Cancelled

The board at the station said CANCELLED in orange letters and I just stood there reading it like if I read it enough times it would change its mind. It did not change its mind. The trains were not running, there had been a problem on the line, and the next way out of this town was tomorrow morning at the earliest, and possibly the day after, and the man behind the glass said sorry love in the voice of someone who has said it nine hundred times today. So that was it. I was stuck. I was stuck in Carrow Bay, the town I grew up in, the town I had spent eight years and a lot of effort being from rather than in, and I had one small suitcase and nowhere to be and a whole afternoon I had not asked for. I want to explain about Carrow Bay. It is small. It is one of those seaside towns that is busy for six weeks of the year and the rest of the time it just sort of sits there, looking at the sea, remembering. There is a front, and there are some shops, and there is a beach that is more stones than sand, and there is nothing here for me, there has not been anything here for me since I was eighteen, which is when I left and decided not to look back. I left because of a lot of things. But mostly, if I am honest, and I am trying to be honest because this is my story and what is the point otherwise, I left because of a boy called Sam Hale. We were eighteen. We had been together for two years, which when you are eighteen is basically a marriage. And we had a whole plan, we were going to leave Carrow Bay together, we used to sit on the stones and talk about the cities we were going to live in, and then in the last summer he changed his mind. He didn't want to leave. His dad was ill and the cafe needed him and he said he couldn't, and I said I couldn't stay, and we were both eighteen and neither of us knew how to do the conversation properly, so we just sort of — didn't. We let it end badly. We let it end with things unsaid, with a stupid argument on the front that was about a bus but was not about a bus, and then I got on a train and I did not look back, and I have spent eight years being a person who does not look back. And now there is a CANCELLED on the board and I have an afternoon in Carrow Bay. I told myself I would just walk. Get a coffee, walk the front, look at the sea, be a tourist in my own past for one afternoon, very calm, very fine. And I did walk. And the front looked exactly the same, the same railings, the same stones, and that was almost okay. And then I got to the cafe. It is the only proper cafe on the front and it used to be called Hale's and it is still called Hale's, the same sign, repainted but the same, and through the window I could see it was busy and warm and there were plants on the windowsill that had not been there when I was eighteen, and there was a man behind the counter, and the man was Sam. He is thirty now, same as me. He has the same way of pushing his hair back when he's thinking. He was laughing at something a customer said, and he had a tea towel over his shoulder, and he looked — he looked like a person who had built a whole life in the exact place I ran away from, and the worst part, the genuinely worst part, was that the life looked good. It looked warm. It looked like something. I should have walked past. I had a whole afternoon, I could have walked past forty cafes. But I was cold, and the train was cancelled, and I had eight years of an unfinished conversation sitting in my chest like a stone off that beach, and before I had really decided anything my hand was on the door, and the little bell rang, and Sam Hale looked up. He saw me. I watched him see me. I watched his face go through about six things in two seconds, and the last thing it landed on was not anger, which I could have handled, and it was not nothing, which I had sort of hoped for. It was just — surprised. And then, underneath the surprised, something quieter and older, and he put the tea towel down on the counter, slowly, and he said my name like it was a word he had not said out loud in a long time. "Mira." And I stood in the doorway of Hale's cafe with my one small suitcase and the bell still going behind me, and I understood that I was not getting out of this town tomorrow morning the same person who got stuck in it today.