Story Cities

by Cherry Potts

  She’d have offered to pay for his time as well but it was best to keep the arrangement simple.

  Light filtered through the net curtain, the sounds of traffic mixing with drowsy birdsong. The pump cut off, restarting a minute later. The time it took him to shampoo. He always seemed slightly too eager to jump into the shower after sex. But he was a considerate lover in all other regards and, after all, they only had an hour together. An hour and a quarter if she was lucky with public transport.

  Still, she was thankful for these stolen moments, while the sensations were still fresh, the memory almost overwhelming.

  She’d thought, once or twice, about letting herself be impregnated, but he’d make a lousy husband. Insecure about the disparity in their salaries, in their positions. He might, she admitted, make a decent enough father, but shackled together they’d both grow resentful. She could always go it alone. Not yet, though; her career wasn’t quite where she wanted it to be.

  He wandered back in, sporting a white towel.

  ‘I’ll need to rebook,’ she commented.

  ‘Don’t bother,’ he replied, uncharacteristically abrupt.

  She propped herself up, feeling the cotton pull at her damp skin. ‘Oh?’

  ‘I’ve got a new job. A full-time one.’

  ‘Some alternative arrangement?’ she suggested, as he dried his legs.

  He shook his head. ‘No. It’s been… lovely. But this is just a distraction, isn’t it? An interlude.’

  ‘A good distraction, I trust?’

  He smiled, shrugged. ‘The best.’

  At the office she stared at the cluster of emails clamouring for attention. Noise. Just… useless noise. Zoned in on a meeting request, a week in advance, organised by her opposite number. She checked the scheduled time: two-thirty. The bitch.

  She could keep the pretence going. Find another partner. It wouldn’t be so very difficult.

  Angrily she stabbed Accept.

  STARLIGHT

  C.A. Limina

  There is one. A single one. A lone white dot on a black carpet, the last soldier standing in an old war. It flickers and reflects off the hotel window, and as he blurs the glass with his breath, he wonders if there was any other alternative.

  The city flickers and beats like a cosmic being, thrumming with sounds and smells and light – all the light missing from the heavens. The stillness of the hotel room feels like the sterility of a space pod, protecting him from all the light and darkness and void that lies outside the window.

  The humming of the air conditioner drives him mad. The unperturbed duvet, the soft yellow glowing from beneath the walls, the bathroom door leading into otherworldly white lights and porcelain surfaces, the fact that nobody but his boss is going to call him and ask how his business trip is going, it’s all maddening. It reminds him that he hasn’t had a good night of sleep in twenty years. He’d thought that if he got a promotion, or made a name for himself, or slept in a five-star hotel with decent internet reception, it would’ve got better, but it didn’t. He couldn’t sleep. Not while the city was awake.

  How does that star feel?

  How does it feel, watching grassy plains suddenly morph into glass and asphalt? How does it feel to be somewhere other than this hotel, this sterile pod protecting him from the smog and corruption and noise? How does it feel to be a dull dot on a black night, staring down at an ephemeral flash of light and madness?

  His hands leave marks on the clear glass, and he knows this is the highest he’ll ever be. The closest he’ll ever be to a star. The hotel vibrates beneath his feet, and he can feel the hollow in his chest, the ringing in his ears, the cracking of his bones. Sleep, he thinks. Just a little sleep. That’s all I need.

  So he does. He pulls the handle of his little space pod, letting the car honks and pollution seep into the vacuum. He dreams of falling into a distant star, watching as the light of the city flickers in the distance. He smiles. And he sleeps.

  TRANSPORT

  COFFEE

  Shamini Sriskandarajah

  She sits opposite me, holding her coffee in both hands but not touching her piece of cake that sits on the table, wrapped in paper. The cake I laboured over last night, the cake that was supposed to make this journey smoother for us.

  She is not going to give me a break. She will sit there until the train gets to our station, staring out of the window, slowly sipping her coffee. The coffee that a stranger made in a few minutes. But she won’t touch the cake that took me two hours.

  NOT EVERY TRAIN

  Jasmin Kirkbride

  The train is mine. It is where I eat breakfast and apply my face, where I sleep off work, so that I can put on ‘bright and merry’ for my family who don’t like seeing dark rings. It is where I dream about my worries and desires. It is where I laugh and cry at dog-eared books and earnest podcasts that I wouldn’t otherwise have time for.

  The train is my home. Mine. Partly because in the anonymous commuter hour, nobody is watching me, not on an inner-city train. The grind of the rails is a static safety-net for the introverted and over-worked. This is where we can be ourselves. Sometimes we just stare vacantly out of the window or into our laps. A communal exercise designed for the individual.

  Although the route I take is the same each day, the trains themselves vary. Yet the extruded plastic seats and psychedelic fabric designs are repeated with such uncanny similarity, that it is as if all trains are connected by a thread of time and space, so that when I lean against a glass partition for support, I am leaning against all glass partitions on every train, being held by each of those huge and indestructible machines, their collective consciousness speaking in a Morse code of hurrying railway sleepers, speaking to each other, and to me.

  They tell me I am safe, that there will always be a destination for me. That if I board at A, B will soon arrive. For me, the railways are a measure of control, a way to contain the labyrinthine city that swings ever further out of my hands. As long as I belong to the trains, I know where I’m going.

  But slowly, I realise the trains operate beyond my knowledge. At night, I hear them – my train, and its siblings – ricocheting from borough to borough, their squeals as drivers brake them too hard, or their galloping laughter as they haul freights and passengers. I sense them other places too: their thunder shaking the ground under my feet in the park, or the tell-tale crack of overhead wires beyond a row of houses. Sometimes just a far-off horn and a whisper of track: shuck-shuck, shuck-shuck-shuck…

  Obsessively, I try to trace every one of them, catch them and memorise their timetables, so that I can speak their language fluently. But they cannot all be found. I hear trains even when I know there can’t be any, unknown ghosts on lines that do not exist. Imagined heartbeats in the cadaver metropolis growing around me.

  And I have to relinquish myself to the greater master of us all: the city itself, which we cannot avoid, and which forces us to make the cold and lonely steel of the trains our home.

  THE SECOND CAR FROM THE FRONT

  Alexandra Penland

  They have spent forty-five minutes together every day for five years. It begins as a ritual: each arriving at the platform to catch the 7:15 in a state of slight agitation. Tapped toes on octagonal brick. Checked watches. Picked-at nails. The train arrives like a silver dragon and swallows them alive: a young professional woman, a man in his daily suit, a person of indiscriminate gender who clearly works in the tech industry, an older gentleman in a museum docent’s uniform. They take their seats, always in the second car from the front. In five years, it is a routine they know by heart.

  They have never spoken to each other.

  The techie sports a hoodie and headphones. They started wearing cargo shorts sometime in the 90s and never stopped, and their hair changes colours with the season. The museum docent enjoys colourful bow ties. The man in a suit has been, for the past five years, slightly irritated by the docent’s garish taste, but the techie enjoys them immensely, and often
comments to their friends at work on what colour or pattern the docent wore that morning. The young, professional woman is serious and works in finance, and she does not have an opinion on the bow ties: for her the commute is meditative, spent half-asleep to the classical music that plays through white earbuds.

  The man stands near the door. The techie is rude and steals two seats, one for themselves and one for their backpack. The woman likes to sit on the right side, staring out the window that does not look at walls. The docent refuses to use the accessible seating, choosing instead to sit near the back of the car. When possible, he always chooses the same spot.

  Each day they are surrounded by others, by tourists and transients and school trips. Occasionally someone joins them for a time, but new riders never seem to last. Their commute changes, or they start sitting in a different car. Some days a preacher or performer will intrude, calling for the residents to seek forgiveness from sin, or pay with small change for drums that no one asked to hear. On such occasions the riders exchange frustrated glances.

  Sometimes the train is delayed, and they are forced to wait in the tunnels. Once the train was delayed for two and a half hours. The man nearly broke a window trying to call his job. They had no cell service in the car.

  The techie was the first to notice when the docent stopped riding. The woman noticed next, then the young man. There was no way to learn why things had changed. They did not know each other. Perhaps he had moved. Retired for good. Died.

  When a tourist tried to take the docent’s seat, it was the woman who intervened. Then the techie, two stops later. Then the man. They said the same thing, instinctively.

  ‘Sorry. We’re saving it for someone.’

  SLIM ODDS

  Laura Besley

  Eight point seven million people in this city and I realise I’m sitting opposite my sister. I’m travelling north on one of the older underground trains. What are the odds? She’s reading (some things never change) a paperback with a colourful cover of abstract shapes. She turns the page, slowly, letting the words soak into her. Not like me; I read quickly, greedily, eager to find out what happens next. We were always different in that way.

  I study her shorter hair, now showing a few strands of grey; her thicker frame clad in an oversized woollen turtleneck and sensible black trousers; and her face which is essentially the same, but with a few more lines around her eyes. Don’t look up, I think.

  We haven’t spoken in years. Most of the time I manage to lock the feelings of hurt and hatred in a box and bury it deep inside, but every now and then the lid creaks open and I am overwhelmed by a sadness that leaves me feeling bereft for days. Money was the cause of it all. When I look back I can’t believe I was stupid enough to fall out over money.

  The train rattles on, clacking along the tracks, alternating between darkness and light as we move in and out of stations and I try to decide whether to talk to her or not. I keep thinking I should, but then remember that I haven’t moved in five years and not once has she contacted me; no birthday card or Christmas card or phone call. Is she still not ready to talk? Last year I walked by her house to find a different family eating dinner behind the sash windows and was stabbed by the realisation that she had moved without letting me know.

  Bland tiles and the familiar station logo come into view and the train slows. I take a breath and tell myself that when we pull out of this station, I will reach out to her. Suddenly she jumps out of her seat and rushes out of the train, clutching her book in one hand and her bag in the other. As she does, her gaze runs over my face, but I can’t be certain she has registered my familiar features.

  The doors close and I stand up, better to see her walk down the platform. She turns her head and looks back into the train. Now she sees me. Is that a smile I see as the train pulls away? Maybe I’ll never know.

  OTHER SIGNALS

  Annabel Banks

  Four stops left and I’d limp home faster than this elephantine, nose-to-tail traffic. But I’ve paid my fare, already hit my ten thousand steps, so what the hell. Bottom on seat, skirt tucked under, shoulder to metal, to purring glass. I breathe lightly, scroll my phone: leave me alone.

  The man next to me is fastidious in his untouching; I sense the tension in his pressed-together thighs, blue trousers so tight they could be body paint.

  He scrolls his phone, too. I leave you alone lady don’t care about you.

  I love him.

  Three stops. The sense of others presses in. Passengers droop over bars, tightly bound or unapologetically spread, depending on their mass and temperament. The city is refusing to release the day’s heat, prickling top lips, staining backs and sticking flopped hair to foreheads. A woman talks, all liquid language and spasming hands that graze the collar of the man in front. She seems angry, but I’ve big-citied for long enough now to know that’s her-as-me, not her-as-her.

  Seven on, five off. The man next to me leaves.

  Four off, six on, to settle like sieved flour. My seat is towards the rear.

  I am alone. Scroll, scroll. Breathe lightly. Love.

  *

  Three off. One on: an old lady with a kerfuffle of bags. Bright red hat, woollen skirt, wet-faced and gasping. She approaches my kingdom of one-on-a-seat and makes the signals of intent, the uncaught eye-flick and half-turn to reverse into position. I shuffle my legs, move my shoulders a little, bumping against the trembling wall. There is no more room, but this is a gesture of invitation, a promise to share properly. Love me. I am safe.

  The woman bumps down heavily, exhales, then bends to scoop the tattered plastic bags onto her lap. Inside, the contents shift and rattle. In a few moments, I will use my side-eye to examine them, curious to see what she’s carrying.

  She scrunches the necks of the bags, fists tight as a promise. You may not see.

  Scroll, scroll, turn away. Streets vibrate with the engine, pedestrians blurred into impressions.

  One stop to go.

  The woman turns her head, all I see you, and – oh god – I feel the words gathering. She will ask What are you reading? Which stop should I get off? Tell me, have you found Jesus? Or she’ll ask me What’s the time? She might demand some cash. Tell me of her miseries. Of her children and their plans. She’ll exclaim Oh you’re so pretty! She is going to call me damned. She’ll ask me Where’s your skirt from? She will bring a knife from the bag. She will cut me a piece of pineapple. She will stab me in the throat. She will ask if I have daughters. Begin to chant her day. Produce an unscratched scratchcard: hey, you got a coin?

  Half-stand, hand out. Bing the bell: I hate I fear I go.

  SCHOOL BUS

  Evleen Towey

  From the small village, in the black and yellow bus filled with cigarette smoke, they travelled daily to the secondary school in the city. It took over an hour each way. They often had to stand, squashed between the sweaty working men and women. If they had a seat, they read a book, or did their homework. The insides of their shirt collars were dark with grime each night.

  But they noticed a wider world through the windows of the bus. City people walking purposefully to their offices; hairstyles like on the telly; wearing fashionable clothes like in the magazines. Occasionally, expensive cars like a Rolls Royce with a personalised number plate swept by. There was money in the city.

  Eventually making new friends, they used their bus passes on a Saturday: swimming in the Olympic-sized pool, fearlessly jumping off the twenty five metre board; going ‘round the shops’, dreaming of buying a knickerbocker glory in the café where the rich kids went after school. Some parents even held accounts for their children in the department stores, so they could buy whatever clothes they liked. Jealousy and camaraderie walked hand in hand.

  After they outgrew window shopping, they took the bus to the theatre: ten of them turning up for an evening performance – still in their school uniforms – then queueing at the stage door for the actors’ autographs. The city cinema showed foreign films and once or twic
e, they were allowed to go to a pop concert.

  Next they were special bussed to the nearby boys’ school: a weekly debating club (for grand ideas); a termly disco (for snogging). One early morning in a cream and red single-decker, the hiking club took them out of the city to the hills. They could look back at the smog and the factories, see the spires of churches and cathedrals, wonder and worry about the smoke from the hospital incinerator.

  A special bus took them to Prize Night at City Hall, with the mayor handing out book tokens and sound advice. They sang their hearts out on the school song. They will never forget those words.

  Then they were gone, as far away as possible, to other university cities.

  They’ve been back, of course, for their reunions: by train, by car and by taxi to the wine bars and restaurants. But there’s rubble where the chapel was, and a prefab on the playing field. City Hall looks naked, cleaned of its sooty cloak. The skyscrapers have copulated and brought forth. The hills have receded, like their hair.

  One day a smartly dressed Professor looked up and saw, sitting on a bus, the ghost of the girl she used to be. They smiled at each other, understanding that the bus had lifted them up out of the village and set them on their feet. They’d been planted like seeds in the city, where they were fed and where they flowered, casting their pollen to the wind and grey skies.

  CAFÉS

  COFFEE MEETING

  Stuart Larner

  Sitting at a table in the café under the escalator, he thumbs through the morning paper. Behind him, in the main body of the café, he hears the hiss and roar of the coffee machine.