A seasonal short story by Tom Tansey

The platform was deserted. The rush hour had taken the city-bound commuters to their desk jobs and shop jobs an hour ago, but I was going in the other direction anyway; west, to Glasgow and to a date with a woman. You might think 11am is an odd time of day to meet a woman, but this was a different sort of date, indeed a different sort of blind date. If Christmas Eve seems to be an even odder day for a blind date, so too, it felt for me. I felt strange and confused as every half-thought of this woman was tangled with expectation, excitement and fear.

The arrival of the mid-morning sun above the skeletal trees to the east did nothing to alleviate the biting cold, however it breached the cloudy Edinburgh skies briefly and cast long, weak shadows across the train station. In truth, it was barely a station, more of a glorified bus stop. There was nowhere to buy a ticket, a newspaper, a hot drink, or even a cold drink for that matter and a hot drink would’ve been welcome that morning, because in spite of a woolly hat, a good parka and a healthy supply of undergarments, I was freezing. Kirknewton Station had an abandoned, frigid, desolate air and that suited my mood.

You see it was not only the cold that gripped me. Christmas gripped me. A feeling of nausea, caused, admittedly, in part by the anxiety I felt about my date, mixed with the unhappiness I always felt at this time of year, as the ghosts of miserable, angry, abusive and hurtful yuletides haunted me, as they had since as a teenager, when I first realised that the conditions in which I lived then were not normal, not like those of my pals and that Christmas simply magnified those abnormalities.

Now, every time I saw a tacky Argos ad on the telly, or heard any of those woeful Christmas number 1’s from the early seventies, or encountered the drunken remnants of an office party staggering around the city centre, I felt a blow to the solar plexus. The fact that I came across these seasonal phenomena in early November just made the pain duller. You see I hated Christmas.

The train arrived and I got on and I swear it was as chilly on the train as it was on the platform. It was old, cold and like the platform, neglected. It too suited my mood. It was by no means an inter-city express, as I was to find out, as it stopped at every West Lothian and Lanarkshire village en-route to Glasgow, despite the fact the no-one got on or off the thing until we were on the outskirts of our destination. The villages of Breich, Shotts and Carfin lay ahead. Breich! Good grief, it even sounded like that great old Scots word, dreich, which again fitted perfectly with how I felt - bleak and dismal, cheerless and dreary.

But I had my date ahead and I had hopes that it would go okay. We had been writing to each other for a year or so and it seemed we had some things in common. We both loved music, football (or more specifically, Celtic FC) and there was a shared, dark humour that stemmed from our mutually sad, but very different histories. We hadn’t shared photos yet, so the date would be truly blind.

As the train dragged itself slowly through the dull countryside that exists between Scotland’s two main cities, so a frost had settled on the ground, as the half hearted midwinter sun gave up altogether. Actually, the brighter frostiness of the Lanarkshire countryside was a welcome relief from the cold, steely grey of its Lothian counterpart and I felt my mood shift, just a bit.

As we got closer to Glasgow and my blind date, the train became busier, as a combination of teenagers and pensioners headed into Glasgow for some last minute Christmas shopping, or I guess just to hang out. It’s a phrase, we don’t normally associate with older people, ‘hanging out’, but that’s what older folk did in pubs and teashops, just like young people. The guard entered at the far end of the carriage wearing a Santa hat, yet another Christmas accessory that made me cringe. However, as he sold and checked tickets, he wished all his customers a Merry Christmas and it occurred to me that he didn’t need to be so jolly, that his sale of tickets was not dependant on this gesture and that he was simply wishing good times on these strangers. He didn’t discriminate between the ‘auld yins’ and the ‘young yins’ with his good cheer either. Good for him, I thought, as one of the kids tried unsuccessfully to knick the hat. It also felt like perhaps his colleague, the driver, had turned on the heating and the rest of the journey seemed to pass quickly as even the names of the towns, Cambuslang and Rutherglen, took on a warmer, more romantic tone.

We arrived into Glasgow Central Station, where I was due to meet my date on time, but with no photo, or even an agreed meeting place, it dawned on me that this meeting could prove tricky. Glasgow Central is a huge Victorian building constructed by the same man who built the Titanic, but at that moment, his station looked to me like an ocean of women, who might or might not have been my date and it was me that was sinking. I was distracted briefly by some carol singers, children from St. Joseph’s School (or so their banner said), a coincidence, given that Joseph is my name. They seemed to be around 10 or 11 years old and looked to be enjoying themselves as they sang In the Bleak Midwinter. I thought of the lyrics drummed into me at school some 30 years before:

In the bleak midwinter
Frost wind made moan
Earth stood hard as iron
Water like a stone

Bit glum, yet rather appropriate, I thought. Nevertheless, the kids were enjoying themselves and gathering a tidy sum for a local homeless project. “Good for you guys”, I called as I chucked a couple of quid in the bucket. I turned to see the guard, still wearing his Santa hat and also enjoying the singing. He wished me a Happy Christmas yet again and wandered off. My mood had lifted yet another notch.

But I was still lost. I didn’t really know which way to turn nor to whom. This whole thing had been a bit silly - no photos, on Christmas Eve, at Glasgow Central. What was I thinking? There were any number of women who might fit her profile and whilst I’d caught the eye of a few, there didn’t seem to be any connection. The cold was beginning to bite again and the PA system started playing I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day. I felt panic and wanted to get on the next train east.

Suddenly the music stopped. “Would passenger Joseph Gallagher, recently arrived from Edinburgh, please make his way to the passenger information desk?” Why hadn’t I thought of that? Feeling the panic subside, only to be replaced by a buzz of excitement, I made my way to the information desk and there she stood. She looked younger than I had expected, impeccably dressed, handsome yet slight. She looked me straight in the eye and we walked towards each other. We embraced, and she whispered in my ear, ‘Merry Christmas, son’. It was the first time that we had touched in over 40 years, a time I wasn’t able to remember, a time when I was just a baby. But the hug felt good and strong, and I thought perhaps it would be a good Christmas this year. For the first time that day, perhaps in a long time, I felt warm.
© Tom Tansey 2009