A Kennedy - Serious Sweet

But Jon is going to wait.

She isn’t here.

Beyond him is even more glass: the walls and doors to the station concourse — another wide and immanent space.

She isn’t here.

Peering through he can see — of course — no rush-hour crowds, no heads raised to watch the indicator boards, intent like worshippers, like animals standing ready to be startled.

She isn’t here.

Without its people, the place seems burdened, packed with a strange energy, on the verge of being reckless.

She isn’t here.

One of the late, of the final, trains must have straggled in, because now a small wave of passengers appears. They amble, or rush towards the Underground. They head out of the exit that leads past him and walk in the outside air, gravity serving them nicely. A man by himself and draped in, no doubt, significant colours trots by and lets loose the kind of cries that end a Friday and start a weekend. The man’s calling does not summon companions, does not stir up echoes of agreement, as he seems to expect. He shakes his head and sways on.

Jon studies the angles of backs and shoulders, the differences of walks and hair, bags, coats and … I’ve no reason to bother — they’re not her. Jon doesn’t know these people: they are strangers, they are irrelevant to his purpose, they are in the fucking way.

If this were a film, they would be the crowd. You don’t need to care about the crowd when it’s a film — the crowd is only there, all dressed up and shifting about, to make the world look real and populated. The people aren’t people, they’re scenery, the backdrop.

She isn’t here.

This entire experience is becoming very much like watching a film, or dreaming a film, or discovering a film has opened up and folded one inside its working.

Jon can’t tell if this is good or not.

She isn’t here.

He wraps his arms around his chest. And it is past midnight and they haven’t wished each other sweet dreams and this fact seems terrible and sad.

But I can fold my arms and I can feel and believe this is me. I am holding on.

And all of this fucking glass and all of this fucking waiting and all of this fucking …

Please. Please.

The pervading emptiness of an almost closed railway station has started to invite a weird ascension, to demand that he drift up, unanchored, clawing at glass to slow himself until he breaks into the depth of the night and becomes all lost and gone.

No, no, no. Feet on the ground.

He clings tighter to his own ribs — caught in the arms of someone he does not love and who cannot love him.

I am stressed. This is simply stress. I am not in danger, I only feel as if I am in danger. A feeling is not a fact.

Men with unnamed professions might arrive soon to ask him questions he can’t answer — soon, or this Monday, or this week, tonight — without making a proper appointment, without warning — in four minutes’ time, or in no time at all — and disgrace and disgrace and disgrace will follow after.

But I am not currently in danger.

He moves, still hugging this invisible parcel of nothing, palms on his shoulder blades, and he eases into the actual station precincts. This is not an effort to put a solid roof over his head, not an attempt to prevent any type of yanking levitation, a wildly floating display of guilt.

Like the test for witches.

There he is — the informer, transgressor, traitor, coward, the too-little-and-too-late man.

Another train deposits a scatter of travellers. He knows none of them. He loves none of them.

It would take a while — if I can be logical — for Meg to get here and I’m not sure — night bus, night train, Tube — how she would be arriving, if she is arriving …

The city’s provision of public transport, while not ideal, still offers a varied and flexible …

It wouldn’t be that hard. She has choices …

I should have offered to send a cab …

I should have said I would come to meet her wherever she was …

I should have arranged to be somebody else …

He wasn’t even sure which direction he should face: outside for buses or inside for trains, for the subway … The tiny, repeated bewilderments of his situation, the turning, the shuffling, the knowledge that he was so extremely, pathetically obvious — a man expecting someone who never arrives — these factors combined to mean he was viewing the world — again — through a wet haze of splitting light.

A man expecting someone who never arrives and therefore makes him weep.

If she finds me like this …

Infantile.

If she finds me with my back turned …

Discourteous.

He has so many worries, like dogs scratching at a door.

He has so many pleasures and they scratch too and he does want to let them in, in, in.

I like the way she shouts.

I am of the opinion that hearing her shout has made me a different shape.

Jon blinks to regain his composure and then rolls his gaze back and forth and round and round, scanning.

His briefcase should be set down neatly between his feet.

But he can’t recall when he last had his sodding briefcase. It has gone absent without leave. He has maybe left the thing at Becky’s flat. If it is genuinely lost, gone astray, abandoned, this will be both a professional failing and a shame.

Additional disgrace.

Before he can avoid it, he recalls another time — lost, gone astray, abandoned — a previous wait on a railway platform. The memory falls on him like water, soaks in.

He was in the big — it seemed big — main station at Inverness and holding his dad’s hand and they were both standing to meet a train, because Jon’s mum was coming back on it from somewhere, from her own mum’s perhaps, or else perhaps she’d been at Auntie Bartlett’s. And the whole occasion had been not as advertised.

Dad had said the expected and inevitable things — We’ll be glad to see her, won’t we? He’d gone on about tiredness in women and the need for pleasant resting and a quiet house and Jon being a good boy for ever to keep the Sigurdsson household free of further tiredness. Jon had not exactly seen, but certainly perceived this threat of illness in his mother as a kind of smoke, black and thick around everyone’s ankles, eager to trip them up. We’ll all go to the pictures tomorrow, would you like that? Other treats were suggested as possibilities — Jon’s mother not being herself exactly a treat — and every offer was only a promise that showed what came next was going to be appalling.

Inverness Station was where, for the first time, Jon had been able to watch while what someone said and what was the truth were peeled right apart from each other, like skin from muscle, like muscle from bone. This was proper lying, important and adult lying. This was the kind of lying that meant reality hung about them in sticky shreds and that it was ugly and made no sense.

Dad’s face smiling but not happy and his hand being almost violent around mine and I was thinking that we’d enjoyed ourselves while we were being alone together and that it had been different from how it was with Mum in a way that I’d liked — different from the stuff before which I couldn’t quite remember, but which was bad. Dad told me the badness would never happen again. He told me so unconvincingly that it was almost not a lie. Mum always brought the badness in with her — we knew that. We couldn’t please her. We did try. I did try.