Just the Ticket                                        Bob Lockett

There they sat, staring up at me from the floor, accusingly, daring me to deny what had been my intentions. Two tickets, single, one from home to London, the other, single, return from London to home.
Return.
Home.
After the weekend.
Was it a mistake? Was I poised on the biggest error I had ever made? Or was I on the brink of adventure?
I remember when life was simple.
I suppose I’m just a normal Joe Egg, not that Joe was that normal. Terrible cliché, bloody good film. Harrowing. I’m married, just, no kids, no mortgage, no loans, no problems, no life.
Probably a bit harsh.
That’s why the tickets were there: in the hope that they may kick-start my life. Boot me up the arse of tedium. Boot me up Scotty. Boot me up. Bloody computer doesn’t work either. Something to do with the registry. The coincidences pile up like…
If only the damn thing had packed up before I got the email from Friends Reunited. If only, then maybe I wouldn’t have been in that terrible situation where I was absolutely terrified of taking the next step and equally terrified of not doing.
Alice, my wife, is bored of me. I’m not complaining that I’m misunderstood or that she’s changed from the woman that I married, or that I’ve changed from the bloke that she married, or, in fact, that anything has changed. I’m not complaining at all, just stating a fact. She’s bored with me and, if I’m being honest, I’m bored with her. There are no real problems (probably, that is the only problem that we have), no major disasters along the way. She’d not been unfaithful (I guess) and nor had I…
Yet.
Those tickets staring up at me.
I remember logging on to Outlook, I was expecting confirmation that two hundred glow sticks I’d bought on ebay had actually been posted to me. I was going to see Faithless next month with a group of ten others – another story. I logged on and there it was: a friend is trying to contact you via Friends Reunited. A friend! I’d forgotten that I used to have friends. Such an odd-sounding word to my ears. Almost like something from childhood.
I clicked on the link, went to the site, and read the name. My God! That name! Twenty years ago? Thirty? Yes, thirty. I tumbled back through the years, giddy at the rate of acceleration, or should that be deceleration? The seventies. My God!
I had to pay to join again before I could read the message. A simple message:
“Saw your name on the site. Wondered how you were. Been abroad for nearly twenty years. Am in London the weekend of December 18th. Will be in Covent Garden at 11.00 Saturday morning after a meeting with my agent. Just a thought. Would love to meet.”
Would love to meet?
My God!
I never gave it a thought. I bought the rail tickets there and then, on line, six months ago, put them in the bureau and then put a reminder on my mobile phone for Friday 17th December, noon.
It’s two in the afternoon now; I’m sitting on platform five, and I’ve been thinking.
Her name was Alice too, same as my wife. For years, Alice, my wife Alice, always referred to my old girlfriend as “the other Alice”. Clearly, there was some degree of jealousy at work. Not that I ever held my old girlfriend up as some kind of standard that all future relationships would be measured against. That would be stupid, and insensitive. But in any case, even if I’d typed up all my former girlfriend’s virtues and stuck them on the fridge, my wife would not have anything to feel threatened by. We were young, very young, and understood virtually nothing.
I met her in a pub. A pub that tolerated under-age drinking. This was the mid seventies so that fact hardly narrows the field regarding exactly which pub. We were both in a crowd, kids from the Grammar school, the girl’s Grammar, the local college, and me. I generally kept it quiet that I came from one of the town’s least respected comprehensives. A school that taught me how to lie, cheat, steal, and run away – comprehensively. It was in a rough area, but I don’t really think that’s an excuse. I was desperately unhappy and lonely (though I wasn’t really aware of that then) so I found somewhere that I could meet people that I had something in common with. I guess the people who populated the Red Lion were old hippies for the most part. They certainly were not skinheads, as most of my school were. I spent every night in the Red Lion for a couple of years. We were tolerated although hardly anyone spent any money. We just sat and talked and listened to one of the finest jukeboxes in the north of England.
One particular night there was this girl there, unbelievably pretty, unbelievably clever, wearing cheesecloth and jeans and reeking of patchouli oil. I tried to join in with the conversation around me but couldn’t, I was far too dizzy. I caught her eye a couple of times and she smiled at me. I remember that I felt blessed. She, of course, had no trouble at all joining in with the various debates: CND, The Common Market, The Police State that we lived under, The Revolution, Legalisation of all drugs, the new Soft Machine album and UFOs. I just sat back and sipped my half of dark mild.
Fourteen pence a pint.
At the end of the evening everyone said their goodbyes and promised to meet at the same time, same place tomorrow. I wandered down the street, depressed at the thought of the long walk home (I didn’t have the two pence bus fare. Still paid child’s fare, even if I stunk of beer). As I neared the corner, I heard footsteps coming up behind me – fast. I hurried on, expecting at any minute to be accosted by some hooligan and stripped of my love-beads or Minnie Mouse, flared-sleeve, scoop-neck shirt. But, instead of the raucous howl of abuse, I heard a rather faint, “Wait for me!”
I turned, and there she was.
The Other Alice.
Only, of course, I didn’t know her as the ‘Other Alice’ then. Then, she was the only Alice.
Perhaps still is.
“Which way are you walking?”
I told her, as best I could. Most of my faculties had deserted me, including coherent speech.
“Mind if I walk too. I don’t like being alone in the dark.”
Mind? God, I walked nearly four miles out of my way that night. It’s too far back to remember but it must have been early hours when I got home and I would have to have adopted the peculiar manner of walking upstairs that I’d perfected that avoided anything that creaked or squeaked.
We talked all the way, about a forty five minute walk, and got on well. In fact, we got on really well. When we were close to her house, she stopped and said, “I’d like to see you again tomorrow.”
I can’t remember my answer. I probably didn’t give one. But what I do remember is panicking about my age. I’d always been able to get served in pubs, right back when I was only fourteen. I was sixteen then. And that was the problem. The Other Alice was clearly much older than me and had taken me for an eighteen or nineteen year old. How was she going to react when she found out she’d allowed herself to be escorted home by a child? I remember walking down the lane to her road, hardly hearing anything she said. I was completely preoccupied with my own dilemma. Eventually I could bear it no longer.
I stopped.
“I have something I have to tell you,” I said.
She just smiled at me, opened her big, dark eyes, and said, “Ooohh!”
“Look, I’m sorry if I’ve misled you or anything like that but… well… I’m only sixteen.”
There, I’d said it.
The Other Alice smiled. “Yeah? I’m only fifteen.” She grabbed my hand and dragged me farther down the path. “Come on. My dad gets funny if I’m too late.”
At the bottom of her road she stopped again. She turned to me and said, “So, what’s your answer? Meet again tomorrow?”
I must have managed to either speak or indicate in the positive because I remember her saying, “Great. See you here then. Seven.”
She leaned towards me and kissed me on the lips. I wondered if the way I felt was anything like people with serious brain disorders feel, because I couldn’t have told who I was, where I was, or which way was up and which way was down. She eventually pulled away from me, gave me another unbelievable smile and said, “That was nice.”
It was.
And like I say, that was all about thirty five years ago. We went steady, or as steady as anyone went in the seventies, for about two years. Maybe more. It was a different lifetime. I was a different person. Completely different. But sitting there, looking at those tickets in my hand, I wondered if I really was. Without the email, without the tickets, without any concrete reason for believing otherwise, I would have said that I had changed beyond recognition from that young boy to the present. I’d known responsibility, made major decisions, been in terrifying debt, lived with a woman for, oh, not that sure, about twenty five or thirty years. I’d driven, flown, been in hospital, buried friends, been arrested, worked in seven or eight different organisations; I’d met the Prime Minister and at least six Lord Mayors. I’d been on stage with my band in front of nearly a thousand people and I’d scuba-dived with sharks. I was as far away from that young boy as it is physically possible to be.
Until the email and those tickets.
Just looking at them shrivelled the years and I was back at the bottom of that lane. I could feel the breeze. I could feel the excitement. I could feel her breath on my face. Her perfume filled my nose more powerfully now than the diesel fumes billowing across the station. I remembered the smell of her hair and feel of her hand in mine…
Was even this being unfaithful to Alice? My wife, Alice? Did I have anything to be ashamed of just thinking these things? Anything to apologise for? And if not, then why did I feel such a shit as my wife’s face filled my mind? Why did I feel as though someone might be watching me, just sitting on that bench staring at two slips of stiff, printed paper?
What should I do?
I looked at the clock and realised that there were only minutes before the train arrived. I knew, even though after I arrived in London I would still have a choice, I knew that, if I stepped onto that train, then my choice would have been made. So what should it be?
On the one hand, what possible harm could meeting an old friend cause? A hello, how are you? What have you been doing with yourself? And then a quick drink, the promise of exchanging Christmas cards and of meeting again some time, and then a trip back home. What could be wrong with that? What wife would begrudge her husband such a small treat?
Mine would.
I know.
And I know because, on the other hand, I wouldn’t like her doing the same. Not even one little bit. And, how did I really know that it would just be a quick drink and then goodbye? How did I know that this wasn’t some terrible set up that would leave me stabbed in a hotel room and splashed across tomorrow’s papers? How did I know she was sane? Safe? Even if she was who she said she was? I knew nothing really.
Apart from the fact that I missed her.
It’s funny. I would never have admitted that either: that I missed her. I didn’t know I was missing her. I felt no sense of suffering or loss.
Not until that email and those tickets.
It’s funny life, isn’t it? You think you know what’s coming next, that it’s all planned out in front of you. You can see how your career will develop, how your relationship will mature down and grow. Everything is settled and almost preordained. There are no surprises. Not pleasant ones anyway. All those things are certainties. I had a good wife and a good life. I lived in a lovely house and had an income that would keep me comfortably off until I retired in fifteen or twenty years. And then I had a pension that would more than suffice. I had all the things that I held dear: my car, my fancy stereo system, Sky satellite and hundreds of DVDs. I had my three holidays in Europe every year, and the safety of my golf club. I had friends and colleagues, all of whom were entirely predictable and would do nothing to endanger the status quo. I even had my band, more or less. The few of us who still met up and played the old songs, for old time’s sake. And I was going to risk all that for…
For what?
A memory?
A dream?
A what if?
All those familiar, comfortable, safe certainties in exchange for the unknown?
There was no competition really. Not when you looked at it like that. Only one sensible thing to do.
I put those two tickets into my inside jacket pocket and took the first steps towards my future, happy in the knowledge that I was doing the only other sensible thing.