Landed

by Tim Pears

  Holly has repacked her bag, is carefully zipping it up. ‘Look,’ says Josh. In a large field, deep in long grass, white in the green, the letter H. A single set of rugby posts? Or all that is left of a HOLLYWOOD-type sign? ‘We’ve been here before,’ Josh says.

  Holly looks up. ‘Definitely,’ she says, slowly, so that Owen can hear where the syllables join, each link. Her latest longest word, to be used at any opportunity.

  ‘You wasn’t even looking,’ Josh tells her.

  ‘I were,’ Holly claims. ‘Don’t be horrible.’

  ‘Whatever you say’s whatever you are,’ Josh says, in a faint sing-song.

  The train begins a long skid to a halt. It stops beside an empty platform. The doors open. No one gets off. Other passengers stand up, look around. One or two step out, gaze up and down the platform, pull up their collars, hugging themselves. Light cigarettes.

  The driver is reading a newspaper. Owen knocks lightly on the window, and when the man looks up Owen opens his arms as if to ask, What’s going on? The driver shrugs: I know no more than you, mate.

  Owen and Josh stand on the platform, shivering smokers on either side. Holly joins them. It is always colder, Owen thinks, on railway platforms, there’s invariably a cold cutting wind blowing through the station. He doesn’t want to be stuck here. He wants to be moving. Is it easier for the police to find someone in hiding or in transit, on public transport? There is no announcement, nor sign of a guard. Every twenty metres stands a T-shaped streetlamp, like those crosses in certain crucifixions painted without the top section.

  The wind tosses objects into the air – a crisp packet, a sheet of newspaper – and plays with them. The wind is solid, like the sea; birds are like fish, swimming through chunky air. A black hat reels above their heads. The children watch it, then look at Owen, as if he might explain it. Behind them, the train grumbles, and stirs. The driver must have received the order to proceed. ‘Come on,’ Owen says. He takes Holly’s hand, the trio climb back on. Passengers return to the same seats they’d occupied a quarter of an hour before.

  The train pulls out of the empty station. Josh shakes his head, then he says to his father, ‘Are we going to see Nana?’

  Owen finds he is unable simply to say, Yes. ‘We’ll call her,’ he says.

  ‘Why didn’t we go to the coach station?’ Josh asks. ‘We could have gone on the coach, couldn’t we?’

  Owen tries to remember whether or not you could get to King’s Lynn by train. He thinks you can, changing at Ely. He knows they have visited his mother without him, more often than he has. He’d withdrawn from everyone.

  Holly stands up. ‘I’m going to the toilet,’ she says. Owen begins to gesture in the right direction, to save Holly walking towards the driver’s cab, but she cuts him short with a smile. ‘I know, Daddy.’ She sways past his right shoulder.

  Josh gazes out of the window. Back gardens, divided by fences, like the frames of a film. He looks like he is asleep with his eyes open. Utterly still. Spellbound by nothing. In a trance, Owen thinks, like the stupor he himself achieves with alcohol. Perhaps the wish to enter it has nothing to do with circumstances: a narcoleptic tendency, a genetic need.

  They pass a small breaker’s yard where parts of disparate cars are neatly stacked: bumpers here, tyres there, doors of different colours. A square, with green shrubs and green metal benches, no one in it. The train passes beneath overhead motorways, the pillars that support them like cloisters coiling through the city. In the centre, a new tower block, with the words SKY LIVING FOR SALE. Holly has been gone too long.

  ‘I’m going to look for your sister,’ Owen says, standing up. A nod of acknowledgement from his son.

  Owen makes his way to the end of the carriage. The toilet is engaged, so he waits outside. After a minute the door slides open. A middle-aged woman emerges. He continues on along the train, scrutinising every seat. He checks each toilet, waiting, if it is occupied, until a stranger emerges. The train stops once or twice, people get on. When he reaches the rear of the train he realises that he must have missed her; in all probability she’ll be back in her seat by now.

  Returning in the opposite direction, it seems like there are many more passengers in each carriage than when he came through just now. That, Owen reckons, is what happens when you are searching for one particular person: you don’t notice everyone else. Lurching in the same direction as the speeding train feels faster than did walking towards the back of the train, against its momentum.

  After a while Owen starts to count the carriages he passes through. He begins to suspect that it is taking longer to get back to his seat at the front of the train: there are more carriages than there were just now. No sooner does Owen dismiss this absurd thought from his mind than it is replaced by another.

  People are looking at him. Not in the idle way that everyone does at someone swaying down the centre aisle, but with a distinct, knowing gaze. He isn’t sure how or when exactly it happens, but at some point Owen realises that they know where Holly is. At first him, that man in the suit, on the mobile phone, the way he watches Owen come towards him, as if reporting on his progress to someone on the other end of the line. Then her, an elderly lady lifting her gaze lazily towards him in his panic, on her thin lips a contemptuous smirk. But soon everyone whose eyes he meets, they all know: this is the idiot who has lost his daughter.

  The train stops again. More passengers climb on board. A steady flow of them come through the carriages, looking for a seat. A female train manager pushes through, calling, ‘Come along. Plenty of room in carriages Gee and Haitch. Toot suite. Move along there.’ Many must have squeezed into the front of the train and now they are dispersing. He begins to smell the toilets as he approaches the end of each carriage.

  People are standing in the aisle, sitting on their suitcases or even on the arms of seats occupied by others. Owen pushes awkwardly past. He wrestles his way around them. The smell of people. Of their clothing. A gradually rank aroma is filling each carriage: bodies sweat, clothes warm up and give out the oversweet odours of the flesh inside.

  The carriage begins to swoon. To sashay, as if the train has left the tracks and is dancing into a disastrous waltz. There appears a vacant seat, into which Owen slumps. The dance slows. Owen remembers that he hasn’t eaten in a while. The blood returns to his brain. The train resumes its normal momentum. They pass the chocolate factories, the university. The train runs alongside a canal; a pair of middle-aged women paddle a canoe. In searching for Holly, Owen realises, he has abandoned Josh. The older brother is still a young boy. He lost Sara, is he trying to lose the other two as well?

  No, no. Calm down. They’ll be drawing pictures together at the table in the carriage at the front of the train.

  An elderly man stands close to where Owen is seated, beyond a pair of tattooed youths, whispering to each other. The man holds on to a partition upright with a frail grip. Owen stands up, catches his attention, and offers him his seat. The old man’s expression of surprised relief. He struggles past the youths, who contort themselves around luggage and furniture to give him space. When Owen turns sideways to usher him into the vacant seat, he finds that it is occupied. Someone else has slipped into it behind his back.

  ‘I’m afraid that’s my seat, isn’t it,’ he says. The woman ignores him. ‘I’m giving it to this gentleman,’ Owen explains, gesturing towards him with his palm, turning his body a little to the side so as to afford her as full a picture of the old man as possible.

  She doesn’t look up. ‘I’ve got it now,’ she says.

  ‘Yes,’ Owen says. ‘I believe he needs it more.’

  She is a hefty woman. It would take some effort, Owen surmises, to lift her from her seat. Her face reminds him of some actress, but travelling in disguise, hiding behind the chubbiness. Her pretty, child-like face registers a brief tremor of annoyance, across the bridge of her nose and around her eyes. ‘I said, I’ve got it.’

  If the woman is ill, why doesn’t
she say so? It’s so hot in the crowded carriage. ‘But it’s my seat, see,’ Owen makes clear, ‘I offered it to him.’

  The young woman stares straight ahead. ‘It’s not yours now, is it?’ she says.

  It takes Owen a second to register that the fragile sound behind him is that of the old man, speaking: ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  Owen can’t think of anything to say. He looks around the other three people sitting in this quartet of facing seats, hoping for support from them. Each one gazes out of the window, into the far distance. No one gives any indication that they can see or hear him.

  ‘It’s the gentleman’s seat,’ Owen says. He can hear the finality in his voice, the acceptance of defeat. He is aware that he is sweating profusely.

  ‘She needs it,’ says a man standing beside Owen. He’d not noticed him there, not as an individual in particular in the crowded aisle. His voice is without aggression, is in agreement with the underlying tone of Owen’s utterance. Owen senses the man’s relationship to the young woman. He is also dark-haired, also good-looking beneath a fancy dress of corpulence.

  ‘It ’s all right,’ the old man says. Owen sees him turn away, prepare to squeeze back past the tattooed youths, as if he could resume his place and this episode might not have happened. Owen steps towards the old man and grasps him by his bony shoulders, arresting his movement.

  ‘I’m going that way,’ Owen says, holding the old man in place so that he can push past him, and the two youths, and on through the carriage and into the next. Bit by bit he puts the incident behind him as he presses, apologises and manoeuvres his way forward, towards the front of the train.

  Finally, after what seems like twice as long a train as before, Owen catches a glimpse between passengers of Josh’s head in the next but one carriage, and, at the far end of it, the door to the driver’s cabin. At this moment the train begins to decelerate, abruptly enough to oblige Owen to grab the top of a seat to keep his balance, and to make the people ahead of him lurch backwards, as if they’d each received a tug from behind.

  The train comes to a halt. Owen peers out. He can’t quite make out the name on the sign on the platform, only the last two letters: RY. He assumes that people will get off, but no one does. The opposite happens: more passengers are getting on. Around him, people do not communicate, exactly, since they avoid eye contact, but what everyone does is to express their feelings, with disapproving little tuts and exclamations of breath, with discreet sighs or shakes of the head, fatalistic gestures that speak of many things (What a sorry state of affairs this is, what happened to this island? Disgrace. But we’ve been through worse than this, and we shall endure.) Then people squeeze a little closer.

  Of their own free will at first. But then they are shoved up against each other as more people come into the carriage from either end, pressing their way in, using their suitcases as battering rams. People who didn’t think they could get any closer to their neighbours find themselves barged up against them.

  It occurs to Owen that they are being forced to take part in a game – there’ll be a prize for the carriage with the most people in it – the kind of game Josh and Holly will want to play. Children are being lifted onto the tables between some seats or even up into the luggage rack. There they lie, looking down, anxious, wide-eyed creatures.

  A whistle blows. There are angry shouts. The sound of doors being slammed. It is then Owen sees Holly, alone, out on the platform. How did she get there? Why? She is trotting up and down the train, looking in through the windows, searching. She looks terrified, lost.

  ‘Let me past,’ Owen yells, panicked fury surging through him. ‘I have to get out.’ He thrusts a young man aside, heaves past a middle-aged woman, but the aisle is clogged with bodies. Even if people want to make way for him, they can’t. Owen climbs onto an armrest. The only space is up above people’s shoulders, that is the only way through. Where to put one’s feet is the problem. The tables and armrests are occupied, so that he is forced to step on people’s laps, thighs, knees.

  ‘Let me through!’ he shouts. ‘My daughter’s on the platform! Let me by!’ He clambers over people’s shoulders. Packed together as they are, there isn’t much they can do but let him, as he puts his hand and hook on their heads for balance, and leverage. Occasionally a hand shoots up and slaps or grabs at his ankle, but he kicks and shakes them off, and he has to be careful of his fingers where people try to bite him as he presses upon their skulls. His hook is clumsier but less vulnerable than his hand.

  Suddenly the train lurches backwards, and like a single serpentine organism the jam of people in the aisle seems to suffer a simultaneous convulsion. Owen grabs the rail of the luggage rack just in time. Immediately he realises that he should have done that from the beginning. Hand over hook now he speeds along, putting his feet he knows not where. He passes a sign saying EMERGENCY – PULL CHAIN, and wastes time bending to reach it. It comes away in his hand. At the end of the carriage it is difficult to get the last few yards through the vestibule to the door, but he is determined. The train is moving forwards now, but this fact has little relevance to Owen at that moment. He reaches the door and pulls down the window. The man who had been standing by the door points to a sign.

  ‘Don’t open that,’ someone else behind Owen says, in a loud voice. ‘The train’s moving.’

  Owen leans out of the window, grabs the handle, turns it, and the door flies open. Owen swings with it and lands on the platform, spun round once but taking no more than a step or two to regain his balance, before looking along the platform. Holly has seen him and stands immobile, staring at him. Owen realises that he has retrieved her, and in getting her has lost Josh. Did he make that choice? A surge of anger like a lightning bolt shoots through him. He turns and sprints on past the next carriage, to the front one. The train is idling out of the station. Owen reaches halfway along the carriage. There is Josh, on this side of the crowded carriage, fortunately. He is gazing out of the window, as he was when Owen had set off in search of his sister.

  Owen hammers on the glass. Josh blinks at his father, who gestures to indicate to Josh that he should get to the door. As if a spell has been broken, Josh leaps into action: as if the knowledge transmits itself from father to son in some arcane manner the boy climbs straight up to the luggage rack and swings like a monkey along it, stepping on people’s heads when he needs or is forced to. Owen follows his progress, jogging along the platform. In twenty seconds Josh has reached the door, which Owen opens. He pincers and grabs hold of his son’s clothing and drags him off the train, hugging him, the pair’s combined momentum taking them into a pirouette along what remains of the platform, Josh’s shoes two feet off the ground.

  Owen holds his son in a tight embrace, breathing hard, the boy rising and falling off his father’s chest. The train drifts slowly out of the station. Owen remembers his rucksack, he glances up to see it and the children’s too hurled at that moment out of the train door window.

  When he gave Josh a hug his son’s body felt stiff. He kept his distance, a certain formality, rarely allowing himself to let his guard down, but now Josh squeezes his father’s neck. Owen’s hair is sweaty. Stubble scrapes against Josh’s cheek. His father smells smokey and tangy and sharp. Josh feels himself being lowered to the ground, as Owen kneels on the platform. As the sound of the train recedes Owen can hear the sound of running feet, coming closer.

  Holly slams into their embrace, demanding space within it for her. She is crying. ‘Why did you do that?’ she demands. ‘I were so scared. Why did we come here?’

  Owen kneels down in front of her. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, drawing her to him. Josh eases himself away and stands by, as his sister weeps.

  The only other person in the station is a man of indeterminate age, with a satchel over his shoulder. He stands by the doorway to a deserted ticket office. He wears a suit that had belonged either to someone else or to himself when he was smaller than he now is. His hair is combed flat on his head, and
he grins as Owen, Josh and Holly approach him, his small eyes contracting into their plump sockets behind pebble specs.

  ‘That is the twelve thirty-seven,’ he says. ‘Running eighteen minutes late.’ He appears amused, by the train’s erratic timekeeping or by the accuracy of his calculations. ‘The twelve fifty-four’s almost caught up with it.’

  Owen ushers the children out.

  ‘Nice to see someone get off here,’ the man says.

  They walk through suburban streets, which after a while begin to widen, houses set back from the verge. A road sign says 40, and the traffic that passes them speeds up. They walk past a mansion with a huge empty car park around it; its roof is charred and the windows have been replaced by metal sheets.

  A boarded-up filling station, a warehouse behind locked gates.

  They are not yet clear of the city. They could be stopped at any moment.

  i will take heed to my ways; that i offend not in my tongue

  The road climbs gradually, towards fields, trees. At the top of the rise they look around: the city spreads itself out as far as the eye can see, south, north, east, west. They are still surrounded. To the south-east is the centre, towers rise like the stalks of flowers about to bloom. Smoke rises from somewhere north-west. West Bromwich. Wolverhampton.

  Holly looks nothing like her mother. She walks, intoning a tuneless song to herself. Her features – pert pinched little nose, cupped jaw, thin-lipped mouth, eyes like blue buttons – are petite. Mel has wide cheekbones, full lips, almond eyes. Yet Holly does resemble the girl in the school photograph of Mel at five years old. The code for her physical destiny buried deep in her genes, instructions to be issued in adolescence, a transformation. As would have happened to Sara.

  Will happen to Holly.