The Wait

It’s been forty years since I last saw my sister.  I don’t remember her of course – didn’t even know I had a sister until last week, and that was a mighty shock, I can tell you.  Last Thursday I’d been sitting in the kitchen eating a sandwich - I can’t think now what was in it - and the ring of a phone changed my life for ever and in an instant. 

And so now here I am, on a filthy wet Wednesday afternoon in a grotty café outside Peterborough station, waiting for my twin sister Ellen.  Yes, twin!  Would you believe it?  Well, I didn’t at first of course, thought it must be a wrong number or crossed wire, maybe even a joke.  But there you are.

The rain is driving down against the window, though it’s probably the first time it’s seen a wash in a while, in fact this whole place could do with a bit of a Kim-and-Aggie, I’ve never seen such filth.  I’m not sure what colour the walls are supposed to be.  The ceiling is a shade of pre-smoking-ban-orange and the peeling lino on the floor is struggling to be patterned through the muck.  I know in these places you don’t get much choice, but even a captive audience has some standards of cleanliness.

She should be here by now.  Maybe her train is late.  I wonder if she looks like me?  Wouldn’t it be funny if she came through the door in the same raincoat, carrying the same handbag – and then we said ‘hello’ exactly at the same time?

My coffee cup makes a tacky sucking sound in it’s reluctance to leave the surface of the Formica table, but I bravely take another sip.  I hope she likes me.

Ellen says she has a photograph of the two of us as babies, her in a red bobble hat, me in a blue, and she’s going to show it to me when we meet today.  A week ago I could have said with absolute certainty that I’d never owned a bobble hat in my life, but I suppose lots of things are going to change now.
I think that clock’s stopped.  You’d think the grease in here would oil the cogs, but most likely the battery died in 1985 or something. 

I read once that sometimes if one twin goes into labour, the other can feel stomach pains even if she doesn’t even know and she’s on the other side of the world.  Ellen said she has two children, but I don’t remember anything like that, unless it wasn’t a ham roll that time that gave me that awful upset.  I look over at the sausage rolls at the counter (a week old if they’re a day) and wince.

I take out my compact and check my face.  A week ago it was my face alone.  Now I am about to share it, today and for ever more with Ellen Bristow from Leeds, on the 3:20 in to Peterborough, platform 5 … a complete, total and utter stranger.