Walking Wounded
“‘Graithnock,’ she said.
‘London,’ she said.
‘Frances Ritchie,’ she said.
She treated his questions like spaces in an official form, impersonally, never digressing into humanising irrelevance. I am a stranger on a train, she was saying. She asked him nothing in return.
But the man was persistent. He had come on at Dumfries, entering a coach clogged with the boredom of several hours’ travel, the unfinished crosswords, the empty whisky miniatures interred in their plastic cups, the crumpled beer cans rattling minutely to the motion of the train. Picking his way among the preoccupied stares and the occasionally stretched legs, he had sat down opposite Fran. The seats had only just been vacated by a mother and a small girl who had made Fran wonder if her own desire for children was as deep as she told herself it was.
His persistence wasn’t offensive. It had none of the I-secretly-know-what-you-want-and-need machismo which Fran had learned to recognise from a distance like a waving flag and... which caused her to shoot on sight.MoreLess
‘London,’ she said.
‘Frances Ritchie,’ she said.
She treated his questions like spaces in an official form, impersonally, never digressing into humanising irrelevance. I am a stranger on a train, she was saying. She asked him nothing in return.
But the man was persistent. He had come on at Dumfries, entering a coach clogged with the boredom of several hours’ travel, the unfinished crosswords, the empty whisky miniatures interred in their plastic cups, the crumpled beer cans rattling minutely to the motion of the train. Picking his way among the preoccupied stares and the occasionally stretched legs, he had sat down opposite Fran. The seats had only just been vacated by a mother and a small girl who had made Fran wonder if her own desire for children was as deep as she told herself it was.
His persistence wasn’t offensive. It had none of the I-secretly-know-what-you-want-and-need machismo which Fran had learned to recognise from a distance like a waving flag and... which caused her to shoot on sight.MoreLess
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