way to smaller towns and then villages and then at last they gave up the ghost and all that was left was the moorland, the slow rising hills. Before the Hall and its village there was one last town, a thin patchwork of streets crowded round a tavern, a butcher’s shop, a scuttling little haberdashery and hardware shop.
‘How do we manage?’ May asked as they trundled through to the far end of Town. ‘Do you have livestock at the Hall?’ She had a bucolic image of Highland cows in her head although the Hall was not nearly far enough north for that. His Lordship smiled.
‘There’s the walled garden. And the deer in the park.’
May’s eyes glinted a little, setting fires in his Lordship. She leaned across the carri
age, resting her hands on his thighs.
‘Can we hunt?’ she asked, knowing he would grant her anything.
The day of the hunt dawned misty and chill but May was not to be dissuaded. The horses clattered out of the stable yard, the keepers ahead tracking the deer to be certain of a kill.
It did not turn out the way that his Lordship had wanted. The deer were skittish. His friends complained that the weather was too cold.
‘You indulge her,’ Vickery had smirked as he sipped a toddy at lunch.
‘Spare the rod…’ Belton began.
‘Oh I doubt he spares her that.’ The joke filtered through the brandied breath that was clouding the air. His Lordship signalled to the grooms. It was time to return.
May was content. The horse ride alone had been a welcome distraction from the frowsty company. The hunting party made its way over the parkland. Not all the women had ridden out, but those that had were now easily distracted, taken with the sight of the Temple to Apollo, the sculpted stone standing out like a beacon against the ochre and rust of the moorland beyond the walls.
It was May who saw the beast, antlered, racing its way across the shoreline of the ornamental lake. Hooves pounding to a heartstopping leap over the distant gate.
‘HO!’ she raised her arm, the small black glove reaching to the sky. Some looked with disinterest at the fleeing stag. May turned to her Lordship, her horse jolting and eager beneath her. His Lordship shook his head. May, with that glint in her eye, kicked her heels. As the horse charged off the wind caught at her hat, threw it down in the grass, still she did not halt.
‘After her,’ his Lordship growled beneath the disapprobation of his friends. The grooms were mounting, gave chase. ‘On pain of dismissal,’ he shouted at their retreating forms.
He waited many hours before the fire. Supper came and went without him and it was after midnight when the door to his study opened.
The stag’s head was to be mounted. The next morning the trophy lay on the mahogany table in the hallway so that all might see it. His wife’s kill. He relished their disapproval, their griping jealousy. Their wives: trinkets, bloodless.
‘Perhaps we might never go back to London,’ May mused, the scent of her hair, blood and earth, intoxicating him.
Solstice. Day meets Night and one is defeated. Dusk comes with her cloak.
At the Hall the ball was glittering and gold. His Lordship watched the way they watched his wife. Her gown, silken and green as a forest to match the emeralds he’d had sent from his bank.
Sweat beaded like diamonds on her lip as they danced. The whirl of light and fiddle and whisky.
Outside, the women who knew, the women who kept the secret, gathered at the edges.
Kitty pulled up her cloak of ivy, carried a basket of freshly spun skeins. Martha rode her horse, bringing a message in the weave of a blanket. Nora brought cream and cheese hidden beneath her coat of bracken.
May took the pins from her hair as she made her way across the garden to meet them, at the farthest edge of the walled garden she tugged on her coat of newly turned earth. She had been shown Sky’s Edge in the eye of the deer and knew the way. There was still time.
Kitty, Martha and Nora were only a little ahead of her, slowing their pace so that she might catch up.
Dusk was stepping towards them, her cloak trailing over the moor, blinking out the windows at the Hall, moving to greet them, to take them with her over to Sky’s Edge.
May followed, her hand hidden in her pocket, sticky with her offering – the deer’s heart.
The Dusk Runner
Cath Bore
She knows full well that winter is gritty and grim for some. Fuel bills are steeper, and everyone goes around swaddled in thick jumpers, long coats biting ankles. Yet she herself enjoys the feel of hard goose bump lumps prickling her arms, the frost pinching her neck. She keeps it quiet but there’s nothing quite like the sharp cut of the chill. There’s a pleasure in the cold, her mind brightens and clears, thoughts cleaned and polished and sharp. Everything is so precise.
At teatime, nearly time, she settles by the front window, a china cup – plus saucer – on her lap, curtains in the windows open wide, the embroidered white nets veiling her face. The street is a cool grey but with a silvery sheen, save for the soft glow of street lamps clicking on, one by one. Rush hour is over, kids home from school, cars are parked, neat and tidy, and everyone is locked in their homes, done for the day. It is beautiful. There’s a comfort in the quiet. It’s safe. Nothing is out there, no one.
Apart from him, the one she waits for, all day. Her stomach squirms in delight at the slap-slap-slap of his feet on the pavement. He flashes into view. He runs at dusk, every night. Like an old film on the telly, the hopeful moon makes him Cary Grant, in running shorts and a t-shirt. Cary Grant, for eight seconds. But it’s a good eight seconds, of just her, and him. Her neck creases in a barley sugar twist as he goes past, and she savours the sweetness of it. This, here and now, is the best part of the day.
But time moves on and ruins everything. It always does, the New Year comes, the weeks turn into months and March is here, soon enough. Temperatures rise, and everything changes. Every night she takes her seat and watches and hopes, but on 1st April feels the fool. The spring day stretches out, and he does too, running later, longer, and slower. He gains a longer lope, arms bent at the elbow and held low. The sun stays up to warm his pale cheeks pink, he goes from fuzzy charcoal to full colour. The daffodils come, blazes of hysterical yellow. She hates it, all this, the changes, the day the first buds spring, tiny slits of yellow behind folds of green, ready to burst. The air clings and prickles, sweat stretches and flattens her pores. Soon, summer is here. It brings so much bloody noise with it, people milling about in the street, watching him, looking at him. It means she has to share him. And because of the summer, he runs later and later, sunset shifting, pulling him along with it. At the season’s peak, the night is so short it’s stolen. He squints at her window, lines furrowing his forehead. He holds a cupped hand over his eyes to protect them from the sun then he’s off, running away, the daylight snapping at his heels.
Threshold
Katerina Watson
The water stain on the doormat is getting worse. Mottled. She should probably change it.
Should.
Well if we’re going doing down should, then there should be a key in her hand. That key should then go into the lock.
She knows that.
Light streams through the glass panels at the top of her door – their door – the door – onto her shoes. She hates them. Maybe she should change them too, maybe she should –
Breathe.
The dusk is creeping in around her outside, on the inside too. Beyond the door he’s there, home.
Breathe.
Now don’t me wrong. She loves him. Deeply. And he her. It’s not about that. No it’s about something else.
It’s about, it’s about what colour the dusk is brewing, right now, in the sitting room. Outside its punch drunk purple shot with streaks of worried grey. Doesn’t bode well.
Inside it’s...who knows. Yesterday when she arrived at dusk as she always does, tired and bent out of shape herself, she held his head in her hands while he cried. The day before was different of course. The day before he had blotted her out. Not unkindly, not purposefully. But still. As soon as she walked through the door she saw it. He had backed away into that unreachable place, where he hears her voice like she’s underwater. One of them’s drowning, maybe both.
The day before that? She’s tired, who knows. She has vague far off memories of what seemed like an endless summer but. Clear skies can be deceiving. She knows that now too.
Of course, that’s not what anyone, everyone, sees.
All day he gets consumed. Online. On TV. Magazines. Once she even saw his face on the side of a bus while an autistic teenager wiped his nose on her sleeve. Her day job. And his.
I just really feel we have a connec
tion!
One of the fans wrote.
Like, we really know each other.
Do you. Really. Because every day she walks in, the dusk is a different colour. Sometimes he’s a storm of heavy grey, sometimes the dusk has set in early and has stamped out all the strips of light with darkness. Blank.
But.
Sometimes, just sometimes, she walks through the door and he’s reds with pinks and oranges shot through. Luminous. Sure there’s darkness, there’s always darkness, but there are a hundred million stars pinned to his night sky and anything is possible.
Those nights.
Those nights are the best.
So.
She puts her key in the lock. And turns it.
Cape Cornwall
Jackie Taylor
‘Meet me at Cape Cornwall – dusk, tomorrow,’ he said, and no doubt he had a particular time in mind when he said it, something to do with the angle of the sun on the horizon, something fixed and factual and scientific. But I wasn’t sure exactly what time he meant.
There’s that time when the sky is streaked red and orange and is all lit from the top, and then you turn around and everything’s gone dark behind you without you even noticing, and the old engine houses lean forward out of the twilight. Did he mean that time? When the earth seems to stop breathing, and – briefly – pause?
Or the time when the gulls finally head for the cliffs, and you see the last boat heading for safe harbour round the Cape, and you shiver, however well-dressed you are, knowing that the night is coming? The time when the winter sun gives up its final gasp of warmth and the temperature plummets as straight and true as a mine shaft, and the wind whips up as cold as lead off the sea. Is that when he meant?
Or did he mean the time when you can’t see the cliff-edge any more, or the sheer drop to the sea? When you can’t see where the path has crumbled away, or where an old shaft has opened up after the rain?
‘Meet me at Cape Cornwall – dusk, tomorrow.’ But I didn’t know what time he meant, not exactly.