The Glove (6)

The Glove 

The doors once again hissed tightly shut, this time closing behind him. No place to sit. He put his bags on the floor by his feet. Leaned on the glass panel and looked around him. He held the glove uselessly in his left hand and just for a few stops, shut his eyes, and trusted to the muffled rocking motion, the regular stops and the warm, dry welcoming air blasting from the heaters.

He awoke with a  start. Feeling a hand pressing lightly against his arm, and a  deep, whispering voice, that unequivocally stated:-

‘Good morning, you have my other glove I see…’

He looked into her eyes for the first time. Blue, tearful, and sparkling, with a sense that he was looking at the ever changing skies, above an incoming tide.

For the first time, the words, his thoughts, his very sense of himself, simply fell away, this as as he looked into her gently receding blue. As if he had been struggling against drowning his whole life only now to have found someone, a stranger, offering him earth to stand on and a blue sky to trust.

She said again,

‘It’s mine, I think I have the other to match…’ and she touched his arm again.

His legs suddenly felt weak. His heart rate rippled and he heard the recorded voice announce his stop as the team  trundled to a halt.

The doors hissed open. His bags at his feet seemed to belong to someone else. 

She touched his arm again, ‘Are you okay? I’d like my glove back, please, see, they match. The next stop, is mine.’

‘This is mine, ‘he stumbled, ‘ I…here, sorry, I found it at my station. On the bench.I….’ 

The words struggled to come to fruition, coherency: his breathing was constricted. He felt light headed, as he lost his balance and fell against her.

The doors closed with their predictable and shuddering thud. The tram whined and rocked, speeding up in lights and reflections to the next stop.

Briefly, she steadied him. The next stop was her own. He released the glove as she took it from his hand.

‘The next is mine…how will you?’ 

She looked past his eyes to the display behind his head.

‘I will walk back, the press office is not so far, you? Where do you work?’

Around them both, the insulated lives of others hurried on screens, through ear phones, the occasional book, and blank stares at the passing streets and shops, as they sped past the standing traffic queues of cars, busses, and lorries, coughing and blinking impatiently.

‘Just here,’ she whispered quietly, ‘behind the church, across from the city gardens, the practice.’

‘Yes,’ he said, bravely taking her description for an invite,’I can walk back from there.’

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