To my mother, Joy,
&
especially, gratefully, Caroline and Brian, wherever you are – this is for you
‘It’s that—the thought of the few, simple things we want and the knowledge that we’re going to get them in spite of you know Who and His spites and tempers—that keeps us living I think.’
Dylan Thomas, The Collected Letters of Dylan Thomas
‘Periissem ni periissem.
I would have perished had I not persisted.’
Anstruther Clan Motto
A Pollock on the Floor
KING’S CROSS STATION, LONDON, DECEMBER 6: DEPARTURE, 8:33 A.M.
Henry
What it all came down to, in the end, were the contents of a small brown suitcase, stored within stretching distance under the bed.
By Henry’s own admission the case itself was unremarkable. Scuffed and shabby, it had mouldered, half-hidden in the semi-darkness on a slightly dusty, carpeted floor. The handle, which was made of a robust, finely crafted cowhide leather, had grown ragged, and the once shiny metal clasps designed to spring open with a conspicuously satisfying click were tarnished and dull. And yet, Henry reminded himself, appearances can be deceptive; what mattered to him lay meticulously preserved within.
He kept a firm grip on the suitcase’s handle as he made his way onto the teeming concourse at King’s Cross train station. It was still early, the air charged with a melee of arrival and departure announcements, the throb of engines, the irritable drone of traffic from the nearby Euston Road. Henry felt a carousel of emotion crank into gear inside him. Focus! he told himself. Don’t let yourself get distracted until you’re seated on that train…
He drew to a stop in the centre of the concourse and placed his suitcase at his feet. Overhead, an indistinct mass of words blurred and flickered on the electronic departure board. Henry rubbed his eyes and tried desperately to remember his Mantra of the Day:
‘Applebee,’ he mumbled under his breath. ‘My name is Henry Applebee…’
Steadying himself with his walking stick, Henry lowered his gaze to the granite-grey concourse floor. Tiny spots of blood were raining down upon it, just inches from his black Derby shoes. It took him a moment to grasp where the blood was coming from, then he raised his hand to his face and realised with a start that it was trickling from his nose.
Henry’s heart sank. The sharp slick of red struck a violent chord of colour amongst an uninspiring sea of grey and black, navy and taupe – flat, wintry hues which hovered like low-lying clouds around the shoulders of the commuters who stood transfixed before the overhead departure board, or scurried backwards and forwards, zigzagging continuously across his path.
‘Whatever you do next,’ he said in a valiant attempt at calm, ‘DON’T PANIC!’
Henry’s eyes darted to the dizzying conveyor belt of faces sailing past him. One or two of his fellow travellers turned and cast a cursory glance in his direction. The majority, he noted, barely seemed to register him at all. He wondered if they were repelled. Perhaps they were just far too absorbed in the busyness of their own lives to notice an old man with a bloody nose?
He teetered, incredulous, as blood continued to gush in slow motion from his body and began to form an expanding pool of crimson on the floor.
It was out of his peripheral vision, as he detected the ferrous taste of metal trickling down the back of his throat, that he suddenly saw the figure of a girl running towards him. Henry scanned the outline of her face, caught the lightness and the ease with which she moved. For one brief instant, he debated whether she might be an angel. But then, as she drew closer, he saw to his relief that she was just a girl, an ordinary teenager like any other, probably seventeen or eighteen at most. Besides – now that he came to think of it – wasn’t an angel supposed to materialise in a nimbus of white light? Not arrive sprinting, dragging a wheelie bag behind her and spilling milky coffee from a paper cup onto the floor…
As she approached the centre of the ever-widening circle in which he now found himself, the frothy liquid splattered left and right, merging with the bloodstains on the ground.
Henry and the teenager stared in unison at what they had done.
‘It looks like a Jackson Pollock,’ he said, marvelling, despite himself, at the effect. He pointed at the evolving creation with his stick. ‘I think the technical term is “drip painting”.’
The girl scraped her long, mousey hair behind her back and tilted her head to one side. She was standing right next to him now, eyes narrowed, lips pursed in contemplation.
‘Looks to me like the inside of my head,’ she replied in a lightly accented voice. ‘When I’m having a bad day. A day full of demons.’
Henry thought this was an interesting analogy, but he was too distracted searching for something to stem the blood flow to express the fact out loud. He patted the pockets of his overcoat and noticed that the fringes of the girl’s multicoloured scarf were stained with thick, wet splashes of coffee.
Silently, he berated himself.
‘It’s dramatic, though,’ the girl continued. Her tone was attentive, her pale eyes keen, unwavering. ‘Like an explosion of light and dark.’
Turning at last to face him, she pressed a pocket-sized packet of tissues into Henry’s palm.
Henry fumbled, his stiff, papery fingers tugging clumsily at the slippery semicircle of perforated plastic.
The girl edged closer and cupped her hand around his arm. ‘Are you okay?’
Henry nodded. Instinctively, he felt that he should ask her name, discover the identity of this troubled, angelic stranger who had rushed, unbidden, to his aid, but his heart was still jackhammering beneath his ribs.
It was the damnedest thing… Half of him had expected to see his life flash before his eyes, and yet surely this wasn’t his time? Not here. Not now. Not when his journey was only just starting to unfold?
He blinked several times in succession in an effort to ground himself more fully in his surroundings.
The irony of the situation weighed on him like sin.
Here he was, once again in a bustling train station (albeit one on a much grander scale), ready to resume where he had left off all those years ago, the night of a snowstorm, and of a slow-curling flame…
Henry