Remembrance Day Part 2

He alighted from the train and walked with a sense of growing excitement along the platform, his bag hanging off one shoulder, amongst the suited business commuters, to the ticket barrier. It felt exciting underneath the huge auditorium-like roof of the 19th Century station because no one knew what he was doing, including himself really and there was a huge release because of this. All these others were heading most likely to offices that they headed to every weekday, pulled by a mechanical force. No doubt more interesting and certainly better paid workplaces than his own, that would be undeniable, but nonetheless, they were on the daily grind, the working week. And himself? Well he felt like he was falling down a rabbit hole as he slipped his travelcard into the machine, the barrier opened and he stepped onto the escalator that led to the underground.

He was falling and it was truly a delight.

The e-mail he'd sent the week before, he couldn't quite believe had arrived at its destination and been replied to. He couldn't quite believe he'd written the thing in the first place and pressed send. You could certainly look at it as a pretty tragic thing really, he thought as the underground train rattled on its rails along the line for the few stops that would lead him to Bridge and his meeting point. Why tragic? Because he was certainly lying himself into something he clearly was not, but longed to be. And the fact he longed to be something that had clearly eluded him and was, if he was being honest with himself, out of any kind of decent reach now, was pathetic in many ways. But there was another part of himself who made a statement to the contrary. Another part of him felt that this was the most important thing he'd done in a long time and it was a turning point of sorts. Perhaps not a sign of enormous and earth shattering change, he was not deluded in that way. But a tunring point in some sense, a reminder that the world was bigger and more interesting than the industrial unit he sat in on the edge of a small town, cataloguing books.

He checked his phone but he had received no text, so presumed the meeting point and time were the same and it was still on.

He arrived outside the popular chain coffee outlet at Bridge and waited. He felt nervous now as if he was doing something wrong. As he stared at the people pulling suitcases on small wheels, rabbiting into phones, staring up at the flickering train times or slumped on metal seats slurping hot drinks. He felt like an agent making a secret rendezvous or an insurgent, terrorist or freedom fighter, whichever one happened to apply,  readying himself to plant a bomb. He looked at the innocent bystanders and imagined what it would be like to do such a thing. He was totally lost in thought, staring a blind man being led across the station by his guide dog, when he saw the man he had arranged to meet rising up from the escalator like lazarus from the dead, his long scraggly hair blowing in that strange underground breeze that seems like artificial wind used on film sets.

As the man headed towards the coffee stand, he readied himself for the second performance of the day and felt not nervousness but a growing sense of determination that who he was pretending to be, was actually far more a convincing person than who he actually was, and far from making him feel depressed, he felt exhilerated by the lie that we was about to tell true.