Waiting (Cecilia Peartree)

I’ve spent the last year or more waiting for heart surgery, and the last couple of months of this time have been particularly frustrating. This is because I got as far as having a pre-operation assessment at the end of May, and felt fairly confident that I would find myself on the operating table within a few weeks of it. Other family members even made their holiday arrangements around that date prediction, and I’m not really getting any better as I wait either! Still, I’ve managed to finish and publish two (or is it three? I’m starting to lose count) novels in the time since I first saw the cardiac surgeon, and I’m working on two more at this very moment, so it isn’t as if I’ve completely wasted the time, though anyone who sees the state of our house might imagine I have.

In some ways this reminds me of the wait I had before giving birth to my first child. I was supposed to be resting in bed during the eight weeks before the due date because of raised blood pressure, but the problem that time was that I felt perfectly fine, so the struggle was to try and stay still. One of the cats we had then was actually the first to feel the baby move, for the cats really enjoyed snuggling up to me as I lay there captive. It was different then, though, because I thought I knew how long I had to wait, and in fact everything happened two weeks before anybody expected it to, so that gave me a bit of a reprieve.

Helmsdale station on the Far North line

I am something of an expert in the art of waiting in any case, due to my tendency to arrive far too early for trains, events, appointments and almost anything else due to happen at a fixed time. Hours of my life have been spent at the Eurostar terminal in Brussels, at Berlin Hauptbahnhof and at other stations from King’s Cross to Chicago and from Barcelona to Thurso. This isn’t a case of wasting time but of sparing myself some of the anxiety of travel. It’s also an excuse to sit around reading even more than usual, or just to look at the departures board and think about all the possibilities featured on it.

I realized while planning this post that that I had once written a short story entitled ‘The Waiting Room’. It isn’t exactly seasonal in any way – it’s set in December and I vaguely remember writing it for Hallowe’en so it may contain ghosts, but here it is for your amusement.

 

The Waiting-room

 

It was a wild, dark evening in late December, and the Dundee train was just pulling away from the platform as I ran across the footbridge to try and catch it. I wished I had been able to talk my sister into driving just a bit faster on the way to the station, but the wind was sweeping in from the North Sea and trying to blow her little car off the coast road, and I could tell she was nervous.

The train disappeared into the darkness and I made my way down the rain-slicked steps at a more reasonable speed. I didn’t even know if there was a waiting-room here. I peered at the signs that hung above the platform. Yes – there it was. I could have done with a coffee, but for now getting out of the elements would have to be enough.

I pushed open the heavy door and took a step back into the past. Hard wooden seats – an old-fashioned cylindrical stove in the centre of the room. Two old people dressed in heavy black huddled close to it, their hands outstretched to warm them. They glanced up as I entered. The man gave a brief nod of greeting, but neither of them spoke.

‘A bit breezy out there,’ I remarked, just to break the silence.

They still didn’t speak. Keeping themselves to themselves. Not everybody enjoyed idle chatter. I took out my phone and tried to check for messages, but the signal had gone, and even the battery seemed a bit flaky. It was a pity – I might have used this unforeseen delay to send some messages. I could have checked in with my sister to ask if she got home all right. I could have warned my partner I’d be a bit late home. I wasn’t sure exactly how late. I had a vague feeling there were trains on this route about once an hour or so.

There was nothing much to do except watch the old couple and the coal-effect glow coming from the stove. I sniffed the air, which was suspiciously smoky. Was the glow produced by electricity or did the thing actually have coal inside? Wasn’t that illegal nowadays? Or at least environmentally unfriendly?

The door opened again and a man in a long overcoat and peaked cap came in, carrying a big old coal-scuttle, which answered my question about the stove. He glanced at me as the others had, but said nothing. It was almost as if there was a pane of glass – or perhaps Perspex - separating me from the others. Even if I had spoken, they might not have heard me. It was an odd feeling.

He went out again, and I suppose about fifteen minutes passed before there was a sound from outside the waiting-room. The old woman nudged the old man, and they gathered their things together and started to leave.

‘Wait – is that a Dundee train?’ I said, although I hadn’t been sure the noise out there had been made by a train at all. It sounded more like… But it couldn’t be!

They let the door swing closed behind them, and I had to pull it open again. I emerged into a cloud of steam that swirled round the platform and up round the decorative edges of the canopy above us. The steam should have warned me. But it just seemed too unlikely to be true.

There was a steam engine standing at the platform, a line of old-style wooden coaches behind it. The old couple walked along a little way and then boarded the train. I began to follow them.

‘Tickets, please, sir,’ said a voice. I turned to see the man in the long overcoat, not far away. He was holding his hand out. I fumbled for my ticket and gave it to him.

He glanced at it briefly, and then shook his head at me.

‘This is not the train you want, sir.’

‘But – does it go to Dundee?’

‘Maybe it does. But your ticket isn’t valid, I’m afraid.’

‘Never mind that. I’ll pay the extra.’

‘Oh no you won’t, sir,’ he said. ‘You aren’t on my list.’

‘List? What list? I want to travel on this train.’ Even to myself I sounded like a spoilt child. I added, in case that was what he was thinking too. ‘I’m a bit of a steam geek. This is too good a chance to miss.’

I stepped forward to open one of the carriage doors, but the train was already moving off. I wanted to fling the door open and jump on, but there was a hand on my arm, holding me in place on the platform.

‘Let go of me! What are you doing?’

‘You can’t do this,’ said the man’s voice again. ‘Just calm down. Your train will be along in half an hour.’

I turned to look at him again, planning to expostulate with him, but I got a shock. Since I had last looked, he had swapped his long dark overcoat for a modern jacket with the logo of one of the train companies on it, and had taken off the cap to reveal a head of neatly trimmed fairish hair in an unmistakably modern style. I blinked. He must have been in character for some sort of special event, obviously. But he had certainly contrived an almost impossibly quick change.

There was no smell of smoke, no sign of a train vanishing into the darkness. It might as well never have been there.

‘Sorry,’ I muttered. ‘I thought I saw…’

He sighed. ‘Yes, we’ve had this happen here before. It’s usually because people have been reading about the disaster and start seeing things. All in their minds, of course.’

‘Disaster?’

‘You know – the Tay Bridge disaster. A train went over into the river when part of the bridge collapsed. In Victorian times. It was a stormy night like this one. Sometimes people think they see the people, sometimes it’s the train.’

‘Strange,’ I said with an uneasy laugh. Of course I knew about the disaster, but I had never come quite so close to it before.

An hour or so later, crossing the Tay Bridge, I looked down into the river below and gave a shudder. I had seen the remains of the old bridge in the water in daylight on previous crossings, but I hadn’t really considered what they signified…. A stormy night like this one. What had happened to the old couple from the waiting-room? Did they have to re-live it again and again for as long as there were people like me, who saw things they weren’t supposed to see?

That would be the last time I used the waiting-room, I decided. It should have some kind of health warning on the door.

The current Tay Bridge with the remains of the original next to it.