Arrival
The boy opened his eyes…
He had the distinct impression that he was surfacing from deep underwater, rising slowly to meet the rippling surface. At first, everything was blurred. He was aware only of sound and movement, his vision an uncertain fog of muddy colours. Then everything came sharply into focus.
He was on a train, he decided, which was odd, because he didn’t remember getting on a train or even having the intention of doing so. He looked slowly around, blinking like somebody who had just emerged from a deep sleep. Perhaps he had.
It was packed, this train – heaving with people, some standing in the aisle, others seated and
balancing heavy bags on their laps, perhaps because the proper luggage areas were too full. The boy realised that he was sitting at a table. Opposite him, an elderly couple, a man and a woman, were pulling on jackets as though preparing to leave. The boy stared at them helplessly. He didn’t know who they were,
he was pretty certain he’d never seen them before but he couldn’t even be sure of that, because…
He didn’t know who he was.
He didn’t know what he was doing on this train or where he was going or why he had got on it in the
first place. It dawned on him in a sudden rush of anxiety that he didn’t even know his own name.
He turned his head to look at the person sitting next to him, hoping it might be somebody he recognised, but it was a middle-aged man in a black suit who was pushing a laptop into an expensive-looking leather case, a man with the cold uncaring face of a stranger.
The elderly woman must have caught his look of confusion, because she smiled at him and said, ‘Are you all right, dear?’
He nodded, but didn’t know why he’d done that, because actually he wasn’t all right, he was scared
and confused and he was trying to piece things
together in his own mind, trying to remember what had brought him here, but it was like groping around in the mud at the bottom of a pond. There was only darkness in his recent past, a thick veil of sludge that he couldn’t seem to see through or get any kind of grip on.
‘Is somebody meeting you?’ asked the woman, clearly trying to be helpful and he could only shrug
and smile like an idiot, because he didn’t know if anybody was meeting him, he didn’t know anything. He thought about telling her that, but for some reason decided against it. He’d sound like an idiot, he decided. No, he needed to pull his thoughts together before he went speaking to people. He needed to get a grip.
As if to mirror his thoughts, the train slipped abruptly into shadow. He turned to look out of the window and saw that it was entering a grey stone tunnel. For an instant his reflection stared back at him from the glass. He saw a boy of about twelve
or thirteen years old, he thought, a boy with dark hair and a face he didn’t recognise. Then a voice came over the tannoy, a man’s voice speaking with what sounded like a Scottish accent.
‘We will shortly be arriving at Edinburgh Waverley where this train terminates. Will passengers please ensure they have all of their personal belongings before leaving the train?’
The voice seemed to act as a kind of goad. Suddenly everyone was up on their feet, pulling on coats,
heaving down bags from the luggage racks overhead. The boy looked up at the glass shelf immediately above him, wondering if one the bags stored there might be his, but as he watched, eager hands removed item after item, until there was nothing left.
And then the train emerged from darkness and slid slowly into the station and he saw a sign announcing that this was indeed, Edinburgh Waverley. The boy knew that Edinburgh was in Scotland, but as far as he was aware, he had never been here before and had no reason to be here now, because he lived in…
No.
Nothing. Another blank. This was beginning to feel really scary. His heart seemed to leap in his chest.
The train lurched to a stop, the doors pinged open and the exodus began, everybody seemingly intent on getting off the train as quickly as possible. The boy hung back, not wanting to be caught up in the frantic press of bodies. The elderly woman gave him one last concerned look, as though she might be thinking of asking him more questions, but her husband was clearly anxious to be on the move, one hand clutching her arm, his expression saying ‘don’t get involved,’
so after a moment’s hesitation, she followed him out into the aisle and off towards the doors. The boy sat there, staring out of the window at the heaving platform, thinking that he really ought to try and come up with some kind of plan, but nothing useful occurred to him and after a little while, there was just him sitting alone in the empty carriage. Then a uniformed man came along the aisle with a bin bag, picking up rubbish from the tables as he came. He paused and gave the boy an odd look.
‘You not getting off?’ he asked indignantly.
‘Er… yeah, sure.’ The boy got obediently to his feet and shuffled sideways into the aisle. He turned and headed for the nearest door. He came to a luggage rack and paused to see if anybody had left a bag
or a case behind, but it was empty. He frowned then, aware that the uniformed man was still looking at him, went out through the exit doors and onto the platform.
It was incredibly busy out there, people sweeping
to and fro, like a colony of ants all engaged in important business, most people dragging huge suitcases on wheels behind them. The boy joined the tail end of a long procession heading towards some exit gates and noticed, as the queue began to shorten, that people were displaying tickets to a man standing at some electronic barriers. He was using a plastic card to open and shut them, allowing only one or two people through at a time.
The boy knew enough to realise that he ought to
have some kind of ticket for travel, so he started rooting in the pockets of his jeans. He pulled out a handful
of coins from one pocket, a piece of folded paper from the other and a single metal key. The queue in front of him was rapidly shortening and the man at the
gate didn’t look the sympathetic sort, so the boy tried the pockets of the jacket he was wearing, a hooded khaki affair. He found various bits of detritus but nothing that resembled a railway ticket and now he saw
that he was next in line and he began to panic.
The man ahead of him went through the barrier and it snapped shut behind him. The guard turned his baleful gaze to the boy. He was a thickset man with cold blue eyes and a stubbled chin.
‘Ticket?’ he snapped.
The boy looked at him helplessly. ‘I don’t… I can’t… it’s…’
‘TICKET!’ growled the guard, looking irritably at the long queue forming behind the boy.
‘I haven’t… I can’t find…’ The boy couldn’t see any other way out of this. ‘I don’t know who I am!’ he said.
A strange expression came over the guard’s grumpy face. He looked weary, as though this was something that happened to him all the time. He rolled his eyes, shook his head, then waved his card in front of the barrier, making it slide magically open. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Get moving.’
‘But…’
‘NEXT!’ roared the guard and the boy jumped forward, galvanised by the urgency in the man’s voice. Then he was following other travellers across a flat stretch of tarmac and up a steep ramp to the open air.