Daydream on a Season’s Ticket
“My name is Dan. We cannot help you.” He is slightly stooped, like a man who has carried a barrel on his shoulders, and his right eye is turned or lazy, but realigns behind his thick black rimmed glasses when he finishes speaking from the Lost Property window. I have lost my phone and I am in a train station, sitting opposite a large 50’s type mural of a family on a picnic, all laughing, and waving back to a conductor who is smiling as the train leaves them behind.
An elderly lady sits next to me, a couple of bench seat spaces away. She is eating hot chips from a rolled newspaper, and I can smell the vinegar. They are thick and sort of soppy, the kind you can remember the taste of, and the extra salt that comes when you lick your fingers. I cannot help myself and ask if I could have one? She is precise and adamant. “No.”
The mural catches my gaze as the children in it have departed and the parents are no longer grinning and are looking about, alarmed. When, I turn back to look at her, she is gone, and three sea gulls are squabbling over half a chip, among them, one missing a leg, hops into flight, crashing into the frozen picnic and falls on to the rails, where it flops back to the wall, sitting as though lapsing in a lounge.
I am contemplating that I have not seen a newspaper in a very long time when Dan approaches me with a phone and places it in my lap. It is not mine. I consider telling him for the sake of conversation and to see if his ocular adjustment will occur again, but the one-legged gull is now part of the mural, caught in flight, taking off with a sandwich crust while a boy child laughs, and a girl chases it mid step, all the while laughing with her brother, as though she is lifted hanging on to a kite. The parents are no longer present, and an older woman, a grandmother, sits on the rug reading a spread-out broadsheet.
A woman in a railway uniform taps me on the shoulder. “You should answer that.” The phone is ringing, the ring tone is Smoke on the Water. I turn around and see a name JACINTA on her top pocket, hand embroidery in perfect pre modern script. I begin to tell her, “I don’t own it, it can go to voice …” when I realize she is the same smiling conductor from the grand mural. Looking back to it in sudden apprehension, she is no longer there, and when I turnabout she is no longer behind me either. As the phone pings I am perplexed as I recall being on a regional train, the teak and huon pine shining in waxed care, and the countryside another State, the driver tooting as we slowed to enter a small-town platform.
My thumb is bleeding, the gull ‘s beak tinged with my colour, it sidles down from my cross-legged sit, jumping to where the children break up a sandwich for it. The parents offer me a sling stopped beer; the small bottle’s pull-down sealer opened for me. The mother wears a lemon cashmere sweater, the father a heavy knit sepia cardigan. I see the train slowly pulling away and a hand waving farewell from the front carriage. In the near distance a figure begins to emerge, and she carries a cane basket, and has The Argus tucked under an armpit. She mouths a glancing hello to me, some acquaintance of the family she does not know, to whom some politeness is required.
My focus is drawn to my shoes which are now set out in rich burgundy small tiles. Movement is becoming a heavy lethargy. Still, I have enough energy to squeeze a finger to the message button, and to look out across the rails to where I see a family watching me, a woman with a toddler on her hip, a man standing with a larger infant, each of them holding their burden close with exhaustion. An older woman hands around fish and chips, snapping the larger chips in two for the children, before passing them to the wanting hands, opening and closing in anticipation. A regret hangs between us, under the lull I feel, a gentle wash of an artist’s cleaning sponge. My eyes are hardening, and I am becoming a pose within ceramics. The phone responds, “My name is Dan, we cannot help you”, as the last light of the elongated summer evening fades.
Many thanks to Mark Jones, editor, for nominating this speculative piece.
James Walton Poetry 