What's your fantasy today?

Finally, I reach my destination. There has been rain after the stifling heat of yesterday, but it’s not cold. The sliding doors of the train open and I find myself bang opposite the exit and the steel-capped steps that lead down to the tunnel under the tracks. A smell of rain lingers in the air. I turn left and head towards the road.

“What’s your fantasy today?”

“I’ve used them all up.” 

“Wrack your brains.”

“I am, but I can’t think of any.”

The truth is I can’t be bothered. All of my day dreams have exploded into nothing, there’s little much left and besides, I don’t want to degenerate into fretfulness, which is always the end result.

I cross the road and walk past parked cars and plastic dustbins in untidy driveways, numbers scrawled roughly on their sides.

“I’ll play a game instead.”

Most licence plates these days close with three letters, like SKN or TGP or NSK and I try and make up words. So SKN could be ‘stupendous kayak ninjas’ and TGP might be ‘the gormless porpoise’ and NSK ‘night sky karma’. There’s so much choice as I walk along the street heading towards the short row of shops that mark the halfway point of my journey. CSX, ‘crazy Swedish xylophones’.

What were my fantasies? Well, perhaps that word ‘fantasies’ is a little too lurid. I’m really talking about ‘scenarios’, situations that I find appealing or relaxing, like being in a house on the beach looking out to sea, waiting for people to arrive; or picking up a brand new Harley Davidson from a local dealer and riding it home on a quiet summer’s afternoon. Lying in a field of corn, again on a summer’s day, doing nothing, possibly listening to music, Dark Side of the Moon, and having nothing but free time ahead of me, time to think. When I was a kid I used to day dream about driving a train. My bike was my train and I made up station names along our road: Plumbury after a Victoria plum tree was a particularly memorable stop for some reason. I never picked up any passengers - or plums - but I’d always stop and then start again, just like a train would do. There was no rhyme nor reason. These were the days of the moon landings when the sun always seemed to shine and there were sprinklers on neatly cut lawns and home-made lemonade in bottles on a trestle table in a shaded part of the garden. ‘Labour always works’, my mum had written in crayon on a sheet of Admiralty headed paper. A distinctive letterhead, a blue strip about an inch in depth across the top of the page. Dad must have worked there or something, I can’t recall. Stag beetles and Action Man, tents for our toy soldiers made out of handkerchiefs and twigs; corned beef, mashed potato and tinned peas for dinner and mashing up the whole lot into a pie, playing ‘manners’ with my brother and sister. Dad comes home around 7pm, but we’re already in bed and can see the daylight through the curtains and hear the birds outside and a train passing by at the top of the garden. We call mum for a goodnight kiss, fresh bedclothes, the smell of fabric conditioner.

I walk towards the station where cars come and go and people wait expectantly for somebody to pick them up. There’s always a man with a suitcase or rucksack. I cross the footbridge and head towards the alley, the first alley, there’s two, but this one has wooden fences on both sides and a Tarmac path under foot - they both do. It’s an uphill walk all the way home, there are more parked cars and posh houses. The smell of the hedgerows brings back more childhood memories of playing in the garden and the day when mum made a golf course out of dad’s immaculate lawn; presents from ‘little nan’ - a plastic toy airliner made of see-through plastic exposing the seats inside, slabs of Wall’s ice cream sandwiched between two wafers, mum’s love of choc ices, as they were known, but no brands, they were just choc ices. The distant sound of ice cream vans playing Greensleeves, mum’s classical piano music LP, ‘the romantic piano’, my Action Man dressed in an Australian bushfighter’s uniform, the only one with shorts and knee-high socks and an Indiana Jones hat long before the character was created. The Corona van that hurtled down the road, mum warning us not to be in the road when it arrived. The laundry van, Riddington’s if my memory is intact. Fish fingers, spaghetti, children’s television, an old-fashioned television set, the buzzing mosquitos during the hot summer nights and me thinking I was always the last asleep and the first awake. I used to have strange dreams, one of a bowl of custard with a small yellow daisy, the sort you find on the lawn, bang in the centre. I’ll always remember it, but I have no idea what it meant. It used to turn into a nightmare and I would find myself awake, crying, waiting for dad to comfort me and say it was just a dream. Dad was good at diffusion, trivialising things in an effort to bring comfort. There was ‘nothing to worry about’, so and so was a ‘piece of cake’, ‘it won’t hurt’ often in reference to a pending visit to the dentist.

When I get to the end of the second alleyway I’m nearly home. In front of me is what we all call the ‘lottery winner’s house’. We have no idea who lives there and whether or not they won the lottery, but it’s a huge house, worth over a million pounds, an ‘in-out’ gravel driveway. Windows are open to let in the air because despite the rain it’s still hot. I cross the road and continue the uphill walk, past the piano teacher’s house where the sound of tickled ivories often greets me and there are people outside, normally Indians, sitting in their cars waiting for their child to emerge, music book in hand. 

I’m only minutes from my front door so I fumble in my bag for the front door keys. Soon I am crossing the front lawn and I’m moments away from being home for the weekend.