delay

Three busy days in the office culminate with a late-afternoon train trip to Castlemaine for my last training session with a group of local mentors.

A large young man sits opposite. His belly balloons from a tee-shirt that cannot span it as he wrangles a bag into the overhead rack. His neck, a deviationless extension of his torso, reddens under the strain. He wheezes audibly from standing on tip-toe, gulps the life out of a ventilator, and sags into his seat and half the seat beside him.

The 4:15 pulls out on time. I’m reading The silence of the lambs. Many regard it as a masterpiece and I want to find out why. Improbable crimes of ultimate horror are not my cuppa; it is brilliant for what it is, for the genre, and I enjoy the tension.

As we pull into Kyneton the driver asks the conductor over the PA to proceed to the rear car when the train reaches the station. A few minutes later she announces a delay due to medical emergency.

Suddenly Fat Boy is out of his seat and straining his ear at the driver’s door. He tells me someone’s had a heart attack. Now he’s on his mobile, barking orders to his interlocutor to get on the scanner and listen to the ambulance frequency. Immediately he reports that they’ve requested a MICA, so we’ll be late home.

I know my slender time allowance to get from station to elderly citizens hall is blown. I have no contact number for Elaine, the program co-ordinator. I sit philosophically at the front of the lead car, picture mentors leaving the hall, making their disgruntled ways home.

Ten minutes later I’m scrabbling in my bag for my bleating phone. It’s Elaine. I give her the news that I’m blighted by train miscarriages. She says she’ll pick me up at the station.

The mentors are waiting patiently when I arrive, about 25 minutes late. Our topics tonight are mental health, drugs and alcohol, and the strengths approach. Despite my tiredness and suppressed stress about being unpunctual, I facilitate the group nicely. They’re smart as, full of bonhomie and good questions.

A woman visits me at the interval and says I should shut Ray up. I sympathise, tell her I’m patient. He is a pain. At the end of the night he drives me back to the station, tells me we’re kindred spirits and offers me his telephone number. I decline, but tell him I’d accept it if he were a woman.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” he says.

“I know you didn’t, Ray.” I close the door and make for the deserted platform, a citrus tart in my pocket to devour on the long trip into the night along with The silence of the lambs.

I finish the book at Mitcham. Three stations to go.

Rock on.