TANYA MITCHELL WAYNE

It was another awful February day. A strong, chilly wind was blowing that had me quivering like a jelly. The train was late into Waverley. There were too many people for the lift. I had to drag my heavy case up the stairs. The Inverurie train was due to leave at 07:30. I only just made it to platform 16 in time. I’d been up since five to six. A pretty young blonde girl boarded the train at Haymarket and sat opposite me. She wore a black and white houndstooth check jacket. She made a bee-line for her mobile phone the minute she sat down. Amazing how many young people do that – they cannot resist sending out innocuous messages to each other in their peculiar language – it took me a while to understand what ‘cu@4’ meant. For some weeks, I thought it was a chemical symbol.
Snow fell raggedly over the bleak and saturated landscape. The water of the Firth of Forth was choppy and steel-grey. The lights on the Road Bridge were barely visible in the murk. We stopped on the rail bridge at a red signal and I had time to study the tiny dolls’-houses below. I wondered what it was like to live in the shadow of this dinosaur-skeleton bridge. It must be pitch-dark much of the time and one must develop a sense of paranoia when bits of the bridge keep falling into one's garden or through one's roof.
I was just drifting into sleep when the stewardess came along with her clanking trolley. She was dark, slender and chic. She was also French. I ordered coffee. She had some difficulty in understanding that I required sweeteners. ‘Zweetairs?’ she asked. Eventually she cottoned on and handed me a couple of sachets of ‘Splenda’. She also marked my coffee-card, which gives me a sixth cup free after I have bought and paid for five. In a field stood a lonely and forlorn carthorse, wrapped in a canvas jacket. He looked desperate for some company.
I had scarcely seen such a dreary, stunted, saturated, colourless landscape. The girl in the herring-bone coat looked pensively at an envelope that she had placed on the table. She drew out a letter and regarded it closely. I tried to read the missive, but the writing was upside-down, and, to remain unobtrusive, I had to feign sleep, and then I couldn’t see anything at all. All I managed to glean was her name – Tanya Mitchell Wayne. It looked very much as if Ms Wayne had been summoned to a job interview. It started me thinking that here she was, starting out on life’s journey, whilst all my best journeys were well behind me.
Her face was fresh, pleasant and unlined, whilst mine is shop-soiled, careworn and has the texture of a pterodactyl’s wing. I tried to remember what Ray Davies had written for the song ‘Shangri-La,’ – ‘You’ve reached your top and you just can’t get any higher/You’re in your place and you know where you are/In your Shangri-La.’ I reached my top years ago, I won’t get any higher, and I certainly know my place. Perhaps Tanya Mitchell Wayne will have great success and be free from pain during her journey through life. If so, she will be a very lucky woman. She got up to go at Leuchars. She slipped her mobile phone and the envelope containing the letter into her handbag. She was indeed very beautiful. She happened to look round for some reason and, momentarily, her gaze met mine. ‘Good Luck,’ I said, and she smiled briefly. Outside, pockets of low cloud had almost reached ground level and the rain flew past like horizontal tracer-bullets. She stepped onto the platform and the future. I disembarked at Dundee, still haunted by the past.