Travelling Alone

The train was busy but it was Father’s Day. It was full of people returning home to visit their fathers, showing their respect on this particular Sunday. I assumed they were because that was what I was doing, but it was only out of a sense of duty. I felt no love for my own father and was only returning this Sunday to avoid my mother’s constant complaining. She saw it as her right to demand that I’d turn up to all her family events, and if I didn’t I would feel her wrath for days afterwards. I’m an adult but I still fear her verbal attacks and belittling, it’s much easier to give in to her. Today she’d planned a big Sunday dinner for Father’s Day, God knows why.

I was bored and restless; to calm my mind I started to watch the other passengers.

Sat on the bench seat, by one of the carriage’s doors, was a couple and their young son, a boy around five or six. He was wearing a Superman tee-shirt and bouncing with energy, running around the carriage pretending to be Superman himself. As he did this he’d shout at his parents to look at him.

Finally, his mother reacted, putting aside her magazine, she shouted back at him:

“Rory, shut up! You’re getting on my bloody nerves!”

“Leave him alone!” The boy’s father snapped back at her.

“What?” the woman turned to her partner. “You don’t have to put up with his goings on every day.”

“Either do you,” the man answered. “Your mum looks after him most of the time. Let him play, he’s only a kid once.”

“Who rattled your cage?” The woman then returned her attention to her son, “Rory...”

“Leave him alone!” The man growled at her, silencing her protest.

I looked away, the envy inside of me was almost painful.

My mother had treated me like that, when I had been a young boy, shouting at me for any infraction of her many rules, she believed that I should be silent and not wanting her attention. But my father had meekly agreed with her, no matter how much I protested, which I soon learnt not to. He’d never stood up for me the way Rory’s father did; he’d never shown me the love that Rory’s father’s simple act of protection had shown.

I bit down on my own resentment and stared out of the carriage’s window.

I’m thirty-nine with a life of my own, yet I still can’t stop smarting over the events of my unhappy childhood. I was resentful of that little boy, and all I knew of him was his name.

I looked over again and saw Rory now sitting on his father’s lap. It felt so unfair to watch. Then the boy’s face broke into a broad smile.

Well, Rory won’t be bitter when he is thirty-nine.