Starting The Engine

CW: this story mentions the death of a child.

This isn’t happening.

After eighteen months of being a ghost in my own life, the one train I need has been cancelled.

I can’t afford another failure. Not today, when the stakes are finally real.

I stand beneath the station board, watching the crisp white text flicker above the black. The 7.54 is gone, replaced by a void. A shortage of crew, apparently. Just my luck that the universe chooses this morning to run out of people.

Did somebody decide to pull a sickie at the last minute?

If only I’d listened to my neighbour’s advice about setting off earlier.

Shirley regularly commutes to London and enjoys comparing notes over the garden fence. Normally I enjoy our chats about plants and the weather’s changeable nature — unless she’s letting rip about signal failures, trespassers on the track, engineering works, leaves on the line, or anything else that bugs her about rail travel.

Infuriating though it must be, I often find myself zoning out.

In future I’ll listen more carefully.

Spotting one of the station staff carrying a clipboard and heading my way, I call out.

“Excuse me.”

“Can I help you?” she says, turning in her smart red uniform.

I explain the cancellation is a disaster because I’m on my way to an interview.

She checks her clipboard.

“There’s another train due shortly on platform one. You should be on your way in about twenty minutes.”

I check my phone hopefully. It’ll be tight, but there’s still a chance — providing I get a taxi at the other end rather than walking into town as planned.

When the train pulls in I step inside an almost empty carriage and settle at a table.

People come and go along the platform. I try not to look at the young couple near the ticket barriers, so wrapped up in each other no one else exists.

It’s been a long time since anything like that happened with my wife.

Perhaps to be expected after thirty years of marriage.

But it’s more than that.

For the past eighteen months the distance between us has widened until it feels like she can hardly bear to be in the same room as me.

It’s why I’m here.

If I can just make one small change.

But then it happens.

Just as the train doors are about to close, a young girl with auburn hair steps out of a car in the station car park with her mother.

My chest tightens. My breath heaves.

She’s probably only a year or two older than Penny.

That was her name.

Not wanting to disturb my wife, I’ve taken to sleeping in the spare room. It’s a room of half-shadows and silence, where the ghosts of a country road wait for me in the dark.

Most nights the dream returns, a quiet reminder of what I carry with me.

A small figure bursts out of the bushes along a narrow lane, golden hair flying in pigtails.

For a moment she runs along the tarmac, laughing, excited to reach her mother who is already reaching out with open arms to scoop her up. But the girl has seen something. Before her mother can catch her, she bolts away like lightning in search of a deer on the far bank.

Then her eyes meet mine.

There’s a split-second flash of understanding — as if she knows the stranger behind the wheel will be the last person she ever sees.

Then the scream.

The sickening squeal of brakes.

The hot rubber smell of tyres.

And afterwards the sound that still haunts me.

A mother’s cries.

When the ambulance finally arrives she is a gargoyle of grief, crouched on the road, rocking the broken child in her arms.

That’s when I wake up, a shivering wreck.

You know, life wasn’t perfect before that day, but it had a certain rhythm.

Now it exists in staccato jabs and stilted conversations.

Every so often my wife reaches a point and says what she really thinks.

The other day she told me she was sick of living this way.

“It wasn’t your fault,” she said quietly. “I don’t know why you keep blaming yourself.”

I didn’t answer.

Instead she repeated the words I’ve heard too many times.

“You should get help. You need to do something.”

Except absolution would feel too easy.

Then two weeks ago life cuts me a small break.

An email arrives offering me an interview for a job in a town twenty miles away. Only two stops down the line from my home station, Melton is manageable even without a car.

The last big remaining store in town needs a part-time accounts manager. I’m hoping my experience will fit the bill.

I haven’t told my wife about the interview.

I want to surprise her.

Just as the train begins to move, the driver announces there will be a short delay because somebody has been sick and they’re waiting for cleaners.

Maybe life hasn’t cut me a break after all.

Eventually the train jerks forward and crawls out of the station like a three-toed sloth waking from sleep.

By the time the taxi drops me outside the store in Melton I’m five minutes late and it’s starting to drizzle.

“Good luck, mate,” the driver says.

“Thanks. I think I’m going to need it.”

Inside, I apologise breathlessly at reception.

The receptionist smiles and guides me to a chair in the corridor.

“We’re running a little late. Can I get you tea or coffee?”

“Coffee, please. I think I need it.”

A few minutes later she returns carrying two ceramic mugs that look slightly too large for her hands. As I take the mug, I’m struck by the unexpected weight of it. It’s heavy, artisanal stoneware, not like the flimsy plastic cups from the station vending machine. There’s something grounding about the way the heat seeps through, stinging my palms a little. I breathe in the sharp, nutty aroma of beans that someone had taken care over choosing — not like the bitter granules I taste when I’m drinking coffee in the spare room.

“A difficult journey?” she asks. She’s not checking her phone or looking at the door. She’s just there.

“You could say that.”

I look down at the comforting swirl of dark liquid. Somehow the silence here feels safer than the silence of my house. In the quiet, the words I’ve been hoarding for so long begin to leak out. I end up telling her about the cancellations, the white text on the black board, and then — without meaning to — about the road.

I tell her about the accident. About Penny. About how I can’t bring myself to drive anymore.

She listens without interrupting. The only sound is the low hum of a printer in a corner, and the distant sound of cars passing on the street below. She doesn’t flinch when I get to the part about the ambulance.

When I finish, my voice feels reed thin, like paper. She asks one question.

“Were you speeding?”

“No.”

She nods slowly.

“That must have been beyond awful. Then you were just a man on the road and she was just a girl in the bushes.”

There was nothing just about it.

Then she added. “Sometimes things happen at the worst possible moment.”

I suddenly feel embarrassed for saying so much. I’m still holding the mug as if it’s the only thing keeping me from floating away.

“You have a wise head on young shoulders,” I tell her, at last.

She smiles.

“They’re good people here. There’s a real family atmosphere.”

A few minutes later she shows me into the interview.

I leave knowing I’ve given it my best shot.

Outside, the rain has stopped.

I wander through the town for a while, stepping into a few shops before finding a café.

The town feels wider than I remember.

When I reach home I slide open the garage door.

Thanks to my wife’s loving care, the car gleams under the strip light.

For months it has sat here untouched, like something from a life that used to belong to me.

My hand drifts to the handle.

I open the door and slide inside.

The familiar smell of leather and polish fills the small space.

For a moment I simply sit there.

My heart begins to thump, the way it did that day on the country road.

The memory presses at the edges of my mind.

Golden pigtails.

A flash of movement.

Eyes, understanding.

I grip the steering wheel and take a deep breath. I wonder if moving forward might be allowed.

Then I turn the key.

The engine catches immediately, settling into its familiar rumble.

Nothing happens.

The world doesn’t end. My hands rest lightly on the wheel while the engine idles.

“I’m sorry, Penny,” I whisper into the empty car. “You’ll always be a part of me.”

I’m no longer lying awake in the spare room, staring into the dark.

I’m sitting in the driver’s seat.

For the first time in eighteen months, I let the engine run.