Parallax

Parallax

I see her everyday. Or, at least, everyday I go to work. She seems to have become a constant in my life, just like the five fifteen from Innsbruck.

She is nondescript: brown hair, brown eyes, brown height, brown voice. Not that I've heard her voice, but I imagine it would be quiet and mousy, just like her. And melancholic. It seems her sad eyes will swallow the world, suck everything into their tear-wet depths. I never wait to see that happen. I have a feeling that if I do, if I wait to see her disappointed face when she realizes, finally, last stop, that she hopes in vain, I will have to see the end of something huge. Something profound. So I rush away quickly across the platform barrier, up the twenty steps, across the flashy crystal boutique, and the twelve hours and twenty-two seconds to another day.

I have a feeling she's waiting for someone. Husband, Lover, Boyfriend? I imagine it's someone who will bring light and laughter to her world, and colour to her wardrobe. It's always the same old belted trench coat, you know. It sweats silently on warm days and goes flap, flap, flap on windy ones. She never pays it mind though. Just stands there in her brown coat and brown boots with the slightly scuffed toes, and waits.

She stands in the same spot every evening, waiting, waiting, waiting. People avoid her instinctively, parting around her by common unspoken consent. She pays them no heed, almost as if she were invisible to them, and they to her. Huge eyes eat up the seconds as they suck every last passenger off the train. With each happy, sullen, grim, bland face she sees, I imagine the hope within her getting lower and lower.

I always rush away before it drains away completely, but I told you that already, didn't I?

Summer turned to winter, and the snow piled up outside. The station was fluorescent and bleak in the long dark nights. They had decorated its steel and concrete in green and red. Festive colours fully a month before Christmas... There was no colour on her--no tinsel, no glitter, nothing.

That day, I got off the train one last time before the start of my break, right up to the dismal second week of January. Already raw from the unexpected break of routine this entailed, I was further agitated to note that she wasn't there.

I hadn't realised how I registered her presence, almost instinctively, even from the end of the straight, grey length of the platform. Instead, there was a group of people near the ticket barrier where she normally stood. Something made me alter my sixty four step beeline to the second-from-the-right exit; my hurrying footsteps ever so loud as I made my way to the small group.

The peaceful, precise routine of the day broken, even the phlegmatic Austrians were moved to gesture. Economical and precise, but gestures nonetheless. Apparently an unusual occurrence had taken place.

They were surrounding a body--it, someone, lay supine on the floor, fenced in by staccato bursts of German.

It wasn't her.

It was a young boy, a teenager: unnatural hair, unnaturally pale. Apparently he had overdosed on glue, and fainted away untidily on the platform. Vulgar, curiosity sated, I made my way up the twenty steps, across the gaily lit boutique and into the holly-garlanded street.

It was odd, her not being there--like missing your morning tea, or not hearing your lipstick snap shut after ritual application. A lack of comforting closure, a destruction of vacuous routine.

Why wasn't she there?

My feet carried me up the cobblestones of Broadway and into a brightly-lit tavern, rather than through the required hundred and thirteen steps and two turnings to my door. The tavern's lighted windows flogged promises of warmth to the cold streets like a cheap strumpet, and I succumbed, knowing there was to be no smooth resumption of routine.

She was there.

And she wasn't brown anymore. She sparkled. She was laughing, at a small table, with a blond man.

My first reaction was betrayal, one of cosmic proportions. For every unrequited romance, for every sundered lover in the world, I paused and felt a pang. Then I let civility take me forward, and bought myself a drink. All normal, all good.

I looked again at the light sparkling around them, and thought: what if it isn't betrayal? What if it's a blessed reunion? Did he come after all? On an earlier train, perhaps? Did her eyes light up when at long last she saw his golden head emerge from the train? Was all right with the world? Did fairy tales come true?

Against all odds it looked that way--they were so engrossed in each other, brown hair melting into blond, breath mixing, and lips almost meeting...

The tavern was crowded, and I was jostled almost to their table, where my panic at being pushed around must have pierced their cloud of lover-ly distraction; for the man smiled and moved his stool even closer to hers so that I could sit.

'Th-thanks,' I stammered, feeling infinitely de trop, yet not wanting to spurn the kind gesture. Could they see, perhaps, that this meeting wasn't between strangers?

She looked up then.

'You're English too!' she exclaimed. I could not imagine why I had thought of her as melancholy. She seemed incapable of it.

'Fancy that!' she continued. 'Hi, I'm Kate. This is my boyfriend, Terry. He's from Essex too. Where're you from then?'

'Uh. Hi, I'm Hermione. I'm from London--er--Kensington, actually,' I stammered. How does one speak to a landmark? I opted for embarrassing personalities.

"I would never have guessed you're from Essex, you know?'

She looked vaguely affronted by this, and I was reminded suddenly of Lavender and of a time very long gone, that suddenly seemed only a moment ago.

'Why? Cos I 'avn't dyed my hair all blond like all 'em chavs?' she responded, in an exaggerated accent. Should I tell her I once made a study of the Home Counties and their Distinctive Speech Patterns? No. No, that was a thing of the past. Where were these disturbing debris emerging from?

'No! Just--you seem so serious and sad on the platform. I-I see you when I get off the five fifteen...' I realized I may come out of this looking disturbingly alone and more than slightly like a stalker.

Kate, however, seemed undismayed by my unmannerly betrayal of observation.

'Oh that! That's just my job! I drive the train back to Innsbruck. The station master is a right wanker for punctuality--I've got to be in the cabin by 6 sharp of the platform clock. So I always wait at the end--takes me exactly 52 seconds to walk to the driver's cabin on the other end. Presto, I just whip off the coat and there I am, all ready in my uniform and everything.' In fact, she seemed intent on stripping away my mystery, my back-story, my pathetic self-projection...

Terry must have sensed my unease, but put it down to the normal nausea at seeing the innards of another's job.

'Honey, you must really love your job if you tell everybody all about it in such detail.'

He had a pleasant voice, slow and mumbling, and something caught in my throat. I swallowed it down with the bitter beer.

'Shut up, she asked and everything! Besides we have a six sigma rating for reliability and quality, y'know. So it's worth it for the Christmas bonuses alone.' And she raised her tankard aloft, knowing that by mentioning the money she was back on the even keel of normality.

I , meanwhile, seemed intent on self-mutilation. 'Actually, I thought you were waiting for someone...Everyday, same time...'.

.

'What? Every single day, come rain or shine? Not bloody likely! No man's worth that kind of hassle!' She nudged Terry sharply in the ribs, in placation or provocation--I wasn't certain.

'Thanks a lot, Kate!' said Terry in his deliberate voice as he rubbed absently where he had been prodded, but he looked at me when he spoke.

'Funny you mentioned it, though. Y'know, I used to see this bloke outside the cafe I worked at in Hyde Park... Rain or shine... well, mostly the former in London...but yeah! There he was from five in the evening to ten at night, as regular as the changing of the guard. Didn't sit or nothing. Just hands crossed over his chest and waiting. Like he bloody expected somebody to appear in the middle of the Serpentine any bloody minute!'

He must have taken my absolute stillness for riveted interest, for he continued with even more detail.

'Gary, who runs the café, said that he'd been doing it for five years... You could set your watch by him. I left in October when I met Kate here on a ski holiday and stayed over, but he's probably still there.'

Kate rubbed her head like a cat against Terry's broad shoulder, affirming the warmth, the togetherness...that not all lives were lonely vigils in the dark.

'But yeah! He always looked like he was waiting, you know--but maybe he just liked to watch that manky old swan paddling about! I just maybe made the same mistake you made with Kate.'

Every carelessly thrown random word worked away at my perfect routine. Fracturing it, rendering it useless. I was naked, choking on amniotic, and there was nobody there to hear me cry.

I must have made some sort of reply, I'm sure. I can't remember. All detail seemed magnified, you know, like seeing things through water--and there was the thundering of drowning, of frantic heels going thunk, thunk, thunk against a tin bath. And still I heard Terry through the treacle.

'And he looked a right posh wanker, too. Fur hats and cloaks. Cloaks, would you believe it? I bet he was Russian--you get a lot of those near Kensington Palace these days. All the girls had a soft spot for him. It's a wonder he didn't get blown away by their dreamy sighs! But he just didn't seem the kind of bloke you went up to and asked for a number, you know? But he was well fit, if you are into pale blonds, that is.'

'I'm into pale blonds!' Kate giggled. This was obviously not her first tankard of the evening, judging by how she was fondling her boyfriend's thigh. I could sense myself gazing at her hand as if transfixed, but I couldn't blink, couldn't breathe, couldn't move.

'But anyway, its Christmas and we're here in the warm, and who gives a toss about wankers who can't stay in this weather!' The noise of the tavern, the built-in smell of sauerkraut and sour beer, the guttural sounds of German, when had they become so distant? When did I stand up, free, at last, of the stasis?

'Hey, where are you going?' Terry called. 'Sit and have a few with us!'

'Oh thanks, but no. I-I have to go. I have somebody waiting. I'm running late... very late. It's freezing in London.'