Free Famished Lover by Alan Cumyn

and threw those on as well. She just had the basket now, but the train was speeding up.
    I wasn’t sure she was going to make it. But our luggage was leaving. “Hurry!” I said. A conductor blew his whistle at us. Then I had her arm, and the car slid by us with no time to decide. I leapt for the moving step, pulling Lillian with me.
    â€œRamsay!” she said, struggling. She seemed to be trying to pull away. But then she grabbed the handrail and I hauled her up. Just in time as it turned out: the platform ended a few yards further on.
    I hadn’t been watching that part of the near-disaster, but Lillian had. Somehow we’d gotten away with it.
    We found seats, and I hurried off to secure the luggage in a proper rack. When I got back Lillian was staring out the window as if she might never speak to me again.
    â€œThat was bloody reckless and stupid,” I said. “I’m sorry for my part of it. We should have just waited.”
    â€œWhy didn’t you just give me enough money this morning?” she said, without looking at me. “You treat me like a child. Why couldn’t you just come on time?”
    My heart was still hammering and I found myself clenching my fists. “I might have left work early. But I don’t want to give Frame any excuses —”
    â€œThank the Lord we’re all still in one piece.” She stared relentlessly out the dirty window as we chugged past the baking, steamy streets of the city, the tenements with their laundry waving over the fire escapes, the darkened, still factory buildings with half their windows broken in, the dusty patches of weed and rock lining the railbed on the way out of town.I explained again about Bill Kelsie and the delay. When I finished I listened to the blessed clattering of the rails, and for a moment I thought she’d just leave it. But finally she said, “London again. Everything happened to you in London.”
    â€œA lot of things didn’t happen in London.” I was too riled up. I should have just stayed quiet.
    â€œYou yearn for her, don’t you?”
    â€œWhat are you talking about?”
    She turned her gaze on me full bore. “Why didn’t you marry her if you wanted her so much? Is she too close a cousin?”
    â€œI married you,” I said in a quiet fury. “I love you.”
    â€œYes, the fat cow!”
    We were picking up speed now, climbing the bridge over the St. Lawrence before hurtling south. The sun on the wide water shone painfully silver, and all the ships looked rusted and old. We wouldn’t get to Mireille soon enough. Not for me. I could not stay quiet and I could not fight. I took Lillian’s hand and held it warmly between my own. “You are more beautiful, more full of life now than even when I met you, and when I met you I thought I’d never seen anyone so radiant. Anyone. All right?”
    She looked down at our hands together.
    â€œBut still you pine for her. What did she do for you?”
    â€œNothing!”
    She turned her gaze out the window again, and I turned my body away and glimpsed, with my rattled eyes, a man I was certain, for a moment, was Collins making his way up the aisle. I almost called out. But it wasn’t the Collins I first met who’d come to get me in the hospital, or the Collins at the manure pile leading the lead-footed fannigans. It was thelater Collins, after the guards had beat him for our schoolboy pranks, after his days in solitary. It was Collins suddenly old and spent, Collins in defeat, Collins broken but still standing, a sad rumour of himself.
    The ghost of that Collins shuffled past. I stared at the space where he’d been, Lillian kept her eyes trained out the dirty window, and we did not say another word the next fifty miles.

    â€œNow then, lads,” Collins says softly, his weak voice barely carrying to the back row where I stand out of the bitter wind. I’m trying to stay still