Goodbye, Waterloo
© Tony Holkham 1980

It struck me, as I stepped down from the train on to the unyielding tarmac, how fortunate it was that unselfish people were not the norm. Nothing would ever get done, with everyone anxious not to make a profit out of others, andxious to leave the world with less than they arrived with.

Afterwards, I could not say that it was that brought this thought into my mind. But with it uppermost in my consciousness, when the old woman tugged at my sleeve, asking for something or other, I shrugged her off.

The incident would have passed unnoticed and unrecalled, had I later not set my eye on the evening paper's small headline: "Woman dies under train at Waterloo". Only then did I recall the blank expression, and the white stick that had rolled away and stuck in a drain. Only then did I know why she died. Because of me. Because of a thought, the origin of which I could not trace.

At four the following morning I was violently sick. Muriel fussed around me with a damp towel, and the colours on the bathroom curtains were more vivid than I had ever seen them. I sat on the corner of the bath, my arms holding me as tight as any straightjacket, and let the whole day tumble out, the words unravelling like a snagged stocking. Muriel listened, not nodding, not tutting, not narrowing her eyes as she does when she hears our neighbour beating his dog. She led me, as she would an old donkey, back to my bed. I was sick again at ten past six.

At nine, I rang the paper, and they gave me her name; was I a relative? A shame, they said, none had come forward. No one wanted to know. The State would bury her. I sent flowers to the mortuary.

But it would not rest. It woke me in the night, it tugged at my sleeve, as she had done, each time I alighted from the train. It stung my cheek every time I saw a white stick, and every unseeing pair of eyes seemed to say: "If we could see you, we would hate you." Eventually, any stick, tapping along the street, or even an umbrella, would make me turn to face a shop window, not to see within, but to struggle desperately against the nausea that threatened to tell evryone what I had done.

It obsessed me. At the mention of blindness I would fly into a rage. I sat straing at my typewriter for hours, unable to produce a line of verse which before had flowed unceasingly and unthinkingly. Not unnaturally, enquiries after my work began to dwindle. Soon I was producing nothing in response to a nil requirement. The insane logic of it appealed to me in those black days, and I laughed at the blank pages, mocking them in their futility.

It was only Muriel who could have saved me. During those weeks of unmentionable terror I learned to trust her. Nothing made her waver from the direct path to my salvation, not my panic, not my tantrums, not my attempts to kill myself. When I deluded myself tht it had never happened, she led me back to the truth. And when the time came to lay the ghost, she went with me, on the train, to Waterloo. She followed close behind me when I stepped down on to the tarmac, now yielding to the summer warmth, and looked about me in numbed confusion.

I looked about, foolish in my expectation of seeing a blind person standing waiting to be helped through the barrier. We got our tickets clipped and bought coffee, watching the arrivals board flicker, and half listening to the droning announcer. I wanted to cry. I wanted Muriel to say something inane, like "Feel better now?" or "I wonder where the man with the limp is going" but she didn't. We finished our coffee, and silently went to look at the tracks where the woman had fallen.

After standing for a few minutes, a nagging thought made me turn sharply on Muriel. "This isn't right, you know. My train came in on platform seven, I remember it distinctly."

"That's right," she said, evenly.

I tried to remember. "What did the paper say?"

When she looked up, I felt she was a hundred miles away. "Platform twelve, this one," she said quietly.

So immense was the difference between those two numbers, as my mind passed through what had occurred during the past few weeks, that I could not think clearly. The next question seemed impossible to ask, and I surprised myself when I got it out: "How long have you known?" But quickly I put my fingers against her lips. "Forgive me."

She hugged me briefly, and we got back into the train. There, she gave me a new pad and a sharpened pencil. I took them, and began to write.

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