Waiting for Spring

The night’s rain had washed down topsoil and silt from the moor, then the frost had frozen it solid.  It covered the roads like rendering, clogging the gutters and forming weird patterns on the pavements. 

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Astrid thought that it looked like some flooded Guatemalan hill village from the news.   She stepped over the debris and tiptoed across the layer of frozen clay so that she didn’t get any of it caked on her boots.

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It had been winter for too long.

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Deadening darkness seemed to press down on her, the cold seemed to clamp the world into inaction, a four month depression.  Lockdown.  She prayed that spring would arrive soon.

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It was always the same, she hated winter.  It was barren and cold and dead.  Like wandering around inside a darkened fridge for months.  The weight of sleep never left her, even in the narrow hours of daylight it was as if some vast anchor was pulling her down into the ground.  She just wanted to curl up in the dead earth and live off her puppy fat till spring, or crawl inside a cardboard box and chew half comatose on lettuce like a Blue Peter tortoise.

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The thing she hated most about winter was the darkness, the shroud that gave sustenance and protection to the evil in men’s hearts.   Every side street, every alleyway was a potential hiding place.  She felt their eyes on her constantly, watching, tracing her body up and down. 

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She knew that the only protection was the light, and so she stepped quickly between the orange pools of the streetlights, kept to well-lit streets and didn’t take shortcuts.  Evil thrived in the wintertime, like a starving wolf coming down from the moors to hunt.

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Astrid walked up to the station to wait for the next train into town.  She moved through clouds of her own breath, tinted orange in the sodium blur of the street lights.  The occasional car drove rasping through the silt like wet sandpaper.

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On the station platform, lit harshly from above with white spotlights, stood the rest of her commuting tribe.  The same faces every day, blank and preoccupied, oblivious to the threat that lay all around them in the darkness.  They stood there, reading their metros, staring into space, each one of them exhaling their own private gauze of steam.  

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Astrid studied their faces, hard and congealed against the cold, sealed up and deadened like seed pods.

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“We are sorry to announce that the seven eighteen to Leeds is cancelled due to flooding.  Please listen for further announcements.”

The voice echoed across the station.  In a unified groan the commuters began to fumble for their blackberries, wander back down to the car park, talk loudly into their phones to inform and console their workmates about the fact that they would be late for early meetings.

Engines started in the car-park and beams of light traced through the darkness as the cars jostled to get out first.  Astrid stood, helpless, not knowing what her next move was, should she wait to see if the next train would arrive?  Should she walk back home, get the bus?  Again she muttered a passionate prayer that spring would arrive.

Across the train-line, past the opposite platform, the tall oak trees, barren of leaves stood impassive, watching and waiting.

Now there was only her and five other people left on the platform, each looking uncertain, as if frozen by indecision as well as the cold.

Then, from nowhere, there was a change in the air.  

A warm sweetness came through the hissing trees, carrying with it the smell of new mown grass and cherry blossom.  It swept across the platform like a wave of joy and everyone seemed to notice it. 

There was animation in the faces of her fellow commuters.  One of the men let out a sigh of contentment and a woman grabbed a handkerchief out of her bag and sneezed into it.

There was a low rumbling roar in the distance.  Astrid wondered if the announcement had been wrong after all, if the train was arriving or if it was the Bradford train and she might be able to change further down the line.  But there was no tell tale hoot of the train whistle as it crossed the pedestrian crossing down the line, and the rumble did not seem to come from one direction, but instead from all around, as if it were a slowly building earthquake.

There was a break in the darkness, an early dawn, perhaps because of the clear sky after the night’s rain.  A grey pinky tinge spread across the platform, making the branches of the oak trees visible.  In the light Astrid felt her heart glow, as it offered salvation from the almost perpetual darkness.  Things weren’t so bad, she thought, spring was coming.

The roar continued to build and she looked around the station, expecting to see a rubbish truck or something that would explain it.  There was a definite vibration coming up through the soles of her boots.   Others on the platform were looking at each other nervously as well.

Then spring arrived.

In a primal roar the oak trees opposite seemed to explode in green, like fans flicking open with an explosive flourish.  Grass leapt out of the bank beneath them like claws flicking out of a cat.  The temperature seemed to increase instantly by about ten degrees causing the red shelter on the platform to pop and crack as the metal expanded.  Cherry blossom exploded from the trees behind Astrid like a pink firework and the force of it’s birth popped most of it straight from the branches into a blizzard of pink confetti that blew in the sweet breeze over the platform, coating everything in it path.

Astrid felt herself rocked back on her heels by the wave of life and joy that seemed to spring from the earth.  There was a fanfare of birds, in the trees, rising to a delirious cacophony, hysterical and wild.  

She felt tears running down her face and she watched mesmerised as ivy on the station walls flourished back into green life, as if it had been plugged into some earthly main and it crawled, insidiously over the walls and across the platform, as if a million ants were carrying leaves across the station and over the cars in the carpark, twining around the wheels, clawing over the windscreens.  

She wiped tears from her eyes with the back of her sleeve and stepped out of the way of the encroaching ivy.  Birds began darting around the station, fighting, desperately trying to gather nesting materials, as if they were on a terrible deadline that they had not expected. 

One stunned great tit, pecked senseless by a rival, lay, fluttering on the platform at her feet before the ivy overwhelmed it and bound it in its wiry cables.

She heard a cry and Astrid turned to see her fellow commuters.  They were stripped naked, wrapped in a swirling maelstrom of ivy, cherry blossom plastering their palid bare flesh.  They were fucking like animals, hard, desperate and savage, the slaps of their connecting flesh echoing across the car-park.  She felt a savage need, a driving ache deep inside her.  She began to run towards the group.  One of the men, a middle aged lawyer, paunchy and florid, was wrenching a younger man off one of the women.  He clawed at the young man’s eyes until blood ran down his face, then he bit into the man’s throat.  They grappled and fought, beating at each other with their fists until the young man stopped moving, then the lawyer, smearing the younger man’s blood over his flabby naked body, seized the woman from behind again and with a great bellow of victory set to.

Astrid stumbled over the ivy towards them, sweet waves of terror and desire flooding her at the sight of the blood.  She felt an animal need, a rising force emanating from the engine earth, and a great incoherent screech ripped from her lungs at the sheer joy of being alive.