Nadine

Nadine got lost on her way to the station in a town

she was visiting for the day, a town whose station

had seemed to be in the place she would expect

a station to be when she had stepped off the train

onto a platform that had seemed solid, a town

whose station nestled beside a bridge, like any other.

Now the bridge led somewhere else, to a field, a

rising hill, a road that led under a further bridge.

A steep climb to nowhere, not towards a station

she realised she must turn and search for hard

if she was to reach her destination, in another place

not too far off, where she had an appointment.

The road curved down through some indifferent

houses that might be part of a railway terrace, or

might not, as she soon discovered, looking out

through a gap at the next junction towards a wider

road - a High street? the one she had passed 

along shortly after leaving the railway station?

But there were several such streets in this town

of wretchedness and a sort of inner poverty, or

at any rate there was definitely more than just one.

Nadine looked at her gold wristwatch. The time

of her youth was already nearly over. She looked

again. And saw that time was already and done.

Nadine, she sang. Nadine, honey, is that you?

It was a song she remembered her father had sung

to tell her name again and again, in his way, as if

that were necessary, as if she was likely to forget it.

Nadine, you are headed straight for the null point,

her lover said when she kissed her, on parting.

She thought of picking up the pint glasses, flitting

between tables in the bar of her childhood home,

singing a new chorus of I’ve got those happy feet.

It had been there she had formulated her great plan

that had to do with knife-splinters in the skirting

to buy her all the lemonade that she could drink.

She stepped out of that door into a new country,

now she had to get to where people were waiting

to accept her again, not that she imagined there

would be a large delegation sent to meet her when

she arrived on the train in the other town where

her small appointment had had to be arranged.

Always by means of an exchange of looks or

rings did we become engaged to those we desired 

and we sought them everywhere, around corners,

in the vestibule of an hotel, walked past their doors

and counted wrong, unaccountably delayed by

one of the causes of our mutual frustration.

Somehow or other she must find the railway station

and, right there, in a moment when she thought

that this town was indeed her final destination,

she experienced a feeling of sinking to a nadir,

stranded forever in the wrong place, in the wrong skin,

far from her memories of idleness and dreaming.