Waiting for Casuals

The country is between storms right now so it cannot come to the phone. Please fasten the window latches and be patient. You have seen the news and the weather report. The storms all have wonderful names – islander names, gendered on their direction, yes, but melodic! – so it might be hard for you to have any hostility towards them, their tumult and velocity, especially when you see the reader-submitted photographs of waves curling dramatically over the stonebanked rim of some coastal village, the sort of print you think would go great in your bathroom, black & white, mounted & framed, with the contrast tuned just right because you very much like the distance between darkness and light.
If it was not this storm [name redacted] then it was the last one who stayed over Monday night; forgive me for not keeping track. I was on my way to chess club, through the wind and the leaves, the stinging rain, everything lost in the volume of weather. The urging from my mother was enough that I arrived enthusiastically early to the railway-arches-pub where it was held. There was a competition on and I recognised one of the opponents from my old chess club a few years prior – luck would have it the two towns were playing each other – yet when I went to make conversation with him, he rejected it in very certain and pungent terms, shaking his wiry-haired head and hurrying off away from me. I recalled him beating me with the Sicilian, a knight in the hole on c5, but I was certain he did not remember it.
I waited for casuals to arrive.
The tracks were elevated over the town, at the same level as the country on either side, from where it entered and where it left. Two arches had been opened to each other: bar & amenities in one and a music hall in the other. The whole place shook when a train passed over head, which was often, as the town, the venue and the chess club were along the mainline to London. There was jazz playing, a soprano saxophone. No other noise, the air did not move, the saxophone swum through, even the tremors of transportation were muffled, filtered out by cold wet air that came in through the brickwork and was burned by the electric heaters working overtime as the storm shimmied the front door back & forth.

Shortly, an older gentleman arrived and, seeing I was waiting around patiently – and a stranger to the organisation – introduced himself with all the mannerisms to fondly remind me of old work friends. ‘Fancy a game?’ His grey beard was cropped close and he arranged his pieces with delicate hands and slim wrists, making conversation with me that was just far enough from small talk that I felt a human warmth against my cautious nerves. I asked him questions on the holiday he had just returned from. He had been travelling across Egypt by train and showed me some photographs—‘Just some of them,’ he said, with a flash of modesty but mostly excited pride – him and his sons, his wife, the monuments, all of them bleached in sand and blunted by millennia. It seemed quite romantic to me, travelling across North Africa by train, and he agreed. How wonderful for two strangers to make honest and lighthearted chatter! Above, the overseeing flicker of a sound meter, which sparkled green through yellow and red whenever a train passed overhead, not northeast African but Greater Anglian. As above, so below. We spoke during the opening, however once our pieces were developed, we silenced and considered only the game.
In the first, I had mate or to fork his rooks, the latter of which he did not see; the second, he could not recover after losing his knight. ‘Give me a chance to redeem myself?’ and I lost the third game after some poor miscalculation.
There were still a few inches of my pint remaining after the final game. The arch divided in two by rows of tables. On our half it was older gentlemen and myself, and the other were younger people, amplified and talkative, for whom the games formed a springboard for conversation and cigarette excursions. One of the young women started to sing in Italian and they all laughed.
He assured me—‘It’s usually much busier than this,’ shook my hand when I was saying good-bye, called me Craig, apologised, and said he would see me next week.
Town was quiet at ten o’clock on a Monday night. There was a handful of pomegranate seeds scattered across the December kerb, and they were there, colourfully, opposite the bus shelter, near the kids with skateboards and weed and through them lamplight energy fizzed rosily.

A handsome couple, closer to thirty than I, were decorating their Christmas tree behind a warm window, all blocks of shade and gold, jittering fairies, music playing, drinks just out of shot. It was not much but they were on tiptoes and everything was being done, even in those brief moments, with the most delicate of fingertips, as much like a bishop as a bauble.
Surfaces are reflected or blurred inside the lift. Upon the vinyl floor are drippings from binbags now dried and kind of strewn by heels or feet that go in and come out. Also, there are dead leaves that were soft in summer but have hardened in autumn and, somehow, made it through two lobbies to end up there, moving up and down, over and over. They thaw. They are grateful passengers, happy enough to be warm, invited along for the ride. They are the lucky ones, for the other fallen leaves put their fingerprints up the face of the building and its glass door.
As I exited the lift, my phone vibrated itself to tell me that my profile had been removed from a dating application due to inactivity. What peculiar timing! There must have been some exchange that occurred on there at that exact hour – 22:18 – a predetermined number of months ago. Yes, one, two, three months ago. It was that date with [name redacted], which, by all accounts, went perfectly apart from arguably its most important metric. How was she doing?
The cat greeted me noisily at the door, just as noisy as the girl singing in Italian. I dished up her dinner and put the kettle on for no reason other than to hear it boil. I leaned in the doorway and watched her eat and felt as if, grotesquely, all of my teeth have shuffled forward and that I am now unsightly. Perhaps that was the reason for my removal from the dating application. I pushed my tongue against my teeth. For all its faults, my tongue knew nothing more of the world than what was within the space my teeth afforded it and so it was most qualified – perhaps overqualified – to judge their improper arrangement. To point, I push my fingers against my tongue and it pushes back.
It does not matter. I am here now. Dripping and cool, I climb out of the bathtub; everything that was on me falls away and onto the bathmat. My reflection in the mirror is distorted, or at least it is blurry until some time is passed and then I am there again, reformed. I am here again, and I am there. I am looking back at myself. The cat is in the doorway staring at me.

Silent As Glass
Kaye Donachie
2018

From All Unriver