Traindreams- A short story.

Good morning, my name is Adrian Rivers and you’re on the 9:30 train to London St Pancras. I am sitting in carriage C, staring blankly at the laptop in front of me whilst outside, the world wakes up in a misty haze. In twenty minutes, we will come speeding into that dreamy greenhouse of the capital, filled with expensive shops and framed by the two bronze lovers, locked in an eternal embrace. In another twenty minutes, I will be locked in the glittering towers of Canary Wharf, surrounded by the sound of typing and serious people in suits.
For now, I sit in the warmth and comfort of my carriage, watching back gardens fly by. The train pauses at a concrete block of a station with an unmemorable name, and a woman enters the carriage and sits opposite me. She wears her red coat well, her long dark hair in a bandanna. As I watch her, she takes out a book, I know it’s not some holiday murder mystery, oh no. She is reading an old forgotten classic and you can almost smell the second hand bookshop where it came from.
My mind begins to wander as I watch her peel the battered bookmark out of the pages and lie it on the grey table; in my mind I’m not just watching her. In my mind I lean over and smile.
“What are you reading?” She looks up at me, for a second she’s slightly affronted and then answers suspiciously.
“…Catcher in the Rye, but why does it matter to you?”
“No reason really, I was just interested.”
A pause.
“So where are you headed?” I ask, grasping at the rapidly disintegrating conversation, she smiles at me. “You do realise that there’s only one stop left?”
Inwardly I curse my awkwardness and busy myself in packing my laptop away to hide my embarrassment, I’m about to get off when she taps me on the back, “Do you want to go for a coffee?” Her sudden intensity shocks me and, for a moment I’m speechless. I think for a second about my supervisor’s anger in twenty minutes when I don’t turn up, my co-workers wondering where I am. “Yeah,” I answer, “why not?”
I’m sitting on the train, watching the woman turn a page. But in my daydream we’re in a busy coffee shop full of commuters, staring into our cups.
“They’re like soup bowls.”
“What?”
“These cups. Look how big they are.”
She smiles “Well, this is a French place, I understand it’s a cultural thing.”
I like how she understands it’s a cultural thing. I tell her so, and she tells me about herself. Her name is Lucy Davis; she runs a shop in Camden Town, selling artsy utensils; novelty spoons and decorative cheese graters. She laughs when I tell her I’m in accounting.
“Shouldn’t you be at work?”
“It can wait.”
I spend the day with her. And the night too. I wake up next to her in an airy room with the sound of traffic coming through the open window; she is asleep beside me, her hair frizzy and her breathing loud and even. I think I love her. When she wakes up we chat and she goes down to the shop, I stay in bed and pick a book from her shelf, it’s the first book I’ve read in years and I savour every moment. In the next few weeks that pass, I am no longer Adrian Rivers the Canary Wharf accountant. I am Adrian Rivers: property of Lucy Davis. She does own me; she is more alive than anyone I have ever met before, she brings me into a land of colour and life. I think of my flat, miles away, everything as I left it before I met her. My old life gathering dust.
“Tickets please.” I emerge from the dream and fumble for my wallet, handing the day-glo orange card to the sombre faced man. Lucy does the same, and then goes back to her book. Looking at her, I realise I’m being stupid. I’m imagining a perfect, bizarre world between me and a stranger. It would never be like that in real life. Something, somewhere would go wrong.
I see myself walking into the shop where I have grown so accustomed to living, I see myself going into her bedroom, I see her and another man.
“What the hell is this?”
Her eyes widen, and her mouth trying to stifle a giggle. “Adrian… this? It’s nothing!”
“I better go.” Mumbles the stranger, grabbing his discarded shirt and hurriedly putting on his shoes, Lucy looks regretfully at him and then turns to me. I stare through her and her excuses fall unheard upon my ears. “I…need some air.” I mumble and run down the steps, through the ridiculous shop, out onto the street. I walk without registering where I’m going, Adrian Rivers is gone. Now I am no one; I sold my identity to her that day on the train. I pace through London, past gardens and groups of drunks and businessmen who would no longer recognise me. I walk until the sky turns red. Eventually I return to the shop. Lucy is there waiting for me.
“Adrian, what you saw… it wasn’t what it looked like.”
“What the hell was it then?”
“It was… it was….” I see her glance around desperately, and then she turns on me. “Look, you can’t tell me what to do! You don’t own me! Mark’s just a friend.”
“Oh, a friend?” Suddenly I’m angrier than I’ve ever felt, “So that’s what friends do? Tell me Lucy, are we just friends? Is that all this ever was?”
“God, you see that’s your problem Adrian, you’ve turned a molehill into a mountain!” Suddenly, impulsively, she picks up one of her decorative cheese graters and flings it at me. I duck, but it still glances off my cheek and I feel warm blood. There is a silence as she seems to realise what she has done, but it’s already been done, she can’t take it back.
“You know Lucy,” I say shakily, “You’ve always been too free for me.”
I imagine that the next day would pass in a grey blur. I would take my stuff, what stuff I have anyway. My briefcase, the clothes I bought. And then, I’d go and Lucy Davis would become only a memory.
“This stop is... Kings Cross St Pancras.” The slowing down of the train and the sudden rush of activity brings me back to reality. The girl I called Lucy puts her book in her bag and stands up. I do the same and together, silently, we join the queue leaving the train. Suddenly, I have an urge to reach out to her, ask her for a coffee in a French café, live and love with her, and have my heart broken. But, like everything, the urge passes. I begin to think of the day ahead, as I step onto the platform, but almost subconsciously I think about Lucy too, I watch her as she gets lost in the crowd. A splash of red in a grey sea.