Chapter 1.7

 

By the time she'd drained the last of her water and licked the inside of her sandwich bag for the last few crumbs and seeds from the sandwich, she could see the paling of the sky through the windows on her right. The train rattled through the pre-dawn darkness, gliding through the early mist clinging to the trees and occasional flashes of building as the growing light dawn peeled away the obscuring shadows. Its rhythm was steady, hypnotic—a lullaby for the sleepless, and she remembered a record of her father’s where a narrator imitated the sound of a train with a series of onomatopoeias: diddly-dee, diddly-dum, diddly-dee, diddly-dum. It had been her first piece of vinyl, although whether her dad had actually given it to her was a matter for debate. It was possible he’d still claim ownership if he remembered it existed. She couldn’t even remember where it was. Presumably in the loft with all the vinyl she’d collected during her college years, once it became vogue to play music on the cumbersome disks instead of the modern purity of MP3 and FLAC.

She was still alone in the carriage. A woman with a small child in tow had got on at Bristol Temple Meads but she’d barely glanced at Róisín before passing through the door into the next carriage. That suited her just fine. She didn’t need to defend her existence to a child and its over-protective mother. The early train was nearly empty, the constant rattle of its wheels broken only by the occasional creak of metal or the soft squeal of brakes as they went round a curve, or the irregularity of a loud BLAP as it passed under a bridge. Outside, the world was still half-asleep; fields blurred into one another, trees stood like sentinels in the mist, and the sky was a pale bruise of lavender and grey.

Her sketchbook lay open on the table, freed from the contents of her satchel in a fit of creativity which had lasted all of thirty seconds. A piece of charcoal lay on the paper; broken it two as a clumsy metaphor for the two parts of her life; the one she’d left behind and the one she was about to begin; two disparate parts forever broken by her change of identity. All she had to show for the hour since the strange art appreciator had left consisted of three lines suggesting his mouth and nose, and a smudge of thumbprint indicating the dark glasses. It was hardy a police photofit, but it was enough to help fix his face in her mind.

With the advent of the growing light, the carriage had slowly grown warmer as the electric heaters under the seats came on. She’d finally been able to shrug off her heavy woollen coat, the one her girlfriend’s mum had always said made her look like a henchman in an old black and white movie. Not Igor, she had clarified at the glare her daughter had shot her, but something along the line of a Burke and Hare, perhaps, or the man-in-black on a Western. Secretly, she’d been pleased by the comparison, and the following week had found a fedora in an antique clothing shop. Fedoras gave off such a ‘gamer-in-mom’s-basement’ vibe, but some coloured feathers had dressed it up into something she could be seen in. At least she’d never developed facial hair. With a sudden pang of regret, she remembered she’d left it on the hook on her bedroom door at her mum’s house. Best to put it out of mind. She was never going back. She'd meant to bring another pair of trainers, too, but there just hadn't been room in her rucksack. At least she had her Docs, battered and ancient though they were. She'd bought them second-hand from her roommate in college; trading them for the return half of a train ticket from Wolverhampton to London. They were at least a decade old, and although the leather over the steel toecaps had begun to wear away, she patched them with fresh leather and epoxy blue and stained to the same shade of tired black of the rest of the uppers, and done a pretty good job of it, too.

The train curved as it entered the outskirts of Kidderminster, and the light shifted. A shaft of gold broke through the clouds and spilled across her seat, catching the edge of her sketchbook and limning the drawing in a warmth that hadn't been apparent in his physical presence. She blinked, startled by the warmth to puff out her chest and stretch her arms wide as if to greet the morning. It was the first time she'd felt hopeful in months; Laverstone had a way of draining the soul of everyone who stayed there.