Parly trains

This is a competition entry I wrote not long ago, based on an image prompt of a young girl sitting on a railway bridge. I felt like trying something different to my usual style, so I donned the mask of an elderly man and took on a new tone.

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They come in sporadic droves, loose throngs of camera-toting trench coats drifting across the weathered platform. Their passion is perhaps lonely in common life – mocked lightly by lovers, derided by cider-incensed workmates – but here, they are among friends; precise photographers, armchair historians, wheel technicians, scale model constructors, passengers, enthusiasts. In vintage rucksacks and plain handbags, they stash beginner’s handbooks, battered journals, pressed tickets and miniature first-class carriages. All of these strangers are variations on a theme. I am merely here for the ride.

There is a faint breeze of whispering on the night air, telling of veins and hearts and minds chilled with anticipation. Up and down the country, I am sure the scene is the same, though in most circumstances the air will be laden with thick, sweet smoke and the jarring flash of sparklers. We’ve chosen an odd place to celebrate bonfire night, but for every person here, I am sure that the toss up between dismal fireworks at their local primary school and this ghostly spectacle was no true contest. It may well be that the route of our journey may pass a glimpse of Catherine wheels. Certainly, some of my companions will know.

I do not engage with them. It’s no latent snobbery – I can admit to the crime of pretension, I am far too old to deny it – but rather a simple lack of interest. We may well label ourselves under the universal banner of railway enthusiasts – railfans, anoraks, even trainspotters – yet I don’t feel an affinity with my obligatory comrades. I take my pleasures alone.

Just as I contemplate passing the time with a swift smoke, a raucous cheer erupts from the platform. In the far distance, twin stars blaze towards us, accelerating like rare comets. This is the source of our collective excitement, the somewhat pathetic object of our interest. Behold – the last parliamentary train to leave Burrwick Croft station. The final journey.

Some people call them ghost trains, railway lines that only run once a week in the dead of night. The tracks are laid between ghost towns, flagstone pockets in the British countryside that really have no need for a train station. Closing the station doors is expensive and tiresome, and so the unused services run on – until the railway owners decided to put this particular spirit to rest.

Through the sudden wild haze of lens flares and chatter, my eyes glaze over, gazing past the yellow-striped train into the devoted crowd. Between great flanks of plaid and corduroy, I see a flushed pink head of hair, curled and tempered into soft waves. The colour sparks painful nostalgia in my chest, but I bury it hastily. Pink hair isn’t exclusive to my past, after all.

Yet the woman’s ring-laden fingers and ancient satchel pierce me in turn, acute bullet wounds between my ribs. Her face tilts in the blazing light, facing me slowly – and that face, crinkled with age, pale in the wind, is more than familiar. It’s a living memory.

The train’s gears grind to a loud, laboured halt, hissing as the engines wind down. The mob descends on the doors – too polite to prise them open, too impatient to wait behind the yellow line – but I’m static. How can she be here? How can my life possibly come full circle like this?

Just as the train doors separate, her head twists like an owl’s, surveying the station with manic teenage excitement. She catches my sad eyes and everything else grows still. Waves pulse under the concrete, rocking my faint body. I didn’t forget my heart medication again. This instability is purely mental.

We match each other’s step towards the doors, delicate twin shadows meeting in the middle. No words pass between us. She may be lined with age, sallow in the cheeks, eccentric in jewellery – but her eyes are the same bright hyacinth blue that they were when we were young.

Adrenaline flushes my skin with a long-absent chill. I feel like I could run forever – run with her, as we used to do, down the deserted train lines that we sought out in the springtime. I could lie down – in my fantasy, my bad back permits it – on the rotting tracks, fingers knotted with hers, and laugh madly in the knowledge that no trains would come to kill us. We were wild with the belief that we would never die.

We are the last passengers to board. No words pass between us. Instead, she finds herself a vacant window seat, still lopsided in gait and wholly unladylike. Forever her blind terrier, I follow, sliding myself into the seat opposite. No words pass between us.

The train leaves the station, leaving us in the twenty-minute time warp in which we cease to exist. We are in a secret twilight zone, one which no other person in this country will ever experience again. The feeling used to excite me like nothing else, but tonight it brings me pain.

Acknowledging the finality of this ride is too much to bear. Neither of us are willing. No words pass between us.

-

Once I departed the train, I was itching with the desire to do something. I hadn’t planned to explore the railway itself – such endeavours are for teenagers, not old hermits like me – but the sight of my old comrade has sparked something in me. Cane, medication and paper map in tow, I depart the train station for the tracks, wandering through the graffiti-tarnished tunnels that weeds have already claimed for their own. I come to the bridge, hardly ten minutes from the station, which overlooks a murky reservoir.

I sit with my legs hanging over the edge, ignorant of health and safety. The teenager roused in me tonight has no care for such things. He cares only for the moment. He cares only for Heather Rockwood and her badly dyed hair, her patch-adorned satchel, her knack for rolling

cigarettes and instigating kisses. He is lost to the sands of time.

“Might I join you?”

My heard jerks back, fast enough to crick my neck. Grumbling into my mottled hands, I nod, barely looking at the person who followed me. I should’ve known she would. She’s never been one to let things lie.

“I owe you,” I blurt out. Quickly collecting myself, I clear my throat and mutter, “I still owe you half a pack of cigarettes.”

“Now now, Ollie,” Heather crosses her legs under her lengthy skirt, the effort of contortion flickering on her face. “Old debts don’t really matter, do they?”

I push my glasses up my nose, a nervous tick I haven’t indulged in decades. “Nobody’s called me Ollie in years.”

“Nobody’s rode a Parly train with me in years,” she counters, grinning with her yellowish teeth. “It doesn’t have the same appeal when you haven’t got a partner to make fun of the freaks with.”

My thin lips twitch into a smile, remembering the times we giggled at the people who carved parts of the train seats off to take home as souvenirs. “But what if we were the freaks all along? One man’s freak is another’s average joe.”

“Did you not get less pretentious with age?” she rolls her eyes, stiffly adjusting her posture.

“I’m afraid not,” I glance at her hands, hidden between the thick pleats of her floral skirt. I’m not sure why, but I’m compelled to bury my own, to conceal the immaculate golden band that sits on my ring finger. I’m not sure if she has one – part of me wants to doubt it – but really, it should be meaningless. We haven’t been in love for years. Of course we moved on and married.

This is the moment where we should trawl over our lives, catch up on missed birthdays, miscarriages, friend’s funerals and wedding days. Several times, I start to choke up the obligatory questions, but words fail me. I realize that Heather has no interest in Oliver Farley, and that I have little interest in Heather’s new surname.

Oliver is not present. No words pass between him and Heather. Rather, it is Ollie who sits with his legs swinging off the precipice, dreaming of a future without death. It is Ollie that I embody as I offer Heather my hand, the back lying flat against the pebble-dashed ground. There’s a moment’s hesitation – a visible shedding of age – before I feel her palm against mine, as rough and warm as I remember.

In the far distance, the lightening sky is doused in pink flames. Fireworks explode above the nearest village. It feels as though it’s in another universe, a different timeline. My hand lightly squeezes Heather’s. Maybe our love can only live in places that don’t truly exist.