Free The Railway Station Man by Jennifer Johnston Page B

they were good friends.
    â€˜I must go.’ Jack stood up abruptly.
    â€˜Suit yourself. Thanks for the drink. I’ll see you around.’ Damian picked up his drink and sauntered over to the corner where the men were playing cards. He pulled up a chair and sat down beside them.
    Helen looked at the four small watercolours on the table in front of her. They were unframed, but neatly mounted on dark cardboard mounts. Scenes of sky and sea and bare hills. Light spilled from the sky, down into the deep blocks of shadows, lonely hollows, through the branches of the trees to become absorbed into the unkempt fleece of sheep searching for shelter behind a thorn hedge. Energy drained down, down all the time. The light troubled every object that it touched.
    She ran her fingers nervously along the edge of the table. This may be the most ludicrous thing to do, she thought, but I must move now, somehow announce my presence.
    A large canvas lay on the floor in the centre of the room. She painted that way, crouching down beside the canvas, leaning and stretching, the light coming above her head through the glass panes with which she had re-roofed the shed after she had moved into the cottage. Makeshift.
    Exposure.
    I have to have exposure now or become some sort of a mad woman locked into an ivory tower, pointlessly punishing myself for so many years of sloth. I must see them now in the hands of other people, see their eyes consider, explore, reject. Note the interest or indifference. Is it possible that for a moment they will recognise my existence?
    Exposure.
    She lit herself a cigarette. The tips of the fingers of her right hand were stained brown by nicotine.
    â€˜I want someone to buy you, even for ten pence off a jumble stall, and hang you on a wall. Another wall. Any other wall.’
    She picked a black plastic sack off the floor and one by one she put the pictures into it. She folded the plastic into a neat bundle, her fingers in the end caressing the shiny surface of the bag as if it contained some dear and loving creature. Then she stood and stared at the bundle, hunching her shoulders up to her ears and letting them fall slowly again. She thrust the fingers of her left hand into the crevices between her collar bone and her right shoulder blade, probing to find the source of the stiffness that made sudden movement painful.
    Decrepitude, she thought, creeping decrepitude. How stupid, how typical to leave exploration so late that decrepitude is setting in. She crushed the remains of the cigarette out in a saucer already filled with dead butts.
    My whole life is makeshift.
    â€˜Mother,’ Jack’s voice called across the yard.
    She hadn’t heard the car.
    â€˜Coming.’
    She picked up the black bag.
    â€˜Mother.’
    â€˜Coming, coming, coming.’
    Dismal rain spread down from lethargic clouds.
    â€˜Where are the Cornflakes?’
    â€˜Darling, you said the other day that you didn’t like Cornflakes. You threw them out. You said no more Cornflakes.’
    â€˜A passing phase. Today, I need Cornflakes.’
    â€˜They’re in the press.’
    He didn’t move from behind the Irish Times . She sighed and went and got the packet from the press and put it down in front of him.
    â€˜There.’
    â€˜Mmmm.’
    The cat, bedraggled from the rain and a night of entertainment, licked with vigour at his fur. When he was quite dry he would take himself to Helen’s bed to sleep for a couple of hours.
    She sat down at the table.
    â€˜Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, how are you!’
    The paper was a wall between them.
    â€˜Mists, yes … maybe it’s mellowly fruitful in England.’
    He turned a page, refolded, neatly, the paper. Newsprint in the country edition always greyed the fingers.
    â€˜Keats can’t ever have visited the west of Ireland.’
    Silence.
    â€˜Or was it Shelley?’
    She stretched out her hand for the cigarettes.
    â€˜I