an eighty sixth story...'saturday'

The train pulled slowly into the station where Stephen was waiting on the elevated platform, pacing up and down, up and down in his grey trench coat.  A handful of people alighted, and presently the train pulled away again, trundling around the next bend, and out of sight to somewhere else.

From the elevated platform where Stephen paced up and down he could see the hotchpotch roofs of London suburbia: tiled and gently sloping, flat, asphalt, steel and glass, as well as the brick dome of the old theatre adjoined to the Bowls Club, a pub Stephen had once frequented.

In the third and fourth floor windows of the red brick 1930s apartment buildings opposite the station, people woke to another Saturday, fresh and flushed with expectation or groggy and disheveled from the night before. 

Stephen felt in his coat pockets for his tobacco, then in his front and back trouser pockets and found his tobacco was missing along with his cigarette lighter, and he began pacing a little faster, his grey trench coat wrapped around him, concealing his bloodied shirt, feet and toes numb in his red leather DMs.

In a fourth floor window of the red brick 1930s apartment buildings, a heavy set man appeared for a moment in a velvet dressing gown, tied loosely about his middle-aged girth.  With his big right hand he rubbed his chin and two day old stubble, and watched a young man in a grey trench coat pacing up and down, up and down the station platform.  Then he turned away from the window to his wife asleep, a plum-coloured bruise underneath her right eye.

The heavy set man looked at his thick fingers and bit his nails out of habit.  His wife would be fine, and she would say, as she always did to her friends, that it was an accident: ‘dyspraxia’ – the word she used.  ‘Your flat must be booby trapped’, one of her friends had said last time they fought, the heavy set man remembered with a smirk, and he rubbed his chin and two day old stubble again.

On the dressing table at the end of the bed were two half empty tumblers of gin, and an empty bottle of Bombay Sapphire, dried out limes on a white cardboard plate, a knife and a plastic bowl full of cocktail sticks and cigarette ash.  The dressing table mirror his wife had smeared lipstick all over, and this had started it.  The heavy set man told her not to cry, and she became more hysterical, her voice high, until he hit her square in the face, and she had shut up; still, he couldn’t sleep afterwards on a guilty conscience, spent much of the night awake until he heard her stir, and had apologised, and they had kissed.

Stephen paced up and down, up and down, anxious for a nicotine hit.

Alison missed Anthony a lot.  Drawing into another station on the over-ground on her way to meet her friend for morning coffee, she thought how she was already bored with her partner.  Anthony, while he was violent on several occasions, she knew, or at least suspected, had loved her once, and eighteen months after walking out on him, she regretted it; with her partner these days she never felt safe, or sexy, instead pawed over like a stuffed toy, thrills few and far between.

Alison had been in a vulnerable emotional state following her split from Anthony, who she since learned had re-married within nine weeks.   Her partner took advantage, or so Alison felt now, when she needed someone gentle and cuddly, which Anthony was never and would never become.  And yet waking up this Saturday, getting out of bed with the morning sun, and after making tea, looking at her partner slumbering like a pink, rotund post-adolescent baby made her shudder inside.  It seemed like time for a ride, to anywhere, and her friend, she had to admit, was nearly always there for her. 

She searched in her handbag for her cigarettes and discovered one left, paused for a moment as the train came to a stop at the station and then put the pack of cigarettes back into her handbag. 

Alison continued thinking about Anthony and her partner and her life as she was passed by a tall young man, wrapped in a grey trench coat, pacing along the platform.  For a second he swiveled his axe-shaped head toward her and his pale green eyes met hers, before he turned away and walked furtively further on up the platform, hands thrust deep in his trench coat pockets, toward the stair exit.  Alison thought little of it, reached back into her bag to smoke her last cigarette and the train engine shuddered into life, and soon she was looking at the yellows and greens of the young trees and the dead bracken and gorse sliding past the train window.

Back on the high street Stephen felt a hundred sets of eyes on him, and he put his head down and began walking fast.

Alun’s Highland Terrier was nosing around in the tangled and decaying vegetation between the footpath and the rusty iron railings beside the railway.  Alun could hear the whistle of an approaching train ringing in the railway sleepers, and soon the rattle of the carriages as the train drew near. He checked his wrist-watch, it was high time he be heading home, his seven year old was at swimming club, Saturday morning, and he needed to pick her up, his wife being out for coffee or shopping, or both.  The train rattled past where he stood, half concealed by the scrub where Alun’s Highland Terrier was busy exploring.  Alun unzipped his tartan lumber jacket and pulled out the lead.

‘Come on’, he called, and clicked his tongue loudly, and then again, but to no avail.  Perhaps he’s found a bone, Alun mused, and took a few big strides into the scrub to fetch his Highland Terrier, following the rustling sounds in a thicket to his right, where indeed he found his dog, sniffing at and digging up something with its front paws.  The morning had dawned fair, but as ever had grown rapidly overcast, the clouds three or four shades of grey, the darker clouds carrying rain.  ‘What have you found there?’, Alun said to his Highland Terrier, ‘A b-?‘.

Alison leaned over and spooned a little more sugar into her coffee, her friend pretended to look mock horrified, the coffee beans used in the small tea parlour where they were sat passing the morning were the expensive sort.  They had not got on to the subject of Alison’s partner just yet, or indeed Anthony; it had only been a few minutes since they sat down, and then Alison had got up to go next door to purchase more cigarettes while her friend ordered their drinks.

In a way Alison was perhaps unusual, she, unlike a number of females was not particularly forthright in sharing her innermost feelings or fancies, but her friend understood her as far as one can another person.

Alison stubbed out her cigarette, as if ready to speak.  Her friend looked over the rim of her coffee cup, and realising this was perhaps the moment, the reason for them coming together, placed her coffee cup back in the saucer.  Alison hesitated, her long, delicate fingers twisting the ends of her curls, the same way people twist the chord of a telephone, her friend leaned forward ready to listen, and then her mobile rang: ‘Ah’, she said, rolling her eyes, ‘it’s Alun!’, and she answered and Alison went on twisting her curls.

Stephen was remembering Billy's face, his swollen eyes, his battered face like a red blancmange, as if it was in front of him, Billy's swollen face and split gums, in front of his streaming eyes.

The rain was now falling in diagonal slants across the windscreen.  The heavy set man drummed his thick fingers on the steering wheel of his Mercedes as he waited at the traffic lights underneath the railway bridge out of the city.  With his big hands, broad forearms, shoulders and chest hunkered like a boxer, his square face and square neck, the heavy set man looked as if he could rip the steering wheel from the dashboard: a bruising portrait of potential energy.

A white van pulled up beside him with the words PETS painted in cartoon writing on the side.  The heavy set man smirked, recalling the fate of his brother’s dog, kicked to death; for the heavy set man a smirk was as good as a wince, and the lights turned from red to orange, and his foot came down hard on the accelerator, sprinting ahead of the rest of the traffic, until the next set of lights where the white van with the words PETS painted on the side would catch up with him again, and with the white van, his conscience.

Somehow Stephen sensed they were coming for him and he started to run.

She’ll be alright, the heavy set man was thinking, she’ll say she slipped on the floor or walked into a closing door, or something. She’ll be alright.  Her friends would believe her, they always did, she’d never.  She was fine. She’s a tough one, she wouldn’t stand up to it otherwise, and she knows how it is.  She was fine and she’d never, she’d…the wail of a police siren somewhere back in the traffic interrupted the heavy set man’s recurring train of thought. And as he was slowing to pull over he saw someone running fast along the adjacent pavement, grey trench coat flowing behind.

Stephen knew instinctively he was running for his freedom, and his life, slaloming in and out of the near static Saturday morning crowds that drifted along the pavement, the pavement he was now sprinting along, his red DMs hammering the concrete slabs left right left right left right.  But the sirens were getting louder and louder in his ears and he was only running on fear, in a blind white panic.  He could sense the traffic parting to make way for the police, and out of the corner of his eyes he could see cars all along the high road slowing and pulling over. 

Slowing down did not seem an option for Stephen: it seemed the only option left for him in his whole life was to keep on running. He could already feel his lungs burning, his throat tightening, his head throbbing, lungs burning with fire, throat as tight as a tourniquet, the veins in his head pulsing with hot blood, his eyes wide and streaming, the whites of his eyes wide and burning, his legs, and his arms, his legs and arms moving of a will of their own. His heart pounding, pounding and pounding, his legs, arms becoming pistons, steam driven pistons driving him on and on and on, his legs and arms together like the great wheels of a locomotive, steaming pistons propelling him inexorably forwards, forwards, forwards: there was no going back now, and no point in looking over his shoulder, or wishing time, and Stephen ran and ran and ran, ran his knees into the hard concrete, the rubber soles of his red DMs burning and wearing, burning and wearing, his legs and arms like steaming pistons, streaming whites of his eyes. His whole head split open on the hard concrete.

‘That’s him’, said the police officer, when they arrived out of breath at where Stephen had fallen a few moments earlier, head split apart. ‘What a mess’, said the other police officer, Stephen’s head open in half, spilling fresh red blood on the hard concrete, pooling on the pavement where he had been running and running.  ‘Do we call an ambulance?’, asked the other police officer, Stephen’s legs and arms, twitching, his feet, in his red DMs, splayed out underneath his twitching body. ‘That’s him alright’, said the police officer, ‘well I never’ - they had been looking for a week.  And Stephen had been running until Saturday.

The heavy set man passed the scene in his Mercedes, confused at the same time enthralled by what the commotion was about, passers by had formed a ring around Stephen's body, with all life shuddering from it, the two policemen trying to hold the gathering crowd of Saturday shoppers from encroaching further.  Back on the fourth floor of the 1930s red brick apartment buildings, the heavy set man's wife was crying hot tears in a cold shower; at the coffee shop Alison was hanging on in quiet desperation for her friend to return; and her friend was with her husband Alun at the local police station shocked and subdued, their seven year old daughter at swimming club once again kept behind, waiting.