Waiting for the rain

They are threatening me with rain this weekend. I am sitting out in the last of the daylight on the platform, in my bathrobe and slippers, safe in the knowledge that no-one overlooks me, and that someone on a train going past at over sixty miles per hour is not going to see enough to complain about. I am cooling off after my evening bath. Either side of me lies the result of my labours this past week; nothing. No clutter, no junk, no obstacle course or invitation to play hopscotch from one bare space to the next. I now have twenty-four paces of uncluttered stones to walk along. All it needs is some rain to wash it clean.

They have been threatening me with rain since the start of this week, when I looked at the five-day forecast and saw three days of sun, one of mixed weather, and a very black-looking picture for Friday. As Friday approached the black picture shuffled away, wandering across the midnight boundary into Saturday. Friday dawned bright and sunny, I unfolded my solar panels and pointed them upwards.

The clouds rolled over after lunch and played briefly at looking dark and menacing, but the sun still shone through them, and I decided to take a bike ride anyway. The threatened rain stayed back for the hour that I was out. I came back and put the bike away in the small bicycle shed I have built for it at one end of the platform. A railway station should always have a bike shed, it isn't complete without it. I sat inside at the computer and fiddled for half an hour. I knew I should be getting down to work, transcribing more of the thirty hours of so of tapes I recorded all those years ago, but outside, the clear light of the evening beckoned.

I put on my socks and track shoes, picked up the waist bag with the poncho and water bottles, took the baby telescopic fishing rod I had bought in Japan years ago and never used, and went out for a walk to see what fish there might be in the River Sem. I knew there would be none, I just knew it, but still I went to try my luck.

River is too grand a term for the twisting little channel that winds between the trees, so narrow that you can often leap from one bank to the other, so shallow in some spots that you can walk across it on the tops of the stones, so quiet that the wind in the treetops often drowns out the ripple of the water. I dangled the spinner through dark pools under trees, towed it up placid little runs of no more than eight feet, and jigged it in and out of the deep patches where the sharp curves had scoured into the steep banks to leave earth cliffs all of six feet high. Nothing tugged at the hook except for weeds and twigs. But I was expecting nothing, I just enjoyed the activity. It started to rain very lightly on me when I was at the far end of my walk, but by the time I had put on my poncho and got back inside the friendly trees it had stopped.







'He called me the Wild Rose, though my name was Eliza Day...'

The wild roses are just coming out. I don't know if they're early or late. I feel like Sam Pearce saying that, the ghostly soldier who haunted the platform of the derelict station Tamasin Bridge, in the Sapphire and Steel series I watched so avidly ten years ago. I still don't know if I saw it through to the end. The last episode I recorded finished with the station platform full of queuing spirits. I set the video to record it at the same time next week, and found something else on instead. It might have been a cliff-hanger ending, or the satellite channel may have got bored showing it and decided to show something completely different. Analogue satellite was a bit like that. I don't mind. I have never seen the end of my favourite film either. I recorded Andre Tarkov's Stalker years ago, not realising that with the adverts it would run to more than three hours total time, and I had only put a three-hour tape in the recorder. My copy finishes where the protagonist has returned from the zone and is walking along past the yellow polluted pools with his daughter, Monkey, riding piggy-back on his shoulders. What happened next? I may never know.

But Sam Pearce would have known the order in which the flowers would appear, and he would have known if they were ahead of their time or behind it. I still want to know how the series should have ended. Would the spirits of the untimely-killed have negotiated terms to allow them back amongst the living? I would offer them some time back at my station if they wished, now that the platform is clear again. Twenty-four paces, that's just over seventy feet. A man can get fit pacing that distance several times an hour. But they are threatening me with rain this weekend, and so I am going to have to stare out of the window at my twenty-four paces of clean wet stones.