Train Man by Patience Mackarness

There is a you who still follows the tracks through India, photographing engines with names like Locomotive Sentinel and Last Star. Who still looks out from a moving carriage on tea plantations, holy rivers, red-dust fields and red-haze sunsets, not yet believing in your future of grey suits and grey skies back in England.

There is a you who’s still twenty-two and sunburnt, sharp knees and elbows in drawstring trousers and washed-out T shirts. Who rides the Himalayan Queen from Chandigarh Junction with a gap-year backpacker you met in Calcutta. On station platforms we drink tea, sweet and hot, from unglazed pottery cups. When the engine huffs on upward, through pine and rock foothills to Simla, we talk about the journeys we’ll make. More trains, more continents, more life.

Back in England, you qualified as an accountant, got a mortgage, got a house overlooking the Leeds to Bradford line.  I once visited you there. The house was solid redbrick Victorian, you too were sturdier now the sweat-slick nights and bouts of Delhi Belly were past. I found you laying floorboards in the attic for your model railway. I said, Wouldn’t you rather have the real thing? You said, There’ll be holidays for that. You asked if I liked the house. Just for a moment  I let myself think, What if?

You married a strong Yorkshirewoman, I saw she was good for you. There were no children. I ducked marriage a few times, travelled, had affairs, taught languages in hot places and cold, still sometimes thought, What if?

There is a you who never had to learn what waited in the cells of your body. Who never watched your grandfather swim out of focus and sink into dementia, never had to recognise the early signs in yourself. Who never stood looking helplessly at bits of railway spread on every surface of your dining room – collapsed tunnels, tiny broken trees, frayed wires that once powered signal boxes and lights.

The last time I visited, I brought food from the takeaway at the end of your road. I think you knew me, but you didn’t say much and didn’t eat the curry. You gave your wife of forty years a lost look, she smoothed your still-thick hair and said it had been a long day, you just needed to lie down.

I walked away from the house in November rain, all the What-ifs crowding in.

There is a you, there is a me, who navigated those years together. Who rode more trains, devoured more continents, drank more life. Who found our way back, weary, still wonderstruck, to India.

Patience Mackarness (she/her) began writing flash in 2016. Her flash fiction, CNF, short stories, and hybrids have appeared or are forthcoming in Moon City Review, Mslexia, Lost Balloon, JMWW, Raw Lit, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and elsewhere. She lives and writes in Brittany.