The Waiting Room
(29/30) A Prompt, Gifted
It was TenThousandJourneys who offered this particularly fine prompt; according to my notes it was as long ago as 29 April 2024. I printed out the words and stuck them in my ‘Just Write, Right’ notebook, saving them for the ‘right’ moment:
Imagine entering a waiting room at a small out-of-the-way train station late in the evening in the middle of nowhere in the depths of winter. The room is warm, a fire blazing in the fireplace, and you’re glad to have found shelter. There is another traveler there, and as you draw closer to warm yourself by the fire, you get to talking with them. You learn they have arrived from the very destination you want to travel to and you realize they are actually on their way to the valley you have just arrived from. Your paths have intersected in this train station though how the two of you happened to be here at the same time is a mystery. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but you can’t shake off the eerie feeling that something else is at work, some strange magic that can be witnessed but not easily understood. You share your stories with each other, your grief, your hopes, and perhaps, most vitally, you share some medicine that will be useful for the other’s onward journey.
It remains to be seen if this is the right moment and the right tale.
It has been many months since she first took refuge in this waiting room. It was early Spring then, late-March - no, early April - when it was easy to believe the days were warming. Perhaps that is why she had never seen flames inside the pot-bellied wood stove in the centre of the back wall. Warmth had certainly been required. What is it, she thought, that makes railway stations funnel spiteful winds to send passengers scurrying for shelter.
Hidden away at the end of Platform 2, relief from seasonal variations came in the form of a tiled room, polished concrete on the floor, and windows that rattled in the breeze but miraculously rebuffed drafts. You had to be confident about your train times, mind you. Fine if you were heading East, deeper into the mountains. Eastbound trains left from Platform 2, which was long but navigable in a few determined strides. Travelling West, as she was, towards the urban sprawl of the city, you needed to negotiate the underpass as well as the platforms so it paid to know your timetable. Miss the last train and you threw yourself on the mercy of the landlady in the only boarding house that offered bed and board to respectable travellers. The bar offered refreshments to less reputable souls while the dining room served as a no-mans-land buffer where clientele from one group were shielded from coarse jokes and unwelcome offers from the other.
It had been cold in April, on the first occasion she had waited the 57 minutes for her connection. The bitter easterly that day might have blown her back to the city had she just opened her overcoat. But Railway Regulation 893 - displayed on the information board and, for the avoidance of doubt, highlighted with a brightly coloured arrow - specifically stated that use of the heating system was expressly forbidden between 31 March and 31 October. Today, All Souls Day, the stove is two days into its winter vigilance. An obsequious platform attendant, puffed up with the self-importance a uniform tends to bestow on men of a certain age, had already poked and prodded at the flaming heart of it twice in the ten minutes she had been there. She would have sworn it was as much for his benefit as hers. He was too attentive, deferential beyond the point of annoying. She was glad when the young woman burst through the waiting room door, spilling bags and belongings onto the tiled floor. The attendant was unimpressed, whether by the look of her or the inefficiency of her packing. His face would have soured the milk they kept topped up on the platform for the station cats. He touched the highly-polished peak of his cap, nodding slightly possessively towards the older woman before pushing past the newly-arrived girl into the chill November air.
“Ru_ude!”
The girl had that way young people have of making the words we think we know feel like a new language. It made her smile, a currency in short supply these past eight months. Weekly trains to a sanatorium to witness your mother slipping away can have that effect. But then her life hadn’t been the smiling kind anyway.
The girl colonised three of the worn seats opposite. It seemed like she had missed some paperwork sliding to the floor but elegant fingers at the end of a heavily-tattooed arm snatched up what looked like an official letter.
“Yikes, I better not lose that or Matron will think she’s taken on a loser.”
The older woman’s thoughts raced; how was it possible to reach your mid-fifties and still be held back by a late mother’s rules? Don’t talk to strangers, she had always insisted, a rule reasserted not two weeks before when the patient woke briefly to witness a quiet conversation with the attentive doctor who murmured to the dutiful daughter about more that just dosages and her mother’s comfort. You hardly know him, she’d insisted. The resultant blushing reflected a double helping of embarrassment; being ‘caught’ had felt mortifying, but the knowledge that he had witnessed her mother’s iron grip diminished her, she imagined.
Forcing herself past her mother’s invisible insistence for the first time, she allowed curiosity to guide her questions. “Matron? Are you travelling to the hospice?”
“Gosh, yes … do you know it?”
“My mother …”, the words wouldn’t come.
“OMG … I am such a klutz. You must have been visiting. I am so so sorry. Is your mum doing okay?”
Why did the tears still arrive unbidden? Two weeks on, long enough to feel ready to go back and collect the handful of personal items that had made the room feel less clinical. The small gilded frame, the black and white picture of a wedding day, a letter her husband (the father I never truly knew) had written from central Africa. She’d been four years old when the telegram of condolence arrived from the Embassy, young enough to barely understand the concept of ‘not coming back’ but old enough to see that Mother had no intention of discussing feelings, her own or her daughter’s, now or at any time in the future. Thus it was, her emotions had stayed tightly buttoned up.
“She passed, two weeks ago.”
“How terribly sad. Were you able to be with her? No, sorry, I’m intruding. God, I’d be a blubbering wreck. I still well up when I talk about Mum and Dad and it’s been seven years since the accident.”
The young girl scrabbled in her backpack for a tissue, dabbing at her face, stemming a tide. Touched by the openness of the girl’s grief, she thought back to the night when Mother had finally given up her stubborn fight and the tears that flowed from Hannah, the nurse who invested so much of herself in a difficult woman’s final weeks. Hannah, the daughter of a kindly doctor who did much to lift spirits in ways her emotions found hard to understand or express. The woman could see that this young girl would fit in perfectly.
“We’ll be missing our trains if we’re not careful. Let’s get your tears dried and get you and your luggage sorted”.
As she passed a fresh tissue to the young girl, a loosely folded piece of paper twisted and turned, like a seed from a sycamore, until it settled on the polished floor close to the younger woman.
“A prescription, that’s important!,” the girl exclaimed, before realising that it was a telephone number scrawled quickly on the first piece of paper that had come to hand for a man whose writing style reinforced the reputation of his profession.
Before she even knew what she was saying, the story spilled out as she confided in the young woman. A flurry of words. The thoughtful doctor. His attentiveness. Her confusion amidst a swirl of feelings. Now wasn’t the time. All spilled out to a stranger.
“Let me have your phone and let’s get this number stored somewhere safely. You never know! Haussmann sounds so formal; what’s his name? Ah, Pieter, with an ‘ie’. Done”.
Announcements were muffled this far down the platform but they got the tinny-sounding gist. The shopping bag she transferred from handbag to handbag ‘just in case’ was the right size to bring order to her new young friend’s escaping possessions. One last check around, an exciting future gathered in a collection of bags with a youngster’s spirit of adventure and a calling to help others.
They hurried along the platform, the guard’s red flag signalling the best place to stand for the two-carriage local service.
“You should come”, the girl blurted out, “to visit me”.
“But I …”.
“Silly thought, not me, you should visit your doctor friend. He sounds lovely”.
A lifetime of excuses welled up, a storehouse of reasons why she shouldn’t. But there was a place, a tiny guesthouse with a terrace where you could breathe mountain air and sort your thoughts, mine your feelings, fashion a future. There was a dining room, the sort of quiet place where conversations might be had, intentions understood, plans made.
“I should, shouldn’t I? I should visit … you … him. I … I should just …”
The girl was leaning out of the window, elbows fighting to keep it lowered. Her eyes sparkled as she insisted … “you really should, you know. And there’s no time like the present …”
The two-carriage local service whistled piercingly, a summoning of strength to haul itself into the high hills. It pulled away from a platform deserted save for a rather buttoned-up guard with a pair of green and red flags hanging limply at his side. He watched the train go - watched her leave - the cold hiss of a deep sigh taking shape on bitter winter air.
*********
A prompt you developed into story with all your usual perceptions of human nature Barrie!
I especially love that we are not certain of the next chapter, the possibility of imagining our own ending...
And, "The girl had that way young people have of making the words we think we know feel like a new language." So true... I am often lost when dealing with the adolescents I teach! I any language... 😂