32

Bodmin station is in the middle of some trees, with nothing but a car park anywhere near it. It’s a nice place because nothing seems to happen here apart from trains.

I arrive at half past nine and spot the ghost quickly among the cluster of annoyed passengers. At least I assume the man sitting cross-legged at the end of the platform with his eyes closed is the ghost.

I picture the blue of the sky. There it is: a glow all around him. I’d expected someone who looked a bit crusty from the way Lara described him. In my head he was a Swampy type. This man, however, is wearing a suit. He’s about thirty-five, of Asian appearance, and supremely calm, and he has the glow of the undead. I don’t like to approach him in case I scare him, so I just sit down cross-legged at a distance and wait for him to notice me. I can hear him humming.

‘Hi,’ I say, after waiting a few minutes. I don’t have all day after all.

His eyes snap open. ‘Hey,’ he says.

‘I’m Joe.’ Did Lara tell me his name? I can’t remember.

He jumps up. ‘Oh, what a treat. A new one. How did you find me?’ He holds out a hand and pulls me up.

‘Lara,’ I say. ‘I met her on the train to London.’

He puts out his hand. ‘Pleasure to meet you, Joe. I’m Bodmin Leo.’

‘Bodmin Leo?’

‘That’s how I style myself, so everyone can remember where to find me. It’s not always easy to hold things in our heads, is it? I wait around this station every day because I like to be the hub for the Devon and Cornwall chapter. They can come and see me any time they like. I’ve been doing this for … well, time loses significance, doesn’t it?’

‘Yeah.’ I think about what he said. ‘The Devon and Cornwall chapter? How many of us are there? And are we all from March the eleventh 1999?’

‘We are, Joe, and that means there are very few of us, I’m afraid. Though one more today! Joy. So our chapter is, as you said, people who are glitching on the same day. I wish we could be more expansive than that, but sadly we can’t. There are three of us I’ve met in Cornwall, and a further four, now that you’re here, have visited from Devon, including the lovely Lara. They don’t come to see me as often as I’d like. Tell me your story.’

He jumps up. ‘Let’s walk into the woods. I don’t want you being picked up and taken back to, I’m guessing, school?’

I follow him out of the station, through a car park and on to a stony path.

‘There’s a stately home this way,’ he says, pointing. ‘Lanhydrock House. Victorian. I worked there and I still go to the cafe from time to time. Just for the heck of it. Not today. Today, I think, we’ll go to the den.’

This gives me a little pang of worry. Should I really be following a (very) strange and dead man into his den? On the day I know I get murdered? Is there any way that Leo could be the one who kills me? He surely can’t be because we were both dead long before we met. However, everything is crazy and nothing makes sense.

I overcome it all and follow him along the path.

His den is a tree house accessed by a hidden muddy track. He swings up into it and so I follow. I calculate that I could push him out if he started attacking me. He perches on a flat branch and indicates for me to sit opposite him.

‘So we’re glitching?’ I say straight away.

‘We are,’ he says. ‘Straight to business! I like it. Yes. I call it glitching. My theory is that it’s because time and space are entirely different from everything they tell you at school, and nothing is real. I think the world is computer-generated, or someone’s plaything. Whatever it is, there’s something wrong with the program and one day it’ll be fixed. Or it might be to do with the upcoming millennium. The numbers changing. Everything going wrong before that happens. Though the numbers are artificial, aren’t they? Just a form of order that humans have attempted to impose on time. Which lends credibility to the simulation theory. So, what’s with you, Joe?’

I tell him my story as briefly as I can, but when I get to Ariel he nearly falls out of the tree.

‘Say that again,’ he says, pointing at me.

‘I meet a girl from 2019 every day. She’s trying to solve what happens to me. She’s met my family in her world. My brother and his family. My dad.’

‘Is this true, Joe?’ he says, looking at me in a condescending way. ‘Or do you think you’ve concocted it to comfort yourself?’

‘It’s true!’ I’m annoyed by that. ‘I can tell you what 2019 is like.’

‘Yeah, but you could say anything because I can’t check.’ Leo looks at me suspiciously. ‘I’ve never known anyone meet someone from the future. If this is real could you bring her here? If.’

‘Dunno. If she wants to we could try. It would have to be a Saturday because she has school. It’s Saturday for her tomorrow, but she’s going to London to look up the guy who we think might have killed me.’

We stay in the tree for a while, but I soon realize that just because someone is a ghost like you, you don’t have to become instant friends. Leo is spiky and seems put out by the fact that I have more to tell him than he has to tell me. I don’t bond with him like I did with Lara. His glitch theory is just that: a very thin theory. We swap last-day stories: he assumes that he’s going to die on a train or be pushed under one, but his day fades out just before he reaches the station.

‘Want me to get Ariel to look you up?’ I say because it seems only polite. ‘She did it for Lara and found her granddaughter.’

‘Yes! Thank you! Leo Chatterjee. I live in Par and I worked in conservation up at Lanhydrock. I always took the train here and walked up – it’s about half an hour and beautiful. I never bother to go to work any more, since I figured this out. I just wait around the station or walk in the woods. I call in sick first thing. But when I used to live the day normally I’d come here on the train and go to work, and then I’d be heading back to catch the train home, and then, no matter what I’ve been doing, at five forty it all stops. And I wake up again back in my bed at home. Get her to look me up and come back and tell me! Promise?’

I find I like him more. We have to take our allies where we find them.

Leo’s eyes are wild. I wonder what happened to him. It seems unlikely to me that someone pushed him under a train. It would be hard to do that at a station, where the trains move really slowly. A level crossing would be better. A bridge.

I shake myself. That’s not a good way to think.

We mess around in the forest for a bit. I find myself building a fort out of branches, and then sitting inside it. Leo’s nervous energy is infectious. By the time I catch the train back to Exeter I’m feeling quite different. I kind of like him. I like what he does.

‘I’ll come back soon,’ I tell him.

‘Please do.’ For a moment he looks desperate, and I see that everything else he does is to hold that at bay. ‘Please. Don’t give me hope and then never come back. Please don’t. Get her to look me up. If she’s real. Leo Chatterjee. Double “e” on the end.’