A man gets out at the next stop. She wants to get out with him, to stay close, to ask for his protection, but her legs won’t carry her and she focuses instead on her book and prays the boy will go away.
Now it’s just her and the three boys and the man in the suit. She wants to be home, to be out of the heat, drinking chilled wine, listening to the blackbird in her hawthorn tree improvising a tune in the last glimmer of dusk. She wants to be left alone.
The other two have been loitering at the far end of the carriage, but now one of them comes forward and kneels on the seat behind the tall youth, peering through the gap between the headrests. He has jug ears and a snub nose, which make him seem childlike-monstrous.
“D’you wanna come for a drink with us?” the first boy asks. His breath is thick with beer and vomit.
“I think you’ve had enough already, don’t you?” Carol says.
The other boys laugh. “Boz is getting his arse kicked by a girl!” the second boy says.
Boz. Carol memorises the name.
Boz leans so close that she can’t see her novel when she looks down at it. His hair gel smells of coconut oil. His hooded jacket is open, showing off his six-pack. This is not a boy you want to humiliate, she tells herself. He’s vain, and vanity does not forgive criticism.
“D’you wanna bevvy or what?”
“No,” she says, pleased that her voice is so steady. “Thanks.”
The second boy sobs theatrically. “She’s breaking his heart!”
Boz grabs his crotch. “I might shag it, but I’m not in love with it.” He lets his eyes drift to the top of her legs, the crease of her trousers. “You a natural blond?” he asks.
The skin on her scalp tingles and her heart flutters in her chest like a trapped bird. The man in the suit is reading his paper. Is he deaf? she wonders. Can’t he hear what’s going on?
Boz blows in her face and she flinches as if he has hit her. “Look at me when I’m talking to you, bitch.”
He is smirking, enjoying her humiliation, and a tiny spark of anger flares in her gut. “Sod off,” she says, but too tentatively.
He mimics her; he’s a good mimic, he captures her accent, her voice, the note of fear she cannot hide.
“I mean it,” Carol says. “Back off or I’ll call the guard.”
His eyebrows lift. “Yeah? How you gonna do that? ESP?”
The emergency cord is six feet away, above the door. It might as well be six miles. She glances around the carriage for security cameras, but can’t see any.
She stands. The boy stands with her. She moves left. He mirrors the movement.
The man in the suit is still reading his paper. Bastard.
“Excuse me,” she says; her voice is weak, frightened. The man doesn’t respond and the boy’s eyes flicker greedily over her body. His sickly-sweet breath in her nostrils is an intrusion, a violation.
Why are you being so bloody polite?
“Hey!” she shouts.
Boz jerks back, startled.
The anger feels good. “HEY, YOU!” she shouts again, louder this time.
The man flicks down a corner of his newspaper. He seems irritated.
“Are you going to help me?” The way she asks, it’s a clear accusation.
The boys watch, curious to see what he will do.
She sees a muscle jump in the man’s jaw, then he exhales through his nose as if he has been asked to perform some irksome task.
He folds his paper neatly and places it on the seat beside him. The train slows and the recorded announcement tells them they are approaching Cressington. Thank God-her stop.
“That’s us, Boz.” The youngest boy has appeared suddenly by the door. He sounds troubled, unhappy.
The man stands in a smooth, easy movement. He’s taller than they expected, more athletic, and the boy says again, the tremor in his voice accentuated by the rattle of the train, “Our stop, man.”
Boz keeps his eyes on Carol, but she notices the tension in his shoulders, the bunching of his fists. He gives her one last disparaging look. “What-did you think it was grab-a-granny night?” He jabs a thumb towards the youngest boy, standing anxiously in the doorway. “I wouldn’t even touch you with his dick.”
The doors open and they’re off, onto the platform, whooping and laughing, making barking noises at her. They swarm up the steep stone steps; she hears their footsteps echoing all the way through the Victorian station house. She looks at the man and he raises a shoulder, a slight smile on his face-embarrassment or amusement? She can’t tell. Doesn’t care.
Her stop. She steps out onto the platform. Seized by dread certainty, she stares wide-eyed at the stairwell. What if they’re waiting for her outside the station? The narrow muddy shortcut she usually takes to Broughton Drive is dark and poorly lit, and even on the roadway there are places they might hide: behind skips outside the house refurbs, in the shop doorways on the main road. To hell with it, she’ll go on to Garston, get a taxi home.
The warning buzzer sounds that the doors are about to close. She wheels round as they begin sliding shut, jumps back on the train. One of the doors slams into her shoulder and she is caught off-balance. She grabs the handrail and steadies herself. The man in the suit is watching her.
He sighs and smiles in resignation and welcome. He smells the fear on her. Exciting, raw, unrestrained. It smells of warmth. Of woman. Of pain. Of sex.
The Day of Two Cars by Gillian Linscott
‘It was a young woman who found him,’ the village constable said. ‘Molly Davitt, the blacksmith’s daughter. She thought he was having a conversation on the telephone. After a while when he didn’t move she decided something might be wrong.’
‘After how long, exactly?’ the inspector asked. He was a city man and disliked vagueness.
‘Half an hour or so, Molly says. Could be longer.’
‘You mean to tell me this young woman stood watching a man in a telephone box for half an hour or more?’
‘There’s not much happens round here. And the fact is, Molly’s been fascinated with that telephone box from the time they put it up.’
It was the spring of 1924 when they came to install the telephone box in Tadley Gate. Nobody was quite sure why. The men from the Post Office travelled from Hereford, seventeen miles away as the pigeon flew and half as much again by winding country road. All they knew was that they’d been instructed to erect the standard model Kiosk One, designed to be especially suitable for rural areas, on the edge of the common, in between the old pump and the new war memorial. It was made of reinforced concrete slabs with a red painted wooden door and large windows in the door and sides. In a touch of Post Office swagger, a decorative curlicue of wrought iron crowned it, finishing in a spike that some people assumed was an essential part of the mechanism. Nobody in Tadley Gate (pop. 227) had asked for a telephone kiosk and very few had ever used a telephone. Still, they were pleased. The coming of the kiosk was an event at least, which made two events in eighteen months, counting back to the other new arrival, the petrol pump. The petrol pump belonged to Davy Davitt, Molly’s father. A third-generation blacksmith by trade, he’d had more than enough of horses and fallen in love with cars. The sign over his workshop said ‘Blacksmith and Farrier’ in the curly old-fashioned letters that had been good enough for his grandfather. Underneath he’d painted, stark and white, ‘Motor Vehicle Repairs Undertaken’. The fact that the parish included thirty-three horses and ponies and only one motor car limited his scope but he was a resourceful man. Long negotiations with a distant petrol company ended with the arrival of a tank and a pump. The pump was red like the phone kiosk door, topped by a globe of frosted glass with a cockleshell and ‘Sealed Shell’ on it in black letters. The tank below it held 500 gallons of petrol, delivered by motor tanker. In the first year Davy’s only sales were five gallons every other week to the colonel from the big house who drove a Hillman Peace model very cautiously, so at that rate it would be nearly four years before the tanker needed to come with another delivery. But as Davey told anybody who’d listen in the Duke of Wellington, that was only the start. He was looking ahead to the arrival of the motor tourer. It stood to reason that as more people bought cars and the cars became more reliable, they’d drive for the pleasure far away from cities and into the countryside. It didn’t matter the only motor tourist Tadley Gate had ever seen was somebody who’d got badly confused on the way to Shrewsbury and didn’t want to be there.