Abby writes novels with quirky narrators. During her first year at Goldsmiths, she is trying her hand at short stories. She lives in London.

Email: aladb001@gold.ac.uk

(DIS)CONNECTING YOU NOW

On the day he moved into Beeching Court, over the top of a battered cardboard box containing woollen jumpers, bobbly and worn at the elbows, Howard saw first her hair, a high and perfectly round Afro. She was coming in from outside with a pot plant, and he commented on the unusual leaves. She seemed like a fledgling new to her home, and he wondered if he would have bought such a plant as a gift had he had a child flying the nest. Howard and Leigh introduced themselves politely befitting the generations between them, and when she walked to her own door, he saw he had been mistaken; she was assured, beyond her years. He went on, deposited the jumpers at the back of the wardrobe where they should stay until winter or the time he moved out, whichever would come sooner.

Beeching Court was a worn-out, altogether unremarkable nineteen-sixties block in brown. Ironically, it sat between three train stations. Ironic, because Beeching had closed so many stations in the sixties. (Not to split hairs, but it had in fact been Marples, the minister, who’d done the closing, but Beeching’s name was attached to the deed, poor unfortunate bugger.) All of this flew into Howard’s head and out of it again. He wasn’t invested; he had no intention of staying longer than necessary, which was as long as it would to take to get back on his feet. And his feet were sorely in need of being got back onto. As it was, in the switching out of his life for this new state of affairs, his feet were going to take him very few places: through the six hundred square feet of the ground floor that was “his”, to the nearest decent-sized shop, and to one of the three local stations. On the rare occasion Howard was to go into the office, he would use the furthest station, because it required a walk through the park. In the words of his dear departed mother, If you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere. Ridiculous to say that beauty was everywhere, but she’d quoted van Gogh with conviction, and the words still rang in his ears.

Howard’s feet were in new territory, missing the feet that had pressed against his calves on Sunday mornings with tea in bed. Twenty-six years. Some while after she stated her intention to leave, after the shock and when acceptance started making fleeting appearances, Howard tried to banish the name of the wandering feet-owner from lip and thought, but there were times when she crept in and found a place in metaphorical square brackets. [Melissa.]

When Howard properly met Leigh it was as though she broke through the brick and plasterboard that joined her kitchen to his living room, complete with pink dust on her false eyelashes and debris clinging to her blue and orange work-issue jacket (if you could call the thing a jacket; it was more polyester than substance). Howard saw this image in the way he saw any metaphor. He dealt in metaphor, and simile, was a consummate word professional. With this skill he made the unpalatable palatable. He had a special gift for it.

Getting to know each other started with the weekly wash. Leigh’s washing, not Howard’s [no longer combined with Melissa’s]. It was the washing that put the first hole in the kitchen/living room wall. [Everyone was getting open plan kitchen-diners, Melissa had said, always an eye on keeping up with the Joneses.] That day, he’d had no need to be up as early as he was, the commute to the kitchen table being short. It was rude of wakefulness to have poked through the slumber, and, disgruntled, he fiddled around in the kitchen doing nothing of consequence. He checked the weather forecast. From the scratched stainless steel sink, which was not his, he looked out to the communal so-called garden and the garages made of crumbly concrete, asbestos, and green metal up-and-over doors. And there was Leigh, smaller somehow. Her hair was straightened and pulled close to her head. She had on her back a sizeable rucksack and was struggling with a clothes horse that appeared to be so heavy it might have been covered in lead, not linen. She deposited it in the sunny quadrant of the garden, which would be in full shade by shortly after eleven. That was overgrown sycamores for you. He knocked on the window, and when she looked up, he suddenly felt ridiculous, surprised by his own action. He drew a blank on how to mime that it was forecast to rain, and it was out of the question to go to the door to say it; he was wearing his favourite [tatty] pyjamas. Leigh straightened the strap of her rucksack and hesitantly raised a hand. He returned the wave and turned back into the room. It took over an hour to stop feeling a chump.

Later that morning, making tea, Howard noticed the rain-coming darkness outside. He heard the first drops splat and hurried out on retrieval. He heaved the clothes horse in, considered leaving it in the communal hall, but, anticipating the complaint of Mrs Oldfield who occupied a flat upstairs and seemed the type to take every opportunity to grumble, brought Leigh’s washing into “his” flat, deposited it in “his” poky spare room, and went to “his” online meeting. Two hours later, having contributed precisely nothing to a five-year strategy (who could see that far ahead these days?) he had forgotten the magnanimous act.

 It was only when Howard opened the door to Leigh’s blue and orange return that it occurred to him it wasn’t entirely proper for a man of late middle age to handle the garments, and possibly undergarments, of a young woman to whom he was not related.

‘Howard, right?’ she said. ‘We met. I’m Leigh?’ Exhaustion dripped from her shoulders as she asked for his remembering.

He nodded. ‘I brought in your washing when it started to rain.’

‘That’s what you were trying to tell me this morning, right?’ She seemed to wake up. ‘Your little knock and wave. That was it, right?’

Little knock? Had it been little? He pulled the door open wider and nodded.

The clothes horse was covered with an old sheet, hiding what was really there. He hadn’t looked underneath but if he said so, it might appear that he had. The neighbour doth protest too much.

‘Good of you. I hope you didn’t strain yourself. This thing is sooo heavy.’ She drew back the sheet in an unambiguous invitation to look. Hanging there was a heavy-duty overall, blue with orange trim. ‘Need it for work,’ she said. ‘Had it made. Cost a fortune.’ He felt a surprising impulse to offer to pay something towards it. The garment was covered with what appeared to be pockets, some the size of large books, some the size of bank cards.

‘For work?’ he said. ‘What do you do?’

‘Railways’ she said. ‘Roving mobile team.’

He’d heard of roving mobile teams. They were teams tasked with visiting the stations in which ticket offices had been closed—to see passengers, but just the lucky passengers who were in the right place at the right time. In truth, he had more than heard of these teams. He looked at Leigh’s overall, wondering how it fit into it.

‘You?’ she said.

‘Sorry?’

‘What do you do?’

‘I write speeches,’ he said. ‘I’m a speech writer.’ Amongst other sins, he had created lines to make the sorry affair of closing ticket offices sound acceptable.

‘Amazing,’ she said. ‘Write speeches for anyone I’d know?’

He considered the overlap between Leigh’s world and the world in which he put words in mouths. She continued before he could speak. ‘How do you get into that? Gotta be good with words, right?’  He wondered, somewhat uncharitably, if she fancied a job working from home, if she thought that meant not really working at all.

‘There’s that,’ he said. ‘I know where to redirect attention. The work chose me. Because of my nature. It helps to see the bad side of things.’ Howard was stunned at himself, to have said those words outside his own head.

‘What do you mean?’ Leigh said.

Whether in charity or exhaustion, Leigh went on into his silence. ‘Talent,’ she said without irony. ‘I’m not cut out for that.’

They didn’t say much more, knowing that she would take her washing and he would close the door. But there it was—the hole in the adjoining wall, metaphorically speaking, a space filled with dust and unlikeliness. He sat down and stared at the empty fruit bowl he’d insisted on having. [Melissa had cried over it]. He had never before so openly claimed cynicism as his own.

***

The next time Howard saw Leigh was the following Saturday at the communal door. The true urgency of purchasing rice left him indecisive, and he bumped into a heavily filled bag that Leigh held in her arms. Something clattered to the floor, and Howard let out a gasp.

‘Hey, Speech Man. Chill. It’s all good.’

He chilled with the plastic and aluminium of a single-use barbecue in his hands. ‘It’s a long time since I had a barbecue.’  He instantly regretted the doleful sound in his voice.

Leigh nodded to the plastic-wrapped tray. ‘Join us if you like. My sister’s coming. Have a burger with us.’

Did she pity him? Did he cut such a pathetic figure that it was unimaginable he could be busy this fine summer’s evening?

‘Unless you got plans?’

And it was out, an honesty before he could stop himself. ‘No plans, no.’

In the week since they’d met, he’d wondered about her and her job and her custom-made overalls. He wondered in the way people did when there was not a lot else to wonder about, the same way he wondered about the child he [and Melissa] had never had. By way of distraction, he went back to old files, ones with speeches and lines about the closure of the ticket offices. When he opened the public consultation document—the main source material for all he’d written on the matter—the amount of red pen shocked him. It had been full of bad copy, bad grammar, missing apostrophes (though a missing apostrophe was less of a crime than a wrongly placed one). “Customers needs” was a grammatical giveaway: the needs didn’t truly belong. But to travel, a passenger needed a ticket, and if that was troublesome to come by with no ticket office at a station, customers could buy one during the journey or at their destination. Why bother? He had underlined that five times.

It had been his idea to foreground the numbers: just twelve per cent of tickets were purchased at offices. That sounded good. He made it sound even better. “Around ten percent” better. And the voices that Howard fed were louder than the voices saying a small percentage of a huge number was still a considerable number: nearly two million journeys were made possible by ticket offices. He’d read on and felt almost embarrassed at how his red pen had let rip at the “single leg pricing”. He’d written “HYPHEN” in outraged capital letters: single-leg pricing. Better still, single-journey pricing. The talk of legs conjured images of carriages filled with prosthetic limbs.

‘What do you reckon, Speech Man? Bring garlic bread and a salad? Keep it simple? A bottle. Nothing fancy, yeah?’

‘Nothing fancy,’ Howard repeated.

‘Oh, and get your washing out and back in before we start.’

He nodded and set off for the shop, rice entirely forgotten.

***

Howard dithered indoors, opened the fridge to check the salad, the garlic bread, simple, yeah going round the musical insides of his head. Was salade tricolore and artisan bread with a homemade garlic and herb farmhouse butter simple enough? He closed the fridge. A tippety-tap at the window made him jump. At first he didn’t see Leigh in the glare of the sunshine, but then they both pointed to meet at the communal door.

Leigh looked downcast. ‘My sister bailed. She’s been called into work.’

‘Abort or press on?’ Howard said. ‘Whatever you’re happy with, Leigh.’

In his head, her name sounded like the music of life.

***

The amount of smoke coming from the silver tray set on bricks was disproportionate relative to its size. So, it was little surprise that Mrs Oldfield opened her window at Leigh and Howard and told them their smoke was going to ruin washing for miles around.

‘It’ll go in a bit,’ Leigh shouted back, apologetic but undeterred. ‘I’ll whizz you up a banger in a bun, Mrs Oldfield. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’ Howard hid a smile. He looked at the scene. Leigh had arranged the redeployment of everyday items to excellent effect: an upturned crate made a table for food, two upturned buckets served as perches. Out of the furthest quadrant of the garden, they had made a new kind of space.

Howard had no allergic reaction to being given instructions by Leigh. He found a sturdy twig when she asked, passed the plate of sausages when she commanded, topped up her wine when required. He worried he was boring her, but he watched her face and found no evidence. She asked his opinion about the forthcoming general election. All the usual manifesto promises. The fools actually believed they were in with a chance of holding onto power when really the best they could hope for was voters turning up at the polling station minutes before closing with canine and camera but not the required identity documents, too late to go home, too bad if they didn’t have them in the first place. When Howard enquired about the purpose of Leigh’s tailor-made overall, he half wondered if the wine [a second bottle before food?!] had gone to his head, but the connection between the politics and her work was clear in his mind.

‘It’s like this, Speech Man.’ She leant out of the smoke. ‘Since they closed the ticket offices, I don’t have anywhere to put the tools of my trade. You think everything’s online, but it isn’t.’ She wagged her finger and her head seemed to side-bob in time. ‘Systems aren’t even accessible on one device. I got four, sometimes five. Then I got stapler, and spare staples, and punches, different ones for different services.’ She pushed a sausage with the hand that was not turning them, saving it from certain grass-death. ‘And there’s lunch. Got no time to buy it, can’t afford to anyway, nowhere to put a lunchbox, no fridge anymore. So, I was holding all this stuff, and putting it down wherever I was on the station. One day, this bloke looked me straight in the face and said in a hoity-toity voice’—she puckered her lips and spoke a notch louder—’“It’s a shame you don’t have somewhere to put all those things. Like an office.” He laughed like a dickhead, thought he was so clever.’ She said “clever” like cle-vv-ah.

Howard wanted to ask about the obvious solution of a bag for her things, but the things else he wanted to say were a jumble. The wine. He poured more. In his mind’s eye, he saw the slashes of furious red pen on the page. It was more than the poor drafting that had irked him, and now here in front of him, was the consequence of all that unspoken rage.

Leigh was speaking again, ‘You know what? That same day, right’—she pointed to the ground—‘some joker nicked my stapler.’

‘Who steals a stapler?’ he said, guilt making him catch his laughter.

‘It’s okay, Speech Man. You can laugh at my plight.’ Her use of the word “plight” snagged his attention, then he felt a snob. ‘They say we don’t need the stuff, but we do. Out of touch, they are.’

Howard felt the urge to waggle his finger and side-bob his head, couldn’t be entirely sure that he hadn’t. A late and meaningless protest.

Leigh drew a deep breath. ‘Roving mobile teams are “roving” further now. They’ve got us walking between stations. You’d think we could train it, but no. Sucks.’ She sucked in her cheeks. ‘You know, when we were on the platforms, customers didn’t know where to find us. This one time, yeah’—she flashed a smile up to Mrs Oldfield’s window—‘a woman three platforms over shouted across the tracks. Not angry. Just so I could hear. She wanted to know what ticket for the time of day, said she couldn’t work it out on the TVM, and I yelled back, you know, helping her. It’s my job to help. I got pulled in by the management for shouting at a customer.’ She looked at Howard and blinked, and he felt her indignation as his own.

‘Was your boss there?’

‘That isn’t how it works. They know.’ This time her finger was pointing upwards, at the all-seeing sky. ‘Like, if the GPS picks me up away from the TVM for more than the median average time it takes to help a customer, they pull up my data for review.’

Words were making too little and too much sense all at once. And what was a TVM?

‘Here, butter that for Mrs Moany Chops, will you, Howard? These are all done.’ Leigh prodded the sausages. ‘I’ll take up her hush banger.’

After buttering the neighbour’s bread roll, Howard went in to bake the garlic bread. Inside, his kitchen felt different. It flowed. Whilst he waited, he looked up TVM. The search engine searched and told him: Time Value Money. He laughed out loud. That wasn’t it but it was good. Very good. He scrolled and found, as he’d thought. Ticket machine. He peered into the screen to see if there was something to explain how those abbreviation-letters made those meaning-words, but the alarm for the garlic bread rang. It was perfectly golden.

Howard and Leigh ate drank and talked about jobs, stupid jobs that became funnier and stupider the longer they talked. Leigh told him about Elsie, that she was a half-sister, unreliable, wouldn’t have been called into work, but she was all the family Leigh had within seventy miles. Howard told Leigh about Melissa, that she’d named his negativity as the reason she wanted to separate, how she’d looked weary when he asked what had changed; he had always been that way. On the subject of his red pen and his palatable lines, he remained silent.

When the evening started to cool, Leigh disappeared inside and came out with blankets and a small red metal tin that she raised and shook gently and winked as she did. She taught Howard how to roll, laughed when he coughed, taught him how to exhale and they giggled into expansive time. And ate all the food. And giggled some more. It had been a long time since Howard had laughed like that.

‘It’s good to laugh about this shit,’ Leigh said as they stood and wobbled on the uneven grass. ‘But it is shit, you know.’ For a moment, he thought she might cry.

‘We’ll clear up tomorrow,’ he said, then realised Leigh had moved to the communal door and was looking back at him.

‘Come on, Speechy,’ she said.

He had never been one for nicknames, but he liked how she named him, felt it like an uncle may feel it from a cheeky niece. It was too dark to read any look on her face, and for a moment he hoped that she had pitied him in the way a cheeky niece may pity an uncle.

Inside, they swayed. Her hand brushed at his elbow and they moved away, each to their own door, hidden from each other by the communal cupboard. Leigh spoke through the overly-lit echo. ‘Speech Man? It’s good that you’re here. I like knowing where I can find you.’ He heard her door click.

Inside, Howard opened the laptop in his kitchen, pressed play on the video on screen, the consultation page for the ticket office closures. The film showed a blue-uniformed man on a platform, suitcase in hand. It was trying to show that staff not based in offices could do more practical helping. Or maybe it was a new service: railway staff would take a passenger’s journey for them, do a day in the office, go to that family lunch, sign the divorce paper […]. A stunt double, a double for life. Howard sighed, clicked shut. He went to bed.

The next morning, he cleared the architecture of their evening, left Leigh’s crate and bucket by her door, set the bricks back on their stack, took his own bucket in. He went back to bed with a tea. He heard Leigh’s door go, and heard it go again later.

The following week, Howard found himself looking through a half-clean train window at the passing bank and uncut hedges, and there she was in a clearing. She was walking, pushing aside branches that stretched across her path, perhaps on the way to her next station, roving and mobile in her stupid job that was, in all honesty, less stupid than his own.

The train was going at a snail’s pace, and Howard banged on the glass. It made a dull thud. He stood and bent to wave the largest wave he could in the space. He felt people in the carriage stop what they were staring at and stare at him. He didn’t care. He waved again, and it was this wave that caught Leigh’s attention. She nodded, and he nodded. Then they both waved again and Howard took in the heat-dusted green of the unruly hedging, the insistent blue of the sky, Leigh’s feet planted firmly on the ground of brown leaves from last year and the year before and the year before that, and it filled his chest with joy. The train jerked into pace, into the newness ahead.