Wednesday's Train

by Pete Mitchell

At seven-thirty the station pulsed, coats brushed against each other, feet stamped as people reached the shelter of the station. Breaths rose like smoke from a hundred different chimneys. Darren stood still on the platform, hands wrapped around his coffee, watching the waves of commuters heading into the city. He didn’t feel like one of them, more like a distant observer. A bird watcher concealed within an invisible hide.

He took the little stick and stirred his coffee seven times. Always seven. He didn’t think that seven, or any other number was lucky, but he believed in rhythm, and seven just felt right. Six or eight and the day was destined to be disrupted. It would be like playing an LP at the wrong speed. Such jarring would ruin the whole day.

Some people might have called Darren lonely. He thought of himself instead as… unattached. Like a saxophonist practicing alone in a basement, improvising into the silence, knowing that his virtuosity would only be recognised as part of a band.

At home, he knew Ellington would be waiting. A one-eyed tabby with a torn ear, Ellington had no interest in Darren’s problems. The cat had walked into Darren’s life, battered and bleeding, and had never left. Ellington always listened when Darren played his Coltrane records late into the night. Sometimes Darren imagined the cat understood jazz better than he did—that Ellington, knew exactly when a blue note bent into longing.

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She first boarded the train on a Wednesday. Half way between the start and the end of the working week Wednesdays mark a transition. Some of Darren’s colleagues called it ‘hump day’, but Darren found them crude.

She stepped into the train with the crowd but seemed oddly apart from them, as if the air moved around her differently. Her coat was spattered with rain, and she carried a book with a red cover. She opened it at once and her lips curved into a contemplative smile.

Darren stared at her reflection in the window. He avoided staring at her directly. The raindrops of the glass outside gave her a thousand jewels. He liked the way she tucked her hair behind her ear and the zen rhythm of her breathing.

She wasn’t magazine cover beautiful. She was something rarer, her beauty radiated from within. Others looked like sepia photographs next to her Kodachrome.

Darren liked to entertain himself on his morning journey by inventing lives for strangers. He imagined the man with the tattered briefcase as an accountant who longed to be a magician, who could make elephants vanish. The woman with the woollen leg-warmers had once been a ballerina, now working as a tailor.

For the woman of Darren’s interest, he couldn’t imagine such whimsical stories. She was someone who had a serious life. He imagined her as an architect, sketching sprawling cities whose buildings drew power from the wind. Charting maps of whole countries that were only visible as dawn melted the fog. Sometimes, he imagined her as a cellist, clutching her instrument tightly between her thighs and drawing resonant notes late into the night oblivious to her neighbours.

If I knew her, he thought, I’d probably say something absurd, like asking her if she liked cats. If she said yes, he’d invite her to meet Ellington. She’d probably ignore him, of course, but maybe she’d really understand, that was part of her mystery.

In his daydreams, she’d invite him to a gathering of her friends. They’d sit around a table drinking wine; melancholic jazz would be playing in the background. He would be her eclectic guest who’d brought some goat cheese and tomatoes that he had sundried to accompany their wine. Her friends would tease him, ‘Who has time to dry tomatoes’, but she would defend him: ‘Isn’t he wonderful? And this pinot is delicious.’

One Wednesday commute the book that she was reading slipped in her grasp. She managed to catch it but the bookmark shot across the aisle to Darren’s feet.

Darren quickly retrieved it and held it out to her. ‘Here you go. Oh, London Court Books, I love that little store.’

She smiled directly at him. ‘Yes, they’re great aren’t they. Thank you.’

The words were unremarkable, hardly a conversation, but they echoed through him like a sax note held too long.

For the rest of the ride, he sat restlessly, as though holding something precious against his chest.

That evening, Darren poured himself a whiskey into a crystal glass. He set an LP spinning—Sonny Rollins’ ‘Body and Soul’. Rollins’ sax climbed into the air like a stage light in a smoky bar. Ellington climbed onto his lap, clearly enjoying the music.

Darren replayed the woman’s smile in his mind. Not romantically—it wasn’t just about her. It was about proof. Proof that he so desperately needed. Proof that he wasn’t invisible. That even for a brief moment he’d been someone who had been seen.

He scribbled a note on the back of yesterday’s Sudoku:

‘Today I stepped out of the shadows. For a moment I was real.’

Ellington pawed at the note, unimpressed, his tail flicking in time with the music. Darren chuckled, scrunched up the note and tossed it towards the kitchen bin. He felt more buoyant than he had in months.

Darren continued to see her on the train every Wednesday. She always got on at Glendalough Station, with a book in her hands. They never spoke again. He didn’t need to. Her presence was enough to warm his heart. She turned the monotony of his train journey into something precious.

He wondered sometimes if she noticed him at all. If she remembered him returning her book mark. Maybe to her Darren was just part of the texture of the crowded train. But he liked to think that one day she might see his face in the crowd and think – I know that face from somewhere.

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At Perth Central Station, the train emptied in a pulse of motion. Darren followed, as always. The air smelled of damp concrete, coffee and fried food.

She walked ahead of him. He saw her as if she was captured in a stage spot light. Then she stopped. A man was waiting for her, smiling with perfect teeth. She stepped into his arms. Their embrace was easy, effortless and natural.

Darren stopped. The crowd washed past him. For a moment, the ache in his chest sounded like the low moan of a baritone sax, full of yearning and regret. He stood still, watching the shape of their oneness, like someone outside a jazz venue, listening through the door but never being let in.

And yet—he smiled. Of course she had someone. She was beautiful wasn’t she. She was real. That was the point. She was not a character he had invented. He hadn’t imagined her life, a life with him in it. She had her own life, her own existence.

Finally, the crowd carried him forward. He swirled his coffee seven times, though only the dregs remained. On the street the sky was clearing. The day no longer felt like an Escher staircase.

That night, back in his apartment, Ellington waited for him. They both listened intently as Coltrane wafted over them. Darren savoured his Chivas and stroked Ellington’s coat.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said to Ellington. ‘We’re fine. Some music is meant to be played solo.’

Ellington stared at Darren with his one eye, unimpressed.