Olive Senior - PEN International

12
WORDS ... PAULINE MELVILLE
Pauline Melville
Is This Platform Four, Madam?
Is It?
The taller of the two men was clearly agitated. He was in his twenties with a pale,
oval face and dark glasses. His light stone-coloured mackintosh flared out slightly
as he turned on his heel this way and that. Next to him stood a man wearing a
light tweed jacket who might have been his father. The two men waited together
on the concourse of Newcastle station. The station had recently been modernised.
In an attempt to leave the Victorian era behind and enter the modern world it had
been painted in bright nursery colours. Blue scaffolding enclosed the kiosks. Red
tubular railings ran along the pedestrian bridge linking the other platforms.
But the huge black overarching iron structures that supported the roof echoed
the cat’s cradle of iron bridges over the Tyne and managed to hold the station in
the grip of the city’s industrial past, open to the gritty airiness and invigorating
breezes of the north. The older man’s white hair blew about in unruly wisps. There
was something bucolic about him. He was portly, red-faced and moustachioed.
The tweed jacket gave him the appearance of an English country squire. His
feet were planted apart firmly on the ground. It was clear by his faint swaying
backwards and forwards that he had been drinking. Beyond him a glinting skein
of railway lines stretched away into the distance.
The station was full of early evening summer light. Passengers had started to
gather in anticipation of the London train. The younger of the two men approached
a middle-aged woman who was sitting on a bench with her brown bag pinioned
between her feet.
‘Is this platform four, madam? Is it? Is it?’
There was a hint of menace in the polite insistence of his questioning.
The woman looked up to check the sign on the platform. The sign, directly
overhead, said PLATFORM 4 in large letters.
‘Yes. This is platform four.’
‘Are you sure?’ He hovered in front of her, shifting from one foot to the other.
‘Yes.’ She pointed to the sign.
‘Good,’ he said. Without looking to where she was pointing, he turned away
again. To the woman’s obvious surprise, she saw him approach someone else on
the platform.
‘Excuse me, sir, is this platform four?’ He asked the same question of the smartly
dressed business man who stood nearby. Having reassured himself that this was
indeed platform four, he returned to stand by the older man.
The older man, oblivious to the comings and goings of his companion, readjusted
his stance, once more setting his feet apart in the manner of a landlubber
trying to catch his balance at sea He swayed forwards, corrected himself against
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