Page 13 of Second Chances at the Board Game Café

They were sitting on the sofa, eating the pizza with their fingers, a kitchen roll in between them. As the family on the screen moved to Yorkshire, she wondered when would be the right moment to mention their own move to Hebbleswick. Maybe at the end, she decided.

As a child, she’d been fascinated by the scenes of Bobbie with Phyllis and Peter, her sister and brother, skipping round the fields and having all kinds of adventures. She’d wished she had siblings, and wanted to be Bobbie, calm, sensible Bobbie who adored her daddy. Now she was struck by the strength and resilience of Mrs Waterbury. How calmly she let the servants go after her husband’s arrest, uprooting the whole family to Three Chimneys, a much humbler house in the little Yorkshire village of Oakworth. She refused help, berating the children when they ask for assistance from a stranger, when she was sick in bed.

Good for you, Taylor thought. An independent spirit. A woman after her own heart.

Once Bobbie, Phyllis and Peter started watching the steam trains on the railway line close to Three Chimneys, Max became glued to the screen. She’d never noticed it before, but the children in the film did seem to spend rather a lot of time walking along the railway lines.

‘Never go on the tracks,’ Taylor said.

‘Yeah, I know,’ said Max, a half-eaten slice of pizza halfway to his mouth. He turned and gave her a tomato-y smile. ‘I like this film, Mum.’

She handed him a piece of kitchen roll for his sticky fingers and wondered if he got the same warm, fuzzy glow that she got watching the siblings playing together. Or was he only interested in those trains?

‘And don’t talk to strangers,’ she said, as the children on the screen held up signs to communicate with the man on the train.

‘Yeah, yeah.’

Taylor put their empty plates on the coffee table. Max snuggled up to her, something he rarely did, and they watched as a landslide covered the railway tracks with rocks.

‘The train’s going to hit it,’ he said, ‘unless they do something.’

Bobbie, Phyllis and Peter had realised the same thing. They raced along the railway tracks, and the girls removed their red petticoats to signal danger to the driver.

‘Good job they had red underthingies on,’ said Max, as the train ground to a halt.

‘Petticoats,’ said Taylor.

A little while later, she dabbed her eyes with a piece of kitchen roll as she watched, for the millionth time, the train pulling into the station at Oakworth. Bobbie was standing motionless, staring into the clouds of steam that shrouded the platform. As it cleared, the solitary figure of her father was revealed.

Bobbie called out to her daddy and began to race across the platform and into his arms, and Taylor blew her nose, remembering how her own mother always had tears in her eyes at this point in the film too.

‘Max,’ she said, as the credits of the film began to roll. ‘You know how in the film, Bobbie, Phyllis and Peter move to live in a different house.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, we’re going to do that too. We’re moving somewhere bigger so I can have my own bedroom and you’ll have a bigger bedroom with more space for your train set.’

Max sat up and looked at her. ‘Is it next to a railway line like in the film?’

7

Harry was standing in the board game café and he was flummoxed.

Up until this point, it had been an ordinary Thursday. He’d turned off the alarm at 7.30 a.m., gone downstairs in his grey towelling robe and put the kettle on, before popping exactly fifteen grams of decaffeinated Colombian coffee beans, medium roast, into the grinder. He’d left his cafetiere to brew for five minutes, whilst he showered and dressed.

He’d worn his usual Thursday attire of a muted yellow shirt with a grey tie and one of his grey suits. He always dressed for work, even on the days when he was working from home. On Mondays, he wore a grey shirt, a cream one on Tuesdays, light blue on Wednesdays, and white on a Friday. He’d read somewhere that Einstein donned the same outfit every day so as not to waste brainpower on choosing what to wear. Harry liked his thinking; however, his own dressing habits had less to do with a need to conserve brainpower and more with his liking of routine. He had two identical shirts for every day of the week, lest one should wear out.

He’d eaten his usual breakfast of muesli with extra hazelnuts and a generous splash of semi-skimmed. He’d manoeuvred his own wheelie bin and that of his elderly neighbour onto the pavement, before pouring himself another cup of coffee. In his home office, he placed his mug carefully on his Flying Scotsman coaster and turned on his computer. He enjoyed being an accountant, but viewed spreadsheets and specialist software as a necessary evil. He sometimes pictured himself keeping accounts in an old-fashioned ledger, with a quill pen perhaps, and only a slide rule for assistance, like a scene from a Dickens adaptation. In fact, he sometimes wished he’d been born in an earlier century, in an era of steam trains and old-fashioned courtesy and loose-leaf tea in teapots with proper cups and saucers. It was, he acknowledged, an idealised view of the past, probably gleaned from the films his grandma used to enjoy like My Fair Lady, The Railway Children and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Although some modern inventions were extremely convenient. Microwaves, for example. Cooking for one never seemed worth the bother, so that Thursday, Harry had eaten his usual lamb hotpot ready meal whilst watching Michael Portillo, before setting off for the board game café.

An ordinary Thursday thus far.

But when he stepped inside, he saw that the Trainspotters’ usual table was empty. He’d known that Simon and Tom wouldn’t be here, but where was Martin?

‘Harry, come and join us.’

It was Ludek. He was sitting with a man Harry had never seen before, unpacking a game box.