One push and it was sorted.
Caro slid into one of the empty seats, put her leather satchel on the one beside her. She’d move it if anyone else needed the place. Couldn’t stand those selfish gits that blocked off a seat with their bag so they didn’t have to share a space with a stranger. Her new acquaintance, still standing in the aisle, removed his hat and scarf and gestured to the two empty seats facing her across a Formica table.
‘Do you mind?’ he asked.
‘Not at all,’ she replied, smiling.
He lowered his aching frame into the seat, placed his possessions – hat, scarf, paper – on the table between them. Normally, Caro would take out her Kindle, lose herself in a book, hope that no one would strike up a conversation, but not today. Today, she’d be grateful for any distraction, especially if it was the company of an elderly gent with a kind face.
‘Going to Glasgow?’ the old man asked, with a Doric lilt in a voice that was stronger than his physical appearance would suggest.
‘Yes. And you?’
‘Getting off at Perth. Going to stay with my daughter and grandchildren for Christmas.’ His pride was evident.
‘That’ll be lovely,’ Caro said, watching as he picked up his newspaper and laid it out in front of him. Going to see his daughter. A few years ago, she’d have automatically pictured her dad, Jack, there, a couple of decades down the line, saying the same thing to a stranger on a train. In fact, maybe even this train. It was the one he’d travelled on every month, for as long as she could remember, when his work took him down to Glasgow. It was all she’d ever been used to. When she was a kid, she always knew when he was about to leave. Her mum, Yvonne, would be just a little quieter, a little sadder, because he was leaving the next day. Off he’d go, all hugs and kisses, and Caro would look forward to him returning because Mum’s face would light up again and she’d be truly happy, singing along to the radio in the mornings, brushing her hair and spraying perfume just before he was due to walk in the door.
It was all because Dad had a Very Important Job. A management consultant in the oil business. Caro had never been entirely sure what that meant. She’d asked a few times over the years and he’d given her spiels about development strategies, man-management, personnel restructures, performance optimisation. As far as Caro could grasp, what it all boiled down to was that his company worked with oil corporations to make the divisions within each organisation work as efficiently as possible. If they needed to expand, he helped them structure the new department, hire the best people and implement training programmes. If they needed to cut costs, he showed them where. He travelled a lot, sometimes faraway places like China, Abu Dhabi and Oman, but usually just down to the company office in Glasgow. He was a cavalier guy in a cavalier industry.
‘Got to go where the money is,’ he’d tell her, before the door banged behind him. In hindsight, Caro wondered wherethe money had gone. She and her mother had never seen much of it. There had never been any lavish holidays. No designer clothes. Yvonne didn’t have a fancy car. They’d always lived in the house that her mum had been left by her parents, a perfectly nice semi-detached granite home on a perfectly nice street, that had been worth very little when Gran and Granda had bought it in the fifties, but had a couple more zeros added to the value by the arrival of the oil industry.
When Gran and Granda passed away, their house had been left jointly to Mum and her sister, Auntie Pearl. When Auntie Pearl married and moved out, they’d worked out a rental agreement and Mum had stayed behind, living on her own until she’d met Jack Anderson at college, got pregnant, married him and he’d carried her over the threshold into the home she’d already lived in for twenty-two years.
Not that Caro could ever remember him being there full-time. He probably was for the first few years, but he’d capitalised on the oil boom, and ever since he’d been gone more than he’d been home. Some months he’d be home for a few days, sometimes two weeks, rarely more. She’d never felt neglected or that she was losing out in any way. It was what she’d always been used to and, as Mum always said, just one of the sacrifices they had to make because Dad had a Very Important Job.
The payback for the sacrifice? A couple of years ago, just as her parents should have been starting to contemplate cruises and bucket lists for their early retirement, Jack Anderson had walked out of the door to go to his Very Important Job and he’d never come back.
Caro felt the familiar inner rage start to build now and she squashed it back down. He’d left them a week before her thirtieth birthday, so she was old enough to process herparents splitting up by some mutual consent. Yet she couldn’t. Because it wasn’t mutual and he’d bolted when her mother had needed him most, walked out to a new life and he hadn’t looked back.
For a long time, Caro didn’t understand why.
Only now did she realise that on the Importance scale, the job was up there with his Very Important Secret.
Maybe.
She still didn’t believe it to be true.
She must be wrong.
Mistaken identity.
Surely?
Yet here she was, sitting on a train on a cold December morning on her way to Glasgow.
She pulled her iPad out of her satchel, logged on to the train’s Wi-Fi, then flicked on to the Facebook page she’d looked at a thousand times in the last few weeks.
It was one of those coincidental flukes that had taken her to it in the first place.
It had been late at night and she’d been sitting beside her mum’s bed in the hospital, feeling like she’d been battered by the storm that was raging outside. She shouldn’t even have been there because it was outside of visiting time, but the nurses overlooked her presence because her mum was in a private room at the end of a corridor and they made exceptions when it came to patients at this stage in their lives. Yvonne’s eyes were closed, her body still, but Caro wanted to stay, whether Yvonne knew she was there or not. It was the first night of the October school holiday, so she didn’t have to get up early to be the responsible Miss Anderson for a class of eleven-year-olds the next morning.
Instead, she could just be Caro, sitting there passing the time catching up with Facebook. She only dipped in and out of it every few weeks, caught up with a Carpool Karaoke, the launch of a new book, or maybe a movie trailer.
A promotional link appeared for the new Simple Minds tour, twenty dates around the country, yet another band riding the nostalgic affection for the eighties and nineties.
Before she could stop it, the opening bars of Jim Kerr’s voice belting out ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’ flooded her head and she felt the bite of a sharp-toothed memory. Her dad had been a big fan, their music playing alongside Oasis and Blur on his CD player when he was home or in the car on the few mornings he was around to take her to school, and that had been his favourite song.
The irony in the title didn’t escape her. ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’. If only she could forget he ever existed, then she wouldn’t have to deal with the soul-sucking fury that he wasn’t there.
