CANTEEN - An Extract from a Novel

Coming home from school they always raced each other, she and her friends, down the long stairs to the station. The exhilaration of jumping, flying, pedalling the air, wind in their hair - five steps at a time, that was her personal record; and then they would run through the piss-stinking foot tunnel holding their breaths, before dispersing beyond.  

Now alone, she stopped dead. The man was there again, at the Canteen next to the station.  Back then she thought all canteens were like this one, literally a van with an awning, selling snacks, coffee, soft drinks to people coming and going to the trains or the steelworks on the other side of the tracks.   The owner, big and kindly, stood inside serving through the side hatch.  She knew his daughter by sight.   She used to come out to play on the street for an hour or so, and then go to her dad’s for her doughnut. 

Anyway, there he stood again, this other man.  She could see his feet and then the rest of him as she came down the stairs. A man of about forty, neither tall nor short, elbow leaning on the hatch, drink in hand.  He wore no cracked boots or fading indigo trousers, and there were no straining buttons on his check shirt. Not like the men who spent the whole day or the whole night between rivers of molten steel and furnaces, and came out at the end of their shift deafened and dazed with exhaustion, resigned to the cold acid rain.

 This man wore a check shirt alright, and indigo trousers and black boots like every worker at the factory, but crisp and new.  Not that she had registered this as odd at her age though, at least not consciously. 

Just there he stood, silent, unmoving, like a crocodile.  

She blushed purple, prayed again for his sudden death, walked fast without looking up, feeling his gaze following her - a grown-up man’s quiet, insolent little smile on her, on a twelve-year-old who looked nine.  How creepy.  A revulsion that crawled from her hair, under her school uniform, down her spine to her backside.  She would have broken out running if it didn’t attract attention.  Because, what if she was wrong, how could she be sure he was staring at her, when she kept her eyes low?  How based-on-nothing this hatred she developed towards a stranger was. 

She didn’t say anything to her friends, and when they ran together, they didn’t seem to see him, so she would just squeeze between them as if nothing was the matter.  It ate away at her though.  Who was he, anyway? Where did he crawl out from?  She’d never seen him before, and now, every time she passed the Canteen, there he was, rain or shine, morning and evening, standing under the awning.  In some blind instinctive way, it must have also registered the oddness of picking a place of passing with a view over train tracks to stand all day.  Not exactly La Concha promenade, was it.  And anyway, what did these two talk about, the Canteen owner and this man?  Of small schoolgirls like her?

So, one day when she saw his shiny boots and then the hem of his impeccable trouser legs peeking from under the awning, she stopped, turned around, climbed back up the stairs and went home down the longcut.  

She now took the hill, a route she had never liked.  A road with traffic and no trees, more exposed to the sun and the rain, overlooked by every gossip window on the street.  And it took her ten minutes longer.  But it was preferable, even though she could be seen from Grandma’s window too.  

Grandma would see her coming down the longcut, and ask her, and interrogate her, and accuse her of god-knows-what.  She could already imagine her truculent snarl. ‘I told you to come home straight from school; always roaming the streets with your little friends, dragging your feet when it’s time to get indoors; now you’re even taking the longest route possible!  Poor mummy and daddy, watching you from up there, seeing what kind of woman you’re turning into.’     

 And she would stand chin down looking at her toes, as usual, whispering, pray-cursing, leave me alone you old witch, if only I’d gone with mummy and daddy as a baby, if only it had been you going instead. 

‘What’re you saying? Stop whispering and go to your room!’

Yet it was preferable. 

And so, Grandma did ask in her embittered mutilating way.  But when she replied that of late there was an odd-looking man at the station, Granma didn’t say a word.  She – who never wasted a chance to vent her rage, to pinch her, to cage her in – just turned to the cooker and ladled stew on their plates.  They ate in silence, as usual.    

She never saw the man down the longcut, and forgot about him until years later, when she was already a permed teenager in stilettos, back from boarding school for her summer holidays.  It was the Summer Solstice Festival and the town was full of the music of the Steelworks Society Brass Band marching down the thronged street, stopping in front of the pubs to rest for a bit, get a drink and a bite on the house and move on with their music to the next. 

She had gone to Kilker’s bar to ask if Nicky could be let off for a couple of hours. ‘Ok,’ her father relented, ‘but only for two hours, back at 6pm, is that clear?’ he shouted over the brass band din, pounding now right outside his door.   

And there he was, that man again; dissonant as the words sartorial steelworker bonhomie put together; whipping the air over his head to the merry beat, conductor’s baton in hand, in the middle of a circle of euphoniums, bass drums, trombones, cymbals.  Who on earth gave him the baton? So now he also knows music, does he? 

The same visceral revulsion, the old childish terror wrapped around her, freezing her, deafening her for a second.  Had he spotted her in this crowd?  

Nah he hasn’t, it suddenly struck her.  He couldn’t recognise her, or be interested in her, now she was no longer a kid.  

‘Pig!’  she cried in victory jumping to the music, so sure she was that no-one could hear her in the noise, as she led Nicky past the brass band and out into the street-party beyond.