Trains, no planes, no automobiles – Nigel Kennedy – Vivialdi Four Seasons – 1989

another short short story based on a piece of music

 

In a fit of madness or maybe sanity, she decides that the only way forward is to run away, far away and so takes a job in a children’s home in almost rural Scotland.

She neglects to tell her new employers that she doesn’t drive and when she is forced to admit this gap, her new colleagues stare at her – country dwellers all, they see driving as a right of passage, the thing you do when you are seventeen legally, the thing you have been doing, illegally and semi-legally in fields and lanes since you were twelve.

 

But, there is a train that shuttles the straight line between Glasgow and Helensborough and that stops conveniently close, if by that, you mean two miles from the children’s home by way of country lanes of absolute darkness and no pavements.

 

Sometimes, kinder colleagues offer lifts to and from the station, recommend driving instructors or friends selling cheap cars. She cannot tell them that she is not staying, that learning to drive would be an admission that she is putting down some tentative roots in a place where everything shuts before eleven at night. Her pedestrian status marks her as an outsider, someone just passing through.

 

So, she spends hours on tiny trains, two carriages long, trains that stop at every village and more mysteriously, stop in places where there is nothing but a railway platform. She wonders where  passengers come from or where they go to when they step out of the carriage.

 

She has moved here by train, admittedly a bigger, faster train and so has been forced to travel light, stereo and record collection left behind in the last room in the last shared house and for the first month lives in a world of silence and doesn’t like it.

 

With her first month’s salary, she buys a cutting edge portable CD player and ten CDs and because re-invention is the name of this year’s game, she buys only classical music and decides that this will be just like learning to enjoy olives, initial mild disgust eventually turning to fondness and finally to a place where olives are truly a favourite food and not just an affectation.

 

Her re-invention is not just limited to music, she joins a library, borrows Satre and De Beauvoir and because she owns no other books is forced to read them, has given up on buying NME, Melody Maker and The Face because nothing  happens and nobody ever comes here, to the place that she will not call home.

 

Occasionally, she wonders if she is actually dead and this is some sort of hell, a hell not just of other people, but a hell of people she has nothing to say to and who have nothing to say to her.

 

Her train journey routine is already set, walk from the tiny rented room, which is still bleak and empty, to the railway station and then the wait on the platform in a coat which simply isn’t up to the job of a Scottish winter, arms wrapped around herself, headphones already plugged in and because she has become too lazy to change the CD, it’s always Viviadi, always skipped straight to winter, because in her hurry to run away from where she was, she neglected to notice that winter in Scotland lasts half a year.

 

She has fallen back into her teenage habit of seeing her life as a movie with whatever the music around her as the soundtrack, she wonders what the other passengers make of her, whether they notice the starting to grow out big city hair cut, the penguin classic on her knee,eyes looking soulfully out of the train window, surely they must be able to read her tortured artistic soul?

 

She begins to fear that she may actually go completely mad, that one day she will stand up on the train and exit it onto one of those platforms that seem to belong nowhere or equally terrifying that she may find herself in one of the two hairdressers on the town’s one main street – “A Cut Above” or “Curl up and Dye” just before she buys a fleece and a bobble hat, before she books driving lessons, develops a taste for Irn-Bru and deep fried haggis.

 

It is a huge relief when the man she ran away from writes to tell her that his life is meaningless without her and that he has bought a kitten. She gives notice at work and when she packs, discovers that in six months she has only acquired enough additional possessions to fill an extra carrier bag.

 

As the proper big train finally pulls into the big city, she removes the Vivaldi CD from the player and leaves it on the seat.

 

Mask

( bit of a disclaimer here- I’m not anti-masks, I absolutely understand their importance in public spaces)

 

I see your son

In the middle of a full on meltdown

Spread eagled like a stranded starfish

On the supermarket floor

And everyone is staring

I want to give you the look

The look that says

I know

I really know 

That complex cocktail of emotions

Part shame

Part anger

Part burning wish

That the floor would open up and swallow you

Or

Preferably him

If only for a moment or two

But all you feel is my eyes on you

It’s easy to read judgement there

When you can’t see the smile

 

And I’m thinking of

Fred and Brenda

Vera, Ted

Like to pop to the shops

For a pint of milk

A little chat

Some company

And reinforcement that they  are still really here

And in the middle of Lidl

( and you either get that or you don’t)

When previously we would gather

And discuss

Whether we could use a zither or a set of drums

But

Fabric mufffes voices

Makes it difficult to hear

So

Instead

I do the little wave

And leave

The guy behind the checkout

The one with purple hair

The one who would clearly rather be anywhere than here

The one who says he’s always tired

So

Usually 

I go into mother mode

Ask if he’s eating properly

Drinking enough water

Says something funny

Witty

Sharp

So

I have to say

I’m smiling

You just can’t see it

And i love his response

Guess we’ll all have to develop

Extremely expressive eyebrows.

 

Clubs and drugs and parenting – Kernkraft 400 – Zombie Nation – 1998

1. Clubs and drugs and parenting – Kernkraft 400 – Zombie Nation – 1998

 

                      We are drowning in small children, three under the age of three between        us.  Days are somehow both endless and flash past so fast that it’s easy to lose track of where we are- where the hell did Monday go?

We spend most days together, the children so used to us that their constant demands for juice, biscuits, glitter, carrots cut differently or simply something, anything and now are directed at whichever of us is nearest or seems most likely to say yes.

 

We both  have bits of work, surprisingly well paid, taking turns to drop children off, trying not to run to the car with the relief of a day with grown ups and the possibility of eating food while it’s still hot. Giddy with freedom, we remember to text each other and bring back treats, try and fit a week’s worth of living into eight hours. So desperate for solitude and silence that a tail-back on the motorway is welcomed, a sigh of relief, a calculation of how long the delay will be, the possibility of children being asleep when we return.

 

But we are trying hard to parent well, attend playgroups, library story telling sessions, feed lambs at the city farm, count ducks on the canal.

At the community centre, the other mother’s don’t quite make eye contact, their smiles reaching only their mouths. They, secure in their identities, sensible baby change bags, sliced fruit in tupperware, dressed in the uniform of leggings, jumpers baggy enough to hide the battleground that are their bodies and sensible shoes are puzzled by us, cannot work out our relationship, cannot work out why we look the way we do, cannot work out what we actually live on.

 

The children, still young enough to wear what we chose, are always beautifully dressed. We build up debt with french mail order companies, build up debt on credit cards, everything is built on the basis of someone else’s money

 

And we shop, dear God we shop, we shop so much that tiny expensive boutiques ring us to tell us that they have new lines in, confident that we will be buying. We wear the most ridiculous outfits, embrace every day for it’s catwalk possibilities and become adept at removing glitter and glue from Paul Smith tailoring.

 

And all of this goes some way to explaining why becoming cocaine dealers seems a wise and profitable career move.

 

We are surprisingly good at it, efficient, organised, reliable. It turns out that the skills needed to get through three days of rain with three small children are very transferable indeed.

 

We make money, we make lots of money, handbags stuffed with twenty pound notes, a biscuit tin contains a handful of slightly soggy digestives and a wad of tenners, we are never short of notes to test run a line, because of course, when your home is full of good quality coke, well, it would be rude not to at least sample a bit.

 

We spend the money, we spend all the money, we spend slightly more than all the money, but that’s ok, because there is always more.

 

We are adept at the handover in clubs – money to one of us – wrap from the other – nod and move on, but this track stops business dead, stone dead – single hi-hat intro beats, enough time to register, smile at each other and as the rhythm builds up, we’re there on the dance floor.

We buy the CD, play it endlessly in the cars, for six months it is the soundtrack of our children’s life – three safely belted in bodies, heads all nodding in rhythm while we sing along…..

“Zombie, zombie nation”

 

Miraculously, we come through all of this completely unscathed, just proving that sometimes crime really does pay.