Making Tracks

“Which way do we go?”

Kate looked up from her book to see if the disembodied voice would receive an answer. A young man fell back in step and pointed up at the board where squiggly orange lines were re-forming themselves every couple of minutes.

“Platform 6. It’s just on the other side here.” The voice smiled placidly in relief and allowed herself to be led across the platform and helped up onto the train.

‘Who does that?’ Kate mused to herself. ‘Who holds out their hand to help someone up a step these days?’ Michael certainly didn’t. It reminded her of the scene in Pride and Prejudice where Mr Darcy helps Elizabeth into a carriage for the first time. How electric touch must have been in those days, and how much things have changed since…

Imagine not being able to touch someone in the most casual or accidental way. No awkward peck on the cheek, no handshake where you wonder if you’re applying the right amount of pressure, no tram journeys where you’re all crushed together like pebbles tossed by the tide. It must have made the times you could touch someone so much more special. Dancing with somebody must have had all the thrill of a first kiss at a bar – if not more, far more. ‘Which is better?’ she wondered? Being able to touch someone whenever you want, to have that warmth or affection, or for the touch of a hand to be a rare and stolen moment?

At that particular moment, Michael shifted his weight towards her to make room for a new passenger to board their carriage. She felt the weight of his body all down her left side, as she looked away from the window and up at the next stranger of the day. He was a tall and unusually attractive man. That is to say, she thought he could be described as attractive, but in an unusual way that made his looks ambiguous and drew your eye back to check that you hadn’t been deceived the first time round. A close-cut beard gave definition to his jaw and highlighted sharp cheekbones that were, at that moment, moving up and down as he spoke rapidly into his mobile. Kate was instantly irritated.

She’d booked the quiet coach for a reason – to be quiet. She couldn’t stand people who booked it because they wanted others to be silent so they could better hear themselves on their oh-so-important phone calls. It was selfish and illogical – two qualities that Kate particularly resented. This thought must have shown in her face because the man cast her an apologetic glance as he settled himself in the window seat opposite her.

“Ok, you got all that? Good. Yes; fine. Absolutely! Ok, I’ve really got to go now… Yes. Speak later, bye.”

He put down his phone on the table in front of him and pulled out a charger from his worn, brown leather briefcase. Looking around him he bent his head down at an awkward angle to try and see where the plug on the table was. Kate smiled at him and tilted her head a little to indicate where he should be looking. A small gesture of goodwill to restore equilibrium from her seeming distrust when he’d first stepped into the carriage. He returned the smile and set his things to rights around him. Earphones in, briefcase on the chair next to him, head turned towards the window at the people still streaming up and down the platform: various stages of panic and confusion painted onto their hurried, harried faces.

Kate returned to the book that was resting, expectant, against her palms. She’d read it before and it had made her so angry that she had almost thrown the book into the fireplace. It seemed an act of madness to be returning to it now, especially as she rarely re-read books – but she wanted to try it again in a calmer frame of mind. She’d enjoyed the language the first time round and she wanted to find a way back into it again. A way in that allowed her to see past the affair that had scorched through the middle chapters and scrunched her stomach up into a seething knot of fire. She couldn’t move past the fact that women throughout history had been disregarded and expected to calmly put up with such debasing treatment.

How did they stand it? How did they not go utterly mad? How was it possible that you could exist as a wife in name only? No trust, no truth, no affection. A half-life lived on a stage where you performed the same mundane actions over and over; until your lines were so simplistically reduced to a cliché that they lost all clarity of human definition. Individuality seemed drowned in this gendered charade she thought, and this is how we lose women in history. This is why we have to go looking for them.

She tried to encourage all of her students to go looking: to find the women. She was studying Macbeth with her two GCSE classes at the moment and she was encouraging them to look at the women through multiple lenses. Not just Lady Macbeth, who loomed up to confront you in the first few acts (before totally disappearing off the pages) but Lady Macduff, who, in her way, was just as controversial and confronting a character. And the witches! That too, was part of the reason she was re-reading, Familiars; it torturously captured an important aspect of the Pendle Witch Trials. It helped you find a way in to the stories of people at the time and to understand, both ‘witches’ themselves and where the fear of them originated. A fear not so far removed from others in our own time.

It was a hard sell to her GCSE classes though. There would be no direct question on that in their exam, so what was the value of it all? If it wasn’t information you could condense onto a flash card and then spew back out onto an exam paper, then what was the point? Not all of them thought like that, of course, and it was for those few that she was fighting. Determined they should leave school with something resembling an education.

After all, she had been produced in the same system of exams and bells and order. She’d had to steal herself to pack a book that she’d already read before. She wouldn’t gain new knowledge; she wouldn’t gain bragging rights at adding another book to her cultural status, she wouldn’t gain anything ostensibly ‘new’ from it. But she would find a way back into the language and she would, perhaps, gain some composure by re-reading about an affair. She hated to admit it to herself, but she often found that she had to work hard for sympathy with the women; just as hard as for the men who cheated. The men she dismissed without much analysis as hopeless shits produced of particular historical moments. The women she wanted to fight for though, and so she wanted to see them fight for themselves.

These thoughts were not fully formed in that moment. They had been thought before and were a backdrop to her current state of mind. She brought these biases and histories with her when she re-opened the book so that it was already unfolding before her, leading her along the paths where she wanted to go. Looking at the pages now, her mind was partially divided by the noises of the carriage around her and beyond that, the platform.  

Too substantial a part of that noise came from Michael, who sat stoically beside her, shaking out The Guardian into the laps of other passengers; mainly herself. She loved him but even now, nine years after they first met, she sometimes cringed at his behaviour in public. He was simply so comfortable taking up space; exerting himself – in a way Kate never had been. While he allowed the pages to rustle into the silence of the carriage, she made her hand as small as possible to creep inside the bag that contained her almond croissant.

She’d bought this croissant a good twenty minutes ago and had been slowly working her way through it ever since. Every time she turned a page, she wriggled her hand inside, careful not to touch the bag itself so that it wouldn’t make a sound. She ripped off a piece at a time, to munch her way through on the next pages journey – momentary tension becoming a part of both the flavour of the croissant and the pace of her reading. Michael would have said she was mad; and she couldn’t deny that perhaps there was a shadow of truth in the claim.

He’d finished his croissant within two minutes after settling into the carriage. They’d bought them from the Costa tucked unceremoniously next to the toilets at Manchester Piccadilly. It had become a ritual of theirs which she rather liked. He knew that she liked a tea and croissant for the journey but felt guilty for this little extravagance – so he always insisted on it, making it seem like it was his idea. He’d kept his arm around her in the short queue and smiled to himself as she went through the motions of ‘deciding’ what she might get. It felt like a return to their past; a shyly optimistic easing of recent tensions.

At moments like these, she sometimes felt as if she had imagined the recent frictions. Every couple had glitches in communication – of course, they did. She didn’t need novels to remind her of that, her friends did it frequently. Many were envious of her relationship with Michael – he was more supportive than many husbands after all. Perhaps she simply compared to the early days too much – when she had felt the focus of his attention, the centre of their world. Now, more and more, he seemed distant, disengaged and distracted in their day to day life. But then, then there were still moments when she remember how in sync they were with one another and how much shared history they had built.

“Do you want to go in?” He’d asked, seeing her looking through the window at the Accessorise sale next to them. “I can get the drinks.”

“No, I like that bag but it’s all just so…”

“Pink?”

“Yes,” she’d laughed with rusty clarity, “exactly.”

Pink was the only word for it. It dominated the backdrop as pigeons pecked their way around the shop front – looking decidedly worse for wear. They were clearly beyond caring that people were swirling around them, powering their way to meetings, or hunting for a bargain. If Manchester had a bird as a symbol, it would simply have to be the pigeon she thought. She loved her home city but there was no getting around the fact that pigeons dominated. They were fearless in their persistence.

More people were making their way onto the train now, but very few came into the quiet carriage, for which she was grateful. Another couple were sat at the far end, but she couldn’t see or hear them now they were settled. There hadn’t been another peep out of the man sitting opposite her. He’d taken off his loose fitted jacket and rolled up his shirt sleeves slightly to reveal inky tattoo lines against warm brown skin. They seemed to swirl in a pattern that Kate thought might have been Celtic but she couldn’t be sure. She was trying to figure out what it might be, discreetly adjusting her eye level over the top of her book, when two more people bustled in and shattered the calmness of the quiet carriage.

She assumed they must be a mother and son, judging from age, attitude and their matching travel bags – but it was hard to imagine two people more totally opposite in appearance and attitude. The woman looked rather tired, gaunt and on-guard; ready for the world to disappoint her and to exalt in triumph when it proved her right. She wore a loose grey jumper with denim trousers that had been assiduously washed and ironed until, in a bizarre contradiction, they had lost all shape. Her energy seemed to suck Kate’s right out from her and she suddenly felt the urge to close her eyes and sleep. The only word that really summed her up was: bustling. She bustled into the carriage and bustled about with the bags and bustled her son into position with as much energy as an actor might have after the success of a debut performance.

Her son seemed designed in opposition to this energy and drew a noticeable contrast to it. He was listless and moved with an apathy that seemed to speak the truth: ‘I don’t really care about doing this and I don’t really care what you think of me doing it, I’m just doing it.’ He had floppy brown hair, a partially missing eye brow and endearingly crooked teeth. How this last feature could exist, puzzled Kate, but she certainly did feel a tug of endearment because of it. Just as the law of thermodynamics suggests that we can never create new energy, so it seemed this boy existed to counterbalance his mother. The world’s supply of energy would somehow have been thrown off kilter by such exuberance existing without a drain on its resources.

“Through here, sweetheart; come on this way. Pop your bag down there. Yes, yours first. Just move that one over a little bit so there’s room. Perfect, there we go. Right, now if mine will just squeeze in…”

She tried to wrestle her bag into the tiny space that remained with obvious futility.

Kate gently nudged Michael, who was still engrossed in his newspaper, elbow jutting out into the aisle where the mother was already pink faced from the exertion of doing battle with her luggage. Michael glanced over at Kate and went to kiss her cheek, but she raised her eyes meaningfully and looked pointedly at the luggage rack where his bag was shoved diagonally across the space. Out of the corner of her eye, she could have sworn the man across from her smirked a little, which made Kate blush in embarrassment at the observation of this private communication with her husband. Michael mistook this for the flush of growing anger and, although he rolled his eyes, jumped up to say:

“Excuse me; may I give you a hand with that?” His gentle, Londoner, upper middle class accent had the mother all in a flutter:  

“Oh that’s very kind. If we could just move it over, just a teeny bit I’m sure it will squeeze in nicely. Sorry to be such a nuisance… Oh that’s perfect; yes well done. Thank you so much. Thank you. Sorry to be such a nuisance.”

Michael smiled and waved away her thanks with a regal gesture that suggested he’d saved her child from drowning at the very least. Indeed, the level of her thanks seemed to corroborate this idea. Kate got the impression she was the more overt in her gratitude because her son had done nothing all this time; he had not acknowledged Michael’s presence at all, and simply slunk into a seat on the table opposite them.

“No, not there darling; we’re over here.”

She looked down at her orange ticket stubs and frowned slightly, glancing at the table where Kate was sitting and where three out of the four seats were already taken. She looked down again and, for the first time, seemed to look properly at the man in the seat by which she was standing. A look of mistrust and reluctance crowded into her small, worn looking face, as she said:

“Excuse me, I’m terribly sorry but I think you’re in my seat.”

Kate cringed inwardly. She felt the atmosphere in the carriage turn toxic with strained British politeness and the potential for awkwardness to be unleashed. Kate wished she’d just sit on the table opposite, as her son had already done; and a stolen glance at him convinced her that he felt the same way. Sullenly silent, he still refused to say anything, but raised his eyes to the roof of the carriage; as if praying for the strength to endure the intense aggravation of having a mother so damned difficult as to want to sit in the seat she had booked.

“Oh, let me check,” replied the man opposite Kate, calmly pulling out his ticket from the wallet at the top of his worn, leather briefcase.

Kate subconsciously tensed herself even more. Did he really need to check? Surely this woman wouldn’t have said it unless she was sure. Couldn’t he just apologise, gather up his things, move over quickly and quietly and put an end to the moment. It was the quiet carriage. When would there be quiet?

Michael read his paper, Kate pretended to read her book, the boy looked out of the window and the man opposite held up his ticket:

“I think this is right. Seat 6?”

The woman blushed much deeper than she had before and looked, first at his ticket, and then down at her own again: confused and wrong footed. She’d entered into the moment ready to be right and, Kate couldn’t help but suspect, to put this foreign looking man in his place. As soon as the thought passed through her mind, Kate found herself entering into his side of the micro ticket drama. Of course he was right – he had a worn briefcase and a well-trimmed beard, of course he had sat in the right seat.

“I… Oh I’m so… sorry… I… How very strange, we seem to have the same ticket number…”

“I think perhaps if….” he took the ticket gently out of her hand for a second and turned it round, “I think it must be a number nine, the window seat opposite,” he finished up – nodding to where her son was already sitting.

She laughed loudly, the noise bursting into the carriage and shattering the stilted atmosphere, without improving it: “Oh golly what a numpty I am. Of course – how did I not see?”

‘How did you not see?’ Thought Kate to herself; didn’t you notice all the writing was upside down too? She remembered reading somewhere that 20% of people in the UK were functionally illiterate, but she hadn’t believed that possible.

“It’s absolutely fine; such an easy mistake to make.”

Kate admired his chivalry but thought this was taking British politeness to the edge of pandering ludicrousy. Regardless, it had the desired affect and the woman bustled herself into her seat – giving instructions to her son that he’d already followed by sitting down and settling himself in the first place. Kate had to admit, it was almost impressive – his passive focus on nothing in particular; staring out of the carriage and completely disregarding his mother’s words. Then again, she seemed equally determined to ignore this passivity and carried on talking at him as if he were hanging on her every word. It seemed a battle of wills was being forged between them – her energy feeding off his listlessness.

She got out some snacks from her bag and placed them in front of him: a can of coke, some crisps and an apple; followed by a book for herself with a bottle of sparkling water. She’d almost got everything to her liking when she decided it was too warm in the carriage and stood up to take her coat off; pausing undecidedly before folding it up and placing it on her seat so that she was sat on top of it. Wriggling uncomfortably, she clearly felt she’d committed herself to the decision because she sighed, closed her eyes for a moment and opened her book – allowing Kate to return to hers. Ready to rediscover… what? What exactly was it she was looking for in these pages?

***

Within a few pages, the book had swallowed her up again and she sank bank into the story – relieved to have her mind diverted through storytelling. Sipping tea from the keep cup she’d handed over to be filled at Costa, she turned the pages methodically as her mind settled into the pace of the story and entered into the world of 17th century Britain. She felt ready: ready to re-discover the frantic fanaticism of the Pendle Witch Trials and of the women caught up in a political game being played above their heads, always out of reach. The novel was fast paced, and the pages flicked steadily through as she allowed herself to be caught in the stresses and sorrows of a world that felt far away from the quiet carriage.

Authors all had their own pace, she thought abstractly. Dickens took your hand and led you through a maze of connectedness, meeting characters haphazardly on your way. Shelley shocked you with the intensity of grand, sweeping moments and the minutiae of a single night. Austen made you stop, have a cup of tea and think about the passage of time. Kate felt soothed by these authors and, although she didn’t re-read often, Austen was a noticeable exception for her. She had re-read Northanger Abbey every Christmas since she was sixteen. It had been one of her GCSE texts and she remembered reading it by the fire for her Christmas mocks as vividly as if it had happened that morning. It had charmed and relaxed her – even in the middle of the stress and the all-engulfing pressure of her exams. The smell of mince pies while she first read it had become an integral part of the memory and she associated it with Christmas; despite the fact that season played no part in the plot.

Persuasion was her real favourite though and, when things got particularly tough, she would always return to it. She had returned to it just last year when her Dad had passed away unexpectedly. It had not helped her in the way it had helped with other problems – but it had still taken her mind somewhere else; somewhere far away from the total impossibility of trying to accept that someone you love went away from you. Grief still ached its way through her at times – inseparably interconnected with the stresses of her job, surviving relationship with her mum and Michael’s distance at the time... That distance had seemed to peak shortly after and then fade – settling back into a new normal: redefining their relationship in a way she couldn’t quite stop herself from questioning.

Had it been because of the strength of her emotions? Emotions he couldn’t fully enter into? Sometimes, she felt that she had been the one to create the distance; but at others she felt that it was entirely his fault. Their marriage was only three years old, but she felt that something fundamental had shifted in that period, so that their marriage now seemed older somehow. It felt weighted to her, in a way that it hadn’t before.

Time had leapt on before that; bounded forward in excited bursts – it had slowed and clarified since her father’s death. It felt to her as if he was lingering. She had never considered herself a spiritual person but sometimes she really did feel as if she could call him up and talk to him. She’d see an article in the paper, or find a recipe he’d enjoy and go to send him the link. She still had his number saved in her phone – just in case.

Michael thought this was morbid and had tried to persuade her to delete it. That had probably been their biggest fight. She’d grabbed his phone and said:

“Let’s see how many people you have in here that you never message? Pointless people; people you love a lot less than I love my Dad.”

He’d reacted as if she’d thrown a bomb. She could see, now, looking back on it – that what she’d said had been absurd. It was the irrationality of total grief speaking, but she still didn’t understand why he’d exploded at her like that. His response seemed entirely disproportionate to the moment of madness.

She looked up from her book, thinking of him now, to see what he was reading. It was a piece in The Guardian about how schools exclusion policies were failing the most vulnerable in society. She started to gather her thoughts up into an opinion, so she was equipped for their inevitable discussion later. She knew she’s read something recently that had shed new light on the subject but, just as the allusive statistic almost came within her grasp, the carriage door slid open again and more people entered.

This time, it was a man with a daughter bouncing along at his midriff. Kate’s mind split in two: his daughter was enchanting and a smile tugged Kate’s lips up to greet her; but she also couldn’t help but hold a secret resentment at bringing children into the quiet carriage. She taught children, she had nothing against children – not most of the time anyway – but ‘quiet’ was not an adjective that she associated them. She resigned herself to the chatter that this two hour and ten minute journey to London would now inevitably bring.

“Daddy, can I have the window seat?”

“Of course you can precious,” her Dad replied, as he swung their luggage onto the racks overhead with an assured movement.

They didn’t have much with them and Kate wondered if they were going to visit a relative who would greet this young girl with toys and books that would amuse her on their London trip. Normally, travelling families seemed to come laden with enough to last a month – even if it was only a weekend visit. If they were staying with relatives who had enough to kit them out though, maybe they only needed the basics for the journey. Or perhaps he was just a very modern dad and had managed to streamline down his packing proficiency to a minimum. Where was their mum, Kate wondered? Already in London? Still in Manchester?

She realised with a slight jolt to her conscience that she hadn’t asked herself the same question of the teenage boy’s dad – she’d accepted his absence and, in fact, jumped to conclusion that this woman was a single mum. Which, to be fair, she probably was. Kate didn’t know how she knew this but she accepted the fact that sometimes the world just kept presenting the same pattern and you could, with reasonable accuracy, make predictions based on that. Was that offensive? She wasn’t sure. She wouldn’t have ventured the opinion out loud, but that wasn’t quite the same thing as the opinion itself being incorrect.

The young dad unclipped his rucksack with deft fingers and expertly swung it round to take out what he needed. It was such a seamless movement that Kate almost started reconsidering the possibilities of parenthood. Maybe it wasn’t always as totally chaotic as it seemed. This Dad seemed pretty in control of the whole ‘travelling with a child’ situation. Then her eye was caught by the teenaged boy sat diagonally across from her on the next table, and changed her mind. His snacks were still spread over the table in front of him and he’d made no effort to move them out of the young girl’s way, so that she could share half the space.

His mum obviously noticed this at the same time as Kate did because she dexterously swept them into a neater pile with an audible reprimand that her son ignored, other than with a grunt and a glance at the girl he had unconsciously incommoded. The girl grinned at him in response – obviously ready to make friends if he gave her an opening. He did not.

His mother started apologising to both the girl and her dad, who passed it off smilingly. Kate was softened against the awkwardness by the look of affection that the father lavished on his daughter. He was obviously proud of her manners and kindness, just as the woman opposite him was pained by her sons lack thereof. ‘Was it luck?’ Kate wondered. ‘Did you just get a good child? One that was easy to bring up? Was it to do with how good a parent you were? Was it a gender thing? Or to do with age? Were all teenagers inherently foul? Was it predestined? Did anyone really have a choice about how they turned out?’

As these questions ticked through her mind, the train finally started groaning into motion.

“This train is headed for London Euston and will be calling at: Stockport and London Euston. Please make sure you keep your belongings with you and mind your step when leaving the train. The Quiet Carriage is located in Coach J and first class accommodation is in Coach A. The café is in Coach C if you would like any refreshments during your journey. On behalf of Avanti West Coast, we wish you a pleasant journey.”

Kate accepted this wish and was gratified by the fact that it was a shorter announcement that usual. She’d noticed in recent years that train announcements seemed to be getting longer and more painfully explicit each time. She felt resentful at being asked to check the carriage for her belongings before departing. Well, obviously. Who were the people that got off the train at the wrong station, casually leaving their possessions strewn behind them and not minding the step, so that they nosedived onto a platform they’d never intended to arrive at, luggage-less. If such people existed, she wasn’t sure that an announcement reminding them not to do those things was going to do much good.

She smiled inwardly at her grouchiness and shook it off, settling deeper into her seat for the journey. They were off to visit Michael’s grandmother, Claire, who still lived in London and whom Kate was fond of. The last time they were there, Claire had taught her to make an incredible vinaigrette that had just the right amount of seasoning. It was a fortunate lesson because it inclined Kate to eat salad far more than anything before had done.

Claire lived in a cool, three story town house near the Thames. The kind of house that no one could afford to buy these days and it confounded Kate to think anyone ever had been able to. She loved these visits, infrequent though they were, because Michael was always at his best around his grandmother. He relaxed and became less ostensibly showy. He’d never been that close with his own parents who, in his mind, had dragged him up to Manchester towards the end of primary school and abandoned him to his Northern school fate. They had, in fact, moved when the BBC did and had bought a much nicer house in Didsbury as a result, but that just wasn’t how Michael looked back on his history.

London, in Michael’s mind, was inextricably linked with the good food and affection of his grandmother. Kate understood this, and let the digs about her home city bounce off her – but Michael didn’t. Michael would joke about how great his parents were and how lucky he was; painting this picture of the perfect middle class family. Only once or twice over the years, after he’d had a few whiskies, had Michael slightly let his guard down and allowed Kate to begin piecing together a picture of the reality. Claire had helped with this. She’d decided early in their relationship that she had far more time for Kate than for any of Michael’s ex-girlfriends and had taken her into her confidence.

Sometimes, Claire almost felt like a marriage counsellor in their relationship – feeding them up, invigorating them, keeping them on track. Kate looked forward to seeing her, as a point at which some of the recent tensions in their relationship would be relaxed. If he had oscillated recently between neglectful and overly attentive, that would soon be a thing of the past. If he had suddenly taken to wearing perfume, that would soon be explained. If she, just occasionally, had doubts about their future, they too would be dispelled in Claire’s kitchen. This train was carrying her to a safe haven.

As she reflected on this, Kate’s feelings about the journey seemed to seep into the train itself and any previous aggravation was lost in her appreciation for the speed at which it was carrying her. The uncomfortable seats and quantity of plastic faded into unimportance, as she watched the city landscape slide past. The dirt of Piccadilly quickly gave way to a view of tightly packed red rooftops, zig zap roads of a city built before modern philosophies on town planning, and the occasional station. It was only ten minutes later that their journey was paused at Stockport because of some bizarre founding principle that said every train had to stop there. She used the delay to try and settle into her book once more; although it wasn’t long before she was distracted by the squares of green that began flashing by.

The views were quite different now and this lifted her mood even higher. Her city had given way to hedges that rose and fell alongside the train track. She knew little about the countryside (or indeed, if this would even be classed as such), except that it was extraordinarily picturesque and calmed her spirits. She had a vague feeling of unworthiness in this; knowing that the term ‘city girl’ was really a slur and wishing that she had a more finely tuned appreciation for different types of plants – or whatever knowledge it was she was missing out on. She had read Nan Shepheard’s The Living Mountain and had felt elevated by the language, but not shared her experience of repeated adventures into the same landscape. Looking out at it now, she felt that it was a beautiful mystery to her.

The train began to slow; presumably because of the type of fields through which they were passing. She couldn’t see any animals but perhaps she was missing something. Or perhaps there wouldn’t be animals until later in the year, but the train always slowed here just in case. It was almost grounding to a halt now and then… it did. Stop.

She looked towards Michael in confusion to find that he too was looking up from his newspaper, a frown line furrowing its way across his forehead. The man opposite them continued to look out the window but had leaned forward a little, as if to see find out if anything was going on. The picture looking back at them stayed the same. The leaves on the trees barely lifted and the fields remained placidly static, no longer blurred by speed.

The silence in the carriage became palpable now – before, it had been almost incidental, irrelevant. Kate glanced at the harried- looking mother to see if she would break it, but even she seemed to feel that the sanctity of the quiet carriage should be preserved until a problem was confirmed or dismissed.

Kate wasn’t worried. She was sure there was no real problem – it was just odd to have stopped so soon in the journey, in the middle of a field. An inconvenience certainly – but probably caused by a glitch in the fault line; wasn’t that a phrase she’d heard before?

The overhead speaker began to crackle into life:

“We apologise for this delay in your journey. We are just being held here for the next few minutes and will be on our way again shortly.”

The silence in the carriage decompressed; she glanced at Michael and smiled at him – but he already had his head back in his paper. Sighing, she returned her attention to her book. The view had lost interest for her now; it was no longer whizzing past and carrying her to Claire. Familiars was picking up pace – the speed accelerating as the novel opened up problems Kate already knew her heroine was walking into. It was engaging enough that it kept her locked for the next couple of chapters. At the end of that, however, she couldn’t help but notice this was definitely more than the ‘few minutes’ promised.

Others around her were increasingly tetchy as well. The girl at the parallel window had already asked her dad how long it would be three times, his answer varying between: “I’m not sure sweetheart, but I’m sure it won’t be long”, “I still don’t know angel” and simply giving her an amused, arch look that made her giggle. The family opposite were fairing in a less composed way. The son’s anger at the unfairness of the world seems to be visibly growing and only found release through heavy sighs while he shifted his body weight around awkwardly.

“Where are we?”

Kate was shocked to register it as Michael’s voice that broke into the concerned, but still polite, silence. His geography was utterly terrible and she knew he would have looked up, had the thought and simply spoken it allowed. The mum quickly perked up and jumped in with:

“We’re in Cheshire, I think.”

‘She clearly saw Michael as the hero of the hour because he helped her with her sodding case’, Kate thought. She never used to resent people thinking well of her husband, but she found these thoughts were intruding with increasing frequency.

“Yes, we are!” chirped up the young girl. “I go riding near here. Don’t I, Daddy?”

“You do,” he confirmed with an embarrassed smile round the carriage.

“Have you ever been riding?” the young girl asked the boy sitting opposite her.

His dumfounded silence at being spoken to was, mercifully, broken by the overhead speaker cracking out at them again.

“Apologies again for this delay, ladies and gents. We’re being held here because of damage to the overhead cables. We’ll be on our way again as soon as we can and will update you with more information later.”

Shit!

Kate was not impressed with this ambiguous ‘later.’ She had rationed her Zen for two hours and ten minutes, before Claire greeted them at Euston and whisked them away to her comfortable London home. She didn’t have the reserves of energy for any longer than that. Her feeling of elation while the train chugged along evaporated into tension and the remembrance of marking to be done and the recent quarrels with Michael. It suddenly felt a hundred years ago that he’d kept his arm around her in the tea line and she was left with nothing but a feeling of resentment for his sodding newspaper.

She was obviously not the only who felt this way. Not, perhaps, about the newspaper specifically; but this announcement seemed to have refocused everyone’s angst into a focal point of pent up frustration. The shift in the carriage was palpable and immediate. The man in front of her accidentally kicked her under the table as he shifted around, pulling a laptop out of his worn briefcase.

“Sorry. Sorry! I just need to make a really quick call.” He looked round at the whole carriage apologetically, seeking their permission. “I won’t be a second; I just need to let them know I’ll be running late.”

“No problem mate”, said the young father with an easy smile, “we should probably all settle in for a while by the sounds of it.”

The woman in front of him frowned her disapproval of this acquiescence. Either she only approved of talking in the quiet carriage if it was Michael doing the talking, or she wasn’t over the ticket fiasco. The carriage remained silent though, as if they’d given collective permission for this call to be made, and must respect its importance now.

“Hey, it’s Muhammad. Yeah, so I’ve set off… oh you’ve seen. Yeah exactly! Right, let’s get the papers to Lucy just in case and let them know there’s a chance I won’t make it… Be honest with them. Yep. Ok… Thank you… Yes, of course… Well, I’ll see you when I see you. Bye. Bye.”

He smiled round again as he hung up: “Sorry about that folks, I was meant to appear in court today and I just needed to let them know I might not make it.”

“You’re a lawyer?” asked the girl in the corner.

The mother across from her looked as if this was an unlikely story. Clearly in her mind, a man who could tell his 6’s from his 9’s was far more likely to be a criminal than a lawyer.

“I am, yes. I go to London every few weeks when cases need to appear in front of a particular Judge.”

Silence fell at this piece of news; no one wanting to seem overly curious about the cases alluded to. Kate was more struck than anything by the quality of the man’s voice. It had an earthy resonance that somehow matched his skin tone and enhanced his good looks. She hadn’t known the sound of your voice could do that for you. How did her own voice sound to others? Did it make her more or less attractive?

She suddenly felt very aware that she and the sullen teenager were the only ones who hadn’t spoken yet. She took a sip of her tea to smooth her throat out and resolved to break the habit of a life time – she would speak in the quiet carriage. Feeling a little nervous, she glanced down into her bag to double check how many she had, and asked:

“Would anyone like to borrow a book while we wait?