“It’ll be all right,” says Grandma. “Don’t worry about a thing. Promise me?”
I get out and watch while Grandma turns the car and drives away. Until this moment, I have no doubt that I’m going to school. It’s not as if I don’t know the way. I’ve walked the route from here more times than I care to remember. But, as my grandmother’s car disappears from view, so does my certainty. It’s as though, by turning the corner, she has cut me adrift. School doesn’t seem the point any more. Even the word “school” seems to have shifted. I can’t fix on its meaning. I stand bewildered. I seem not to know what to do or where to go.
And then I hear a voice, soft and low. “I know,” the voice says. And then it whispers: “Come.”
“Jan, Jan – do you hear me, Jan?”
He does hear her, though he does not reply. He listens to the soft way she articulates the first letter of his name, making the J into a Y: Yan, Yan. There is a yearning in that letter, a yearning in the way she calls, he thinks, even now. But he shuts it out, shuts her out. Not that he does not love his mother, his English mother. He does.
He is simply not in the room. Which is to say, his body may be sitting on the bed, his shoes scuffing the floor, but his mind is up at the railway track. He goes there often, both in his head and on foot. There is something in the wind up there, the noise it makes as it crosses the desolate bridge. A high, melancholy, mountain sound. A sound he thinks he recognises, though of course he cannot recognise it, for it is only wind over a bridge. But he goes there to check. This morning he took his pipes. The Antara, panpipes from Bolivia. The strong reeds bound together with wood and string and brightly coloured wool. He hid them under his shirt. Though there is no one up at the bridge to look. Usually.
Why did he go today? He never goes during school. School is important, he knows that. Was it the bridge, the music, calling him? Or was it that moment when his mother said, as he stood in the hall checking his books: “I think it’s going to be cold. You should take a coat.”? As though he was five not fifteen. Is that why he walked out of the door and turned left, not right? Life pivots, Jan thinks, on such tiny decisions. The moment when you elect, for whatever reason, to choose this road rather than that. Other people might call it chance, or coincidence. But Jan has a sense of a purposeful universe. The railway line has been waiting.
And so he climbs, without any hurry, street after street, towards the edge of the town and the opening, which runs by the graveyard of St Thomas, out to the field and the railway beyond. It is not a place that invites company. There is no path, except the one that Jan has trod, and the wilderness covers what tracks he makes soon enough. The nettles grow high and undisturbed and, where the mound of the railway begins to rise, brambles stretch like lashes. Jan takes a stick and beats them back, like a latter-day prince clearing a way to a castle. And, today, there is a princess.
Or at least a figure. Standing right at the edge of the bridge. His bridge. He is so astonished he almost drops the pipes, but they are suspended around his neck on a black plait of Bolivian wool. Perhaps he has imagined the figure? He does imagine things. He’s aware of that. But this figure moves; it swings around to look down the track. A girl. He knows, at once, what she’s doing. She’s trying to guess when the next train will come.
He knows this because he has stood where she stands now. The bridge is over a river. It’s narrow. Four tracks pass here. There is very little space between the outer tracks and the low wall of the bridge. If you were to run alongside the wall when a train was passing, and they pass at over a hundred miles an hour, you would not, Jan thinks, survive. Unless that is, the train was using one of the centre tracks, and you couldn’t know that until the engine was almost upon you. And even then the wind might knock you to the ground. Jan has listened to this wind too. The displaced air of a train coming. It whines like a circular saw. Unless it’s one of the twelve-coach passenger trains, which has a softer, plusher sound.
The girl is already too close. She is almost on the bridge. She’s a small thing, slight, with cropped dark hair. One would barely have to puff, he thinks, to blow her over. He could almost do it from where he’s standing, in the lee of the elderflower tree, twenty metres away.
Her head is averted now. He cannot see her face, but he knows she’s calculating. Can I do it? Can I cross the bridge in safety? The thoughts he thought, when he also stood there, poised. Only he walked away. You’d have to be prepared to die to run by the wall. You’d have not to mind which way it fell out. Left or right. And he’d wanted to live.
You see, he has already died once. When he was a baby. His was a difficult birth in a difficult country. Chile. They looked at the scrap of him and put him on a life-support machine. An hour later someone decided to blow up one of Pinochet’s power stations. The cot died then, but the scrap of life didn’t. It breathed for itself until the spare generator kicked in. You might not be lucky twice, Jan thinks. Which is why he doesn’t run the bridge.
There’s a low rumble further down the track. Jan listens, quick and intent. It is, he thinks, the sound of the train that forks off before it gets to this bridge, about half a mile away. He recognises the drone. But the girl can’t know that. She’ll wait for it to pass, thinking, as he did once, that if you wait for a train, there can’t be another one immediately. So you’ll be safe. You’ll have the two or three minutes you need. That’s a fine calculation in itself – how many minutes will it take you to run the seventy-metre bridge? If a world-class athlete can do a hundred metres in under ten seconds then…
She’s running. He cannot believe his eyes; the girl is running. What if he’s wrong about the train and the fork? What if the train is coming right here, right now? A sound explodes out of his mouth. He thinks it’s “Stop!” But it would be madness to stop now, she must keep going, she must run faster than she’s ever run in her life, just in case. He can still hear the rumble, it’s gone on too long, the train must be past the fork and the girl is still running, running like in a dream where no matter how fast you run, you never move forward at all.
And then – she’s arrived. She’s at the other side. And there is no train. No rumble even. The train has gone the other way.
She’s a good distance from him now, a dark silhouette against the sky, and yet he feels her flash of triumph, sees it in the defiant stamp of her body. Yes, I did it. I ran the bridge. Then her head drops, she’s holding something. It’s a doll. A small doll, no bigger than her hand. How can he know that when he’s so far away? And yet he does know.
Jan leans from his bed, in the bedroom of his very English house, and opens a drawer. He extracts a tiny painted box, lifts the lid. There are seven Worry People in this box: three men, three women, one child. They are made of matchwood, their bodies bound with brightly coloured cotton and vibrant scraps of cloth: blue, purple, pink, red. All except one, and it is this doll – Violeta – that Jan lifts out and puts in the palm of his hand. This doll is made of wire, the cotton bindings a dull yellow, the skirt the colour of baked mud. Its face is orange paper and, though it has black eyes and a black nose, it has no mouth. Its hair is black and sparkling, as though it were made of sand and tarmac. Its wire arms are uneven, one outstretched towards him, the other a rusted stub. The doll is only half a thumb high. He closes his hand around it. Oh yes, he knows. He holds the doll for a moment, then puts it back in the box with the others and returns the box to his bedside drawer.
In the eye of his mind, he watches the way the girl touches her doll, observes again how she closes the doll against her chest. That’s when she realises, he thinks. She has to run again. There is no way back, unless she wants to swim the river.
She begins at once. Her hand still on her heart. Starts to cross for a second time. But she isn’t running now, she’s jogging. Barely that, she’s ambling. It’s the confidence; she doesn’t have to hurry. The doll has absorbed her fear. Is that why she doesn’t react to the noise down the track? It’s loud enough. Not a drone this time but the circular-saw