I had the chance to realise a persistent fantasy. We sat opposite each other - table seats in an otherwise empty carriage. This is how it was meant to happen. She might have been a bit prettier, and a bit less drunk, but she was, I was sure, without inhibition - if caught in the right frame of mind there was nothing she wouldn't have done.
Ah, it might have been so different. I might have proved myself a man. I could've fucked my way to true adulthood. Instead, my bottle went AWOL, my stomach shrunk, and I didn't know what to do with myself.
I had looked at her with my best tenebrous stare. She had smiled and shuffled round the table to sit next to me. In the sickly dim light, I had noticed the relief of a cluster of little whiteheads on her chin. She had waited for me to act. But I had no strategy. I didn’t know what the word meant.
She wanted wit, innuendo, or maybe (as my fantasy would have had it), ravaging, and I didn’t know what to do. I proffered sheepish grins and a muttered ‘sorry’ for ever having existed.
She laughed. ‘You're cute but your shit,’ she slurred, perceptively.
I had nowhere to hide. I had nothing. I had become a child again, far from home, far from anything except raw, inescapable shame. I was cute, but I was shit. No way out of it; a spotty drunk on a lonely night train had bested me.
Now, as the train raced through the night, her head swayed slightly and she closed her eyes. She took my hand and held it. I held hers back, fizzing with my sense of failure. She began to laugh short, stabbing laughs – the only appropriate reaction to the general silliness of things, personified in me for the remaining hours of the journey.
Then the lights of the carriage suddenly went out. Her laughter diminished to sighs. She continued to hold my hand. ‘You’re a cute wee lad,’ she said. She kissed my hand, and let it fall with hers into her lap. Then she went to sleep.
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