He took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes.

The platforms were blurred now, under a slab of grey-white sky that went from horizon to horizon: typically dull September, life-sapping weather. The waiting area was un-vandalised, and when he walked further, to the ticket office, he noticed exhibition boards. There were photographs of soldiers, and maps with arrows.

Why soldiers, he wondered? He would need his reading glasses now.

He started to read, and as he read a boy called Morris was in need of his help – but they’d got down at different stations, so help could not be offered. The track connected them, of course, but as Michael read the word Flanders, and tried to remember where it was, Morris sat hungry and sad waiting for a call that just wouldn’t come. He knew in his heart that things were going to end badly.

He had so little money, and he was a long way from home.

IN FROM THE WEST

8

He had no credit on his phone, or he would have called Keenan.

He’d set off in good faith, and had spent his own money on the ticket. He’d got to the café as instructed: nobody had turned up so far, and twelve-thirty was the time he’d been told. Now he sat alone with sixty-seven pence in his pocket, which wouldn’t buy him a bottle of water let alone a hot drink. Breakfast – hours ago – had been a sausage roll.

This was Morris.

He was staying with his sister at Newport, and had crept downstairs so as not to wake up the baby that had woken him twice. No milk, so he drank half a cup of black tea. One sausage roll, from a pack of three: he’d bought them the day before, and there was one left because Ben, his sister’s boyfriend, had stolen two. No juice, and no point trying to eat cereal without milk. Other than that, it was baby food and a rancid yoghurt. The sausage roll had filled him, and the deal was always the same: he’d be given money, food and drink. Now he didn’t know what to do.

Boots, jeans and a sweatshirt: he sat back with his arms wrapped round himself, keeping his eyes on the window and the door, worried already that he’d missed whoever it was. The woman behind the counter was getting ready to move him on, and he thought about leaving so as to make life easy. Then he looked at all the empty tables and chairs, and decided not to: he could sit where he wanted to sit, surely, since he wasn’t being a nuisance.

He wasn’t smoking.

He wasn’t stinking. He wasn’t in anybody’s way, but the woman kept glancing at him. A man came in, with a little boy.