I went on my way.
I’d invented many games to pass the time on the long journeys to and from school: Worst and best dressed awards, the weirdest person, the person I would least like to be, which I now realised was designed to make me feel better about myself. It rarely did, but rather succeeded in making me feel guilty for feeling sorry for myself. I was healthy and had a roof over my head…and enough to eat, didn’t I? It wasn’t bloody enough - and I’m no woolly liberal. I would not be forced to feel grateful; so there.
My God, I felt grey. I was sorry for myself. I had crawled out from under a stone - and I wished I hadn’t.
As I descended slowly on the escalator to a lower level, a face met mine. It had intruded into my thoughts: A man’s face. It had registered me. Why? In the past I would have automatically assumed that he fancied me, but those days were all but forgotten. Did I know him? I didn’t think so, and as I rarely forgot a face, I was pretty sure. I glanced back as he passed. Yes, he was still looking at me. Then he disappeared in the crowd.
Gone. Oh. Disappointment.
Perhaps he did fancy me. Perhaps he thought he knew me. But the expression on his face had been so intense. I tried to make sense of it.
I fed on this event during the day, denying all the other possibilities that had occurred to me. He found me attractive! It was balm to my sore and weeping ego of the early morning, and I pushed away any doubts, fending them off whenever they crept near. I began to feel better, and in fact, I began to feel quite gorgeous and I knew I was walking, moving differently. I may be old but I had far more magic, charisma, than all these stupid blank young things that were everywhere, that believed themselves superior. Unpainted empty pots, they were simply uninteresting. I still felt brittle but I was exceedingly grateful for the change this small incident had brought. Perhaps my superstitions were wrong?
II
The following morning the weather was decidedly better. As I looked in the mirror, I dragged out the memory of the incident yet again to stoke the good feelings that were beginning to falter. It was weakening. I had overworked it and it was becoming ragged and would, I knew, soon be useless.
Then… can you believe it. It happened again. I was going down the escalator, and obviously reliving the event, although it was starting to annoy me that I kept doing this, I saw him rising up towards me and was unsure about the reality of it. He looked at me with a look of wonder, shock, incredulity! I knew it was a different event, mainly because there was more of it than yesterday. It was clearer, but more puzzling. I was definitely having a profound effect on this man. This time I was more aware of his identity. He was quite presentable, almost good-looking… well, not bad anyway and very well dressed. Good colour sense and not bald; probably about my age. Bit small perhaps but never mind.
As I worked it over and over in my mind I became a little alarmed. As a young woman at college, among my friends, I had had the reputation as someone who attracted nutters and it was true. There was the old crone who had come up to me outside Woolworth’s and told me ‘Mark my words, you’ll be fetchin’ and carryin’ all yer life’ - and she could have been right had I not taken great pains to ward off the curse and make sure I did as little fetching and carrying as was humanly possible (difficult for an art teacher who is always supposed to be bringing in this and that, and marking the essays from the art history course.) Another time a seriously deranged man who was shouting and swaying about on the pavement, had reeled round the rear of a car in which I was sitting in the back, whilst it was stationary at the lights.
He had banged on the window right next to me although I was seated in the furthest corner, opposite where he had started out on the pavement, much to the amusement of all the other occupants of the car, one of whom had, only that minute predicted just such a thing happening as the ragged apparition neared the car, ‘He’ll go for Angela’ he had said ‘You’ll see!’ He was amazed when his soothsaying turned out to be true.
Later on in life I had studied psychology and had ended up working with, if not out-and-out nutters, people with serious psychological problems. Was this yet another instance of my magnetic qualities towards the mentally insane?
I brushed it aside as me being negative. After all it was just as likely that he, the man on the escalator, fancied me, wasn’t it? Middle-aged men could conceivably fancy middle-aged women, couldn’t they? It didn’t always have to be bimbos and floosies, did it?
But would he turn out to be obsessive - a stalker, perhaps, to combine the two trains of thought? Maybe, in fact probably, but right then it really didn’t matter. It was exciting.
The following day I found I almost expected to see him, was looking out for him, and I was pleased when he sort of nodded at me along with the stare. I think I would have been disappointed had nothing new happened. I was beginning to feel good about the whole thing, and I was terribly shocked the following day when he was nowhere in evidence. To add to my consternation it was a Friday and I felt slightly wounded, and not quite comfortable about things all weekend. Was that it?
Monday morning came, as it inevitably does, and I had a strong feeling of apprehension, which vacillated between excitement and fear of being let down. I put on a rather smart black suit, something I had not had very long and was still really in the ‘for best’ category.
Looking in the mirror, my appearance seemed moderately impressive but not as alluring as I wanted it to be, just in case he showed up again. I turned the waistband over to raise the hem a touch. That was better. The black leather coat worn open and with the collar up looked a bit French, a bit ‘left-bankish’. I wasn’t too sure… but it was time to leave, and now I was stuck with it.
On the first leg of my journey I decided if I did see him I would say something, just a greeting probably as something told me that otherwise the staring thing with the perfunctory grunt would be all that happened. I wasn’t sure I had the guts and I was still mulling it over in my head – shall/shan’t, will/won’t, ought to/shouldn’t when he passed me on the escalator with a nod of the head and a strangled, over-hurried ‘Good Morning’. I was confused, both elated and disappointed, I had been prepared to do it; he had beaten me to it, damn it - but the elation won out as I continued with the more usual ingredients of my very predictable life. Sitting on the train I listened again and again to the greeting as it played in my head. Another voice warned ‘this is becoming obsessive, this is unhealthy’, but it was easily drowned out. No-one who was present that morning wanted to hear it.
This pattern continued over the weeks and, although it still gave me some comfort, and fed my wilted, impoverished ego somewhat, I no longer believed it would be my salvation. He was it seemed, no white knight. It wasn’t going anywhere. Life had returned more or less to drab, and, although I was still more careful about how I looked in the mornings, it didn’t seem to be having any effect, and I was required to fight off a pervasive sense of disappointment, an ‘Oh well that’s obviously how it would go. Nothing surprising there.’
One morning I got up to find it had rained in during the night. I had left the window wide-open, as it had been a stuffy, oppressive sort of an evening. The weather forecast had not predicted any rain and I, in naïve fashion, had believed them. Had there been a thunderstorm? If so, why hadn’t I woken up? I was a very light sleeper. I cleaned up the mess as best I could, but my diary which was on a table under one of the windows was soaked and, since I wrote it with a fountain pen, quite a lot of it was seriously smudged. I put it carefully down, hoping to dry it out without exacerbating the damage, but I knew that some of it was ruined. How much, remained to be seen.
Wiping up the sludgy mess had taken some time and I was really late leaving the house, after dressing hurriedly and not as carefully as I would have liked, and as had become necessary of late, for reasons you are already well aware of.
Surprisingly I caught my first train which providentially, also turned out to