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Beginnings
It’s cold at the station at 5:45. The Teacher lounges in a hard plastic seat (the urban armchair) and wishes that the train, just for once, would not be delayed. Yes, she thinks, it is tragic that the poor dears are driven to despair and want to die, but why oh why must they always jump off the bridge over the 5:45 am train to Cardiff? Why do those leaves always fall on her line? Does the snow feel compelled to catch up on much-needed sleep on the sleepers that her train runs on? She can’t help but be possessive over the service, not really, not when it’s only her and the doddery old lady in the back row that ride the run-down car day in day out, Cardiff and back again, to Cardiff and back. Day in day out, to Cardiff and back again, there again and back.
The Teacher has long since told everyone that she’s French. She doesn’t speak the language, much less understand it, but her mother was a quarter Parisian and that’s good enough for her. With her little beret and her over highlighted hair, she prides herself on the fact that she could almost be French, if only she could be bothered to learn her etre and avoir and relearn the half-memorised phrases from her old schooldays: je suis anglaise, merci and d’accord and parlez-vous francais? She thinks it fitting to overuse her now trademarked bien sur! and she makes sure her baguette lunch (discount price £1.99) comes in the special packaging with French Bakery of Leeds stamped across it. She doesn’t see Madame’s little smirks or hear the underlying notes of sarcasm in the baker’s merci beaucoup; she looks like a country-bred Englishwoman’s stereotypical Frenchwoman, a cartoon caricature, and that’s good enough for the Teacher.
If only, she thinks pensively whilst sucking on a stale cough sweet, if only I could have a change. Maybe if something new and exciting will come up, something wonderful and magical and so out of the ordinary that it might put some colour into the monotony of my existence!
The Engineer is a new beginning at the station, a white face amongst the pale greys of the commuters, a thing with presence on the empty shell that is the platform for the 5:45. He lives with his girl because it suits him: she keeps him living and pays for the gin and he stops her from calling free phone number 0800 even though she won three in a row on the Bingo! scratch card she found on the floor of Safeways (and she would be entitled to a million, billion, trillion pounds and then they’d both live happily ever after and she could buy that Chanel dress she earmarked in last season’s copy of Vogue, and that would be nice, wouldn’t it, darling?) The Teacher laughs in all the wrong places and bats flaking false eyelashes in the Engineer’s approximate direction. Unaware the lipstick on her teeth, she beams at him and offers him a rancid cream toffee, which he declines. He has ink-stained hands.
“Will … will monsieur be using the train daily?” She pronounces it mon-seeurr and puts all the right stresses in all the wrong places. She hopes that he thinks it’s charming. He tries to give her a reason not to speak.
“Oh! How simply enchanté! Maybe we could be les amis together, non?” She prattles on. This is my beginning, this is my beginning!
The Engineer doesn’t bother to tell the Teacher that he is, in fact, French himself and is on a week long post from Tours. He doesn’t bother to point out her smudged eyeliner, orange foundation or motorway blusher. Instead, he prepares to board the 5:34 (too early and to Preston, but what does he care?) and turns around only once.
“My girlfriend,” he begins in his strong accent, “is Swiss, and of German descent. When she had been studying her French for a week, she sounded a lot better than you do now.”
The Teacher pales at his true accent and at being caught out. Ignoring her skirt catching in the space between seat and support and fraying forever, she stands up and makes her way towards him in her ripped-up stockings.
“Call me sometime. Nous … nous pouvons …” We could be … We could be so, so much more …
The redundant conductor shouts “All Aboard”, pleased that there is someone to hear him, and the Engineer sets off in the opposite direction. Glass doors close behind him. The Teachers suddenly cherishes a secret ambition to shatter them.
“I will call! I will call when …”
I must not let it go. This becomes my beginning.