Where We Come From

OVERWRITING!


In Ballistics, the Story, "The Smell of Almond Polish" opens:

Paddington, London 1954

Bridie Collins steps down from the train, waits for the crowd to wrap her up. She looks above her; pigeons scattering under the great glass roof. Someone bumps her shoulder, rushes on. In the half-light she shivers, picks up her cardboard case and walks towards the ticket collector.

On the train, from Wales, Bridie had listened to the clattering songs in the track. "Did she do right? Well, did she do right? What could she have done? What should she have done? Was it right, was it right, was it right?"

After twenty-minutes, about an hour-and-a-half ago, the train had slowed down, clacking and slapping as it crossed points, then easing into the dark Severn tunnel. Bridie had felt her first real moment of guilt, then. How could she have left Pat, Jenny, Ronnie? And Barbara, Angela? Smoke had leaked in through an open window, but then the train emerged into light sunlight, bright, fresh English green, and she was excited. Now the rails whispered, "Of course it was right. Of course it was right. What else could you do, could you do, could you do? It was right. It was right. It was right."

*


The ticket-collector is a darkie. He smiles, has gold on one tooth. Bridie smiles back. Steam hisses somewhere, everything smells of sulphur. People push round her. She picks up her little case and walks out of the station into a damp morning. She has nowhere in the world to go.


250 words



I have just found the same scene in a novel I started when I didn't have much of a clue. it's 416 words but WHAT words!

Please ensure you are sitting down before you begin reading this:

Nineteen Fishguard to Paddington trains had now clacked neutrally through the back-garden mishap of London. The dry late September was a gagging dust and sweaty afternoon. On the second of those nineteen trains, in third class, feeling the sulphury tang of smoke and disembodied breaths, Bridie Jones had been chained to a corner seat. Somewhere furiously inside the sadness and lethargy of the flat, unseeing look she had was the fiery dream of the fifteen year-old that had left Cork to change the world a little. Now the red laughter and temper had turned inward as a tiny voice agreed with the running train in her brain.

“Of course you did right!”
“Of course you did right!”
“Of course you did right!”

The skin at the edge of her right eye was bored deep a trench that was the mark of the window surround. Snakes of wires and banks and poles ran a high sea of speed across her face, raced round the carriage wall and died. Somehow, the brown eyes didn’t quite focus on the greens and blacks. What was out there was of no consequence, just as the train was a limbo between breaths where thoughts lasted forever and came again and again and again and again...
__________________________________________________________________

A dark metal animal had hissed steam at the dead-end bumpers of Platform Five, Paddington. People were with newspapers and taking heavy battered suitcases for walks. Trickles of them unstrapped doors and fell to the platform. The stream burbled along the smooth stone floor and washed against the trellis end-gates and a thin, wrinkled man. Miles away, the sky was laced with iron and glass and a heartless, toneless voice filled the air. To breathe, there was no way except to swallow the bark of “Bristol, Paignton and Torquay” and anyone who noticed could taste the acid and coal of each letter as it melted in the mouth. It was a place full of people, and, like any other station, it was the coldest, saddest, loneliest place on earth. Mary Bridget Jones was on her own. Behind her a single ticket cooled from the warmth of her body and was buried in the bony cold of business trips, holidays and going-homes. As she looked at the fat black clock and saw ten-past-six, the ticket-man took his last piece of cardboard and touched his cap. The fingerprints on one piece of green were fifty-six tickets from the first and more than a hundred lives from the last.



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Incidentally, as far as I can remember I wrote "Almonds" 10-15 years after the attempt at a the novel, and I don't think I copied and edited.