The Last Train

Music:

Ravel: Pavane pour une infante défunte  Pavane for a dead princess  

(played at the piano by the composer) 

Content Warning:

Strong language, mental illness theme, xenophobia

Transcript

The Last Train

“Excuse me,” said the Ukrainian man. “This goes to London?” 

            In his strong Slavic accent, he pronounced these last four words with an exaggeratedly questioning intonation, gesturing to the train which had just come to a standstill beside the long, bleak platform, the nose of which pressed tight against the station buffers.

            “No, Colchester,” the Englishman answered. 

            “This is Colchester,” the Ukrainian stated.   

            “This is Colchester Town. Colchester North is a different station.”

            The Ukrainian man seemed puzzled, panicked. His eyes mustered a look of superlative desperation. In his voice, he mustered the vocal equivalent of the desperation in his eyes:

            “London, please. Which is train to London, please?” 

            The Englishman decorously took out his phone from his coat pocket. He was wearing a duffel coat of deep blue, with big, baggy pockets beginning just above his waist. 

            “I’ll look it up for you,” the Englishman said, though he knew that the last train to London had already departed. “I have the app.”

            The Englishman knew that his phone, a fairly recent Samsung Galaxy model, was low on charge but the three percent in the top right hand corner of the screen still came as a surprise to him, a surprisingly slight remainder. The battery sign showed an emptied power supply, nothing left but a trickle of final, nearly dwindled red. Looking up the train times for this Ukrainian man would almost certainly cost him a percent or two. He shouldn’t have offered but he didn’t regret offering, though he knew he needed power in his phone in order to show his digital 16-25 railcard to the ticket inspector.       

            Genuine relief flooded the Ukrainian’s face. In general, people wanted him to go away; as soon as they heard his accent, his confused questions, (where, which way), they wanted him to go away. But the Englishman was showing him kindness and there was a look of genuine gratitude in his eyes. If the Englishman hadn’t been so preoccupied with other matters, he might have felt moved at seeing such relief and gratitude flood a human face, at being the cause of such an inundation.

            “Thank you, sir,” the Ukrainian said.  

            The husky Welsh woman- thirty four?- who had been wandering the station aimlessly, was suddenly drawn to the two men. The synthetic light of the Englishman’s phone-screen was like a candle of kindness, a beacon of goodness in the cruel dark of nearly eleven o’clock. The moon was huge. Huge and useless. She was sure she had missed the last train but the voices of the Englishman and the Ukrainian inspired a new thrill of hope. Otherwise, she would have to seduce a man into taking her home. She had, in the past, bartered for shelter using the grubby and unscientific tool of her sexuality but she was loath to do so again.

“’Scuse me, when’s the London train?” she said. The Englishman nearly winced at the husk which clothed her vowels, like invisible fur.  

“Eleven o’clock,” the Englishman began, relating to the Ukrainian and the Welsh woman what the Greater Anglia app had just told him. “…But you’ve got to change at…oh, actually, hang on…oh no…” It dawned on him that the Welsh woman and the Ukrainian had missed the last train. The Welsh woman had already known this, to some extent. To the Ukrainian this was bad news, bad bad news.

            The Ukrainian peeled away, hoping that the Englishman was wrong. The lazy guard, leaning languidly against the side of the train, confirmed what the Englishman had told him.

            “Where am I gonna stay?” the Ukrainian rhetorically questioned.  

            “I dunno, mate, I don’t live in Colchester.”

            “What am I gonna do? Where this going?”

            “This train goes to Colchester North but it don’t leave the station until eleven o’clock.”

            “And when is last train from North Colchester?”

            “Three minutes past, mate. But this service won’t get you there in time. I can’t get round there in two minutes, know what I mean?.”

            “Is there taxi?”

“There’s a taxi rank round the corner. If you go now…” the guard looked at his watch. “If there’s one waiting there and you go right now then you might make it…but…no, I don’t think there’s enough time, mate.”

“Thank you anyway,” the Ukrainian man said sadly.  

            The Englishman enjoyed listening to the sound of the guard’s gently impatient courtesy. 

The Ukrainian man was quite a young man but he looked old for his age. His beard was thick and black, his grey-green eyes were weary, and his skin was bad and unhealthy-looking.

            The Welsh woman, husky with cigarettes and alcohol and possibly other things as well, was intoxicated but not greatly incapacitated. She was dressed in black, from top to toe. Her curly hair was jet black, she wore a black leather jacket studded in patches with little, conical, silver spikes, and had on a knee-length skirt of black denim, black nylon tights, and clumpy black shoes. She was anxiously striding the length of the platform, up and down, up and down. She had a genuine desperation about her. 

            The Ukrainian was dressed unremarkably: an olive-green macintosh which wasn’t zipped up, jeans of a very pale denim, a pair of Converse sneakers. A set of aviator sunglasses hung from the V of the collarless shirt he wore underneath his coat. His hair looked like it had been cut and styled quite recently. The back and sides were closely shaved but he still had a mop of thick hair on top.

            The big church beyond the station carpark had been open late for a concert. The concert had concluded nearly an hour ago. The church went suddenly dark as the lights were switched off. Since nightfall, the windows had thrown a steady glow onto the ruined abbey before it.

            The Englishman stood watching the scene. His face was expressionless, it didn’t betray any of what he was thinking as he followed the Welsh woman and the Ukrainian man with his eyes. His mind was full of thoughts: he was thinking of so many things, his mind felt impossibly full. 

            The Englishman was waiting for the last train to Wivenhoe- a village only an eight minute journey away. The battery life in his phone dropped to one percent.

            “Oh dear” he said aloud, as the phone shut wearily down.

            It was two minutes to eleven. 

            The Welsh woman, who had been strutting and tutting with what she saw as an injustice, (that there were no trains after eleven), at last sank down onto a bench and began to cry. She put her head in her hands and compacted herself into a black ball of grief. From this bundle, on the penultimate metal bench before the platform ended, a muffled sobbing was released into the night. At the other end of the platform, the Ukrainian man paced back and forth, exiting and re-entering the station. He began to curse loudly, in English and Ukrainian. Sooka! the Englishman heard him exclaim, followed by eight or so intervening seconds of tortured contemplation. Then: Fuck! The Welsh woman boohooed, the Ukrainian spat his bilingual expletives at the floor. The Englishman found himself in between these two beings. He suddenly found that he could act as a bridge between them, a uniting source of warmth, of hope.  

            It struck eleven. From the town centre, the deep-voiced bell of Moot Hall proclaimed this hour. They were interminable: those eleven rings- after the full “o’clock” flourish. In concert, the automatic doors of the train in the station sounded out the warning that they were about to close. The OPEN disc- positioned at the edge of the right hand door of each pair so that it looked central when the doors came together- flashed red. The doors all shut with perfect simultaneity. There was then a low clunk, the first seconds of slow, silent movement, and then a whining crescendo as the train withdrew from the buffers and gradually gathered speed, leaving the station. There was only one line of track. The departing train revealed it, coach by coach, by which time it was speeding off into the darkness. The cab lights, like a pair of spectral eyes, were pulled further and further away. The train horn sounded briefly, in an almost ironic toot that meant Goodbye. The cars all rounded a bend until, at last, there was no visual trace of the train. The carriage wheels continued to thunder and the rails continued to hiss. These sounds quickly diminished, leaving an eerie, nocturnal quietness in their place.

            The Englishman spoke first to the Ukrainian man.

            “You’ve missed the last train, I’m afraid, sir. And there isn’t the time to drive to another station. Your only other options are to sit on a bench and wait for the first train tomorrow, to stay overnight in a hotel or hostel, or to travel to London by taxi. But…if you like, I can offer you a place to stay. You can stay in my house and catch the first train tomorrow morning from Wivenhoe. It’s two stops down the line.”

            The Ukrainian couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing.

            He made an incredulous reply:

“You joking?”      

            “No, not at all. I have plenty of space in my house. I can see you’re in a bit of a bind and it would be a pleasure to help you out.”

            The Ukrainian man didn’t understand every word of the Englishman’s last statement but he understood enough to realise that he was extremely fortunate to have crossed paths with him. He was on the verge of tears.

            “You are sure? You are sure is okay?”

            He wasn’t used to being shown this kind of kindness. More often, he repelled people. At his accent, at his approximate English, people so often recoiled and made him feel repellent. The Englishman had a deadpan affect and deader eyes. But, as his actions made apparent, he wanted to be a friend to this Ukrainian man. 

            “Absolutely,” he assured. “Please, join me.”

            “Thank you, sir. Thank you, sir. Thank you, sir…”

            “I’m going to ask that lady over there if she’d like to come with us…”

            “She is prostitute, yes?” the Ukrainian said with a smile. 

            The Englishman was slightly taken aback. 

“No, I don’t think so.”

They went to the Welsh woman and the Englishman made his offer to her.

She was initially hesitant, but after just a few more words of persuasion she accepted, delighted that it was here and on this night that she had missed the last train to London. Her voice, full of gratitude, shook a little. She wept briefly: ugly, husky sobs.

The last train, (the last train headed in the opposite direction to London), pulled into the station three minutes ahead of schedule. The new trio got onto the train and sat in a section of seating formed of four seats, two pairs facing each other. A swaying drunk, headed for the purple, semi-cylindrical door of the on-train toilets, passed them quickly. When he found the toilets occupied he kicked the panel to the left of the locked door and cursed unintelligibly.

The Welsh lady and the Ukrainian man were awkward around each other. She was fairly weary and suspicious, not best pleased at the prospect of sleeping in the same building as him. He emitted a somewhat predatory vibe; he was sitting just a little too close to her.

“Hello,” the Ukrainian man said to her, warmly.

“Hello,” she answered, coolly.

“Do you want to know what is my name?”

“No.”

“Do you want to know why I am in UK?”

“Not really.”

The ticket inspector emerged immediately from the nearest staff-only door. Immediately the Englishman clocked the red jerkin and the purposeful walk. The ticket inspector was very tall and bald and pale- he was an albino or very near. He strode briskly down the narrow aisle. 

“Tickets please,” he requested.

The Welsh woman and the Ukrainian man had no tickets. They purchased them from the ticket officer. 

The Englishman showed his return ticket to the ticket officer and the ticket officer asked to see his railcard.

“My phone’s run out,” the Englishman said.

“Give it a try. Press the On button.”

“I assure you it’s run out.”

“Just try it.”

The Englishman did so. As he had assured, the screen remained dark. There was no hint of life in the phone. It sat in the Englishman’s hand, like a dried-up fish or poisoned rodent, a dead thing. There was a long diagonal crack in the screen.

“I’m afraid, in the absence of supporting documentation, I’m going to have to issue you with a penalty fare.”

“Can’t I repurchase a ticket without the railcard?” the Englishman asked.

“You can but the penalty will still stand.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s an offence, I’m afraid. Fraud.”

“My phone ran out of juice, it could happen to anyone. Are you saying you don’t believe me?” There was not a hint of desperation in the voice of the Englishman: he fought calmly, clinically, with logic and nothing else.

“It doesn’t matter what I believe.”

“It seems a bit unreasonable,” the Welsh woman interjected.

“He looks up train for us on phone,” the Ukrainian hazarded. “Phone work then…” he made a noise to signify death, expiry. “He is helpful man.”

“Sorry,” the ticket officer said.

“Que sera sera,” the Englishman said. His calmness was amazing.     

“I’ll need some details,” the ticket-man said. “You don’t look between 16 and 25, by the way.”

“I’m twenty three,” the Englishman said.

Everyone seemed surprised. He looked closer to thirty, maybe thirty-two, thirty-five even. 

The ticket inspector took some details and handed the Englishman a big orange piece of paper, what looked like a giant ticket, bearing the penalty notice.

The ticket inspector moved on. 

“Wanker,” the Welsh woman said.

“Fucking piece shit,” the Ukrainian said.

“No, no,” the Englishman said. “Not at all.”

Scarcely a minute more went by before they arrived in Wivenhoe. The great moon lay doubled in the flooded marshes: breezes gently blurred the watery twin.  

The automated voice announced the approach. Then the train slowed to a gradual stop, the doors bleeped and opened, the Welsh woman and the Ukrainian and the Englishman all disembarked, the train doors beeped wildly, they then shut in unison, and the train left the station, revealing a mostly bare platform, a dormant ticket office, a blank arrivals screen.

“Follow me,” the Englishman said.

He led them over a footbridge, up a long row of terraced houses, up a completely featureless street, up another line of terraced houses, and up a further, much more sparsely propertied street. Eventually they came to a forbidding cul-de-sac, with a detached house at the end of it and two semi-detached houses off to the side. Left of the detached property stood a bare sycamore tree, lauding its height over a little maroon car. Beside the carless semi-detached houses, there was a cone-shaped tree of some coniferous species. There was not a single light on inside any of the three addresses.

The detached house was the one belonging to the Englishman.

“Round the back,” he said. “I left the back door open.”

They went round the back. Round the side of the house there were stacks of wood tied up with rope, and much smaller bundles tied with string, hanging from the wooden door to a kind of concrete passageway. The Englishman and his two guests ventured through this tube of darkness; at the other end, the night sky and the faint stars and the huge moon were all visible through an opening framed in leaves and creepers. There were old, broken-down appliances, a few abandoned- or retired-looking bicycles and go karts, various empty glass bottles- some smashed, some intact, vessels of both alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks. The Welsh woman wondered why the Englishman had been using the train if he had a car.

They came to a back garden, a patio with some steps which led down to a featureless lawn and thick trees which formed a general impenetrable darkness. Directly to the left, as they exited the passage, they noticed a trellis and a wooden grid heaped with flowing vines. The wood was buckling slightly beneath the weight of what it was upholding. Hanging by their little brittle necks from the vine-beams, beneath the leaf-obscured night sky, there were pagan dollies, twirling cruciform figures formed from sticks and straw. As they hung, these lifeless dollies performed a kind of static copulation with the darkness; (or the darkness performed it on them). The Ukrainian man and the Welsh woman did not comment on any of the peculiarities they observed. To call out anything as strange or unsettling seemed somehow rude, inappropriate.   

Without a key, the Englishman let them into a very ordinary kitchen. It was visibly stocked with all the normal sorts of things that British people consume. Good, healthy quantities of pasta, tea bags, coffee beans, bread, jams, preserves, cereal, raisons, beans, tins of soup, spice rack, fruit bowl. Lying around were the hemispheres of onions, bulbs of garlic. In one place, there was a set of well-polished analogue scales: the metal bowl was loaded with big King Edward or perhaps Maris Piper potatoes. The only major oddity was an empty methuselah of champagne. The huge, oversized bottle stood, uncorked, on a counter in a corner. It was relieved of liquid- though this fact was not immediately obvious through the dark green glass. The thumb-sized butt of a cigar, extinguished long ago, lay at the base of the bottle. 

“My father drank that on his wedding anniversary,” the Englishman explained.  

“Which one?” the Welsh woman asked.

“I can’t remember,” the Englishman replied.  

The Englishman went in front and his invited guests both followed. They went through the cramped kitchen and into the living-room, (which was in two parts, divided by a door and wall). 

The Ukrainian man, surveying the interior with interest, seemed impressed.

“This your house? You buy this house?” he enquired.

The Welsh woman sat on a sofa in the half of the living room nearest to the front of the house. She looked awkward and uncomfortable, her expression said something like: I shouldn’t have come. But she had only to ponder the fact that she had missed the last train to London and had no place to sleep for this doubtfulness to quickly dissipate and disappear entirely. She was, she reminded herself, the beneficiary of an uncommon benevolence. 

            The Englishman nodded, silently answering the Ukrainian’s question. 

            “You twenty-sree years and you have house like this. What your profession?”

            The Englishman didn’t seem comfortable with the question and changed the subject:

            “Rules. No smoking in the house. If you want to smoke, please go outside. No drugs. If you want to take drugs, please leave altogether. Do not go upstairs. If you need the toilet, use the downstairs toilet. Do not go upstairs for any reason. There is no good reason for you to go upstairs. Lastly, please be ready to leave by six o’clock in the morning. You must be gone by six o’clock in the morning. Is that all clear?”

            The guests nodded.

            The Welsh woman was beginning to get a headache. She envisaged the perfect nightcap, the double shot that might briefly soothe the ache, that might prove soporific. A glass of warmed brandy or whisky and then sleep. She was tempted to ask the Englishman if he had anything to drink.

            “I’ll go and get some bedding,” the Englishman said. “There’s water in the kitchen, there’s milk, tea. There’s herbal, there’s decaf. There’s cups in the cupboard opposite the sink.”

            The Welsh woman thanked her host quietly. The Ukrainian man nodded.

            The Welsh woman felt slightly worried by the Ukrainian man, she didn’t like being left alone with him. They had been acquainted barely twenty minutes. Now they each found themselves in this uncomfortably intimate, domestic situation. Briefly, she yearned for the open-air distance, the disconnection and detachment of being on the railway platform. Tea, tea, yes: the Welsh woman approached the kettle. Russell Hobbs: white plastic.

            The Ukrainian man was perusing the spines of the books in the bookcase. 

            The Welsh woman opened the door to one of the lower cupboards, determining it to be the kind of place where one keeps bottles of booze, counting on a furtive swig. But inside she found nothing like that. Tea would have to do. She boiled the kettle. 

            Perhaps it was just lazy prejudice rather than an authentic instinct, but she felt quite certain that the Ukrainian was going to steal from the house. She hoped he would steal something, or at least attempt to: mostly so that should the desire to steal something creep up on her then she wouldn’t feel too bad about doing it. He was asking for trouble, this strange, generous Englishman. He had invited trouble into his house.

            The water in the kettle reached boiling point with a click. She had difficulty locating the tea bags at first. But she found them soon enough, in a tin- in what she felt was a biscuit tin- with Van Gogh’s Starry Night printed on it. That night unlike any other night in the history of the universe; that night witnessed by no-one but Van Gogh. She examined the tin a little more closely. She looked beneath the lid, she looked at the base of the tin. National Gallery. She imagined the pleasant, sweaty, interesting but ultimately unfulfilling trip on which the tin had been acquired: an imperfect memento of an imperfect day. But beautiful, beautiful in its imperfectness, in how relatable she found the imperfectness, the near-bathos it suggested. She felt able to understand how purely functional the tin had become, how shorn of significance or resonance until seen and handled by a stranger.          

            She sat down at the breakfast bar, on a stool. The height of the seat was unexpectedly vertigo-inducing. She sipped her tea. The heat of the tea gave a satisfaction akin to that of alcohol. 

            The Ukrainian promptly appeared. He looked a bit lost, suddenly insecure, as he explored the tea-making area. It evidently wasn’t a setup he recognised. He settled for a glass of milk, locating the milk-carton in the fridge and pouring generously into an Aston Villa F.C cup. He gave the Welsh woman a peculiar look as he took his first big gulp of the milk and produced a loud exhalation of pleasure.   

            Surely, under the circumstances, he’s not going to…try anything on, the Welsh woman thought.

            It was strange that the three of them, the Englishman, the Ukrainian man, and the Welsh woman, all remained nameless, each to each. It seemed right to maintain a sense of iciness, to keep the temperature cold. Personal details, such as names, often have a thawing effect. 

            The Englishman reappeared with a blanket, a duvet, and a pillow, bundled under the crook of his right arm. In his left hand, he grasped a soft, blue cylinder- what was clearly a sleeping bag.

            He prepared two sleeping areas. Though his face was precociously aged, he was slight and strange and quite childlike in some ways. Yet, as he fashioned a bed in the back part of the living room and unrolled the sleeping back in the front part of the living room, he took on an intensely parental quality, like he was overseeing the bedtime of two small children, as though he were putting to bed two tired infants. He seemed to the Welsh woman to be earnestly enacting something, with solemnity and longing.    

            “What were those…things, those…erm…” she was about to say Puppets. “Those…dollies…those wooden figures, outside in the garden?” The husk on her voice had been slightly softened by hydrating tea. 

            “Just some wooden boys and girls I made. I make things,” the Englishman answered.

            He had a way of putting an end to any dialogue, a way of being expertly conclusive. The Welsh woman felt as though she couldn’t ask him any more than that.

            She wanted to lie down. 

            Something about being tightly cocooned in fabric immensely appealed to her. 

“Can I have the sleeping bag?” she enquired, hopefully. 

The Englishman nodded. The Welsh woman removed her leather jacket and her shoes. She would have liked to remove more but didn’t feel comfortable doing so.  

The Englishman showed the Ukrainian man to his makeshift sleeping quarters.

“The lady’s in the bag. You’re here,” the Englishman said.

“You have vodka?” the Ukrainian asked.

“Sorry?”

“Vodka? You have?”

“No. Sorry. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.”

The lights went off and, for a few hours, the night intervened with its peace, dropping silence and stillness upon all three parties and the house.

It was deep into the night when the Welsh woman woke. In desperate need of the toilet, she looked for the downstairs lavatory the Englishman had mentioned, having forbidden them to go upstairs. She felt disorientated and perplexed in the darkness. The unfamiliarity of the property gave a somnambulistic quality to her struggles and she felt half-convinced that at any moment she was going to wake up and find the whole situation revealed as a dark, drunken imagining, a meander around some subconscious stratum of her mind. She had never missed the last train, she had never encountered the Ukrainian and the Englishman. She was home, she was where she wanted to be, she was safe. She had never even accepted Elena’s gig-and-after party invitation.

            Not so. She was already hungover as hell: her head aching horribly, and she was in desperate need of a piss- and potentially more than a piss. She went back and forth, she went into the Ukrainian’s half of the sitting room- he was fast asleep, snoring nearly noiselessly- she was growing more frantic and fearful. Finally, cursing this unlocatable downstairs toilet, she went upstairs. 

            In the near-total darkness, she tightly gripped a wooden stair-rail. Her feet seemed to know these stairs, her feet had no trouble navigating their rising zigzag. As she approached the landing of this upper storey, she became aware of a low level of light coming from somewhere, perhaps through the gap under a shut door. A section of a banister became apparent, a wooded lattice, vertical bars like those of a prison window. She clambered up onto the landing and faced a short corridor, with several identical doors. 

            She tentatively, very tentatively, tried a few of the doors and soon found one which opened onto a bathroom. She couldn’t find a light-switch in the bathroom and so used the toilet in the near darkness which was quite difficult but not as difficult as she had first feared. 

            She flushed and winced at the loudness of the flush.

            She exited the bathroom and found a shadowy figure waiting for her on the landing. The figure was male but child-like, boyish looking. Almost adult-sized: not big but not quite small enough to be a child. She couldn’t make out any facial features, the colour of the hair, the design of what appeared to be short-sleeved and knee-length pyjamas. She could discern a big mop of unruly, uncut hair. 

            “Hello,” she said, uncertainly, offering her timorous greeting to the void. 

            The big child froze and then rushed left, panicked. He hurried past the banister and went like a shot into one of the upstairs rooms, shutting the door behind him. 

            So there were others in the house. Why had the Englishman kept this from her, and from the Ukrainian?

            She felt suddenly, unbearably, overcome by a sense of menace and trepidation. She wondered if she should leave immediately, find her way back to the village station, wait on a bench for the sun to rise and for the first train of the day to pull in…

            No, she should stay. She should take advantage of the shelter she had been offered. The night would be long and dreary. She should stay, for sure.

            She went to the kitchen for a glass of water.

            That’s when she observed a lantern-like source of light at the bottom of the garden. She noticed it through the pane of glass in the back kitchen door. This light burned brightly through the thick, rustling trees. She opened the door, stepped onto the patio. The patio slabs were dreadfully cold, they sent a sharp pang of cold up through her unshod feet, through the nylon of her tights. A solitary owl hooted a few times. Each lonely monosyllable somehow surpassed in volume the loudly blowing breeze. A great snakelike hiss was general, all around. She felt surrounded, cordoned on all sides, by angry nocturnal forces.

            The fire-like light at the bottom of the garden began to seem to her like a radiance from another world, like a good, beckoning spectre calling her forward. She approached the trees that stood between her and the light. She put her face to the trees, she peeped through the liquid and insubstantial curtain they formed. 

            Beyond these trees, the garden sloped gently down. At the bottom of the slope, was a small cabin. There was someone in the cabin. The Englishman. Her host! Yes, she could definitely see the Englishman in the lighted window. He was seated, facing the window, facing the darkness. He was speaking into something, into what looked like, and was, a microphone with a pop-guard. His mouth was moving quickly, in fast, fluent, passionate motions. It was the strangest sight she had ever seen; so strange that it did not enter her memory perfectly preserved. Any attempt to recall what she had witnessed would prove invariably erring, and insubstantial- as though it had only ever been imaginary.   

            The Welsh woman felt like an intruder upon some privacy, some private ritual. She was naturally unsettled by all of this. She retreated to the house, briskly and abashedly, and drank what water she had drawn for herself. 

            She returned herself to her bag. She half-slept; she voyaged, languorously, in and out of unconsciousness. She fell into total slumber shortly after four in the morning, which wasn’t good news since she had failed to set an alarm. To wake before six, she would probably have to be roused externally.

She was, at three minutes past seven in the morning, by a hand on her forehead. Her greasy dark hair lay in unruly tangles. She stirred with reluctant languor, and become immediately aware of the yellow morning light glowing softly in uncurtained windows, and of two unfamiliar figures, a middle-aged man and a middle-aged woman, standing over her. The downstairs of the house was tinged with the musk of sleepers, of night sweat.

            “Wake up,” the woman encouraged, in a voice that was not quite a whisper.

            The Welsh woman was confused.

            “Who are you?” she groaned, her huskiness worse than ever.

            “This is our house.”

            The Welsh woman, whose name was Laura Glynn, took in the faces and features of the two strangers towering over her. The woman was short and short-haired. She had an old, weathered face, forehead wrinkles, crow’s feet which the least smile discovered. Her eyes exuded a melancholic friendliness. She wore an ankle-length dressing gown of raspberry red and brown slippers that looked far too big for her feet. The man was more severe-looking, he was very tall and broad-shouldered, with a hairy chest. He was nearly bald and wore an orange towel-robe with no slippers. 

            Laura felt awfully hungover. Her head was pounding, she had a vile taste in her mouth, and nausea was not far off. She felt exposed and vulnerable, and quite suddenly tasked with the onus to defend herself, to repudiate any wrong-doing. But no such repudiation was ever demanded of her. The middle-aged couple standing over her seemed eerily, sadly calm. Sort of resigned. They recognised the situation at their feet. 

            “Where’s…I’m sorry he never gave us his name…he said he owned the house…we missed the last train and…”

            “It’s alright,” the female of the two spouses said, in a genteel sort of voice. Her partner said nothing. “This is our house. It was our son that you met. He isn’t well. We’ll be taking steps to address what’s gone wrong. Tom has bipolar disorder and autism. When he comes off his medication, he adopts an erratic sleep schedule and starts to engage in bizarre behaviour. He has done this a few times before- it’s one of his signature manic acts.”

“Done what before?” Laura asked.

 “Well, the same as what happened to you. Collected people from train stations, people who have missed the last London train at Colchester and brought them here. From their point of view it’s an attractive proposition.”

“Where’s the other guy?”

“Hm?”

“There was a…an Eastern European chap, Polish or Russian or Latvian or something…he stayed the night as well.”

The husband spoke at last, in an accent as genteel as his wife’s:

“We didn’t see anyone. He must have slipped out early, before we got up.”

“Did Tom do anything to hurt you?” the wife interjected.

Laura was made inarticulate by the strangeness of the situation. She could make no sense of this paradox: that she was somehow a recipient of both generosity and abuse, a beneficiary of citizenly conduct and a victim of some sort of crime.

            She felt sorry for these people. And for the one she now knew as Tom she felt an unbearable, sorrowful pity. It compelled her to respond to his mother’s question:

            “No. He did absolutely nothing to hurt me. He offered me shelter and a place to sleep when I had nowhere to go. I had a very restful, pleasant night. Whatever his motivation, I felt and I still feel very grateful to him for what he did.” She yawned widely and put her face in her hands. “Sorry, I’m a bit hungover. Let me get out of your hair.”

            She didn’t ask why Tom’s parents hadn’t been up when they got home, why, if he had a history of doing things like this, they weren’t primed to deal with it, to catch and stop him in the act. Presumably they didn’t know that he was out, or they didn’t know that he had discontinued his medications, didn’t how much trouble he was in, or maybe they just made a mistake being old, weary, jaded, temporarily naïve. In any case, it was none of her business. 

            “Where is he now?” Laura asked.

            “Fast asleep in his study down the bottom of the garden,” Tom’s father answered.

            Laura exited the sleeping bag, put on her outer layers, gathered up her possessions, and left the house. The last thing she saw was Tom’s big blue-black duffel coat, hanging prominently from the coat-rack, the coat he had been wearing when he brought her to this place. She was apologetic, but the couple assured her she had nothing to apologise for. She wanted to tell them how sorry she was for their suffering, for the suffering she saw so clearly in their faces. But there wasn’t enough time.  

They shut the door behind her, a door which she now saw was green. A strange euphoria came of the closing door, an unexpected burst of exhilaration. Perhaps it was freedom, relief that nothing awful had happened, that she was free to enjoy this new day. Perhaps it was relief that there were logical explanations available for all the oddity she had observed at those nocturnal hours.       

            The front of the house looked very different in daylight. The tweets of many unglimpsed birds showered down upon the drive, upon the maroon car. Laura trudged the short length of gravel path and left the cul-de-sac. She came out onto the street, looking urban and out of place against the order and quietness. An old, shawled woman walking a West Highland terrier paced past her and pressed a hard, inexplicably disapproving look upon her. She got out her phone, enabled Data, and loaded Maps. She obtained directions between her present position and the station. Six minutes. Nought point two miles. She faithfully followed the blue line which showed on the digital map. 

            The Ukrainian man, who was more used to unfamiliarity and chaos and strangers’ houses than Laura, had slept like a baby that night. He’d risen at ten to six, found his way to the station, and taken the first train towards London. He had left the situation before he had had the opportunity to become aware of its peculiarity. He had departed the situation with a radically incorrect notion of the scene he had been a part of. He had slept in a house in which he had not technically been given permission to sleep. He had departed “none the wiser”, as the saying goes. Still, it wasn’t such a bad misapprehension: that the English were, on occasion, unnaturally hospitable.

            Laura walked, following the map on the screen of her phone, showered in the sickly glory of the seven AM sunlight. She felt darkly happy; upbeat but not quite guiltless. Something continued to bug her, to nag at her, to give her no peace.  

            That large child, or childlike man, that she had glimpsed in the night, who had fled in surprise as soon as he saw her on the landing, continued to amble about in some dark annexe of conscious memory. She did not deliberately think of him; she couldn’t be sure that he had not been imaginary, that he had not been created by fevered, fearful imaginings. But, once she was seated on the right platform, awaiting the next London train, the image of this child suddenly assailed her mind and she could not think of anything but him. She began to fear that something was terribly wrong, that that nice couple and their troubled son were gripped by some dooming spectre she should have warned them about. (Something that she was privileged to observe? No, surely not). Or perhaps the couple had two sons; perhaps it was a shy, unsuspecting younger brother that she had encountered, a brother they had failed to mention. She should have asked: should she have asked? In either case, having failed to ask, it would have to remain a mystery. The rails began to whirr and a hiss shortly followed. It would cause her disquiet for years to come: that she could not say that she had not seen a ghost. 

            The train arrived and Laura boarded it. She suddenly panicked about Peak and Off-Peak trains. She could not recall what day it was. The ticket inspector appeared, different to the night before, but she found she hardly cared. She had other things on her mind. That she should drink less, for one. 

The Lawrences- Lawrence being their shared surname- sectioned their son, Tom, and he was taken away to a mental health treatment centre in an ambulance. He went quite willingly. He had extracted satisfaction of a kind from his nocturnal activities and could ask no more of the world for a time. He went quite willingly.          

            When all that was over and done with- though such things are never really over and done with- when they had taken down the wooden children from the vine, (since they found them disturbing), Mr. Lawrence walked down to the bottom of the garden. He walked very slowly and carefully. It looked from the house as though he were disappearing into a screen of trees. He went into the little cabin, (his son’s study), and opened up his laptop. His work table was clear of shavings or material. The saws and files were retired peacefully, their blades blissful and without hunger for the day ahead or soreness from the day before. Mr. Lawrence knew the password to his son’s laptop, the disclosure of which had been considered necessary for Tom’s continuing care. The sound-file had not been closed. All that Tom had recorded in the night lay there, blatant, a long jagged soundwave, like a long, peculiar cloud. It lay there, grey-blue against a white background, lined with bars like the bars of a prison window, like a view of the sky through prison bars. It wanted to be listened to. At least, Mr. Lawrence believed as much. He put on the headphones that were still connected to the computer, pressed play, and listened to what his son had captured in the night.