SMOKE SCREEN

In the winter we hid in the safety of our smoke screen.  We used to stand in the cold of your porch, watching the fag smoke curl upwards into the starlit dark.  We avoided the subject.

We talked about everything else instead – put the world to rights, laughed at my stupid jokes and your acerbic wit and criticised the digital obsessed world.  During pauses in our conversation, when it might have been right and proper to raise the subject, we played music and critiqued that.  To distract ourselves further one night, we went dancing and our antics made you believe that people thought we were crazy.  I just didn’t care, but then I never did care enough, did I?  We were safe in our bubble, we avoided the subject.

It turns out that all through last winter, you were waiting for your moment to raise it, to end things between us, to recede and disappear like our fag smoke disintegrating into night air.  Me, toking on my cig, laughing at your humour, all happy and secure, I had no idea.  I thought we could avoid the subject forever.

 Well, the Spring came, didn’t it?  The light revealed a fraudulent friendship and there was no hiding anymore ... You picked your moment then and I?  Finding myself unable to watch smoke curling upwards, I gave up cigarettes and got myself through the summer.  Now that the nights are drawing in again, I find myself wanting to stand on your porch and share a cigarette with you.

 

TRAINS IN WINTER

When I was a kid I used to live near a railway.  For some reason, I used to feel a sense of fate whenever I heard the trains passing on a still winter’s night.

I used to lie there and wonder who the people on these late night trains were.  In my mind’s eye, I could see the sallow skinned teenagers with their speakers, their street music, the cider cans in the fingers of the boys and the hoop earrings on the hard faced girls.  Their noise would disturb the exhausted professional who having worked late and, not ready to face home, had stopped for a gin and tonic and another and another, until the last train was called.  I also imagined a high class crowd on their way back from a night out, the women in cocktail dresses, the men in designer jeans and shirts.  They’d be buzzing from their night out, telling jokes, maybe planning to go somewhere for a nightcap.  In contrast would be the nurse going to his nightshift.  As he listened to tunes with closed eyes, he’d be worrying about who was going to come into A&E and desperately hoping that tonight at least, no-one would insult him or spit on him.

Perhaps I saw in my reverie, the woman sitting on a window seat, staring out at the blackness with an enigmatic Mona Lisa smile.  Every now and then she checks her reflection in a little mirror.  She sucks on a mint.  Her eyes are deep with racing thoughts, her red tipped fingers are fidgeting, her feet encased in long boots.  She is protected from the cold by a long coat.  I can see her now, getting up eagerly as soon as the station is called.  She passes the boisterous teenagers, the tired professional, the revellers and the anxious nurse, some of them look up, others do not notice.  No-one watches as she alights onto the platform.  There’s a man waiting for her at the other side of the barriers, leaning against the wall smiling broadly.  He takes his hands from his pockets and holds out his arms as she runs to him.