Chapter 5 Strangers on a train

Tom was still sitting on the train when his mobile phone rang. Someone from his office. He answered it. His mobile phone rang again. Someone from the office again. He answered it. His mobile phone rang again. Someone from the mobile phone company asking if he was happy with his mobile phone. Normally Tom loved his mobile phone. He could be in touch with the world at any time. If he was out of the office he could tell them where he was and what he was doing. Even if his boss could not see him, Tom could always talk to him. Tom remembered his mother saying that 'little children should be seen but not heard'. But Tom knew that to get anywhere in business you either had to be seen or heard all the time. Usually both.

Now, however, he was not so happy with his mobile phone. He was trying to think. He was trying to think about Marina and the phone calls were making it impossible to think.

He went to the toilet. He did not need to go, but he had found out on his last train journey that, for some reason he did not understand, his mobile phone did not work in the toilet. He had discovered this because he had walked into the toilet with his mobile in his hand, talking to someone (not his boss, thank God!) and the phone stopped working the minute he got inside and closed the door. Tom had thought the train was in a tunnel. He had looked out of the little window they have in train toilets, the one that looks like there is ice all over it, but they were not in a tunnel. He tried to phone the person back but his phone would not work. Then the moment he stepped out of the toilet, the phone rang.

So Tom went to the toilet so he would have time to think. On his way there he suddenly remembered how his father used to spend hours in the toilet when Tom was a child. Maybe his father had also been looking for somewhere to think.

And so he sat and the phone did not ring and he tried to think but he could not get any further than:

Ironing Man Is Marina going mad? Is my wife seeing another man?

butterfly going mad?

Joanne Searle another man?

Why would Marina say she was going to meet Joanne in London if Joanne was in Nepal? Who was she going to meet? If something was going on between her and this Ironing Man person would she tell Tom about it? Well, maybe she was not sure if she was going to go out with this man or not. Maybe she just wanted to see what Tom would say or do when he heard the story. (Tom had said and done very little when he heard the story.) Maybe she was just going mad because she was so bored at home in the village. What was she going to do in London? That was the question!

This question was still going around in Tom's head as he returned to his seat.

Tom was not very happy when he saw that a man was now sitting on the other side of the table. Tom could not see his face because the man was reading a newspaper and was holding the newspaper in front of him. Tom sat down and looked at the back page of the newspaper. The man went on reading. Tom did not like this newspaper. Tom did not think it was a newspaper at all. What news? The paper was full of big photographs, big headlines, big ... well, big everything, as if the readers had forgotten their glasses or were just learning to read.

At university Tom and his friends used to play a game in groups with this newspaper. Each group had three minutes to read the newspaper and then another person would ask both the groups questions about what was in it. The groups with men always remembered the name of the girl on page three! There was always a girl on page three and she was almost never fully dressed. And men always seemed to remember her name. But then in three minutes you could actually read all of this newspaper from the front page to the back page and still have time to look at the photograph of the girl on page three, and then look at her again, and perhaps again.

So Tom very quickly got bored reading the back page of the newspaper. He did not, however, feel like working. He noticed another newspaper lying on the table in front of him. The man had clearly brought this one as well. It was his village newspaper which Tom did not normally read because it was so boring. It always had stories about people getting married and stories about lost cats and the problem of ducks from the village crossing the main road to get to a river on the other side of the road. The headline read:

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 833