Paddington…he was never sure whether he loved or hated it. There was something about stations anyway; a kind of restless, anxious energy; people on the move, partings and reunions; sometimes it reminded him of a disturbed ants’ nest teeming with frantic movement. Airports were the same. The crowds waiting while their train was being ‘prepared’ whatever that meant – a quick clean and restocking of crisps and beer probably, while people stood around like slightly dishevelled athletes waiting for the starting pistol. Everything was being done for ‘your convenience’ except that was the last thing it was really done for. Eventually, just before departure time, the train would be ready for boarding and then there would be the lemming-like stampede, the level of panic increasing if there had been a last-minute platform change. Heart attack country that; out of condition men and women lugging huge wheeled suitcases and trying to run down the platform, once that is they’d managed to get past the Gestapo on the gate, listlessly but pedantically, checking every ticket. Except now ‘the virus’ had changed everything. Masks everywhere, fewer people for fewer trains and a sense as much of nervous exhaustion as of intent movement. ‘Bring back nationalisation,’ he thought morosely, ‘it couldn’t be worse than this conveyor belt of money to some foreign owner.’
He stared at the departure board and scratched his head. He always left London feeling sweaty, hot and grimy, having accreted a fine layer of dirt. If that was what the outside felt like what must his lungs look like? Still there was an energy about the place, manic but invigorating. Living there, well that was quite another thing. In his younger day it had been affordable, just; now a garden shed was beyond most people, even with the slow collapse of the City as the banks and money men moved their operations to Frankfurt and Dublin. Still, he was travelling first class and would lash out on a restaurant car meal. But first, some freebies in the first-class lounge. Paddington was still identifiably Victorian, the lounge even had some wallpaper from the days when the Queen herself used it. ‘What would she make of it now? Would she have liked the shiny chrome and plastic seats or favoured the leather Chesterfields in the original? How could it be that the Victorians could afford to build so much so splendidly when these days it seemed everything cost too much?’ He’d read somewhere that the country never made any money out of the Empire but Victorian wealth had come from somewhere. ‘A captive market of millions for British goods’ he supposed ‘plus cheap food and raw materials.’ He stepped to the side as a rubber tyred electric trolley came down behind him flashing its orange light and beeping anxiously.
He began to move slowly down the side of the station towards the lounge. There were worse places to kill an hour; free mags., nibbles and drinks. He was in his early sixties and alone, a slight, pale, blue-eyed man with thinning hair, hanging around, waiting without knowing what he was waiting for, or not wanting to face it.
When he got there the lounge was closed, ‘to ensure the safety of passengers and staff’. His glasses steamed up as he breathed out in exasperation. He’d known the Night Riviera sleeper had stopped running except for Sundays but hadn’t thought to check what else was off limits. He had a thought and headed off to Sainsbury’s for sandwiches; he had a bad feeling about Pullman dining. It surely would be off too and it was just too long a journey for crisps and coffee.
‘What did it matter in the scheme of things anyway? I can rough it this once’, he thought. Compared with the other changes in his life, making do with a sandwich was hardly life-changing. For, as the weeks of Covid had turned into months and the country’s loosest, most care-worn bricks had begun to tumble at an ever-increasing rate; as R numbers had been quoted then forgotten; as ‘following the science’, ‘world-class’ and ‘world-beating’ had been and gone while people’s lives were shattered or lost, he had decided to leave the city and move to what seemed to be the relative safety of his little holiday-let in the south-west. He could never be called a reckless man; he didn’t make life-changing decisions. He liked routine and familiar surroundings, or, at least he had. But something had happened to change his thinking, to change him. A neighbour in an adjoining flat had fallen ill. Mr Hussain had been a neighbour for ten years and more, living a quiet and calm life with his wife, sometimes having the grandchildren to stay and just toiling away doing harm to no-one. Then Mr Hussain sat in his driver’s seat one day when the air on his bus had been full of droplets and Mr Hussain had become ill. Then he had died. Grief had descended like endless rain from leaden skies. He had heard the crying during the day and during the night. Mrs Hussain, a friendly, smiling and compassionate woman, had seemed to diminish; she shrank and grew fearful; she lost all direction. And he thought, ‘What is the point of all this? There is no longer firm ground. I cannot bear the grief I see. I must leave. I must run away.’
He was not just confused or saddened, he was adrift in a leaking boat. Like all sick animals he wanted to be at home, but home was not the place he had lived in for some thirty years; home was where he came from. Somehow he felt, felt not thought, that he would be alright if he went home. He had had a life of sorts, a career in the civil service after university, relationships, though none for longer than he cared to think about and no marriage and no children. Over the years he had grown, or more accurately, shrunk, into a calm, unambitious, unemotional man whose life was ordered and organised and safe. The bearded young graduate living with his girlfriend in a tacky bedsit in north London and then, when she left him, living alone in the same bedsit and telling himself everything was fine and things would work out, had in time grown a shell, isolated and alone and, yes, lonely too, he admitted to himself. Now as he looked back at the turns in the road he had taken and looked forward to nothing, he felt hollowed out. He was running away; ‘Like the coward I am’, he thought. He knew his neighbour’s death had been the trigger not the cause of his panic. He knew too he wasn’t escaping poverty or deprivation; he was comfortably off. He would rent his London flat and had been able to take redundancy when Cameron’s civil service culls had started. Work had filled the week but he hadn’t missed it. He hadn’t been able to commit more than his time to his work as austerity had become the slogan and mediocre politicians prioritised slash and burn over rational policy in order to climb the greasy pole. He had learned to keep his ideals securely locked away after a few years of post-graduate radicalism and, eventually, had lost the key and then forgotten all about the cupboard he kept his values in. That had been why she had left him; she hadn’t been ready to compromise beliefs that were part of who she was. He missed her still after all these years, like the part of him that made him whole.
They had lived in a first floor bed-sit in north London; a bedroom-cum-lounge, then down the corridor to a long room that took a single bed, a kitchenette and a bath with gas geyser over which showered limescale into the bath whenever it fired up. The shared loo was downstairs by the front door. They’d painted the walls orange, bought lots of scented candles, installed a fish tank and started to build a life together. Then, somehow, life had got in the way; it wasn’t their relative poverty in the early years, or the simplicity of their lives. It was, he knew now, his loss of faith. He had come to believe that they could not change the world and had become cynical about the value of trying. She had not and he had been a lead weight holding her back and stifling her spirit as he tried to persuade her that his career was more important than idealistic dreams.
One day when their huge and overweight Armenian landlord, sweating from the climb up a flight of stairs, had given his usual peremptory knock and burst in, he had found him crying, her note clutched in his hand. Having satisfied himself that the rent would still be paid, Mr Jack (not his name but as near as the English could get to Assadourian he had long ago decided) had shown, what was for him, unusual delicacy and left, clearly puzzled that a woman’s departure should seem so devastating. He had not cried since, having found another secure place to keep his feelings and again, so he had thought, forgotten them all together – until his neighbour had died, having lived a blameless and yes, a good, life.
……………………………………………………
‘Pots’, she thought and began clearing away the debris from cooking.
She heard the cat flap clatter and looked down and smiled. “Oh hello. Where have you been?” The cat yowled gently and looked at her expectently.
“Hungry are you? Well let’s see what we’ve got for you.” She measured out a helping of food from the tin, looked at it in the bowl, felt a stab of doubt. Was it was enough or too much? she pondered. She put some back in the can then changed her mind and put it back in the bowl. ‘What a thing to fret about’, she thought. The cat waited impatiently. It jumped up on the worktop and she gently put it down again. She did that a lot lately, hesitated, unable to make her mind up, usually about stupid little things. When she went out – if she went out these days – she locked the door, got half way to the gate and thought, ‘Did I lock the door?’, turned round and went back to check. Ridiculous really; part of growing older or being alone she supposed.
“There you are then, a perfectly measured portion….more or less.
Listen to this puss: It’s Boccaccio describing the time of the plague. He writes that a certain sector of society ran away from the sick and bonded together in small groups to entertain themselves with music and whatever other amusements they could devise to avoid the scenes of death in the city. Could be Bournemouth beach in 2020 not medieval Italy don’t you think?” The cat silently agreed.
Outside the birds were singing, plants and animals were hunkering down for winter and the world was turning. The moon dragged water across the globe, creatures were born and creatures died. Clouds formed, rain fell, plastic polluted and fat men with tattoos gave Nazi salutes and drank beer. Police were attacked and other police attacked. A virus spread and governments acted and postured.
What could she do about all that? What could anyone do? Well, this time she would do something, go to Greenham, bend the knee, protest, march, sing. Otherwise those fat, tattooed men with bellies would win. There ought at least to be a fight.
Trouble was, she didn’t have much fight left these days. Still, what she had she would put to good use. It had to be better than watching endless repeats on afternoon telly along with ads for stair lifts, funeral plans and equity release.
Later she sat down on the settee and thought about what on earth she could do to make some kind of difference. She was soon joined by the cat which settled on her lap, purring as she absently stroked its ear.
‘Politics won’t do’, she thought, ‘I don’t want to be on the inside of a broken system. Of course, there are some good people in politics but they don’t often prosper and some, like Jo Cox, lose far more than the chance of advancement. Most people don’t feel they have a voice, even if their lot are in power.’
“They’re right too,” she said out loud and the cat opened its eyes briefly and gave a half purr. “Remember the anti-Iraq War march puss? Don’t suppose you do – before your time. Over a million people saying to parliament, ‘Please don’t go to war’. Made no difference at all. And the million marchers were right. This time around we clapped the health workers and government offered them a badge but nothing else. Meanwhile, over the water, the ‘leader of the free world’ was sowing violence and division in the hope of stealing an election.
No puss, politics won’t do it.“
