Tête-à-Tête at a Train Station

She hadn’t meant to kiss her, hadn’t meant to make her cry, and she very well hadn’t meant to leave without saying goodbye, but the train—an hour late—was pulling into the station, and if Bella was any good at anything, it was running away.

“It’s a cliché but are you running to or from something?” asked Amelie.

They’d met a half hour ago, both affected by delays, and now sat on cold tiles just outside the news agency, Bella’s legs around a small backpack, Amelie’s propped up on a green 80L rucksack as though it were a footrest.

“I don’t know,” replied Bella, fidgeting with the orange cover of a Penguin classic. She’d bought it for the peace of mind; nothing else would silence that nagging voice within.

News agencies were like a candy store—those at train stations, of course—and Bella had a sweet tooth. There was an unfamiliar stillness, an unfamiliar hunger, in these high-ceilinged rooms where we waited and waited and waited for reality—written on the departures board—to resume.

And all those shelves of colour, the different packaging, the different possibilities…

We couldn’t help ourselves, not really, not with an empty pocket of time to drool over novels and the sweet, gooey promise beyond their covers; and we squeezed these potential new lives (who will I become?) into this small interlude like a child stuffing their pockets with candy.

“To or from?” Amelie repeated, pouting like a purple-lipped fish.

“I suppose,” said Bella, “I’m trying not to exist. They say that to be is to be perceived, but as soon as anyone becomes a constant in my life, I up and leave. New place, new people, new everything.”

Amelie tugged at the tongues of her Converse with long, tattooed fingers.

“I don’t know if I’m asserting my existence,” continued Bella, “or undoing it.”

“You don’t want to be somebody to someone?”

“Sometimes, but other times I don’t want to be anybody to anyone.”

“Want a coffee?” asked Amelie, rising to her feet.

“Am I boring you?” joked Bella, plucking coins from her pocket.

“Bah non, but Bella—”

“M-hm?”

 “It sounds like you’re too afraid to feel.”

Amelie disappeared into a crowded café, barricaded with rucksacks and snoozing backpackers. Nothing had changed on the departures board, and that unfamiliar stillness still reigned. Was Bella afraid to feel?

Not really, she thought, fidgeting with the orange paperback. In fact, she was afraid others would burden her with their feelings. Who were they to like her? Not to mention love! Most people projected their desires onto her as though she were a blank screen, and in so doing rendered her arbitrary. They didn’t even see her, didn’t even look, but dressed her up in their own expectations until she was invisible like that one bedroom chair buried beneath clothing.

Amelie, two coffees and a brown paper bag engulfing her small hands, closed the white, bustling distance; Bohemian Rhapsody was being played, albeit clumsily, on the public piano.

“I bought some Madeleines,” she sang, shaking the bag.

“Don’t you think,” said Bella, “that it’s unfair to love arbitrarily? It’s like a retail sale and everyone just snatches up what they can find. You probably don’t even fit, but they’ll make adjustments; you’re a leather boot stretched out with ice, you’re a pair of trousers cut and hemmed to their desired length.”

“Is it arbitrary, though? Haven’t you ever fallen in love with someone’s smile?”

“That’s limerence, not love.”

An announcement drowned out the piano: madame, monsieur, votre attention s’il vous plaît—

“I once dated a girl,” said Amelie, “who kept buying me rosé.”

“And?”

“I prefer red.”

Bella snuck a glance at the departures board. No platform yet.

“What I mean to say,” continued Amelie, “is that she didn’t know me, but she loved me. Sometimes love is a verb and it’s the thought that counts.”

“And what happened?”

“We broke up.”

“Why?”

“Because she kept buying me rosé.”

Amelie smiled and stuffed a Madeleine into her mouth.

Bella herself had once dated someone who bought her a book she otherwise wouldn’t have touched with a ten-foot pole. She could recall the revulsion as she peeled back the wrapping paper and saw the ghastly pink cover defaced with the illustration of a woman, tongue out, flipping the bird. It took all her willpower not to scowl as she smiled and said thanks, and the recollection alone made her lip curl up with distaste as though she’d taken a sip of curdled milk.

“You don’t like the coffee?” asked Amelie.

Bella licked sugar from her fingers. “What about you, Amelie?”

“I’ve had better.”

“No, I mean to or from?”

“Ask me another question.”

“What’s wrong with that one?”

“I’ve been asked that many times,” said Amelie, nodding at her rucksack.

Bella nodded and gulped down her coffee. “I’ve got it,” she said, wiping the back of her hand across her lips. “Are you trying to be seen,” she began, gesturing to Amelie’s purple pout, “or the contrary?”

Amelie sat up and crossed her legs, her tattooed fingers wringing her right ankle like a washcloth.

“Is this you,” said Bella, “or a hiding place?”

“Like a disguise?”

“Yeah, nobody’s that cool.”

“You think I’m cool?”

“The older I get, the more I realise that adults are just children pretending otherwise.”

“But I know I’m playing make-believe,” replied Amelie. “Children aren’t convinced they’re doctors or knights. They play dress-up because it’s fun. We’re all just big kids and yet there’s something adult about acknowledging it. There’s nothing sillier than a boy driving around in his toy car, clomping about in his father’s shoes, and asking, with a studied frown, ‘What costume?’”

“How long have you been studying English?”

“My father was English.”

“Was?”

“Was.”

“When?”

“Three years ago.”

“What was he like?”

Amelie paused an instant, her features softened. “He used to furrow his brow before he laughed,” she said. “Kind of like this.”

“And he loved birds,” she continued. “We had binoculars on the kitchen windowsill, and he’d call, ‘Amelie! Come quick!’ And sometimes, when we went grocery shopping, he’d buy a bag of sweets and we’d have to finish them in the car before we got home.

 “This one time we had to go around the block over and over again because we’d bought an entire bag of Carambar, and I was reading him the riddles. He was much better at it than I was, even though it was his second language.

“And once, he took my sisters and I to see Carmen at the opera. I was very young, but I remember looking over at my dad and it was the first and only time I ever saw him cry.”

Tears welled in her eyes, but she laughed and swatted the air like a fly.

“And now, as an adult, I wonder if he knew a Carmen. Everyone is a treasure chest of stories, even our parents…What is she playing?”

Her big doe eyes, lashes clumped with mascara, found the public piano; it was swamped by tall rucksacks, each attached to a pair of gangly legs and Birkenstocks.

Silence settled over the station like mist as the piano keys climbed—one, two, three; one, two, three; one, two, three; one, two, three—and unfurled like a flower at sunrise—

no! like the time-lapse of blue Iridaceae blooming.

no! like rain, like showers, on an iron roof.

no! like Pollock’s Blue Poles pushing through an anarchy of colour like seedlings through soil.

no! like the quivering of leaves before a storm.

And then the timid frenzy lulled.

Silence stretch—

—ched

out

like a rubber band,

slowly,

slowly,

slowly,

and then snap!ped.

The backpackers scattered, voices hummed, and children squealed like an unpaused scene.

“Hans Zimmer,” whispered Bella. Why was she whispering?

Madame, monsieur, votre attentio—both girls glanced up at the departures board: Bella’s train, platform A.

“That’s me.”

“It’s fine.”

As they leaned in to faire la bise, Bella kissed the corner of Amelie’s mouth.

“We start on the left here.”

Blood rushed to Bella’s cheeks, and she apologised, threw on her bag and made to leave.

“Don’t forget your book.”

“Thanks,” murmured Bella, snatching it up and scurrying off past the public piano, past the backpackers and down an escalator.

She hadn’t meant to kiss her, hadn’t meant to make her cry, and she very well hadn’t meant to leave without saying goodbye, but there was something about Amelie’s eyes that saw, something about her voice that spoke, and that stillness—from the piano, surely—still lingered in her bones. What was this feeling?

The train pulled up to the platform and passengers alighted, queued, pushed.

Bella wouldn’t notice the purple smudge in the corner of her mouth, like the residue of a blueberry smoothie, until she’d found her seat and startled reflection in the train window. She’d open the orange paperback and read the first page three times; but it would prove hopeless, for something else was on her mind.