by Greg James
“No, I have not seen that box. I have my sack. It is all I need. My sack and what’s in it is all I will ever need.”
I didn’t like the way he smiled at me as he finished speaking.
So I asked the next person. A long, thin woman with her hair drawn up in a tight bun and her son sitting next to her. They shared a complexion of sour butter and eyes that were hard flint marbles. His forehead bore the mark of an iron needle puncture. It had become law a few years ago that any child known to suffer from excessive thought and imagination would have its brain cauterised. A thin line of drool ran from the corner of his mouth and I could see that his eyes saw and focused upon less than most.
“Excuse me, Miss, have you seen this box before? Or, perhaps, your son-”
“Perhaps my son what?”
“Well, has seen this box before, perhaps?”
She turned her eyes on her son, who continued to stare sullenly ahead as the bus rocked along the uneven road. Then she turned her eyes back to me.
“No. He hasn’t seen the box. He hasn’t seen any boxes ever. None at all.”
“Perhaps, if I could ask him-”
“No. He hasn’t seen no boxes. None. Not ever. Why you asking? You an Inspector? You want to be one? Do you?”
The colour drained from my face as I shook my head vigorously, realising what I had done. What an admission that gesture had made. I backed away from the woman and her hard stare. Her son’s dull eyes were also looking at me now, at a man who had shown public dislike of the Inspectors.
My fingertips were almost piercing the card of the box as I approached the third and last person aboard. He was sitting at the back, by himself, in the far corner seat and I had to duck to squeeze into the shadowy compartmented space. He was old and frail, picking at the fraying grey wool of his fingerless gloves.
“You want to know if I have seen this box?”
My mouth worked dumbly as I processed the man’s words. Eventually, as I sat down beside him, I found my voice.
“Yes. Well, have you?”
The man nodded.
“When? Where? Do you know what it is?”
“A long time ago. Years, maybe. I saw it somewhere, I’m not sure where. But ... I can tell you that it is yours.”
He reached out a cold, bony hand and took one of my hands in his as he leaned forward out of the shadows and met my gaze with his.
“It is yours.”
I saw he was holding onto something in his lap.
Something that should not have been there.
What is not seen, nor heard, nor felt, cannot send your soul to Hell.
With a yell, I snatched my hand out of his and made my way, on shaking feet, back to my seat. I could not stay on this bus. Not with this box. The people on here. They knew something, all of them, and whatever they knew, they knew too much. I could not stay here.
I had to get off – now!
The bus stopped. The doors hissed open and I was outside in the driving rain under grim, grey skies. I was in a bus shelter and it barely stood upright. Its supports were buckled and corroded. Its panes of protective glass were shattered. I had been here before, and I would be here again, many, many times. And soon, I would forget this and I would board the same bus when it came by again. I would take the same journey, the same seat, and the years would continue to go by as I travelled with this box in my hands and I would grow older, so much older and still not know any more about the box or who I was. Until the day came when I decided to take a seat by myself in the back of the bus, in the farthest corner, and from there, somehow, in some way, for some dark, unknown and senseless reason, I would see myself, my younger self, climb onboard.
Waiting
Waiting, waiting, always waiting. That was the life of Rebecca Frobisher. The odd one out. The last in the queue for anything and everything. That was how it felt to her. Her feet hurt, her ankles were bulging as she stumbled in her clumpy shoes onto the station platform. The air had turned bitter over the last few nights, it was that time of year, winter’s teeth nipping at extremities. She rubbed her hands harshly over one another, wringing the fingers until she felt her knuckles ache. The cheap faded wool of her gloves doing no good. I can feel my body heat whistling out of me, she thought, like the steam out of an engine.
It was empty and quiet on the platform. It always was for her. She never left work early, she often missed her lunch breaks. I have to get everything done, she thought, plucking at her shuddering fingers. The shakes had been with her for a few years now, since the divorce. The night he told her he was leaving. Wetness stung at the corners of her eyes, she blinked it away. Good riddance to him, she thought.
I should have found better but I didn’t.
“Now, look at me.” She whispered to the unlistening world.
The kind would say I’m plain, she thought, but I know I’m ugly. He told me so but he didn’t start it. It was always there, always in me, waiting, always waiting. Frog-face Frobisher. Mouth too wide and plump, eyes too big and goggly behind my glasses, which are too thick and look like they’re made from bottles. Then, there was the wind. Little belches, wheezy pops, burping like a frog. The doctors couldn’t find out what was causing it. Mum and Dad hated it, especially at dinner times. Made me hate myself, lock myself away in my room. I still live in that room.
Mum and Dad died and I hadn’t left home. Too scared to be doing more than a dull office job. White walls. Dirty carpet. Computers hum. Tepid tea and cardboard biscuits. I barely know what I do but they pay me so I keep on doing it.
Waiting, waiting, always waiting – but what for?
Dressed in washed-out shades of beige, my head down, my shaking, shivering hands. I’m waiting for nothing, for no-one. Just waiting, that is all.
A freezing gust of wind rushed down the platform into Rebecca, making her hug herself and wish for warmth and home. There was stew in the fridge, some nice chunks of veg and lamb. Mix in a little red wine. That would bring the flavour out.
She saw the lights, heard the honk of its horn, and took a step back, away from the edge. She was a good few feet from it but it was a gesture she always made. To vehicles, to people, to any form that might consider her to be getting in its way. I don’t like to get in people’s way, she thought, as the train ground to halt, hissing hotly at her.
The doors clunked open.
Rebecca didn’t get on board, not yet.
There was something off about it, the train. It wasn’t cleaner than the others. There were the graffiti scrapes on the windows. There were the flickering yellow-white lights. There were seats with lining that had seen better days, foam slithering out like escaping flesh. Still, to her eyes, bobbing like goldfish in the thick lenses of her glasses; there was something not sitting right, she could feel it in her stomach.
The train hissed again. The whining tone that came before doors shut pierced her eyes. A cry of distress. A lonesome childish wail.
Rebecca was inside the train. The doors clunking shut. It was warm in here. It was empty too, of people, of their unforgiving stares.
Rebecca smiled and sat down.
Her hands were no longer shaking. Looking at them, lying limp in her lap, she willed them to twitch and judder. They did not. The motion of the train was soothing. It was a cradling feeling, that rocking, rollicking, bumping-thumping sensation, as it went through the dark and the tunnels. Lights darted by, made into amber fireflies by speed. Rebecca bounced lightly on her seat, feeling its aged springs creak. She bounced again, it creaked, she giggled. The train was going faster, she was sure. She could feel force tugging at her heartstrings, momentarily, as the outside world whistled on by. She bounced once more, giddy as a child on a fairground ride.
“To be a child again.” she said to herself.
It all went so fast, like this train, her life. So many years yet they all feel so short, so little, so insignificant in the end. All those thoughts, ideas, memories and momentary loves lost. Like those lights outside,
those orange flickers flashing past, gone, so quickly. All about them was that darkness, that endless night, it was permanent and eternal. It did not need the lights but they needed it. Otherwise, she thought, how would we know them? What light would guide us?
Looking out of the window, her nose touching its cool, scratched pane, Rebecca asked a question to the darkness, “What light’s guiding me? Am I following one? Tell me, please.”
The darkness kept quiet. The train honked and hooned, suddenly gushing into another tunnel. Rebecca jumped back from the window, from the jolt coursing through her. The air pressure change as the tunnel swallowed the train.
Was that it?
She sat back in her seat, sinking into it, feeling a shaking pass through her. One that kept itself inside, not showing in her hands. She was catching her breath, blinking her eyes. It was spreading, that shaking. Into the lolling, unshapely ovals of her breasts. Out to her fingertips, stumpy and sausage, not a trace of elegance or soft femininity was incarnated in her fifty-year flesh. I’m all the bad bits, she thought, the leftovers nobody else wanted.
The lights of the carriage, yellow and infectious, were no longer flickering. They were winking out. One by one. This happened sometimes but not like this. Going out in order, following a sequence. No, she thought, electrical failure, that’s why the train’s jolting, why I’m feeling this shaking. The train’s going to go off the rails, go up in flames, I’m going to die in a crash. She grabbed at the seating with her fingers and found it tacky. Soiled, peeling from her skin as she tugged her hands away. Rubbing them together, she felt a slight glueyness. She sniffed at her palms. Recognising the scent, she wiped her hands roughly on her skirt, her face twisting into knots and creases.
“The things people’ll do in public.”
The train was still in the tunnel, deep inside, a long way in. How much longer until we come out, she thought, the other side. Her hand fell onto the seat as she leaned forward to peer out of the window. There was that tacky texture, her face already twisting in on itself as she felt it.
There was something else. The seat was warm, pleasantly so. I ought to take my hand away, she thought, get up, sit meself somewhere else.
She didn’t.
Rebecca let her hand lie there though; feeling a searching heat tease its way across her palm, radiating out to her wrist and fingers. A warming web, growing, sending sensations up to her elbow. She sat back down, square on the seat. Feeling it get warmer. Letting it trace its way from her tingling hand, up through her arm to her throat, to her chest. The heat was a colour, same as the lost lights. Amber, it was, a sort of dull-bright.
The lights in the carriage were all out now. She was alone in the dark, warm and safe in the train, in this tunnel’s ancient womb. She closed her eyes, letting the umbra-born fingers touch her. Making her fingers rake across the seat, now sweating, becoming wet as well as warm. She undone a button, or it did, something soft and heavy was leaning against a breast, making the nipple bud until it was achingly hard. Her tongue traced the rough insides of her mouth, imagining another tongue as eager and exploratory for it to entwine with. There was something moist at her bare throat. Her skirt was being lifted; rucking back over her unbecoming thighs to reveal her rough, grey-threaded mound; a glistening grove of untouched brambles. She was gnawing at her lips, the inside of her mouth was coppery from molar bites already made in the flesh. Her eyes were tight shut. Her fingers dug into the moulting stuff of the seat, sunk in – until they tore out something hard.
The brakes shrieked. There was a jolt, not the one she wanted.
Oh no, she thought, can’t be.
It could not be but it was.
The train was slowing down; the lights were back on, they were out of the tunnel, the rhythm faltering, receding, leaving her. Everything was steadying itself back into the stillness of the world. She bit down hard on her bottom lip, tasting a bead of blood. There were tears in her eyes. She looked down at her hand, it was shining with something wet and prismatic. The wound she’d made in the seat was closing.
This couldn’t be happening, this can’t be happening. Not now, to me, after all of this waiting. My whole life waiting, waiting for this moment, this time – and now it’s gone. Passed. Over. There was a voice inside her, bitterness undefeated, and it told her she should have expected nothing more, perhaps even less.
The train stopped, hissing, doors open.
“But I don’t want to go.”
More hissing, harsher and harder.
“You can’t make me.”
A great groan; old, prehistoric with rust, passed through the carriage, making the windows shake. She uttered an incoherent sob in response. Then, Rebecca, dishevelled, hands shaking once again, disembarked, out into the cold of the world. The train pulled away, its hiss was curt and made her angry. She looked around. It was a station – could have been any station – anywhere. As cold as before. As overrun by the night as before. As empty too. Streetlamps cast bright shadows and mice scuttled in and out of nooks and crannies to drink at the running patches of afterglow. Rebecca shuffled across the platform and sat down on a bench. She gazed up and down the tracks wistfully, looking for those tell-tale lights, for another train. She sighed.
Hours later, she was still there, on that bench, looking down the shimmering oil shine of the tracks, listening out for that awaited sound. The platform, the station, she couldn’t leave them. Not like this, unfinished; that beautiful ache dulling and dispersing, a disintegrating web spreading across her lower abdomen and down her thighs into her knotty knees. That ache should have become a blossoming, an outpouring; a cry from the heart of her, a hot seed-shower of creation.
Nothing else like it in the world.
I just have to wait.
She walked up the platform and down the platform, whistling through her thin teeth into the endless night. I’m staying, she thought, I’ll get on the next one, whenever it gets here. It’ll get here. It must. It has to.
“I’ll wait as long as I have to.” she shouted.
She’s still there, you know. Sometimes, you can see her. Other times, you can hear her. Waiting, waiting; always waiting for a train that never comes.
Christmasland
It must be the bus, thought Maureen, as another jolt of wheels on slick tarmac sent varicose pain lancing up her legs to gnaw at her hips and the base of her spine. She was used to the pain though it usually rested as a constant ache in her calves whilst she shuffled from table to table at Pedro’s; the greasy spoon café where she worked.
It was an easy thing for the doctor to say she could get surgery. It was an easy thing for him to put her on a waiting list, sit back, smile, and tell her it was going to be all right. He got paid to do these things and he was never left waiting when something was wrong. She could smell it in his rich cologne and see it in the smooth, pressed lines of the powder blue shirt he wore under his white doctor’s coat. This was a man with money and those with money do not worry, nor suffer with their pain for long.
It could take her years to come off the waiting list and actually be seen by someone. She barely had enough money coming in each month to keep things going. She couldn’t afford private care and was old for a mum; forty-five when Charlie was born, when Matthew left her.
It wasn’t just younger men who ran out on their fiancées and wives. He’d not been cheating on her, and somehow that hurt more. The only reason he left was their son; the child he didn’t want. Infidelity was meant to be how these things happened, but not in her case. No, she had to be hurt by something far worse; emptier and more bitter.
“I can’t do it. I’m sorry, love. I’m too old for a son. I can’t start being a father now.”
He’d walked away from her hospital bedside, leaving her to scream, cry, beg, and then bring Charlie into the world alone.
Bastard.
Little Charlie – he was the light of her life. All of the clichés and then some came to mind. After a shitty day on her feet in
the café, he’d make it all go away with one of his smiles, by running up and grabbing at her jeans with his little hands. The marks left by his grubby fingers seemed to take forever to come out in the wash but Maureen didn’t mind. They were made by him, her little man, and she loved him so much.
Another violent jolt of the bus. Maureen hissed through her teeth as it stopped and made her way to the doors. She stepped out onto cold, wet pavement and made a moue with her lips as the pain’s teeth bit deep into her calves once again.
Varicose veins. Surgery. Easy for him. Too much money. Not enough sense. Bastard.
The carrier bags in her hands weighed a ton as she made her way down the narrow street towards the Chamberlin Estate. She wanted to get Charlie away from it one day. There were always used needles and soiled condoms to be found in the stairwells. The lifts reeked of shit and urine. He didn’t seem to see it – that was the joy of having a child – but he would one day and she didn’t want him spoiled by it; the world’s ugliness. She felt it might ruin him completely if he came to understand what it all meant. Though Maureen wasn’t sure there was much meaning in the filth that inveigled its way into most people’s lives. We see too much sometimes, she thought, we stare too long at the cracks and what’s caught in them.
She stopped walking and put the carrier bags down. Her arms were aching as much as her legs. She’d just catch her breath and be on her way again. Charlie would be home soon. He was getting big now; old enough to catch the bus on his own. With her legs being as they were, it was a relief that he could. Without a car, Maureen knew she couldn’t keep as close an eye on him as parents were meant to. A part of her wanted to think it was all nonsense, that too much molly-coddling would spoil the boy but another part of her knew the world wasn’t a safe place. Something had changed in its nature since she was a little girl. She couldn’t put a name to it but it scared her deeply.