One Year Ago.
Twenty five minutes until the train leaves. The knowledge alternates between being concerning and comforting. Time is stretching on and speeding up around her in irregular intervals one minute the long hand sits idly on the eight the next second, and it feels like only a second, it's sitting on the nine. She can feel panic twisting around her heart, winding its way up her throat until she feels like she can't breathe.
Where is he?
She scans the crowd quickly her eyes trying to take in everyone at once and linger on the details. Dark eyebrows here, a scar on the hand there, red shirts, blue jumpers, and black coats. Long hair, short hair, tall, small, fat, thin, they race by her in hurried blurs, each passing by unaware that with every second that goes by her heart is sinking further and further until she can feel it in her belly.
He's not coming.
The certainty with which she knows it makes her eyes mist and she quickly wipes a traitorous tear away. Everything they promised one another dead before it lived and instead of him telling her he's left her here in St Pancras, surrounded by tourists and grumpy business men who shovel over priced faux deli sandwiches into their mouths as they fight to get their tickets out of their wallets, to figure it out for herself.
With a sigh she looks at the clock. 19:00 Brussels - Now Departing. Turning on her heel she walks calmly to the counter, pulls her suitcase up to rest against the shiny plastic front and smiles at the pretty female attendant who gives her a welcoming smile completely oblivious to the hollow feeling that is consuming her. The attendant, Katy, asks her how she can help.
"I'd like a ticket to Paris, the next one you have available please."
x x x
He sits in the trailer, the velvet cushions of the bench sofa scratching his elbows. The place smells like Glade and cigarette smoke even though his mother always smokes out the door to try and prevent the stench from sinking into the fibres of the caravan. It doesn't work. These small things they do to try and make their small spaces seem nicer than they are never work. A flower box hanging out the window, a cheery sign hung in the window, a fresh coat of paint on the balcony doesn't detract from the tan tinfoil sides of their homes or the cement bricks tucked under the wheels. It does not distract from the wire fencing circling them or deafen you to the sound of heavy traffic that whizzes by right next to them. You can still hear the plastic slap of the doors as they open and close, you can still hear the footsteps of the caravan next door as though they were walking up your corridor. You can hear every shout, scream, cough and moan like it was happening just outside the bedroom door.
There's no such thing as privacy here.
It's how he knows that the silence surrounding them is because everyone can hear the hitch in her breath as she exhales smoke. From their plastic windows they can see the way her mouth turns down to touch the edge of her trembling chin and the discoloured tracks her tears have made on her cheeks. Her shoulders are hunched over making her look ten years older than her actual 55. He has done this to her, run her ragged with fear letting stress and anxiety age her prematurely. His reckless determination has carved deep lines on her forehead and around her mouth. The cigarettes haven't helped but they give her something to fuss with as her expectations are shattered and her self-worth called into question.
He wants to cry, not only because his mother is trying her hardest to hide how she is slowly falling apart again, how she is wondering just how much longer she's going to have to endure this, questioning how she got her and if it's worth it any more, but because he was done the exact same thing to the woman he loves. There is a silly part of him that tries to find comfort in knowing that without him she will never look like his mother, old and broken, but when he thinks about her standing at the train station by herself he knows that even if she won't be broken in the future for a while she will feel that way. She will have to pick up the pieces and put them back together missing the most important part of the puzzle.
Why he did it.
He cannot tell her, she already knows, but she won't understand. They are from the same world but they hale from opposite ends. She is on the top looking down on people like him, free from her shackles, he stares up at her tugging at the chain tied around his ankle. They bonded over having to keep this secret but ultimately it has separated them as they always feared it would.
He looks at the clock.
19:00
She'll be gone now. He has missed her.
His mother throws her cigarette into the bucket outside the door then turns to him her lips quivering. He rises to meet her for a hug blinking back his own tears.