Chapter 3.1

 NOTE: You haven't missed anything, I've just split the previous chapter into two.

After Gloucester and Cheltenham, the carriage had three more passengers, each, thankfully, moving further down the train and not stopping to gawp at the weirdo on the first table seat. Two of them didn’t bother her at all, but the third sat right behind her and played music on tinny earphones. It wouldn’t have bothered her so much if they were listening to something she vaguely enjoyed, but death metal didn’t alight with her sense of personal growth, though she had appreciated it in her early teenage years. She was rebellious then, although uncertain what she was rebellious against. She wondered if she even knew then. Some modern personification of “The Man” or “The Establishment.” The same amorphous target of all teenage angst since the first time a teenager had an expectation of living beyond twenty. At least a man with the snacks cart came through the sliding door when they were thirty minutes south of Birmingham.

To celebrate the biggest art sale of her life so far, Róisín splashed out on a tall cappuccino coffee and both a packet of cheese flavoured crisps and a chocolate bar. “Breakfast of Champions,” the porter said when she tapped her bank card against his app, and she laughed and nodded, though she knew full well that he was completely wrong. The breakfast of champions was Wheaties cereal, as any well-read student could tell you.

So it goes, as her one and only tattoo would inform you. So it goes.

With her breakfast completed with the rubbish tucked neatly into the cardboard coffee cup, the train entered the first of the long series of tunnels on its approach into Birmingham New Street. Róisín’s chest tightened. After Birmingham, Wolverhampton was only twenty minutes away and her new life would start in earnest. How would she get on with her new housemate? How could she cope without her mother acting as a safety blanket in case everything went wrong again? Tis was it. This was her make-or-break, stand-on-her-own-two-feet time. She would make a iving as an artist or die trying. Well, not actually die, though the option of Ending It All was always present for a young person, and even more so for a young person in the Arts, where the competition was crueller than an octopus in a fish-punching contest.

As the train drew to a shuddering stop against the dim yellow lights of New Street’s Platform Two, the thought of getting off and booking the next train back to Laverstone pressed against her ribs like a wardrobe door covered in rocks. She could get a job in Markham’s supermarket until the robots took over or spend her days picking up litter and dog excrement. With the AI revolution in full swing, jobs were increasingly hard to come by. She remembered the hopes for it in her youth, with all the menial work carried out by machines, leaving humanity free to govern and indulge in the Arts, but the reality was more like the science fiction films of the previous century, where Ai took over all the literature, music and fine arts, while humanity was left to toil in the quarries and factories to produce more materials for increasingly overpowering entities.

 But no. Róisín kept her inner gaze fixed determinedly forward. To go back would be to admit her mother had been right all along, and self-deprecation was a luxury she could no longer afford.

With a shrill whistle and the banging of carriage doors, the brakes squealed as the train juddered into motion once more, far more crowded now as commuters made their way into the first day of the week’s long toil in offices, shops and factories further north. The low hum of voices filled the carriage, though thankfully, the lad playing the heavy metal had alighted at New Street. A few more tunnels and the train flashed back into daylight, and then the city was gone—replaced by cuttings and flyovers, dirty canals and boarded-up warehouses. The deep ridges concealing the railway opened before fields and shopping centres, wide and litter strewn. In a few minutes she’d be in the heart of the Black Country, where the mills had become museums and the factories where Victorian children had once toiled had been converted into car parks and enterprise units. Wolverhampton beckoned, and she felt a shift in her body, as though she were traveling into a land where hopes and dreams could come true. And then almost jumped out of her skin from the sudden roar of a train going the other way.