The Last Train to Somewhere

At eleven forty-two, the departures board went dark.

Anna watched the station clock instead. It continued moving, which felt inconsiderate. In the outer pocket of her case was a ticket to a city where she had accepted a job, rented a flat and told everyone she would be happy. Her mother had called twice that afternoon. She had answered neither time.

“Does this happen often?” she asked the man beside her.

“Only when you need to be somewhere.”

He was carrying a paper bag full of oranges. One handle had torn, and he held the bottom carefully against his coat. When he noticed her looking, he offered her one.

“No, thank you.”

A moment later her stomach made a noise. She had skipped dinner to finish handing over her old flat.

“Actually, yes.”

He chose the largest. They stood under the dead board, peeling oranges into his bag, while the other passengers drifted toward the ticket office. The station smelled of damp coats and hot dust from the radiators.

His name was Daniel. He restored clocks in a village Anna had passed through without stopping. He was sixty-two, perhaps older; she found it difficult to tell. There was a streak of orange oil on the cuff of his good wool coat.

“An unfortunate profession tonight,” she said.

“Clocks don't make time behave. They just report the damage.”

She laughed, surprising herself. All day people had congratulated her. Even the woman who collected the keys had said how exciting it must be. This was the first conversation in which excitement had not been required.

A railway employee emerged from the office carrying a clipboard. A signalling fault had stopped the line. There would be a replacement coach, but nobody could say when.

Anna opened her phone. Three messages from her new manager waited above a photograph of the desk that would be hers. A plant, a monitor, a window overlooking another building. She had replied with an enthusiastic sentence and an exclamation mark before leaving her old kitchen.

Daniel glanced at the screen without trying to read it.

“Bad news?”

“No. The opposite.”

He nodded as though that made perfect sense.

They found seats beneath a timetable printed three summers earlier. Someone had scratched a heart into the bench, then scratched out one of the names inside it. Anna moved her case to make room for the orange bag.

“Are you visiting someone?” she asked.

“My daughter.”

“Does she live far?”

“Far enough.”

The answer closed a door. Anna let it remain closed. She understood doors. In her family they could be shut with a cheerful change of subject, a kettle switched on too quickly, a conversation about roadworks.

Her phone rang again. Mum.

She let it stop.

“You can answer,” Daniel said. “I won't listen.”

“I'll call when I arrive.”

He looked at the dark board. “You might have time for several conversations before then.”

She put the phone into her pocket, annoyed with him for making the obvious sound like advice. Beyond the glass doors, rain slid along the pavement toward a drain full of leaves.

For six years she had worked toward this promotion. She knew its salary, its title and the distance between the new flat and the office. She knew which words to use when people asked about it. She did not know why the thought of Monday morning made her feel as if she had swallowed something too large.

Daniel was smoothing an envelope against his knee. The fold had split, and a corner of a second sheet showed through.

“Is that for your daughter?”

“Yes.”

“Birthday?”

“No. An explanation. Although explanations become less useful the longer you spend improving them.”

He folded it again. This time he kept talking.

Her name was Lucy. She was twenty-nine. He had not seen her since she was twelve. He said this plainly, without offering Anna a version in which everyone had misunderstood him.

After his marriage ended, there had been arguments about visits, money, where Lucy should spend Christmas. He had disliked every arrangement and become difficult about all of them. Eventually her mother stopped asking. He stopped insisting. Letters were easier to draft than send. Years accumulated around decisions he had never admitted were decisions.

“I told myself I was giving her space,” he said.

“Were you?”

“No. I was saving myself from hearing what she thought of me.”

Anna looked at the scratched heart. She could think of several comforting things to say, none of them earned.

“What changed?”

“She wrote. Said she was having a baby. Said if I wanted to know my grandchild, we should have a conversation first.”

He took out his phone. The message was short. Lucy had suggested a café near her home. Tomorrow, ten o'clock. Daniel had booked a room above a pub because he did not want to arrive late.

“So why the oranges?”

For the first time, he smiled without effort.

“When she was little, she'd make me peel them in one piece. She wore the peel like a bracelet. I saw these outside a shop and forgot she wasn't six anymore.”

Anna imagined him at the fruit stall, choosing carefully. She hoped Lucy liked oranges. She hoped, with an intensity that startled her, that somebody would make his journey end kindly. Then she remembered that kindness was not something he could demand, and he seemed to know it.

A boy in a school uniform came down the platform looking close to tears. His phone had died. His older brother was waiting at a station farther along the line and would have no idea where he was.

Anna gave him her phone. He knew the number by heart, dialled, and immediately began to argue about whose fault it was that he had no charger. By the time he handed it back, he was grinning.

“Thank you,” he said, already running toward the ticket office.

The call history showed the unknown number above three missed calls from Mum.

Anna went outside.

Her mother answered before the second ring. A television was playing in the background, a programme they used to watch together while pretending neither was paying attention.

“Are you there?” her mother asked.

“Still at the station. The line's stopped.”

“Oh, love. Have you eaten?”

“An orange.”

“That isn't dinner.”

Anna laughed. Then she began to cry, abruptly and without the elegance she would have preferred. Her mother turned off the television. Anna heard the remote being set down.

“Tell me,” she said.

Anna told her about the desk photograph. The flat she hadn't seen except through a camera. The way everyone seemed to know what this move meant except her. She admitted she had been avoiding calls because she didn't want her mother to sound proud while she was feeling frightened.

There was a little silence.

“I am proud,” her mother said. “But you don't have to perform the happy part for me.”

“I worked so hard for this.”

“I know.”

“What if I don't like it?”

“Then you'll know something you don't know now.”

Anna leaned against the wall. Across the road, a taxi driver was wiping his windscreen with a folded newspaper.

Her mother asked if she wanted to come home. Anna thought about the familiar bedroom, the creaking stair, the relief of not having to continue. Then she thought about going to work on Monday without deciding that Monday had to justify the last six years.

“Not tonight,” she said. “But could we have breakfast on Sunday?”

Her mother said yes so quickly that Anna had to close her eyes.

Inside, Daniel had found a socket and was charging the schoolboy's phone with a cable borrowed from the ticket clerk. The boy was describing an examination nobody expected to pass. Daniel listened as seriously as though the result would affect them both.

“Everything all right?” he asked when Anna sat down.

“Not everything. Enough.”

He nodded.

At twelve thirty, the employee announced that a coach would arrive in twenty minutes. It could take them as far as the junction. From there another train was waiting.

Daniel checked his envelope again.

“May I ask you something?” Anna said. “What does the letter say?”

“That I was unhappy. That there were things I didn't know how to manage. Some things about her mother that probably don't belong in it.”

“Probably not.”

“No.” He took a breath. “There's a lot about what I meant to do.”

“What would you say if you didn't have it?”

He looked toward the doors.

“That I'm sorry I didn't come.”

Anna did not tell him this was better. She had known him for an hour. But he took the envelope out, opened it, and read it once more. Then he put it in a different pocket.

On the coach, she sat beside him. The schoolboy fell asleep across the aisle with his phone charging between his hands. Rain covered the windows. The driver turned the heating up until everyone began quietly shedding scarves.

At the junction, Daniel's phone rang. Lucy. He answered in a voice so careful that Anna looked away.

She had seen the service alert. She could collect him from the station. He said there was no need, then stopped himself halfway through repeating it.

“Yes,” he said. “Thank you. I'd like that.”

The junction was almost empty. Anna's connecting train stood on the opposite platform, doors open, light falling onto the wet concrete. She held the orange bag while Daniel put on his coat.

“What will you say?” she asked.

He touched the pocket containing the letter.

“Probably hello first.”

A young woman stood near the taxi rank. One hand rested on the curve of her stomach. Daniel took three steps toward her, then slowed. Anna couldn't hear what he said.

Lucy listened. She did not embrace him. For a moment they stood with the awkward distance of people who had every reason to recognise each other and no practice doing it.

Then Lucy pointed at the bag. Daniel held it out. She took an orange, and something in his shoulders loosened.

Anna crossed the footbridge. From her train window she could see them walking toward the car, Lucy speaking now, Daniel carrying her shopping as well as his own.

Her phone lit up. Her mother had sent a photograph of the breakfast table, taken the previous Sunday. At the bottom she had written: Same time. More food than an orange.

Anna saved it. Then she opened her new manager's message and read it again. The desk was still a desk. The window was still a window. She didn't have to love it before she arrived.

As the train moved, she put her ticket away and watched the lights of the junction fall behind her. There was another orange in her coat pocket. She left it there for the morning.