Waiting

I have friends with whom I keep in touch over social media and at present they are in foreign parts. They share some amazing photos, quirky, interesting, intelligent, and I’m often inspired by one of their images to write something. They have been in London recently and posted what might seem an ordinary street view, but there was something in it which really captivated me. I was challenged to write about it. I think this story needs a little more work, but here is my first draft:

Waiting

At least the drizzle had stopped, leaving a sheen on the pavements, reflecting the lights from the shops and the pub. My feet were perishing, I’d been standing waiting for twenty minutes, wondering if I’d mistaken the time and was here too early or if something else was awry. It wasn’t actually that cold, not that cold for December, it was just my feet.
Across the street, The Jack Horner was a blaze of welcoming lights and I wondered if we were meeting here opposite it, with the intention of going into the pub. I didn’t know it, had never been here before, but it looked bright and cheerful, happy voices and music bubbling out each time the door opened.
There was a lull in passers-by, a couple were walking away from me, sauntering along, almost silhouetted, one of them must be wearing a strange hat because her head looked extraordinarily elongated and I was momentarily amused. A girl with a perfectly normal yellow bobble hat had stopped to look at her phone, reading whatever the message was.
I wanted to look at my phone again, but I was holding it and it hadn’t buzzed an incoming text. Had I made a mistake, wrong place, wrong time? Or had there been a delay elsewhere, a late train, bus held up at roadworks, tube not running for some reason?
I tried to pretend I wasn’t nervous, wasn’t anxious, I tried not to be annoyed at the silly arrangement, meeting on the street, outside a closed shop – it would have been just as easy to have arranged to meet inside The Jack Horner. It looked a nice pub, an interesting pub, probably an old pub, so why wasn’t I inside in the warm, clutching a diet coke? How had we come to arrange to meet outside? At this time of the evening, under streetlights – supposing it hadn’t stopped raining?
Should I wander up and down a bit, pretending I was just killing time? Should I message and check it was the right date and time, the right palace? Was there another pub called The Jack Horner where I should be standing opposite, waiting.
The girl in the yellow bobble hat glanced at me and I quickly looked away, I think I had been inadvertently staring at her.
“Um, excuse me,” it was the girl in the hat. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen anyone else standing here waiting have you?”
I apologised and said no – ridiculous British thing to do, apologise for nothing!
“What do they look like?” I asked, she seemed tired and sad, and anxious. Obviously this was the day for making arrangements with people who let you down.
“I don’t know… it’s a bit embarrassing, a man… I’ve never met him before.”
I nearly said ‘snap! Ditto!’ Poor girl – I say girl but she was probably in her twenties, maybe ten years younger than me. I felt so sorry for her.
“Well, you’re not the only one, same here, I’ve been waiting nearly twenty minutes, obviously a no-show.”
“All I know is that he’s called Frankie, that’s all…”
I nearly exclaimed something, bit it back.
“I don’t suppose your name is Gerry?” I asked and now she looked at me in astonishment. “I’m here to meet a brother I never knew I had called Gerald…”
“I’m Gerry!” she exclaimed. Good grief! “Geraldine! Are you Frankie – Francis?”
“Frances, yes!”
We stared at each other. I guess if we’d had thought bubbles above our head they would have had exactly the same thoughts in them. We had different mothers, but could it be, could it be that we had the same father?
My mum knew there’d been another woman in my father’s life, that she’d had a child, name unknown. Maybe this lovely young woman was my sister – not the brother I had expected! Maybe her mother had a similar story to mine; maybe she knew her husband had had another wife, had had another child.
When Gerry and I had got in touch with each other, we had been so circumspect, so cautious, so worried because of all the terrible news stories of deception and duplicity. All the tricking and cheating and exploiting, that we’d kept our details to the minimum. We were searching for news of a father, we’d said, had heard that our father had had another child. Somehow we had both thought we were meeting a brother!
Suddenly, spontaneously we hugged.
“My feet are absolutely freezing, little sister! Let’s go over to The Jack Horner, find somewhere to sit, have a drink and get to know each other!”
We hurried across the road, babbling out the story of our silly mistake, laughing and holding hands. I had a sister! I had a little sister!