Stabat Mater stood on the windswept platform with two children either side of her, clasping her hands, it seemed, for dear life. Occasionally, she lowered her head to listen to their words which would otherwise be lost to the wind, or to exchange with them her own choice of words, in evident mutual encouragement.
The children knew they waited for a train: more likely to spot its smoke first, snaking above the nearby hills, even in advance of the hooting whistle being conveyed to them, even now, upon the driving wind. They also retained a beady eye for scrutinising the silver runners of the track for any telltale sign of the clacking's coming.
From behind the derelict station house, I approached the solitary threesome (guessing that such a few could sometimes feel more solitary than being truly alone). I could see Stabat Mater's wintercoat was weatherworn, but a bright yellow scarf at her neck relieved the dowdy appearance somewhat. She wore a large silver brooch depicting, I thought, a lizard, which secured the scarf against the cold's onset. The small children were dressed in khaki jerkins, tangled laddered stockings and threadbare berets with bobbles of hair poking through. They shivered visibly. They failed to see me, since I now crouched in the old ticket collector's booth, untenanted for decades - yet I could still sense the reek of that ticket collector's rank shag doing its best to conceal the ripeness of his soiled undergarments. Scattered around me were a number of clipped platform tickets, among which I had long since ascertained was no residue of used journeys from far off Samarkand and St. Petersburg. Yet, who'd ever disembark in this neck of the woods! The wind, in the interim, had died down to allow me to catch a good share of the threesome's words together.
"We'll be there before you can say 'knife'. A roaring fire right up the chimney and you'll toast your hands - with Nanny's stories all stocked up, just waiting to be told..."
"Shall Nanny be pleased to see us?"
"She'll be so pleased, she'll dance a jig of joy and give you both big kisses on your rosy apple cheeks."
"And shall we stay there...to live for ever and ever and ever?"
"We'll live there so long into the future that the end will always be too far away to worry about."
"Look, I think I see black ghosts in the air."
"That's the train. An ancient train by the look of the dark smoke it's giving off, but a warm one, with an endless corridor."
"I can't hear it yet. Is it really coming?"
"Yes, it'll be all darkness inside and those passengers in the Third Class will just have the reddening ends of their ciggies to watch."
Listening to them, I smiled to myself. I had feared that life outside my little world had not subsisted, ever since they closed the station waiting-room, the steamy buffet and the dark dripping Gents. I had been solitary for too long and the vision of such happiness was a tonic to my old heart. It was a pity that trains never stopped at this particular halt anymore.
Momentarily losing interest in the threesome, I nibbled at one of the discarded tickets with my teeth, the taste of rich train smoke seeping to the lowest tongue of all. I slumped back in some meditative trance which was more than a little self-indulgent, because, by the time I looked from the web-choked cubicle again, the platform was deserted. Since I needed to keep exercising my limbs, I scuttled to where the threesome had stood. The wind was filling its own cheeks, I sensed, to fetch the tuggiest gust.
I picked up the lizard brooch that the woman must have accidentally dislodged from her scarf as she hustled her charges away, with bitter disappointment gnawing at her heart-strings after the train slid past them into the trundling echoes of darkness. The brooch wriggled and its tongue flickered quicker than any eye could see. Not a lizard brooch at all, but a large glistening insect the like of which I'd never seen before, slugged out by the sudden arrival of winter. I forthwith popped it between my jaws to allow its flavour to wash through me.
The old lady, like a nun in habit, yet wimpleless, sewed long stitches into a battered wintercoat - listening to the wind howling the length of the chimney. Or was it the sound of those spiny creatures with sticky wings that haunted her dreams, now attempting to reach her in real life down that very flue? She was pleased that she had banked up the fire in the grate, which served both to warm the room and to keep such unwelcome chimney visitors at bay. Still hemming, she moithered over miscegnations, versions of competing history, regal heirs and graces playing Russian Roulette with Fate - and plucking unwanted fruit off the well-mulched family-tree. The clock pendulum swung idly to and fro in rhythm to her stitches. She still heard the mothballs clacking in the wintercoat's lining where she'd sewn them, but Nanny didn't know that I watched her from behind the clockcase, whereto I'd scuttled, black as coal, before she'd ignited the fire.
The two children watched the wreaths of coal-smoke billowing past the train window, as it churned them through a wintering dusk. The leather strap that was used for raising and lowering the carriage window swayed gently with the clack-clack of bogies over runners. They knew Stabat Mater sat between them, still in wintercoat and yellow scarf, for the cold would have seeped otherwise into her every bone. I could have informed her charges that if she had doffed such impervious garb, she would have allowed the cold to seep out again. A mature woman, at least, should show some semblance of common sense. The children felt her shudder in tune with the train. On either side, they had their hands tightened with hers. If they let go, they sensed they'd never see her again. Or was I sensing it on their behalf?
The train entered the darkest tunnel. I lit a cigarette, so that they could see I was there. Or so that I could pretend I was there when I wasn't. I could see nothing of them. There was no corridor, only autonomous carriages, it being a stopping train - so I knew for sure they were still there, even if I myself wasn't. The train hadn't stopped since they got on in the middle of nowhere.
I knew exactly how long the train would take to pass through the tunnel, having been on this journey, one way or another, for as long as I could remember. But they were new to its foibles. I listened to the children speaking, despite the surging tunnel.
"Why don't they have lights on trains?"
"Is Nanny still expecting us? Won't her fire have gone out?"
"Why don't you answer?"
The train emerged into light, too quickly for a blink, and revealed the answer. The two children were hand in hand, the wintercoat lying like an empty rhinoceros skin between them. I had scuttled to the window where, with jaws clacking, I pressed my suckers to the stained glass to keep myself steady, as I stubbed my ciggie on the 'out' of 'don't lean out of the window' and stropped my beetle pincers on my leather tongue: I the solitary everyone and everything ever tenselessly testing history's credentials beyond everywhere, beyond now.
The Orient Express screamed through the bewintered bewildered night: into another horizontal chimney of smokes and spooks.
