The Meeting

The train rattled to a stop and Peggy pushed herself to her feet, stumbling towards the doors. Her heart set up a staccato beat as she alighted onto the platform. She paused a moment, earning an annoyed click of the tongue from a fellow passenger. Collecting herself, Peggy moved to one side, and then skittered to the safety of a billboard on the platform. She rummaged in her handbag, pulled out a folding mirror to check her hair and makeup. She met her reflected gaze and drew a shaky breath.

She rarely traveled to the city these days. City life was too frenetic, and she couldn’t hear the birds. Patting the ends of her hair with her fingertips, she drew another, steadying breath before she pulled her ticket from a pocket, holding it like a talisman as she approached the turnstile.

A disinterested guard waved her through. Peggy fumbled the mirror back into her bag, closing the zipper with trembling fingers. She swallowed hard, trying to remember the directions she’d been given to the café. It’s just across the road, a little way down on the left. I’ll be wearing a blue shirt.

The click of her low-heeled pumps on the tiled floor of the station, gave way to a dull clip-clop across concrete as she stepped out onto the street. The sound carried her back to another time. To a patient old Clydesdale, plodding along a country road near Colac. To a young shearer with auburn hair and startling blue eyes who secretly held her hand as they hitched a lift on the butcher’s dray into town, for the pictures. She remembers his laugh, and the way his eyes crinkled at the corners when he smiled.

--

The ‘ding-ding’ of a tram bell pulled her back to the present. Peggy laid one hand over her heart. The prickly wool of her overcoat tickled her palm. She’d almost stepped onto the road without looking.

Go and get yourself killed, why don’t you?

Another tram rumbled by behind her. the click-clack of its wheels vibrated through the pavement under her feet.

--

They’d sat in the back row of the picture theater. He’d bought Jaffas and released a few of them to click-clack down the aisle. evoking annoyed shushing from other patrons.

Peggy thought he would be hers forever. He’d whispered promises in the sticky heat of stolen kisses under the willow tree beside the creek near her home. After, she couldn’t look at that tree without something too big and heavy welling up inside her. Heavier than the weight that nestled in her womb, and the thunderclouds that brooded over the land the night she went into labor.

She gave birth on Christmas Eve. A baby boy with a fuzz of auburn hair and startling blue eyes. She named him Noel. She only held him for a moment before the nuns came to bear him away. Outside the maternity home window, curlews wailed like women crying for lost children.

--

The café was quiet. One young couple occupied a table in the corner. Peggy smiled uncertainly at the waitress.

“I’m meeting my…friend,” she said.

She perched, timid as a wren on the edge of the chair the waitress ushered her to.

Behind the counter, steam billowed from the coffee machine forming clouds around the barista’s face.

--

A train chuffed idly by the platform, steam hissing from the engine as rank upon rank of soldiers climbed aboard, hanging from the windows to exchange final goodbyes with mothers, sweethearts, and friends.

Peggy brushed smuts from her clothes as she looked for a seat in a crowded carriage, wrapping the red woolen cape more warmly around her shoulders. She adjusted the pin on her collar, just so. Her fingers traced over the silver metal, the red and white enamel. She felt the words stamped onto the pin. Pro humanitate.

She was 27, a nurse on her way to the war. Perhaps, going to the front to help and heal the wounded, would provide a balm for her own sorrows.

There was no-one on the platform to see her off. Her father had died four years after Noel was born. Funny. How the events of her life pivot around the birth of her son.

--

The waitress laid a menu on the table in front of her and Peggy looked up, smiled. Her fingers caressed the cover. It felt like suede. The color reminded her of the sky the day the letter came.

Magpies caroled in the gum trees across the road as Peggy walked to the letter box. The envelope stamped with an image of the Virgin Mary cradling the baby Jesus in her arms was addressed to Peggy and bore the logo of an adoption search agency. She’d listed her willingness for contact a few months earlier but hadn’t dared believe it would ever happen.

He wouldn’t want to know her. He must think she'd abandoned him.

I didn’t. They gave me no choice but to give him away.

--

Peggy dug a tissue out of her handbag, furtively dabbing at her eyes, biting her lip, holding her breath against the tears. She thought she heard a curlew crying and looked up sharply, but it was only the wheels of a tram, shrieking against the metal rails as it rumbled to a stop across the road.

Peggy felt her heart stop as a man alighted onto the street. He had auburn hair, greying a little at the temples. He wore a blue shirt. The way he walked, the bearing of his shoulders - so familiar that she is transported for a moment - holding hands on the butcher’s dray. Listening to the plodding horse’s hooves.

--

“Are you Peggy?” He’s standing in front of her.

She nods, trying to remember how to breathe, and slowly gets to her feet. She reaches for him, but thinks better and pulls back, offers a handshake.

“I’m Michael…Noel.”

She smiles. “I’m…” she shakes her head. He knows your name.

“Do you want coffee, or tea?” When he smiles, the corners of his eyes crinkle.