The Empty Train

She was glad she could hear people.

The compartment had four seats, and three were empty. Her suitcase lay in the overhead rack; her laptop bag occupied the seat opposite. She had taken off her wet coat and hung it beside the window, where it dripped onto the carpet. There was room to put her feet up. She had been awake since five.

The storm had flooded the roads out of the city. Two taxi bookings had been cancelled; a third driver had called to say he wasn't going anywhere near the northern bypass. But the trains were running, and someone from the office had to attend the meeting.

She had bought a ticket for the 11:40.

Now she couldn't sleep.

Her phone had no signal, and she had put it in the laptop bag to stop herself checking.

There was something unpleasant about the warmth. It collected beneath her collar while her fingers stayed cold. The upholstery smelled of damp wool, and somewhere behind the wall a loose fitting vibrated continuously, too faint to locate.

Outside, rain blurred the fields into strips of grey and brown. Water trembled on the glass without running down it.

She ran her thumbnail over a crescent-shaped scratch in the table, then shut her eyes.

A man was speaking nearby. Another voice answered, rising at the end, and the man made a brief sound that might have been laughter.

She waited for the next sentence.

The voices seemed to come from beyond the compartment wall, although that side of the compartment faced the corridor. She could hear the movement of conversation: interruptions, pauses, the little intake of breath before someone disagreed. The words themselves were unfamiliar.

It sounded like a language she had known as a child and forgotten. Every few seconds, something almost made sense.

She opened her eyes.

For a while she lay still, trying to catch a single word. Then a door slammed somewhere ahead, and she sat up, irritated with herself. She would get coffee. Perhaps someone in the restaurant car could tell her when they were due in.

She left her bags, closed the compartment door, and checked that it had latched.

The corridor was empty.

A narrow strip of carpet ran between the windows and the compartment doors. The overhead lights had yellowed their plastic covers unevenly, making the far end look further away than it was. An empty coat hanger swung inside the nearest compartment.

She walked past it.

The next compartment was empty too. So was the one after that.

It wasn't a popular route. Midday, on a weekday, in this weather. Most people with any sense would have stayed home.

Someone coughed.

She turned towards the sound and found herself looking through an open doorway at four empty seats.

The cough had probably come through a vent.

At the end of the carriage, she pushed through the connecting door. The rubber walls of the gangway flexed around her, giving off a warm, sour smell. Beneath the metal floor, something knocked three times.

In the next carriage, the voices were louder.

She slowed down.

Someone was talking just ahead, with the quick, apologetic rhythm of a person asking to squeeze past. She moved against the wall before she realised there was nobody coming.

She waited there anyway.

An indistinct answer. A laugh. The faint chink of something hard against glass.

“Hello?”

Her voice sounded thick and private, as though she had spoken with her hands over her ears.

Nothing changed in the conversation.

She checked the compartments one by one. No coats on the hooks, no bags, no shoes protruding into the corridor. In one, a curtain had been caught beneath a seat cushion and pulled taut. She stood looking at it for several seconds, then continued.

The third carriage had rows of seats instead of compartments. She could see the entire length of it.

Empty.

She no longer wanted coffee very much. She wanted to ask an ordinary question and hear someone answer it. Even a complaint about the weather would do.

Ahead, above a glass door, a faded sign said RESTAURANT.

She hurried towards it.

There were eight tables, a counter, and an open hatch leading into the kitchen. The tables were set with paper napkins and squat salt shakers. A serving spoon lay on the counter with its handle projecting over the edge.

No one was there.

A scrap of paper stood folded beside the till.

OUT TO LUNCH. BACK SOON.

She read it twice.

“Of course,” she said.

People who served lunch had to eat it themselves. They were probably all sitting together somewhere, staff and conductor and whoever else worked aboard a train. There must be a carriage she hadn't passed through.

The explanation helped until she looked through the kitchen hatch.

Beyond it, a fluorescent tube shone on stainless steel. A tap was dripping into a deep sink. There was no steam, no cooking smell, no sign that anything had recently been prepared.

She checked her watch. 12:17.

On the nearest table lay a newspaper, folded open to the local pages.

She sat with her back to the wall, where she could watch both doors, and pulled it towards her.

The paper was soft at the edges. Beside an advertisement for replacement windows was a photograph of railway carriages lying at an angle beneath a bank of dark trees.

RAIL SERVICES RESUME AFTER STORM.

She glanced at the photograph, then read the first paragraph.

The northbound 11:40 service, train 214, had derailed yesterday after floodwater undermined a section of track. Emergency crews had worked through the night. A limited service had resumed that morning.

She looked up.

214.

The number was printed on the little route card beside her compartment door. She remembered checking it against her ticket.

She read the paragraph again, this time placing a finger beneath the words.

Yesterday.

The wrecked carriage in the photograph had the same narrow windows as hers. A pale curtain hung out of one, pressed flat against the side by the rain.

Something scraped behind her.

She turned so quickly that her knee struck the table.

There was only the wall. The sound had been a chair being pulled back; she was certain of that. Someone murmured, almost directly beside her ear.

She stood.

“Excuse me?”

The carriage swayed. The spoon stayed where it was on the counter.

She tried to remember what the voice had said.

Then she tried to remember any of the voices.

There had been a man. Hadn't there? Someone had laughed. Someone had coughed. She had listened to them for most of the journey, but she couldn't bring a single sound back into her head. She could remember believing that she had heard them.

Even the murmur from a moment ago was gone.

She sat down slowly.

The article continued on another page. She turned the paper over, looking for the page number, and found the weather forecast.

Clear skies across the northern counties today, following Thursday's severe storms.

Below it was a row of small suns.

She looked out at the rain.

Thursday was today.

She had a meeting at three. Her manager had sent the revised figures on Wednesday evening. She had stayed up putting them into the presentation, then slept badly and woken to the storm.

She turned another page.

Sports.

A goalkeeper lay face down beneath a headline about a costly mistake. She recognised the team shirts. Someone at work had been trying to leave early for that match.

Tonight. The match was tonight.

She read the score. Then the account of a penalty in the eighty-third minute. It described an argument with the referee, a substitution, things that had already happened.

At the top of the page, in small black type, was the word Friday.

She went back to the railway photograph.

Perhaps she had slept. Perhaps she had been asleep for a long time.

But her coat had still been dripping when she left the compartment. And she had lain there listening. She remembered opening her eyes, putting her feet on the floor, closing the door behind her.

She read the first paragraph once more, hoping she had misunderstood it.

From the kitchen came the sound of water being poured.

“Hello?”

She waited, holding the newspaper in both hands.

“I've been waiting.”

She looked at her watch.

2:19.

The second hand advanced.

She held her wrist close to her face, then lowered it and looked again. Two nineteen.

She had read a few paragraphs.

Her legs struck the underside of the table as she got up. The newspaper slid to the floor. She stepped over it and went to the counter.

The note was gone.

She looked beside the till, beneath it, along the floor. There was no folded paper anywhere.

She had been facing the counter. Both doors had been in view.

“Where are you?”

Her voice barely filled the space between her face and the kitchen hatch.

She pushed through the forward door and began walking fast.

Then running.

Compartment doors flickered past. Through each little window she saw seats, hooks, a table. She shoved through a gangway and felt the floor drop under her foot before meeting it again. Voices crowded close, a mass of urgent sounds she couldn't understand.

She didn't stop to look for them.

At the front of the last carriage was a narrow door marked STAFF ONLY.

The handle turned.

Beyond it, three steps led into the driving cab.

She climbed them, already speaking.

“There's nobody—”

Two empty chairs faced the windscreen.

Lights burned across the control panel. A needle trembled on a dial. Beyond the glass, wet rails ran into a cutting and bent out of sight.

The train followed them.

She gripped the back of the nearest chair. It shook against her palm.

There should have been a man here. Someone with his hand on a control, watching the track. She stared at the vacant seat, unable to look at the rails again.

A soft click came from the panel.

In the side window, a face moved.

She recoiled against the doorway.

It was a man's face, pale in the glass. He was looking straight ahead. His mouth shifted slightly, and a hand rose to rub the side of his nose.

She looked at the chair.

Empty.

Back at the window.

He was sitting in it.

She could make out a blue uniform, a thinning patch of hair, a reddened crease above his collar. He looked tired. That was all. An ordinary tired man driving a train.

She stepped closer to the glass.

Behind his reflection she could see the opposite chair, part of the control panel, and the open doorway through which she had come.

She moved her head.

The angle changed. A second man appeared in the reflection, standing behind the first with a paper cup in his hand.

She could not see herself.

She raised her arm. The reflected doorway remained empty.

Her fingers began to tremble.

The seated man said something. Through the glass, she could see each small movement of his lips. If she could just hear him properly. If she could get his attention.

She reached out and touched his reflected shoulder.

The window was cold enough to hurt.

A sound broke open beside her.

“—bad weather coming back tonight.”

She jerked her hand away.

The cab smelled of coffee. Air moved against her damp face. Somewhere close, a radio hissed, and beneath it the wheels made a hard, distinct rhythm she hadn't heard before.

She turned.

The driver sat in his chair. Sunlight lay across his sleeve.

The second man stood beside her, holding his paper cup.

For a moment she could only stare at the steam rising from it.

“Yesterday was enough,” the driver said.

“Supposed to miss us this time.”

The second man turned towards the door.

“Please,” she said.

He came towards her without slowing. She flattened herself against the doorframe. His sleeve moved through the hand she had lifted to stop him.

She felt nothing.

He went down the steps, took a sip of coffee, and continued along the corridor.

“Wait.”

She followed him.

A woman stood outside the first compartment, rocking a baby against her shoulder. Two men were talking through an open door. Further along, a conductor leaned over a ticket held out by someone she couldn't see.

“Excuse me,” she said. “Can you help me?”

The woman adjusted the baby's blanket. The conductor said thank you.

She started to run.

Now every carriage was full of small obstructions: elbows, shopping bags, feet stretched into the aisle. She tried to turn sideways between them. Nobody moved to let her through. Nobody needed to.

In the restaurant car, a cashier was counting change into a customer's palm. Through the hatch, she saw a cook lift a metal lid, releasing a cloud of steam.

The smell of fried onions was overwhelming.

At the table where she had sat, a man was reading the newspaper. He folded it back to the sports pages and pressed it flat with one broad hand.

“Milk?” the cashier asked someone.

She caught herself turning to answer.

The customer behind her said yes.

She kept going.

Her compartment was near the back. Her coat was there. Her suitcase. The laptop with the presentation open on it. She concentrated on these things as she ran: the broken zip on the bag, the little blue ribbon tied to the suitcase handle.

If she could get back to them.

She reached her carriage and stopped at the door.

It was open.

She had closed it. She had pulled the handle to make sure.

All four seats were occupied.

A young man slept with headphones on. An older couple shared a packet of biscuits. Beside the window, in her seat, a woman in a green jumper was untangling a charging cable.

There was no coat on the hook.

No suitcase in the rack.

On the seat opposite, a paperback lay face down beside the sleeping man. Her laptop bag was gone.

She checked the number above the door, although she already knew. On the little table was a crescent-shaped scratch. She had traced it with her thumbnail while trying to fall asleep.

The woman in the green jumper found the end of her cable and bent to plug it in. Above her, a canvas bag filled the space in the rack where the blue-ribboned suitcase should have been.

Nobody had moved her things.

There had been nothing to move.

In the window behind them, four people sat in a warm, crowded compartment.

The doorway was empty.