his right arm, his left hand gripping his right wrist. There was a popping sound, as if of a balloon, then another. The train continued to move. Kenyon’s last impression was of a vague and retreating mass of people, running and throwing themselves to the marble floor, or perhaps being shot and falling to the floor. The small resolute figure stayed where it was, its arms outstretched with a firing weapon at the end of them. The train slid out from the station canopy around the concealing curve, into the sunlit railway path, lined with sunlit towers, of west London.
‘Did you see that?’ Kenyon said. He asked nobody in particular, and nobody answered. Perhaps nobody had seen it. The pages of the newspapers between his fellow passengers and Kenyon stayed where they were. Something in the angle of the sheets made it clear that they were not being read. They were thinking of Kenyon’s sweating dishevelment, and would lower them when he might have cooled down and stopped panting like a dog. So it was left to Kenyon to read the story on the front page of all of them. It was concerned with the small town he lived in and where he was travelling to. Tomorrow, those same front pages would be filled with what he had just half seen, a teenager shooting at random at strangers at Paddington station on a sunny afternoon. None of them would mention what seemed most noteworthy to Kenyon, that a train had managed its departure at the exact same moment, as if the shooting were no more than a trivial and irrelevant part of the station’s normal work. He concluded, as the train went on with a smooth lack of feeling or shocked response, that he was being swept away from one catastrophe towards another. The world was experiencing an ugly abundance of news, and its experience in the face of that abundance was neglected and unshared. Nobody knew what it was like to travel from the site of a mass shooting towards the site of a child’s kidnapping, and sit in a first-class compartment, the only announcements to listen to those coming from the buffet, about hot and cold drinks, snacks and light refreshments.
It could have been a delirious dream. But at the first stop, Reading, the platforms were milling with disgorged passengers beyond the extinguished trains. They had the patient and forest-like appearance of English people asked to stand and await news about an inconvenient but remote crisis. The crisis, remote as it was, had not been enough to erase the difference between travelling strangers, and for the moment they stood separately without coming together to share observations. ‘Due to an incident,’ an announcement from the platform began. The doors shut, the train moved on. Like a forlorn responding bird call, the Tannoy said, ‘For the benefit of customers joining us at Reading, the buffet is now open for the sale of light refreshments, snacks, tea and coffee, soft drinks and alcoholic drinks. Please have the correct change if at all possible.’ There was nothing in the westward direction to detain them, after all.
On an early summer evening in a medium-sized city in the west of England, a more than customary crowd stood on a railway platform and noisily waited. Between the tracks, someone had once placed heavy concrete troughs and had planted them. Nobody, however, had tended them for years. A tattered linear meadow had spread. Scraggy meadowsweet and Michaelmas daisies had seeded themselves in the gravel between the lines and even along the tracks. They grew leggily, their flowers patchy and periodic as a disease of the skin.
The holiday atmosphere had spread up the line from Hanmouth. Caroline inspected the other passengers coldly, fingering the Moroccan beads at her neck. On this line, you got the squaddies from the camp at Reckham. They were bony, pimpled youths with identically applied and variously successful haircuts. With them was the miscellaneous and motley humanity, and its sourly unpromising children, that had washed up finally at the grim and dole-funded settlements where the train ground to a halt. They all came into Barnstaple to shop, to have an afternoon’s spree, to be subjected to a modicum of education. Today, too, there were others: prim middle-aged couples in neat gear, as if for Sunday-morning drinks, and professionals, too, with a notebook or a complex camera about their necks. One such professional had insinuated himself into a seaside group of teenagers: a fat, womanly Goth in an unseasonable floor-length black leather coat and purple eyeshadow, his dead-black hair plastered to his scalp with sweat, and with him, three blonde girls, non-matching and clean, in floral sprigs or mini-skirts, pastel in overall effect. The professional—the journalist—was polo-shirted and knowledgeable rather than knowing in appearance. He was committing their comments to a list-sized notebook, flicking the short pages over as he scribbled. The children talked one over the other, craning over his shoulder to wonder at his shorthand.
Caroline looked away as if at a lapse in taste or judgement. She knew what they were talking about. She believed, on the whole, that if one had something to say about such stuff, one said it to the police, and if not, not.
One infrequently saw one’s neighbours from Hanmouth on this platform, though the train was at least as convenient as driving into Barnstaple, and without the terrific bore of having to find a parking space. It was particularly unusual to see Kenyon here on an early Thursday night. He was standing on the platform, this hot and celebratory night, as if no one had told him a girl had been abducted from the town he lived in. The ensemble of his professional London wear had somewhat disintegrated in the three-hour sequence that had led him from his Islington AIDS-aid office to the platform at Barnstaple. (Caroline had heard the explanation of the structures of his commuting more than once. Sometimes, at his wife’s parties, people took pity on Kenyon and engaged him in conversation. If they did, he tended to fall back on explanation of how he got from Hanmouth to Islington and back again every week, perhaps rightly assuming that people didn’t cross the room at Miranda’s party to hear about anything interesting like AIDS outreach in Africa, which was how he spent his days.) The jacket of his suit lay in the crook of his arm. His scuffed briefcase stood at his feet, the seams unravelling at each corner. He looked mostly as if he had been recently dipped head downwards in the vat of some sugary solution, his hair anyhow in all directions, though smoothed down by the ineffective motion of his palms. His white shirt and red tie might never have been ironed at all. Kenyon was so evidently at the end of some long and exhausting journey that, for his sake, Caroline hesitated to greet him. But he saw her. With the last smile of a long, smiling, official day, he came over to her.
‘The most extraordinary thing,’ he said. ‘Have you seen a newspaper—an evening newspaper?’
‘To be honest, we’ve rather given up,’ Caroline said. ‘I honestly don’t care to read about it any more. That poor little girl, and that awful family. And everyone—’ She shuddered, as if shaking off everyone around her.
‘No, the most—the most extraordinary thing,’ Kenyon said. ‘Just happened at Paddington. Just as the train was—’ He gave up, unable to explain. ‘It seems very crowded, doesn’t it?’
‘Hanmouth’s’ —Hammuth’s— ‘become a popular destination these days,’ Caroline said. Then, as Kenyon didn’t seem to understand, or was still deep in contemplation of whatever coincidence or casual meeting had occupied his thought for the last three hours, she murmured, ‘You know—the ghouls…’ and left it at that.
‘The—’ Kenyon said. ‘Oh. That poor little girl. And the awful family, as you say. I can’t understand it either. Are they hoping to discover them, or are they just curious? Rubberneckers, Miranda calls them. She’s had a new story about a group of them every night this week, every time we’ve spoken on the phone. One lot tried to take a photograph through our front window, as if the little girl might be bound and gagged in our sitting room. What do you think they’re coming for?’
A stout family of four on a bench, raising and lowering food to their mouths in a steady, complex, four-part rhythm, caught Caroline’s eye and answered the question so firmly that she said nothing.
‘Have you had the police round?’ Kenyon said. This had become an ordinary opening to conversation in Hanmouth in the last week or
