‘What was that?’ Walter asked. ‘What did you just say?’
The man looked at him with a polite smile.
‘I beg your pardon?’ he asked.
‘What did you say? Just then? About the train?’
‘About the train?’
‘This train.’
‘I’m sorry, I’m not sure what you mean.’ The man smiled again, but not as politely, not genuinely. He gently but firmly shook his head, signifying that as far as he was concerned the conversation was at an end.
Walter had heard correctly. He knew he had. His hearing was perfect. The man beside him on the platform had said to him, quite close and clear behind him, as if he’d even leaned in a bit closer to say it:
Don’t get on the next train.
The train pulled into the station and the displaced air rushed over the platform and through the waiting commuters. When it had stopped completely they began to shuffle forward and into the carriage. Walter unconsciously took a step towards the carriage along with them, alongside the man who had spoken to him. He was going to say something to him, but before he could the man stepped inside the carriage and was lost to Walter amid the other commuters. Walter stepped forward to follow him, but hesitated, stopped. He was suddenly aware of the dampness in his shoes and trouser cuffs from walking through the rain, an uncomfortable dampness that made his leg hairs stand against his trousers.
After a moment he realised that he was the only person left on the platform. Everyone else had entered the train, but he remained rooted to the spot, just a step away from the open carriage door, his feet planted firmly in his comfortably soled shoes, his upper body moving slightly forward and backwards, like a praying mantis on a twig.
A couple of people from within the carriage noticed him, hesitating as he was, and their eyes focussed, they looked at him. Walter felt a flush of embarrassment mount in his cheeks as another and another of the people in the train carriage noticed his mantis-like hesitation, met his eye and became, as one, slightly wary, as if thinking: Why is this man not getting on the train? Why is he behaving in this unexpected way? And then finally: He isn’t going to delay the train is he?
But he couldn’t move. He couldn’t move.
Then, hovering, stuck as he was in the middle of such a horrible social faux pas, a terrible breach of train etiquette, the moment was broken by the beeping warning from the train that the doors were about to close. He stepped backwards, gingerly, away from the train, back behind the yellow line. The doors closed, the train slowly pulled away from the station and the carriage-full of people looking at him was borne away. He was alone on the completely empty platform and the moment was over.
He closed his eyes.
Don’t get on the next train.
But why had the man said such a thing? As a warning? Against what? What possible reason could there be for such a warning? What possible danger could there be to him, Walter, if he had boarded that train? His rational mind, and he was a very rational man, rebelled against the very idea of what had just happened to him—and yet there it was, the man had warned him not to board the train and as a result he had not boarded the train.
Walter felt annoyed with himself, foolish, edgy and agitated. It was a familiar feeling. Well, not as familiar lately, but still familiar. However, with a concerted effort and a deep-breathing technique he had learned from Dr Feldman, Walter attempted to put aside the feeling.
Imagine your fear, he told himself in his head. Do you see it?
‘Yes.’ He nodded.
Would you like to get rid of it?
‘Yes.’ He nodded.
Then imagine screwing it up into a little ball.
His right hand made a fist.
And throwing it away.
His right hand made a somewhat muted throwing gesture.
It never worked, not really, but as he opened his eyes he was aware, not that he had got rid of his fear, but that he had mastered it, had forced it back down and snibbed the lid closed on it, and that was enough to be getting on with.
2.
ON THE JOB AT EQUITY
He ended up driving his car to work that day. At first he was going to catch the next train and he stood waiting on the platform as more corporate commuters turned up to wait alongside him. But as the minutes ticked by he felt increasingly positive that he wasn’t going to get on the next train either, so he returned through the still-wet streets of Wintergardens to his house, got the car out and headed off towards the freeway on-ramp where he queued with all the other cars.
It wasn’t, as it turned out, a great decision. He ended up caught in a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam on the West Gate Bridge where there was one lane out due to a broken down truck. The clouds had disappeared completely by this stage and the sun was further up in the sky, warming the wet bridge until it seemed to be steaming. Walter had the windows up and the air-con on low. He also had a CD playing. He was, perhaps incongruously, listening to a chill-out album called Ibiza Summer, with slow beats, the sound of waves crashing on a shore and a man’s voice chanting abstract and vaguely sexual lyrics. Yeah baby, oooh, yeah baby.
Walter’s mobile phone, secure in its hands-free cradle, rang. He glanced at the display and saw who was calling.
Oh crap! Maggie!
His wife’s actual name was Margaret but she was only ever called Maggie, and the words ‘oh crap’, at least in Walter’s head, were often aligned with her name.
Walter had been fascinated by Maggie when he was a young man, absolutely fascinated, and had married her presuming blithely that theirs would be a happy marriage. The best that could be said of it now was that it wasn’t actively unhappy.
She was an attractive woman, with dark hair, pearly skin and a sense of entitlement about her. She had grown up having her mother, Arlette, tell her she was a princess, could do anything she wanted in life, have anything she wanted. A sense of entitlement was perhaps not an attractive trait, and on Maggie who was a little aloof and withdrawn, it was sometimes unattractive.
Arlette had been, albeit very briefly, a model—one of those Paris End of Collins Street set who were incredibly chic there for a few years in the fifties. To this day she had on display the photo Helmet Newton had taken of her in a stiff shift coat, holding a square handbag and (apparently) hailing a cab, very po-faced and straight-armed, with one leg kicked out behind her.
Following her short modelling career, in which Paton pattern books featured heavily, Arlette worked for a number of years, until her marriage and Maggie’s subsequent birth, as a consultant with a finishing school. Even in the mid to late 60s the idea of a finishing school in Melbourne was anachronistic, but it had survived to the present day. It was now called the Potter-Hopkins School of Personal Development, but it stil ran short courses in manners, grooming, which cutlery to use at dinner, and how to get out of a car without showing your undies.
Walter was not a fan of his mother-in-law. She was pinched and thin, dressed in power suits from the 80s, which now stood off her thin frame like dolls’ clothes. She wore bright patches of rouge and lipstick and her hair was thin and brittle, tortured regularly by permanent wave and blow-waved in a big curve off her face every morning. She looked, he thought, like a voodoo doll of herself.
There was (Walter would have said, ‘unfortunately’) a little bit of Arlette in Maggie. A little bit. It was in the way she moved and the way she held her cigarette—yes she smoked, Walter could not get her to quit. It was in the way she ate. It was in the way she got out of a car without showing her undies.
Maggie