Jerry has ten minutes to decide his future. This is a journey to Platform Two and beyond.
Jerry has ten minutes to decide his future. Locked into a futile cycle of work and family, Jerry suddenly realises one bright May afternoon that there may be an escape route to paradise. This is a journey to Platform Two and beyond.
Jerry finished work at 16:30, started walking to the station at 16:35, arriving there at 16:50 precisely. This gave Jerry ten agonising minutes to wait before his train departed home: no benches to sit on; nothing to listen to; not even any 24-hour clocks to stare at.
Jerry liked twenty-four hour clocks, especially the large industrial-looking ones where the time was displayed by the numbers flipping down with a satisfying snap. Jerry had had a lot of clocks as a child. Time was the one thing he could definitely rely on. He would phone up the speaking clock almost daily to check that all his clocks were bang on GMT, so that on the hour they would all sing out in harmony. Only in the early eighties had he got into the newfangled digital display types, which, while lacking the character of his wind-up ones, certainly cut his parents’ phone bill down with their almost flawless time keeping.
He had, of course, often thought of leaving work a little bit later to avoid the wait. What prevented him was the fear of the unpredictable happening, which might cause him to miss his train. Because his wife left for her night-shift job at 17:45, it meant he
had to catch the 17:00 to be back in time to look after his two sons. Missing his train would mean his wife would be late for work, his sons would go hungry, and his reputation as a reliable husband would be in tatters.
Over the years Jerry had resigned himself to the fact that it was just one of those things you had to face up to. The inevitable happened, like Christmas. He saw it like this: if I get to the station early, I have to wait, and get annoyed. If I cut it too fine, I get jittery. Jerry preferred to be annoyed rather than jittery.
He used to pace up and down the platform in an attempt to extinguish those tiresome minutes. But as the years rolled by he became quite content to lean against the fire hose outside the buffet bar and accept that the disciplined march of time was unlikely to suddenly change for a man who worked in insurance.
However, on one bright Wednesday morning in May, with his patience with Platform Number Two at breaking point, something happened.
As Jerry passed an armless harmonica player in the High Street, the question: ‘what if I don’t get on the train?’ ripped into his mind just as a mangled screech from the mouth organ split the peace of the spring evening. He usually tossed the crippled busker a coin, but not today. Jerry knew that the real question he was asking himself was: 'can I cope with never seeing my family again?'
On a normal day the answer would be a firm 'no'. However, today that solid 'no' had transformed itself into a possible 'yes'. Jerry then did something very rare: he stopped. Jerry never stopped; he was always far too worried about missing his train to stop and ponder the intricacies of his existence. Jerry did not know what life would be like without his family: he had never tried it.
‘Tough situations need tough decisions’, his supervisor had said at work during a dreary office meeting a few weeks earlier.
He looked at the clock inside a branch of Boots, a classical circular twelve hour one. The second hand of the clock hit the vertical. It was precisely seven minutes to five. He had seven minutes left before going back to his sons, house, and wife. He had a decision to make.
Jerry had gone to study Chemistry at Nottingham in the hope of becoming an eminent research scientist. A year later, on discovering his girlfriend, now wife, was pregnant, he left his university and started working for an insurance company to support his young family.
Sometimes, as he sat at his desk dealing with insurance claims, he imagined them instead to be complex chemical equations leading to a miraculous scientific breakthrough. Only the phone calls from his wife, informing him that the boiler needed replacing or that the credit card company was sending in the SAS to reclaim their belongings, dragged him back to his mundane reality.
All he seemed to do was work, feed his sons, change nappies and then work again; even sleeping had become an optional extra.
It was nothing like it said in the books, in which the gentle patter of feet awakens you from your sleep. Their tiny bodies cunningly slide in beside you. You listen to their dreamy murmurings about trips to the seaside echo under the covers while you drift off once again into blissful slumber.
Jerry, since he had had children, thought it should say: you are woken up at five every morning by boisterous louts smashing up your room, still wired from last night’s ‘dinner’ of dog burgers and processed chicken foetuses. You will never get time to go down to the seaside because you are too busy working to pay off all the astronomical debts you accrued in the days of shoving coke up your nose and telling everybody how egotistical it is to have kids.
He remembered nothing, he did nothing, he was nothing. The inescapable irony of what his life had become suddenly bore down on him.
16:55. Jerry had five minutes to turn things around.
‘Excuse me, which way is the station?’ a passing tourist asked Jerry rather curtly. Perhaps he had mistaken Jerry for one of those automated tourist information bollards, where the visitor presses a button and speaks to somebody in Bombay for directions. Jerry duly gave them to the man, who hesitantly thanked him and went on his way.
The thought of the station terrified Jerry, which was why he had sent the hapless tourist in the direction of the city ice rink: he wanted to be alone.
That blank lifeless platform had become a buffer zone between one part of his life, his job, and the other part, his family. Jerry’s life, his dreams, his aspirations had been condensed into a ten minute pause on a railway platform. It had become his nemesis: changing each evening from a benign strip of tarmac into a malign souvenir of wasted opportunity.
A platform peppered with gobulets of chewing gum had become his life.
Jerry, the new tourist information booth, started walking. He was walking fast now, really fast. A bystander might argue that Jerry was walking with purpose. He walked straight into the station, took the stairs to an unfamiliar platform, sat firmly on the floor, and waited.
He could feel it. He was terrified that it might drag him back if he gave it the attention it desired. He quickly moved to hide behind a timetable placard to protect himself from being plucked up and thrown back to Platform Two.
A train was coming. He could not see it yet, but he could hear the familiar buzz of the tracks screaming out for release as the weight of the locomotive angered the metal. Jerry felt the same way.
The train was now visible; the destination on the front was blank. How apt. Jerry pushed the button to open the doors, stepped inside, sat down and waited. Ssshhhh. The hydraulically operated doors shut, signalling the end to Jerry’s involvement with his current existence.
As the train slid out of the station, he looked across to Platform Two and saw his old self. He was standing and waiting; waiting for the train to take him back to his adoring family.
