Chapter 20
It Goes By So Fast
Outside the window, debris from his childhood sped by:
A glimpse of his wrought-iron school gates.
Himself on a bed reading a library book – The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood.
The haberdasher where he spent hours as a young boy as his mother chose fabrics for clothes or curtains.
Walking out of Bagdale’s Bookshop empty-handed and heading back to the library.
He stood up and moved through the train as it rolled along its invisible track. Eventually he sat down on the long parallel seats covered with green velvet.
Staring out, he saw Mr Parkin’s umbrella resting in the kitchen.
He kept on seeing his mother, getting cross with Dougie, or staring at young Wilbur like he was a problem she could do without.
Then, something happier.
A house with unseen walls. The house wasn’t any he had lived in. But he was there, a young, slight-shouldered boy, standing amid a crowded living room of children and adults, watching television for the first time.
‘The second of June 1953,’ he said aloud, as if answering a question in a pub quiz instead of sitting alone in a carriage.
The Queen’s coronation, he remembered. Mrs Yelland’s house.
Number 40. The first on their road to get a television.
All he really remembered about that day was food.
It was one of the rare days of his childhood where his stomach didn’t rumble even once.
Fish-paste sandwiches and coronation chicken.
And then it disappeared out of view as the train moved on through time.
This troubled him. The speed he was travelling.
He hadn’t had that many truly monumentally good days in his childhood, but that had been one of them and so he wondered why the train hadn’t stopped.
Maybe there would be no stopping again until his death.
Maybe that was it. Maybe you see yourself as a baby and you see yourself dying and everything flashes in between. Perhaps there were only bookends.
But, no, he felt the train begin to slow again and he saw himself on his bed, reading.
He looked out of the opposite window.
An Elvis Presley record spinning on the old turntable at the Milk Bar, where Dougie took him one Saturday.
Then that faded, dissolved into nothing along with everything else, and in no time at all, the Midnight Train had come to a stop.