In the train carriage, shut behind the thick glass, I feel comfortably locked away from responsibility. I know I’m running away but my heart has become a sterile zone where nothing can grow. I don’t want to face facts, shape up, snap out of it. In the pumped-out, dry bed of my heart, I’m learning to live without oxygen. I might get to like it in a masochistic way. I’ve sunk too low to make decisions and that brings with it a certain lightheaded freedom. Walking on the moon there’s no gravity. There are dead souls in uniform ranks, spacesuits too bulky for touch, helmets too heavy for speech. The miserable millions moving in time without hope. There are no clocks in Misery, just an endless ticking.

The train has been delayed and we are sitting in a cutting with nothing but the rustle of an evening paper and the tired stirrings of the engine. Nothing will intrude upon this passive derelict scene. I’ve got my feet up on the stained upholstery. The man two seats away is snoring in sleep. We can’t get out and we can’t get on. What does it matter? Why not relax in the overheated stagnant air? IN THE EVENT OF AN EMERGENCY BREAK GLASS. This is an emergency but I can’t lift my arm high enough to smash my way out. I haven’t got the strength to sound the alarm. I want to stand up strong and tall, leap through the window, brush the shards from my sleeve and say, ‘That was yesterday, this is today.’ I want to accept what I’ve done and let go. I can’t let go because Louise might still be on the other end of the rope.

The station at the village is a small one and leads directly on to a lane and through fields spread with winter wheat. There’s never a ticket collector, only a 40-watt bulb and a sign that says ‘THIS WAY’. I’m thankful for a little guidance.

The path is bulked with cinders that give a high-pitched clink under your shoes. Your shoes will have charcoal patches and flakes of white ash but it’s better than mud on a rainy night. It’s not raining tonight. The sky is clear and hard, not a cloud, only stars and a drunken moon swinging on her back. There’s a line of ash trees by the picket fence that takes you out of man-made things into the deep country where the land’s not good for anything but sheep. I can hear the sheep munching invisibly over tussocks of grass thick as a pelt. Be careful to keep on the right, there’s a ditch.

I could have got a taxi that late night, not chosen to walk six miles without a torch. It was the slap of the cold, the shock in my lungs that sent me up the cinder path and away from the pub and the telephone. I slung my bag on my back and made for the outline of the hill. Up and over. Three miles up, three miles down. We walked all night once, Louise and I, walked out of darkness as though it were a tunnel. We walked into the morning, the morning was waiting for us, it was already perfect, high sun over a level plain. Looking back I thought I saw the darkness where we had left it. I didn’t think it could come after us.