A Game Between Trains

I was asked to be a table. This seemed within my qualifications.

The woman held out one corner of a folding chessboard while her friend excavated a suitcase. We were on a station bench, beneath a roof which ended just short of the afternoon rain. My contribution was to keep the pieces horizontal until a cardigan could be removed from the case and the lid made reasonably flat.

“Don't let her move anything,” said the woman with the suitcase.

“I wouldn't.”

“You would,” said her friend.

“Not while he's looking.”

They were Gwen and Tessa. Gwen was catching a train; Tessa had walked down with her. The suitcase contained clothes for a week at Gwen's sister's house, although apparently no provision for anyone suggesting a nice restaurant. Tessa had already raised this twice. Gwen had brought the chessboard.

The pieces were wooden, with the black knights worn almost grey along their ears. One white pawn had been replaced by a button standing on its edge. It fell over when I breathed on it.

“That's Gerald,” Tessa said.

I sat very still.

Gwen folded the cardigan, wedged it under the case and took the board from me. The bench sloped. We tested the arrangement with our hands hovering nearby, then removed them one at a time. Gerald remained upright.

Across the tracks, a man in orange waterproofs was emptying a bin. Rain tapped the canopy above him and struck the uncovered rails with a finer sound. Somewhere behind the booking office, somebody was having a long disagreement with a door.

I had meant to ask about a train in the opposite direction. Instead I found myself watching a black bishop.

It had a route through the white pieces which looked interesting. I leaned forward. Tessa's hand paused above the board.

“Don't help. I'm losing perfectly well on my own.”

“Sorry.”

I leaned back. Gwen moved the bishop somewhere else entirely.

For several moves I tried to understand why. Then I noticed that I had confused the white king and queen. The king's little cross was missing. My interesting attack had been directed at the wrong person.

Tessa took a pawn and set it beside her knee. Gwen asked whether she had remembered to telephone the glazier. Tessa said she had, and that the bathroom window would cost more than the bathroom was worth. Gwen considered this, moved a rook and asked what the glazier had thought of the proposed cardboard alternative.

“He said he'd measure up on Tuesday.”

“For cardboard?”

“I didn't specify.”

The rain thickened. We drew our feet back beneath the bench. A drop from the roof found the suitcase handle and began travelling down it towards the board. I put my folded newspaper underneath. Its account of a minister's difficult week proved usefully absorbent.

The freight train announced itself before we could see it. A sustained horn reached us from beyond the bend, high and rather mournful. Gwen rested two fingers on the board. The locomotive came through on the far line, trailing wagons which seemed to have no intention of ending.

As it passed, the horn's pitch fell. The Doppler effect, that familiar little tug in the ear: the source could keep making the same note while we heard it differently. Approaching, it sent successive sound waves from positions closer to us, crowding their arrivals together; receding, it spaced them farther apart. Higher frequency on the way in, lower on the way out. I listened for the lower note until the clatter swallowed it.

Beside me, Tessa's lips moved. I could not hear a word. Gwen held up a finger, and we waited through another procession of wheels.

“I said,” Tessa repeated into the sudden quiet, considerably too loudly, “SHE'S BOUGHT A HOT TUB.”

The man with the bin looked over.

“My sister,” Gwen explained, though he had not asked.

He nodded with the gravity this information appeared to warrant and returned to work.

Gwen took a knight. Tessa regarded the vacant square for a long time. Then she looked at me.

“Now you can help.”

I studied the board again, taking care over the identities of the royalty. There were several possible moves. None seemed particularly comforting.

“I wouldn't have let it get into this position,” I said.

“That's what I said about the window.”

She moved before I could offer anything more substantial. Gwen smiled, but did not take the piece I expected her to take. There was plainly a great deal going on which did not require me.

Their local train appeared on the display. Gwen photographed the board. Tessa inspected the picture, enlarged it and made her take another: Gerald had become indistinguishable from a pale square.

We packed the pieces while the train slowed beside us. I held the box open; Tessa counted, stopping twice to retrieve pawns from Gwen's palm. When the doors opened, they were ready. Gwen lifted her own case and climbed aboard.

“Tuesday,” she said through the doorway.

“The glazier?”

“Your move.”

Tessa held up her telephone. The doors closed. Gwen found a window seat and began removing her coat with the determined expression of somebody who had left too little space for her elbows.

Tessa and I watched the train go. Then she turned the suitcase's wet rectangle of newspaper over with her shoe.

“Which way are you going?”

I pointed.

“Replacement bus today. Out the front.”

I looked at the departure board. There it was, beneath the service number, where I had not looked because I had been interested in a bishop.

She took the wet newspaper to the bin. I thanked her for the directions and went through the booking hall, arriving at the bus just as the driver opened the luggage compartment.

“Anything to go underneath?”

“No. I've finished being furniture.”

He looked at my ticket.

“Single?”

“Yes.”

He waved me aboard.