Paul and Miriam get on the last train of the day to Southampton. No luggage apart from the suitcase and Miriam’s handbag. Paul is still in shorts and his racing top, a quilted jacket on top. Miriam is wearing a dress with tiny specks of Drago’s blood on it. She’s too breathless, too scared to talk. She imagines spies and grimy boys reporting back everywhere. Thanks to the drugs, Paul is much calmer. ‘We must have passed thousands of people giving us away on the way to the station, a whole army, a nation of snitches just waiting for their reward,’ she whispers to Paul.
She pulls the curtain of the compartment they’re in and leans back in her seat peeking out through the inch-wide gap. Her chest is rising and falling quickly. Her cheeks flushed. Her eyes are big and her hair is dishevelled. She’s nothing like her usual self.
Then they hear the first creak of the carriages. The whistle and the goodbyes shouted out through compartment windows. For the first time since getting on the train she looks over to Paul. He’s sleeping, childlike. An arm draped across his forehead. The blue panda marks on either side of his boxer’s nose now fainter.
She keeps an eye on the door to their compartment and her hand on the ivory gun inside her bag. It’s not until they have been on their way for almost two hours that she relaxes.
She prods Paul awake. Knows that he needs to drink and move for the drugs to leave his body. He doesn’t want to open his eyes, but she won’t let him sleep. She opens the windows, forces him to stand up, which he does with eyes closed. Forces him to move his limbs. Once he’s awake she tells him she’ll read for him. ‘For a change,’ she says.
‘That’s nice,’ he says and sits down again. Comes close to her.
‘I wrote this one in Coventry. When you were in the bath. Remember we had just had that fight,’ she says.
‘I do,’ Paul mumbles.
‘I was so afraid of losing you, but I didn’t know how to tell you.’ Miriam now puts her handbag on the floor, covers her gun with a scarf. ‘I did some thinking in that hotel room, and I decided I don’t want to be like my mother. She had a terrible life, but she let her circumstances shape her. I won’t let that happen to me. This is her one.’
Paul closes his eyes.
No. 50
I watched her become more thorn than rose
Cut off from all that blossoms and grows
I saw how her scars made her wither and die
Unable to love, unable to fly
The greatest promise I can make
Is this, I won’t make the same mistake
‘She had a man for a few years, Frank. He was nice to her. Nice to me and my brother, but she didn’t treat him right. Not because she didn’t want to, but because she couldn’t do it. She wasn’t very good with people after everything that happened to her.’
Paul opens his eyes.
‘I’m not leaving you Paul. I’m not like the people who came before me.’
He sits up straight and kisses her. She cries a little. Then he sits back and says, ‘It’s so nice to hear you read. It’s a shame we’ve not done it before.’
‘There’ll be plenty of time on the boat.’
‘The boat,’ Paul says. ‘America.’ Then he tells her about the time she brought him up on the roof of the Baths. Makes sure she remembers the towel she dropped and the dogs that ripped it apart. She laughs. He can tell she also remembers what happened once they went downstairs.
He brings out the box he meant to give her then. He has kept it behind a loose brick at Copenhagen Street and only remembered to pick it up before his last supper with Silas. The pendant, shaped like an eight, made from a link of bicycle chain, hangs beautifully around her neck.
As the train picks up speed thousands and thousands of chimneys, millions of lives, billions of coincidences pass by outside their carriage window.