Piece of Tin

By Sean Watkin

This story was shortlisted for the Book a Break Prize in 2017 with his short story, Piece of Tin. You can purchase a copy of the With Our Eyes Open: Book a Break 2017 anthology here.

It happened because I couldn’t think straight. The bus shelter was full of people, all grey, all coughing and spluttering and wafting away puffs of rank cigarette smoke. Nobody cared about the No Smoking sign on the window. My mind flashed back to the argument with Will – the unnecessary shouting, the ‘but you do this, and that,’ and me telling him I need space from him and from Oliver.

            ‘You can’t just take off,’ he hissed at me. ‘We’re parents now.’

            I couldn’t tell him what I wanted to tell him, so I stood looking down, smoothed out my work clothes. My stomach was sinking, pulled down by the heavy anvil that was the realisation of Will’s justified words. We had made a choice; we had picked our life out together, piece by piece. The house, the car, the kid. We. But where am I in all of this now?

            The bus rumbled into the stop, and my sullen shelter comrades filed out, squeezed through barely open, hissing doors. Through the mist of a light rain and clearing smoke, I watched their vacant faces search for seats. They took off their scarfs, slid their coloured lanyards over their heads, fixed earphones into ears and waited – a fishbowl for me to peer into. The driver looked at his watch, and read the back pages of some red-banded newspaper, while the windows throbbed with the engine, rattled in their frames. Before the driver finished his break, before the engine revved, and the indicator light tick-ticked right, and the buss pulled away from the stop, I was gone.

            I walked toward home, not homing in on it – squatting there, watching the world flash by, while those inside played their games – but in its general location. Will would kill me if I told him I wasn’t going into work today, so it was best he didn’t know. I had circled the general area of the house, my orbits increasing with each revolution, like the moon twists slowly away from Earth. I read that somewhere.

            I needed to get away from this: the office, the house, from Will and Oliver, away from this gloomy town. I knew these streets by heart, knew some of the neighbours to say hello to, but that was it. The chances of meeting new people, seeing new things and places, of having new experiences, had lost all scope and depth. I’d become predictable, boring, like someone too scared of the sea, so paddles in the shallows. I work for a boring woman called Suzanne who spits when she talks, in a boring office in a deprived area of Liverpool, managing a team of bored telephony agents. Every single day is the same grey day. I think the biggest lie we are told as children is that we can be anything we want to be. Well sometimes, Mrs Pomfrett of Year 3 Summerhill Primary School, you just bloody well can’t.

            I found myself by the lake, a mile or so from the house. Ducks quacked and launched themselves at crumbs thrown onto the water by a girl and her dad. I took a muddy path to a wooded area, a path man-made by those always in search of a shortcut.

            There was a bench here, mostly dry and covered in graffiti: ‘Smigga 9T7’, ‘JT 4 HG’. I thought about adding my own stamp to the bench: A man sat here and pondered the weariness of his life. But that didn’t really have the ring to it that ‘Fishy Fiona woz ere’ had. I took out my phone. Eleven missed calls from Suzanne. I ignored them and opened a text message to Trish, and typed: I need to see you. Now.

            The phone lit up and buzzed in my hand almost immediately: I’d love to. See you soon xxx.

The train station platform was quiet, just a few people: a woman in her late 40s, I’m guessing, sat on the wall, her face buried in the fur of a nonchalant dog; a group of three college-aged girls, using ‘like’ as verbal comma; and a young boy, older than Oliver, with his grandad. He was teaching the boy to whistle.

            The train grumbled down the line and shuddered to a stop at the platform. The doors swept open, the few of us climbed aboard, and found our seats. The woman with the dog sat on a tattered blue seat in front of me, her face still hidden in its fluff.

            The driver swapped to the opposite end of the train, pausing for a chat with his red-haired colleague. ‘Yeah,’ the red head said, ‘Stuart had murder with him on Monday.’  She squeezed a carrier bag from Heron Foods close to her chest, looked up at the lanky driver through thick glasses. I imagined she would have lipstick on her teeth, or some toast.

            ‘I’m just gonna stay clear,’ the driver said. He put his hands up, took a step closer to the front of the train. ‘It’s nothing to do with me.’  He walked on. We rolled out of the station as someone pelted down the stairs. There was hope in his face, optimistic that the driver would take pity. He didn’t.

            We blew past trees, thundered by a golf course, and clanked over bridges, before I noticed the whimpering. I thought it was the dog, but he was fast asleep on the woman’s lap; she sat, head in her hands. Oh, why me?

            ‘Are, erm …’ she looked up at me immediately. ‘Are you okay?’

            Her eyes were wide and slick like wet glass, face shades of cherry and rose. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. She looked down at the dog, it opened one eye and stared back like the waking, pissed-off whale from Pinnochio. ‘Izzy,’ she said, ‘her name’s Izzy.’

            ‘She’s…’ I struggled. ‘Small. Cute, I suppose.’  If it’s small enough to kick over a fence, it’s not a dog. That’s what my dad would say.

            ‘Was Mum’s,’ she said, wiping away fresh tears with the tatty sleeve of a dirty duffel coat.

            I folded my arms, spun the platinum wedding ring on my finger. ‘I’m sorry.’

            She leaned forward, smiled. ‘Thank you so much.’  She moved the dog onto the seat next to her. ‘I’m not supposed to do that, I know.’  She put her finger to her lips and shhh’d me.

            ‘Was it sudden?’ I asked. There was silence. ‘Your mum, I mean.’

            She rubbed her ear lobe between thumb and forefinger. ‘It’s always sudden. But she was sick. A burden, some would probably say.’  Her brows knitted over her powder blue eyes, her lip trembled. ‘She was like gold to me. I think sometimes we treat our gold like tin.’

            I swallowed a pebble in my throat, thought of Will and Oliver playing at home together; and I thought of Trish.

            ‘We don’t see what’s in front of us every day, and it is golden,’ she said. ‘Of course it is, or why else would we already have and want it in our lives?’ She shook her head. ‘We can’t just leave things to tarnish, when all they need is some polish and elbow grease. Don’t get me wrong,’ she held up her hands, confessing, ‘there were times I wanted it to be over. But now she’s gone…’

            ‘All you’ve got left is Izzy?’

            ‘And her wedding ring,’ she said, showed me it sitting loosely on her finger, a plain gold band. ‘To someone else it might as well be tin. But not to me.’

            Izzy sat up on little chubby legs, looked out of the window and stared at nothing. Somewhere behind us, the boy started to whistle, but the grandad cut him off. ‘No, no,’ he chuckled, ‘you blow out, you don’t suck in. That’s not how it’s done.’

            ‘It doesn’t matter,’ the boy said. ‘It worked anyway.’  Good on him.

            ‘To have a dog’s life, ey?’ I said.

            ‘I know,’ the woman chuckled. ‘Things would be easier.

            ‘So much!’ There was something in the way I said ‘so’, an emphasis that drew the woman in.

            ‘Difficult morning?’

            I looked out of the window too, now. I started at Izzy’s reflection, and those big black eyes stared right back.

            ‘This is my stop,’ the woman said, standing as the train decelerated.

            ‘It was nice chatting to you,’ I said, half-stood.

            She held the dog tight as she approached the doors. ‘Hopefully I’ll see you again sometime. On your way to work. No, it is a bit late for that,’

            She was tangled with the leash, and I rose to help her as the train fizzed to a stop, and the doors opened. She thanked me. ‘How long has it been?’

            The woman lumbered down from the train, turned to face me as the doors began to slide shut. ‘I found her this morning.’

            The train pulled away.

I was home by 11:12am, and Will was at the door, Oliver in his arms, both upset. He was talking so fast that he stammered. ‘Where have you been? Work has been on the phone! I’ve been worried sick.’

            I kissed him on his cheek, and felt his body unfasten the knots it had tied in my absence. ‘I thought I’d take the day off and we could go out together? All of us.’    

            Will welled up, looked away from me and smiled at Oliver. ‘Did you hear that? Daddy wants to take us out, wouldn’t that be nice?’ He looked sternly across at me, ‘And he’ll pay for everything, too.’

            That day we pushed Oliver on a set of swings, walked down the canal to feed the geese, and ate lunch in a small pub that smelled like disinfectant. Will was distant, never offered me his hand or put his head on my shoulder. I didn’t even notice the text message from Trish: Where are you? I’ve been waiting hours. You’re not coming are you?

            I wondered if someone was watching us, and they could see the divide between us, whether they’d think: they had a long journey ahead of them.