I went to visit my sister yesterday, and her beautiful newborn baby girl. I took the train to her house, in an absurdly quaint village in the flatlands of Leicestershire. Beside the train station there is a small community garden, filled with planters and picnic tables. It is called the “Friendly Garden”.
My sister lives in a three bedroom house, with a garden and a pond. “The napkins are in the sunroom,” was a sentence I once heard her say.
As soon as I got in and saw her little girl sleeping on her chest, her tiny inked on features, the face of a sleeping cat, I started jumping up and down. I was very excited! My mum and sister told me to calm down. I am always jumping up and down because I am very excited, and I am always being told to calm down.
Later that afternoon, I commented on my sister’s husband’s ability to quieten the baby. “Martin has a very calm energy,” my mum offered. “And your sister also has a very calm energy.” She looked over at me. “It is just you who is chaotic.”
A while ago, my friend and I were assigning ourselves Dungeons and Dragons alignments (Lawful Good, etc..) She assigned herself Chaotic Good. I identified as Chaotic Neutral. I liked that about myself. That I had not identified as good. It made me suspect I was really very good indeed.
But we had both agreed we were chaotic.
On the way home I missed the train I’d intended to get back, so content I was, with my little niece resting on my chest. The nothing-weight of her. Watching the skin of her throat contract and expand, like a bullfrog, croaking. Her eyes fluttering open, half rolled back into her head; the unfathomable content of her dreams. I’d get the next train! It was not a big deal!
The next train back ended up being very delayed. I sat beneath the filthy awning of the shelter, just me and a man in a high vis jacket beside me, who offered me a tin of Stella, which I declined, and then regretted doing so the more delayed the train was.
On the train I made a playlist of very sad songs, then listened to them all, looking out of the window. The fields were so flat, so sprawling. I hate the unbroken plains of the Midlands, the landscape I grew up in. There is something existentially terrifying about them; something which makes me want to curl up into a ball and cover my head with my hands. I have had a joke with all (both) of my boyfriends that I like to be hemmed in, always picking the seat in the restaurant next to a wall, some space in which I might feel encased. The flatness was making me nervous; I couldn’t listen to sad songs anymore. I needed something I could hold up to my face, so I started reading.
I started reading Leslie Jamison’s memoir of blowing up her life, Splinters. I was so engrossed in it, I missed my stop, not realising this until I got to the end of the line on the train. The train was going back the same way, so I remained on it. One of two teenage boys drinking cans of Monster, sat diagonally across from me, said “did you miss your stop too?” I replied “yes” but what I really wanted to say was, yes, but I am a nearly forty year old mother!
I once ended up in London, accidentally. There had been a bunch of train cancellations, and I’d had to take four separate trains from Nottingham back to Manchester. I’d gotten the wrong one, at some point, blithely settling into the journey until the train moved past Wandsworth. That’s down south, I remembered thinking. I sat on the train until it pulled into Euston, where I got a gin and tonic from the shop, sat outside in the warm night to drink it, then got the train back home. It seemed scarcely a big deal, just a little inconvenient.
On this journey I had to change at Derby, then change at Sheffield again. I briefly wondered what I would do, if I missed the last train back home. Would I book into a hotel for the night? Did I know anyone I could stay with? This is a situation I find myself in roughly once a year.
I hadn’t had any dinner, and at Sheffield only the One Stop was open. I bought a packet of crisps, a creme egg and a Sprite, eating them while staring at the departures board; the second time I have eaten a packet of crisps for dinner this week.
On the train back to Manchester, my mum rang me. “Why aren’t you back yet?!” she asked. My two hour train journey had taken five. “There’s a problem with the trains,” I replied, impatiently. “There’s a problem with all of the trains…I don’t want to talk about it.”