The Road
The train stopped at a small station. A gravel depot was heaped
between two wooden walls, and beyond the lines a rusting plough grew into
an elderberry bush. No one got on or off the train, which made the stop
boring and inexplicable. People rustled among baskets and haversacks for
sandwiches and flasks of drink.
“I want some water,” Ivan said, staring at the open door of the waiting
room.
“You’ll have to wait,” Amy said.
“There’s an hour yet,” Stanley reminded her. “He can’t.”
The train jolted, as if about to start. “I’m thirsty. I want a drink of
water.”
“O my God,” his mother said. “I told you we should have bought
some lemonade at the station.”
“We had to get straight on. We were late.”
“A couple of minutes wouldn’t have mattered.”
“I wanted to get seats.”
“We’d have found some somewhere.”
To argue about what was so irrevocably finished infuriated him, but
he deliberately calmed himself and rooted in the basket for a blue plastic
cup. His whole body was set happily for action: “I’ll just nip across the tap.”
“The train’s going to start,” she said. “Sit down.”
“No, it won’t.” But he didn’t get up, paralysed by her objection.
“Are you going?” she said, “Or aren’t you?” A vein jumped at the side
of his forehead as he pushed along the crowded gangway, thinking that if he
didn’t reach the door and get free of her in a split second he would either go
mad or fix his hands at her throat. Their carriage was beyond the platform,
and he was out of sight for a moment. Then she saw him running between
two trolleys into the men’s lavatory as another playful whistle sounded from
the engine.
“Where’s Dad gone, Mam?”
“To get some water.”
Everyone was looking out of the window, interested in his race: “He
won’t make it.”
“I’ll lay a quid each way.”
“Don’t be bleddy silly, he’ll never get back in time. You can hear the
wheels squeaking already. Feel that shuddering?”
“You’re bleddy hopeful. We’ll be here an hour yet.” The face disappeared
behind a bottle: “I’ll live to see us move.”
Money was changing hands in fervid betting.
“He will.”
“He won’t.”
At the second whistle he bobbed up, pale and smiling, a cup held
high, water splashing over the brim.
“What’s Dad out there for?” Ivan asked, lifting his face from a mug
of lemonade someone had given him. The wheels moved more quickly, and
Stanley was half-way along the platform. Odds were lengthening as he
dropped from view, and pound notes were flying into the bookie’s cap. A
woman who wanted to place two bob each way was struggling purple-faced
to get from the other end of the carriage. Her coins were passed over.
Amy sat tight-lipped, unwilling to join in common words of encouragement
even if it meant never seeing him again. Their return tickets were in
his wallet, as well as money and everything else that mattered, but she wouldn’t
speak. He can wander over the earth till he drops, she thought, though the
vision of him sitting outside some charming rustic pub with twelve empty
pint jars (and the plastic cup still full of water) in front of him, while she
explained at the other end about their lost tickets and destitution, didn’t
make his disappearance too easy to keep calm about.
The carriage slid away, a definite move of steel rolling over steel beneath
them all. He was trying not to spill his hard-won water. A roar of voices blasted
along the windows as the train gathered speed. “He’s missed it!”
The door banged open, and a man who had slept through the betting
spree jumped in his seat. [...]
“What’s the hurry, you noisy bogger?” he asked, at Stanley standing
upright and triumphant beside him.
Allan Sillitoe, The Road (a short story), 1968.
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