He seemed disoriented. Long after the other passengers had gone, he stood trembling on the platform, looking bemusedly about, his underlip hanging loosely. The afternoon light slicked off his bald skull. His raincoat was undone. In one ropy-veined hand he clutched his walking stick; in the other, a damp-looking brown paper bag, which, every so often, he seemed to offer vaguely to the empty air, as if expecting someone to take it from him. Eventually, two men did come and try to help him. He began to argue with them immediately, though he seemed to know them. While they were persuading him to leave the platform, Anna went out through the ticket hall and stood on the pavement outside. She couldn’t have explained why. A single minicab waited in the parking area: after perhaps five minutes, the old man, now minus his paper bag, was ushered out by the railway staff, who manhandled him gently but firmly into the back of it. For a minute or two nothing happened except that he wound his window down and stared out into the rain.

‘Found anything real yet?’ Anna was prompted to call.

He gave her a cold, alert look and wound the window up again. The driver turned round to speak to him, but he didn’t seem to answer. Taking a right into North Street, the cab was balked by traffic; as soon as things started moving, it vanished towards Grove Park. Anna imagined the old man sitting in the back alone, looking from side to side as the vehicle slipped between Carshalton Ponds, listening for the faint action of his own blood. She wondered where he was going. She imagined him being driven back to a house like the one she had seen that afternoon. She imagined him meeting the boy with the bad hair there and though the picture was incongruous found that it had lodged itself as solidly in her world-view as Carshalton itself.

After a few minutes, the voice of the station announcer drifted out on to the forecourt again – ‘This is Carshalton. This is Carshalton.’ – its bland yet rawly self-conscious accents clearly recognisable as those of a fictional 1940s radio-operator, pumped up with the importance and strangeness of a brand new official medium. It had sounded, Anna now tried to explain to Marnie, as if he was auditioning for a part in an as-yet unmade Powell and Pressburger film. But Marnie, who had never been convinced by Powell and Pressburger, didn’t seem interested.

‘Can we turn this off, darling?’ Anna said, piqued. ‘Because I find it rather depressing.’

‘England calling,’ she had expected to hear the announcer say. England calling, into night, bad weather and bad reception. England begging, with that desperate but almost imperceptible interrogative lift of the last two syllables, ‘Is anyone out there?’

8 Rocket Jockeys

EIGHT

Rocket Jockeys