The train sat for a long time, long enough so that after a while he put down the paper and looked out at the platform again. For the first time since boarding at Euston Station, he was irritated with himself. He should’ve hired a fucking car. The journey by train had been an impulsive, sentimental act. He had not been in England since the years right after college, had spent two weeks in the UK, on the first leg of the world tour that would eventually dump him in a decaying heap of stone in the breezy mountains of Kashmir. He had come because the Beatles were there; if not for the Beatles, he believed he would’ve killed himself in his teens, in the bad days after his father had left his mother. He arrived in London with a craving to feel the Beatles in some way, a restless need to put his hand against the bricks of the Cavern Club, as if the music they had played there might still resonate in the warm red clay. He rode the rails north, packed into coach, on his feet for hours in the hot stale air, pressed up against an auburn-haired Edinburgh girl in blue jeans, who he didn’t know when the trip began, and who he was half mad for by the time they reached Liverpool. It was maybe the happiest memory of his life, all the reason he needed to go by train now.

Saunders tried never to think about what had happened after he got off the train. He and the Edinburgh girl had split up, making a loose plan to meet at the Cavern Club that evening; Saunders had stopped at a mom-and-pop for some fish and chips, but the fish was greasy and spoiled, and he spent the night in a sweat, shaking in a hostel, unable to stand. In the days that followed, there was a continuous sick fizzle in his stomach, as if he had gulped down a cup of especially bitter coffee, and he couldn’t go more than half an hour without running for the can. He could not shake the grim conviction that something special had gotten away from him. When he finally made it to the Cavern, the night following, the Edinburgh girl wasn’t there—of course she wasn’t—and the house band was playing fucking disco. The branch of Jimi Coffee being opened in Liverpool was not actually built on the ruin of the mom-and-pop that had served him rancid fish, but Saunders could pretend.