How Many Times Did You Fall?

Time passes. People change. Thirty days, thirty weeks, thirty years. Time flies and people change, but not that much.

Robert De Niro, Noodles if you will, says the name Deborah. The woman sitting beside you in the cinema chokes.

“Popcorn,” she croaks. “Wrong hole.”

She squeezes past you, past all the others seated in this row. Legs fold up, voices sigh and tut. She whispers sorry, coughing at regular intervals. The noise of her walking down the steps to the exit door seems to go on for ever, and you miss most of the dialogue. But you know it by heart by now.

The mawkish sentimentality, the clichéd speech. The things you came to seek out tonight. Reunion of former lovers after thirty years apart. Hints at hidden passion. Hints at feelings that have never gone away.

“She called you Miss. You never got married?”

“Where were you?”

“I was out of town.”

Where were you? Out of town? Long gone and able to forget? Time passes and days or weeks or years make no difference. These feelings never change. Until the moment of reunion. Then the relief of finding that it really does no longer matter. That only caring is left. Passion spent.

You leave the cinema and the pavements shine with rain, although the air is dry and there are no clouds in the sky. The sulphur glow of the street lights shines back from the patches of water on the ground as you walk from the multiplex to the car park.

You pass the bar you used to drink in together. Blue with silver lettering on the outside, terracotta and turquoise inside. You go through the doors. It has been months, but the bar manager still remembers you. He pours you a Santa Teresa and adds coke without having to ask. You pay. He refuses to accept the money.

“Good to see you again,” is all he says. You talk about France, about family. His daughter was a babe in arms the last time you were in here. She has been on her first trip to the Continent since then.

You sit at the bar and speak to no-one. The bar manager leaves you be, pausing every so often to give you a refill, still refusing to accept payment. You sit and let your eyes lose focus, lost in some long distant memory; a scene in your mind that only you can see. People jostle against you, sitting on that high barstool, as they elbow their way to the bar and vie for the manager’s attention. He is on his own tonight, and the bar is filling up. Lawyers in their pinstripe suits. Hacks from the local news station. Camera crew, semi-famous nobodies that populate the local soap opera. They are raucous, their laughter rising and crashing like waves against a granite shore. Their voices are harsh and too dedicated to the task of having a good time.

You sit and remember the times gone past; drinking down the rum; soaking up the desperation that surrounds you.

You almost signal for another one, but Starman comes on the juke box and this is your cue to leave. You leave enough notes under a beer mat to cover your tab. If he doesn’t put it into the till, he will put it to some better use.

Santa Teresa with her taste like old English toffee, golden syrup, not molasses. Santa Teresa fuels your journey from the middle of the street to the top. Your heels click on the paving stones.

You climb the stairs to the train station and wait. The world on the streets below you is beginning to wake up. Shivering arms and midriffs, clattering footwear and cackling laughter that sounds to you like crows circling carrion. Meat Market Friday on the Locks.

The train comes in, and you find a seat close enough to the door but far enough away not to feel a draught. There is nobody in this carriage, and as the train passed by you on its way in to the station, you saw that any carriage could have guaranteed you solitude.

The train rides high above the city on this section of the line. It pauses at the station with listed building status and others come onboard. You look at people standing on the platform, at people sitting inside the café. Then the train pulls away, and in between the glimpses of street lights between the buildings, and the flashes of lights on in living rooms and bedrooms, there is darkness and your reflection appears in the glass of the window. Double skinned; reflected twice; not quite in alignment with yourself. Your image a caricature of your life.

A man, breathing heavily, bundled in a grey herringbone tweed overcoat has taken a seat diagonally across the aisle from you. You watch him with your reflection’s eyes. He has a cold, or asthma, or something that makes it difficult for him to breathe. There is a rhythm and a melody to it, like the sounds made by the steam engines in the museum across from the bar you were just drinking in tonight. Clicks and hisses and groans. Snuffles and creaks, as he shifts his weight in the seat. You watch him through your reflection and he thinks he is unobserved.

Murphy. A Dutchman called Murphy. That’s what the overcoat man looks like. A Dutchman mugged by dampness in the air. Murphy Wejk. You conjure the ways in which Murphy Wejk might conduct his life. Is he here on business? Did he marry an English woman and never go home? Is he lost and confused; searching for something; hopeless and rootless and waiting to find a way to return?

And you realise in that moment that you are no longer imagining Murphy Wejk but you are questioning him. The one who has been gone so long that time had no option but to pass and make you different. Does he sit on a train somewhere and look through his own reflection at some woman across from him? Does he sit at a table, chewing a pencil, waiting for the clock to say that it’s time to go home?

You come to the stop with the gaudily painted horses, fenced off beside the platform, at the top of some stairs. On panels fixed to railings, the name of the station spelled out in sign language. Eight different hands; an eleven letter word.

Murphy Wejk leaves the train, and you watch him walk along the platform to the stairs. The last thing you see of him, as the train pulls away from the station, is the top of his head, beginning to go bald at the crown.

You wish him the benefit of a hat in future.

As the train nears your station, your instinct still is the put your hand inside your pocket to draw out your phone. But ringing his number now is pointless. Letting him know you will be home soon is also pointless. And you wonder, because you can’t help yourself, whether he sometimes wishes that you would ring. Just to hear your voice; to know you are alive. And at the same time you know, it’s you who wishes that, not him. You wish you had the courage to ring him, just so you could hear his voice and know that he is still alive.

The train is below road level by the time it stops at your station. You walk up the steps, underneath their Victorian brickwork tunnel, and emerge onto the street. There are fallen leaves on the pavement and you realise that you are hungry. Not because of anything the leaves have done, but because your body reminds you. A film straight from work. A forgetting to remember to eat. Drinks on top of drinks that fill the space, then wash straight out again.

You want bread and butter on a white china plate. You want jeans and your old grey cardigan. Your heels click again on the paving stones as you hurry from the station to home.

I imagine all this, years from the moment that I last saw you. I imagine you, changed by time; older, maybe greyer; softer perhaps. I imagine you, still living in that house, and I almost pick up the phone.

But it is too far, and it is too late, and a cold beer is waiting for me in the place I now call home. And the woman that I left you for is making dinner. Our children, her children and mine, are safely tucked in bed.

In all my imaginings of you, I never give you a husband. I command that there will be no others after me. I condemn you to that, because I am condemned, and it’s only fair that we share the same fate.

© J R Hargreaves October 2006