Cambridge

The proactivity rushed to fill a vacuum: important and easy: the train already booked. Such was the relief of potential escape, that the boy was seduced by the webpage’s green and the rounded corners of its layout; they promised simplicity, and certainty. All forewarnings of England’s transport forgotten in that excitement.

So it was with mild irritation that he met the inevitable ‘cancelled’ notice at London Liverpool Street.

He had arrived half an hour earlier than his intended departure, symptomatic of an arbitrary earliness applied to all appointments, rather than out of any careful planning.

The information desk informed him, agnostically,  that he should go quickly to the fourth platform, for a replacement. He ran.

It withdrew from four as he breached the barriers and the staff indicated his return ticket would readmit him to the concourse.

And so he was left with his fifty minutes to make up as he wished and perused the shops and cafes. But these were clones of chains, and had no interest, no surprises, no worth save for the products you could buy. Even the bookshop, which he’d priorly bought from, exhibited little character but the sheen of plastic lamination on all but few of its covers.

The boy travelled so infrequently. It was true he earned little, but his passive town of ill-united culture had made him passive too: stuck there; it was Neverland.

With a frail greenness he loitered before the great displays. He walked to one end. To the other. Spotted where he’d rather’ve bought his lunch. He explored the upper level, where he saw again the same magazines, the same pre-packaged sandwiches, the same darting in and out of suited people. The soap shop, stripped of oppressive sweetness by the cavern of the space, stood idle, and symbolically, as if only for advertisement.

A tin of strawberry mints, of which he drew from at resentful intervals, titilated his bored mind.

The prospect of the quiet warmth of a waiting carriage kept him regularly inspecting the orange dashes which precluded his new platform number. Even so, in his clump of other waiters, they edged towards the likely end.

Platform Two.

Having illigitmised his tickets’ barcodes, they were swept by the glance of a guard. The few first passengers cut their parallel lines past the unopened doors: a tired swagger in some, trot of expectation in others. As the boy went with them, he felt too their irrational anxiety. And another, caught in indecision, turned backwards to the doors behind.

The doors extricated themselves, and slid apart.

As the pioneers of this quiet service threaded through the continual carriages, the boy cast his eyes over them. In the humming cleanliness, they were picked out in relief against the white and blue. Their faces, and footsteps, and distant coughs now made specimens of by their imminent displacement.

He thought about which of them, if it were not for the division of the seats, he would most like to talk to, or rather to listen to: idyllically connect to. But the man with the interesting face, and the girl with the crocus-coloured bag, made their way away from him, in search, not of empty seats, but of entirely absent sections, of which they could equidistantly disperse themselves. Those left spaces would, reluctantly, be bisected, and then quadrisected, by those of the coming stations.

It was a relief to be sat down with surety, and in celebration he let himself daydream, regretting the way in which his window’s view was impinged upon by its frame.

On becoming aware of the train’s mid-travel, he saw to his lunch. The cheese and onion he’d bought were, he discovered, mostly salt; were it not for the aftertaste of his sandwich, he might have gone without them. He left his seat to bin the remnants, and returned appreciatively to the book which would alleviate the majority of the journey. It did so well enough, and he paused his reading only to recontemplate a sentence, or to check the progress of his route.

When the station came, and he prepared to disembark, the thoughts from his novel continued in him, and the voices along the train lost their edges. He was oblivious, therefore, of the change in those voices.

Cloudless light engulfed them all as they all stepped down. And their voices, on the most part, were young ones, or at least, young ones that belonged to those who hadn’t aged. Their tones to one another were curious, optimistic: laying down preparatory strata for pressing anecdotes.

Those with only curt politeness, exhibited, in their few words, their elocution, and their tutoring, and the money that had paid for it.

All along the platform, they were the international, and their many genres of attire, of coloured jackets, headscarfs, suits and long-coats served to plant them here, to progress them here and far and wide.

Station staff allowed the boy through the barriers, and on either side the many people flowed past.

In front of the station, the light was cloudless, and the taxis, and the bicycles, and the coffee shop across the road: all were illuminated equally.

The coffee shop, whilst of a same predictable chain, was adorned by the vivacity of its customers. None of them appeared to be waiting. They only talked, and thought, or wrote, or typed, or observed each other’s eyes in that cloudless light.

The boy, now alive to all these things, relaxed. As he rarely relaxed. And a homely, near-spirituality descended.

He checked his phone for directions. He had plenty of time - and a vaguer sense of direction would serve him better; that way his walk would be made of half adventure. So, pocketing his phone, he embraced this vagueness, and studied the grey-brown of the stone buildings: zigzagging his way diagonally past gardens of ornamental trees, wisteria, the brass plaques of college departments.

Discovering a second-hand bookshop, he listened to the owner argue American politics with a regular. And appreciated that there was a regular - community, and a curious one! with which they dissipated each other’s anxieties in these medicinal encounters.

Arriving at the college, the boy was directed to a hall at the end of a cloistered garden of green bushes and tradition and benches.

It was a small octagonal hall, of wooden beams, like a chapel. Such was its intimacy, that when the talks begun, the use of a microphone was insisted upon only by the rear row.

So casually everyone sat, and how receptive was that hall of quiet people. The sentences of the authors were filled with music and they concluded to jewel-like questions; jewel-bearings of a watch, around which the young man’s thoughts pivoted in soaring action.

But the boy, sat with spaces either side, digested the incident words with admiration and disturbed simplicity; there was, surely, a lack of substance to him; no meat in his physique; little rock in his mind. And as the authors, in their reserved confidence, addressed the hall, the boy renewed his anxiety. He worried what he’d say to them at the book signing: imagined their look of dismay at his ingratitude and inadequate questions. And then he complained to himself he wasn’t listening. Around him were the undergraduates, postgraduates, fellows, an anthropologist, poets. It seemed that their very mechanism of sitting was superior to his own and the boy thought of the way his head hunched against the pillow of his anxious nights, and how the very alignment of his spine was set against him.

The talks concluded with the promise of drinks in an adjoining room; there were wines, and biscuits, and juices beneath the swimming torsos of vicious hospitality.

Outside the hall, the sky was dark and warm. Intending to trace his same route back, the boy found himself, instead, along a high-street. He passed the restaurants and the bars of this foreign city. Through the windows, the foreign people with their superior minds, roared at the climax of their humour.

He could get a later train. He could go into a bar maybe and share their laughter but he should go.

The boy came down the stairs of the station’s footbridge looking for somewhere to sit. Between his hands he carried his food just bought and a bag of books. He’d intended to eat on the train but it had been delayed for over half an hour and was too hungry to wait. He wanted to sit down.

The foot of the stairs was amass with those waiting for an earlier train and all the seats were taken. But behind him was the bricked column of the descending lift shaft; a cheap obelisk cut short which divided off one side of the platform. He walked round to find a desolate line of segmented benches. On the nearest, he seated his bags either side, in preference to the black filth of the station floor. All view of the peopled half was blocked from him. He begun to eat.

After several minutes, a girl appeared from around the lift shaft. She was on the phone and walked past to populate a seat several benches down. The boy was sorry she was on the phone.

He looked to bin his rubbish, and not finding one, took up his bags and walked around again to the other side. The benches there were free now. But he binned his litter and returned to his bench, sat between bags as before.

The time after that passed quickly. He checked his phone: the boredom for it’s curated content newly rousing. He took out his books and read, for the first time what the authors had signed. He read their “best wishes”, and “warm wishes”, and admired the flick of their script.

When it was almost time, he made his way back to the orange displays on the other side of the lift shaft. The young man took out again his tin of strawberry mints and popped the lid. He caressed the rolled edges at its lip, without which, the edge would cut him, and saw his train approaching. His eyes diverted to those collecting along platform; most were bound for London; he’d be with them. And he continued to fondle that crimped edge, until, with a crisp snap, he clicked the tin lid shut.