Does he regard me with disdain? He wouldn’t if I had my uniform on! It is more imposing than his…if only I could console myself with Thomas Gray’s poem. When it’s drizzling and I am lonely and uniformed people confront me who’ve no idea of my history, I become…I was going to say I become like a kitten, but even kittens have claws to protect them….

Have I begun quivering? Does a drop hang off my nose?

“Is something the matter with you?” the ticket-seller asks with a lumpy eye.

“I suppose this station,” I say, “being open at all hours, gets its share of riff-raff. But you needn’t worry about me. I’m simply allergic to the noise here and I seem to have forgotten my medication….”

Sounds roar: trains arriving underground, defective fluorescent lights, the murmur of passengers snaking to escalators at the Toronto and Halifax platforms, a surround of crashing coffee-shop cutlery.

“I’ll improve once we get this ticket arranged so I might visit my…friend.”

It is untrue that seeing Madame Blanchard might make me less unhappy, but I tell him this anyway. He needs to know that I, like himself or like any normal person in this station, have a human connection with somebody.

He doesn’t respond.

“Do you imagine I have no fire in the hearth? No wife? No child waiting to climb on my knee and kiss his papa as soon as I return home?” These blessings come straight from Gray’s poem and belong to the self I abandoned the day I signed up to become a soldier. But this petty official needn’t know that.

“Sir, you are raising your voice.” His hat bears plastic buttons made to mimic metal. He fumbles for his phone and I back off, run outside to Saint Catherine Street and lean on a brick wall in tears, eavesdropping on those who pass: how is everyone so cheerful, with their umbrellas and steaming paper cups and chomped sandwich-ends?

—

AN AGONY OF CIVILIAN LIFE is the constant need to make small, inconsequential decisions—decisions whose stakes are far from high: goals whose attainment matters not in the least. Non-soldiers stand around nattering as if they care about what, for instance, they might eat tonight for supper. Will it be haddock and should the cook add mustard grains to the sauce, or will we instead simmer the bit of kidney left over from Wednesday in broth? One of the things I like about lunching at the Mission is that these decisions have been made for me. A supermarket has donated tins of Heinz beans and cases of Vienna sausage, so praise god, beans-and-sausage it’ll be.