Episode 213 · The Last Train North

At the corner he looked back once. Maxim was moving inside the kitchen window, clearing the bowls. Soles kept walking. By the time he reached the tram road, the house was hidden by the buildings along it.

By the bakery, a girl was turning the sign in the door while her mother wiped the counter. Men outside the bar moved aside for his bag and went back to arguing about somebody’s wages. The canvas bag pulled at his shoulder. Maxim had been right about carrying it. He shifted it to the other hand, carefully; the handle was old.

The agency phone stayed quiet. His own was in the outer pocket of his coat. He could feel both as he walked: one waiting to tell him what to do, the other full of people he could still call.

At the station the last northbound service was already on the board, its platform and time matching the ticket on the agency phone. The train stood under the white lamps with its doors open. He bought a tea from the cart before boarding. The woman filled the paper cup too high, saw it spill over the rim and took it back to pour some out.

— There. You can carry that.

He drank it beside the coach with the bag against his shin, until the heat reached his chest.

He watched the platform entrance while he drank. People came through it in twos and threes, with bags and children and boxes tied with string. None of them was a woman in a buttoned coat, walking slowly, as if she had not decided yet. He had told her before. That did not mean she owed him the platform.

The guard’s home.

He tried to keep his thoughts there, at the gate opening and the sister running across the road. In the apartment afterward, the guard had kept looking for Krista until she came. Soles could have called her before they left the gate. Instead he had told the guard she was at work and sent her love for her.

Even then, he had preferred an answer nobody could argue with. Tonight he had sent her the truth, plainly, before. He did not know whether it counted for anything when it came this late. Perhaps it only counted for him. That would have to be enough for now.

Get on the train. That’s the job tonight.

He dropped the cup into a bin and boarded. Warm air smelled of upholstery and somebody’s supper. A narrow corridor ran along the coach to his compartment, past a soldier asleep with his boots on the seat and a woman peeling an orange for a child who did not want it. Through the glass door of his own compartment he saw the man in gray, sitting at the corridor end of one bench with a file on his knees. His coat lay folded on the opposite bench, leaving the window seat beside it free.

Soles stopped with his hand on the door handle.

The man raised his head and indicated the empty place.

— Your bag will fit underneath.

Soles had pictured the journey by the window, alone, with no one asking what he intended to do. The man had already taken off his coat and made himself comfortable.

He slid the door aside and went past the folded coat to the window. The seat was too warm from the heating and smelled of other people’s journeys. He pushed the bag beneath the seat and settled with his back against the wall, his own phone on his knee. No new message. The man waited while he checked.

Soles put his hands on his knees. Since the stairs, in small rooms, he kept them where he could see them. The man noticed, and said nothing.

Then he opened the file and drew out a photograph of a low brick pumping station beside a drainage channel. Steam or smoke showed above its roof; the picture gave no way to tell which.

— Tonight? Soles asked.

— You’ll be met when we arrive. There’s a room for you. Read this in the morning, if you’d rather sleep.

He laid the file on the seat between them, the photograph on top.

The whistle sounded outside. A door slammed farther down the coach, and the train began to move. The woman with the cart was still pushing toward the building, leaning her weight into the handle.

Soles could call Maxim. He could ask whether Mina had eaten and hear the kitchen behind him. But Maxim would answer, and Soles would have to find something to say after the dogs.

He thought of the grit in Krista’s hem, and of Tesa, who had not called Maxim back about the evenings. He told himself that was what leaving looked like from the inside: everyone at home going quiet at once, each for a reason of their own. He minded less than he should have, and noticed that too. They had each other. That was what he had signed for.

The photograph had a service door at one end, a drainpipe at the other and a dark line beneath the roof. He looked at it the way he looked at a machine in a customer’s yard before anyone told him what was wrong with it: what it was for, what it was built to stand, where it would fail first. He could start with those. Ask where the photographer had stood. Find out what the line looked like from inside.

He put his phone away and reached across for the file. The man let him take it.

— How much time have we got?

The man settled back.

— First one’s tomorrow.

— And the others?

— There’s a list. You’ll get it a page at a time. It’s kinder.

For a while Soles followed the lines beneath the photograph. Beyond the glass, the last station lights gave way to darkness, and his own face grew clearer in the window. For a moment, in that light, it looked like his father’s. Then it looked like a stranger who had signed something. The wheels settled into a rhythm. He found he had read the same sentence twice without keeping it. He held the folder beneath his palm, rested his head against the wall and let his eyes close.