The first Sunday

Fiction, about adults over 18. Three weeks of deciding, one afternoon in a railway arch, and the most reassuring thing that has ever happened to her on this subject, which was being bored.

Fiction. Every character in this story is a consenting adult over 18.

A story by the editor.

It sat in my phone for three weeks as dentist, which was idiotic on two counts. Nobody has a dentist on a Sunday, and nobody has ever looked at my calendar. There is a kind of caution that is not really caution, it is a rehearsal of being caught, and I have been running it since my twenties.

What frightened me was not the people who would be there. They were, by definition, people who had also decided to go, which made them the least dangerous group of strangers in London. What frightened me was the eleven metres of pavement between the corner and the door. Somebody from work. Somebody from the gym. A man I once shared a lift with, standing outside the chicken shop opposite, watching a woman he vaguely recognises go into a place with the shutters half down.

I cancelled twice, in my head, on the Saturday. Both times I got as far as inventing what I would tell myself afterwards.

The clothes took twenty minutes and I got all of it wrong.

I owned nothing, and I briefly considered solving that, which took four minutes and a website and a skirt I would have had to explain to a delivery driver. Then I put on the black dress I wear to funerals and to leaving drinks, looked in the mirror, and understood that I had dressed to be taken seriously by people whose standards I had entirely invented.

In the end I wore jeans and a jumper, because they were what I would have worn to go anywhere else, and I had run out of time to be a different woman.

Half the room was in jeans. Not most of it, and not none of it. Half.

There were people in extraordinary things, latex and boots and a man in a leather kilt who was having a long conversation about parking, and there were people who looked like they had come from Sainsbury's, because they had. I stood inside the door for a moment with my ordinary clothes on and felt the specific deflation of arriving somewhere and finding nobody had been waiting to judge the entrance.

Here is what nobody had prepared me for, and it is the only thing I would tell anybody who asked. It was boring to get in.

A trestle table. A woman with a cash tin and a roll of paper wristbands, the same ones they use at festivals.

A laminated sheet of rules that I read twice out of nerves and would have skimmed anywhere else. Somebody's coat sliding slowly off the back of a chair, and nobody picking it up. A man to my left eating a sausage roll out of a paper bag, holding it away from himself so the flakes went on the floor rather than on what he was wearing, which was a great deal of leather.

I had spent three weeks imagining a threshold. What I got was a queue of four people and a card machine that was playing up.

The arch was long and cold and full of stalls, and it smelled of new leather and, faintly, of the railway. Trains went over about every ninety seconds and everybody carried on talking through it in the way Londoners do.

There was a man selling canes, in a bin like umbrellas and racked along the back of his stall by length. When I stopped he did not look at me in any particular way at all. He asked what I was after. I said I did not know, which was true, and he said right, and picked one up.

Then he talked to me about rattan for eleven minutes.

Why the nodes matter and why you want them spaced rather than clustered. What happens to a cane left in a hot car. How the weight is not in the thickness so much as the density, and how you can feel the difference between two that measure the same by rolling them on the table, which he did, twice, while I watched.

Then he asked whether I wanted something that would mark or something that would sting and go, and I heard myself answer, out loud, in daylight, to a man I had known for four minutes, in a normal tone of voice.

I had been thinking about that object privately since 1998. I had never once said a word about it to a living person. And here it was, being discussed like a saucepan, with a man who wanted to make sure I did not overpay for something that would not suit me.

I did not buy one. He said that was sensible, that they last for years and there was no rush, and gave me a card with nothing on it but a name and an email address.

A few stalls down a woman was selling leather. She was maybe sixty, with reading glasses on a chain, and she was tidying a tray while she talked.

She did not ask me anything about myself. That was the whole of it, and I have thought about it a lot since. She did not ask whether I was new, or who I was with, or what I was into, all of which I had braced for and had answers ready for that would have sounded like a woman reading from a card. She asked whether my hands were big or small.

Then she handed me a short strap, doubled, about the length of my forearm, and told me to hold it properly rather than politely, and adjusted my grip with two fingers, the way you would show somebody how to hold a tennis racket.

It was heavier than I expected. Everything was heavier than I expected.

There was a workshop at the back at three. I sat in the last row of chairs with my coat still on and my bag on my knees, which is the international posture of a woman who has decided in advance that she may need to leave.

I did not speak. Nobody made me. A woman near the front asked a long question about her shoulder and got a practical answer involving a cushion, and I wrote nothing down and remembered all of it.

Somewhere around four o'clock I was standing between two stalls, holding a paper cup of tea, and I realised I was bored.

Not uncomfortable. Not overwhelmed. Bored, in the ordinary way you are bored at a craft fair or a garden centre when you have seen the good bit and your feet have started to hurt. Somebody behind me was complaining about the Northern line. A couple were disagreeing, mildly, about whether they had already bought one of those.

I want to be careful about how much weight I put on this, because it sounds like nothing. It was the most reassuring thing that has ever happened to me on this subject.

Boredom is what ordinary places feel like. You cannot be bored in a place you think is dangerous, or shameful, or a threshold. Twenty-five years of treating this as a locked room in my own house, and it turned out to be a cold arch under a railway line where a man was worried about his card machine.

I went back to the woman with the reading glasses and bought the strap. It cost less than a bottle of wine I would not think twice about. She wrapped it in tissue paper without being asked and put it in a plain paper bag with handles, and said, mind how you go.

On the train I kept both hands on the bag, and then made myself stop, because a woman clutching a paper bag invites a question and nobody in that carriage cared at all. Somebody was eating crisps. A man in a suit was asleep across two seats.

It is on the kitchen table as I write this, still in the tissue paper.

I have told nobody. Not my husband, who is upstairs, not the friend I nearly told in June. Nothing has happened and nothing is arranged, and by any sensible measure I am where I was on Friday, minus nine pounds and an afternoon.

But it exists now, in a way it did not before. Not the wanting, which has always existed and has never needed my permission. The room. There is a room, with a cash tin and a laminated sheet and a man eating a sausage roll, and it is forty minutes from here, and it happens again next month, and I could walk into it on a Sunday afternoon in my ordinary clothes and nobody would look up.

I keep thinking about that and finding it hard to sit still.