Inspired by The Kinks.
When he got nervous, Barry counted elephants. One elephant, two elephant, three elephant, four elephant… passing the seconds until he calmed down, as if playing hide-and-seek with the world. Around a hundred elephants—a proper stampede—he lost count and started over. He had done this at least ten times now.
As always, Barry waited for Annie at their bench, the bench where they always met, always between a quarter- and a half-past five, always on Friday when they got off work, always to catch the 5:40 to Bedford from Waterloo Station together. Always—well, since his mum got sick, which it felt like she had always been. But now it was quarter ‘til six and the 5:40 was gone, and they were in danger of missing the 6:00, and there was still no sign of Annie. This had never happened—she was never this late—and now he’d lost track of the elephants again.
His fingers worried a worn scrap of paper, its edges soft against the polyester of his pocket: Annie’s note. He couldn’t think about Annie’s note right now. The cold metal of the bench dug into his bony legs. Clatter and chatter, hissing steam and squealing brakes, and the thunka-thunka of passing trains accumulated in his ears. People poured endlessly from every corner, none of them Annie.
Tired of sitting there inhaling cigarette smoke and exhaust and who knew what else, Barry scooped up his ragged duffle bag and pushed his way towards the nearest payphone. As he walked, his eyes stayed locked on the corner of the station by the newsstand. Annie’s corner, where she made her entrance into his life, every Friday night, like a character in a play; enter stage right, lights on, the music starts.
To his dismay, the payphone was occupied by a large bald spot. Barry stopped in front of the booth, tapping his foot restlessly against the tile floor. There was a man attached to the bald spot, he supposed, some kind of large, tweed-covered mass, but the back of the man’s head had a strange grip on Barry’s agitated attention. At least, the small part of his attention that wasn’t fixed on Annie’s corner.
Barry imagined the bald spot sliding open like a vault door and little brain men bouncing out gleefully, free of their master and his ponderous conversation about taxes or politics or football. As if in response, the bald spot’s owner turned and gave Barry an odd look. Barry blushed and looked at his feet, then back at Annie’s corner. Why did his nerves always give him such strange thoughts? He felt like everyone could sense them and it made them uncomfortable. Everyone but Annie. His ideas always made her laugh. And Gran, before she died. And Mum, but laughing hurt her lungs too much these days. They all loved his flights of fancy, except for the scary ones that trapped him in bed or made him hide in a bathroom stall.
The half-bald man pushed past him. “All yours, buddy.”
Barry rushed forward and grabbed the phone, fumbling a coin into the slot. He directed the operator to the bakery where Annie worked, where she spent all day collecting the smell of sugar and fresh bread. Ring after ring, and then silence. Closed, as he expected. He jammed in another ten pence and called her flat, just in case. No one there. At least, no one to pick up the phone. Who knew, maybe she was passed out on the floor, the way he’d found his mum when they first learned something was wrong. He pictured the phone ringing uselessly over Annie’s still body and slammed the phone back into the receiver. Then he turned and stalked back to their bench, fingers scrunching the unread note in his pocket.
The gigantic station clock hung over him like a magnifying glass trained on an ant. It was ten ‘til six now. He double-checked his scratched plastic wristwatch. Same bad news.
Barry searched for a distraction. He tried to watch the people swarming by, but their bustling footsteps only reminded him of his own impatience. He tried to watch his feet, but the scuffs on his boots were a sore reminder of the day. He tried to look up at the steel girders that crisscrossed the ceiling, but they seemed to close in on him like the door of a birdcage. He tried to watch the sun set behind Waterloo Bridge, but he was used to sharing the view with Annie from their train, and tonight the lonely light that filtered through the grimy station window felt like a rough imitation. He considered opening the tightly creased note in his front pocket, but knew he couldn’t bear to face what it might have to say. Instead, Barry watched Annie’s corner and let the cold wrought-iron hands of the clock slowly tighten around him. Half of London passed under its watchful stare, but the clock seemed indifferent to all but him. One elephant, two elephant…
Fragments of passing conversations washed over him, finding no purchase in his thoughts. The clock ticked carelessly on. Five ‘til six now. She was so late! He decided if she wasn’t there by six, he would do something. What, exactly, he wasn’t sure.
As the station darkened and minutes passed, he started to run out of comforting explanations. The bakery had never kept her even half this long past five. He pictured a fire, an oven left on, a hopeless scramble to get through a door already engulfed by flame. He’d heard sirens earlier, right? It was hard to be sure in all the clamor. Everyone was so loud, so busy, so unconcerned with each other as they noisily barreled towards their destinations. Barry put his hands over his ears, pressing hard as if to push the natter of their voices and the thumping of their footsteps and the rattle of their luggage out of his brain. He wanted to shout at them all to SHUT UP, to let him think, but he knew that would only add uselessly to the din.
Maybe the underground was out of service. But the bakery was one stop away. She should have been able to walk here by now. In his head, the smoke from the imagined fire re-shaped into rubble from a collapsed tunnel. Workers and firefighters chipped away from above. Too slow, much too slow! In the subway car below, Annie suffocated under a panicked mass, the desperate passengers pawing at the windows, wasting the last of the air, Annie’s air.
Suddenly it was hard for Barry to breathe or think. His breaths became rapid gasps and the gaps between them closed tighter and tighter and tighter until he was sticking his face between his legs and trying not to hyperventilate. The cracked tile floor stared back at him, seeming ready to collapse beneath his feet, to spit him out into the same pit as Annie’s train. Or maybe she’s just tired of you, a persistent voice whispered. Who wants to spend every weekend in Bedfordshire with you and your sick mum? Her note probably says that she’s leaving you—
FOOOOOOL! bellowed a train whistle as it pulled into the station, briefly puncturing the general clamor. Barry sat up, jarred out of his spiral of worry. He took a ragged breath. The clock read six; so did his watch. He slumped back against the bench, trying to think of what to do.
“Beautiful, innit?” croaked a voice next to him on the bench. Barry turned to see a lanky middle-aged man, grey hair poking out from under a blue flat cap. He held a crossword puzzle and a golf pencil in one hand and crooked cigarette in the other. Barry hadn’t noticed him sit down.
“Excuse me?” asked Barry, momentarily distracted.
The man gestured with his cigarette. “The sunset, don’t you think?”
Barry looked out the window again and found the sky a brighter orange than before. The water glinted purple and gold, framed by the arches of the bridge. It was lovely, even through the thick, sooty window. As lovely as any sunset he and Annie had caught together.
The dirty river’s shifting currents of refuse, momentarily cast in gold, washed over Barry in a vivid rush. He saw every sunset that he and Annie had watched from the train all at once. He felt his body melting into hers in their booth like the sun melting into the sky, and for a moment, he wasn’t scared.
Like all those other sunsets, like all beautiful things, the moment ended. Time resumed its gentle pull, depositing Barry back on his and Annie’s bench, property of the City of London but made theirs by the patient application of time and love. The only way anything is truly earned. This sunset, the one in front of him, still shone.
“Aye,” Barry said, “it always is.”
From his pocket, he took the note that Annie had left on her empty pillow that morning. Barry unfolded it, no longer terrified of what it might say.