The Train That Didn't Fit

Dad sent a screenshot of a train timetable with three words beneath it: Doesn't look bad.

Leila opened the image on the bus to college. It showed a journey of thirty-eight minutes from Westmere Central to Fenwick Vale. The train left at 10:12. There were no details about reaching either station, and no suggestion that the first lesson at Briar began before ten.

She saved the picture and began looking up the rest herself.

From Dad's flat to Westmere Central, there was a bus every twenty minutes in the morning. From Fenwick Vale station to college, there was another bus or a twenty-two-minute walk. To arrive before registration, she would have to leave his flat at six thirty-five, assuming every connection worked. The fare was more than she wanted to send him in a message because it looked like an accusation when set beside his three words.

At break, Esme found her with the route open.

“Going somewhere?”

“Trying to work out whether Dad's spare room is an actual room or a theory.”

Esme sat beside her. “Could you stay there?”

“Not without learning to sleep on trains.”

“You do that on buses already.”

“Only accidentally.”

She showed Esme the connections. Esme traced them with one fingernail, stopping at the early departure.

“That's horrible.”

“He'd take me to the station sometimes.”

“Does he work near it?”

“No. The other direction.”

“Has he said he'd take you?”

Leila looked at the screen.

“No.”

Esme did not add anything. That was becoming one of the ways she tried to be a better friend: leaving a space where a conclusion could arrive without being pushed.

Leila rang Dad at lunch. He answered over a noise that sounded like metal being moved across concrete.

“Can't talk long, love.”

“I checked the travel.”

“Good. Manageable?”

“Not really. I'd have to leave before quarter to seven. And the fare's more than the route I'm doing now.”

There was a pause. Somewhere behind him, a man called a name that was not Dad's.

“Could you stay a couple of nights a week? It would still give you some space.”

“And carry my school things between three places?”

“Two places.”

“College would be the third place where I'd keep something because I couldn't bring it all.”

She heard the sharpness in her own voice and tried to pull it back.

“I'm not saying I don't want to see you.”

“I know. I'm trying to help.”

“I know that too.”

The problem was that knowing his intention did not improve the train timetable.

“Let's not close the door on it,” he said.

Leila looked across the courtyard. A group of students were eating chips from one tray, taking turns to hold it in the middle. She had been one of those people recently: ordinary enough to spend lunch arguing about whose turn it was to buy something.

“I need to know what I'm actually doing,” she said. “Not keep a bag half packed for something that might happen.”

Dad was silent for long enough that she heard him move away from the work noise.

“All right,” he said. “Then weekends for now. We'll arrange the next one properly.”

“Before you tell Toby.”

“Yes.”

She ended the call with the uncomfortable feeling that she had rejected something generous. It took her most of the afternoon to admit that an offer could be generous and still not fit.

In art, she began the second of her three pieces. The first would be the outward journey, arranged as a long narrow panel. For the second, she wanted several views from the same seat layered together, the reflections of the bus interior changing against the buildings outside. She had drawn the retail park too neatly. Every building looked as though it had been assembled from a kit by someone with time to read the instructions.

Armitage stood beside her for a while before speaking.

“You're making the parking spaces very beautiful.”

“They aren't.”

“No. Are you trying to make us feel differently about them, or are you tidying them because the mess is difficult to draw?”

Leila stared at the perfect little rows.

“The second one.”

“Good. Now you know.”

She used a rubber on the lines until they became pale ghosts. Then she drew the trolley shelter she actually knew: the bent lower rail, the puddle that remained after the rest of the car park dried, the point where the plastic roof had clouded over. She added one trolley sitting apart from the others, its wheel turned the wrong way.

The drawing immediately became less attractive and more interesting.

At the next table, a boy called Dylan was making a model of the railway underpass. He asked if she had any spare card. Leila passed him a piece, and he asked what her own project was about.

“The journey I do now.”

“Because you moved?”

“Yes.”

“Where to?”

The question was ordinary. Dylan had not lowered his voice or glanced at anyone else. Leila could answer it without turning the studio into a confession.

“Near the retail park. Temporarily.”

He nodded. “That bus is awful after six.”

“I know.”

“My sister works out there. She says the last connection's a lottery.”

He returned to his model. Leila waited for another question that did not come.

On the way home, she got off one stop early to draw the trolley shelter from outside. She sat on the low wall near the pedestrian crossing and worked for fifteen minutes. People passed without paying much attention. A woman asked whether she was counting cars for the council. Leila said no, and the woman appeared disappointed because she had information about the road layout she wanted someone to receive.

Micah came out with a line of trolleys near the end of Leila's sketch. He spotted her, raised a hand and then had to chase the last trolley when it began deciding on another direction.

She drew that too. Not him in detail, just the angle of a person adjusting to a piece of work that would not remain orderly.

When he came over, she showed him.

“That's flattering,” he said. “You've given me control of the situation.”

“For about half a second.”

“Longer than usual.”

He asked whether Tuesday still worked. She said yes. He smiled in a way that made the day feel less divided between things she could and could not manage.

Back at the hotel, Mum read the route Leila had sent her.

“You did all that yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Did your dad understand?”

“Eventually.”

Mum folded a towel and put it on the chair. “I'm sorry you had to be the one checking it.”

“I wanted to know.”

“That doesn't mean you should always have to do the work after somebody else's idea.”

Leila looked at her mother. The room was untidy; Mum's hair had come loose from its clip; there was a red mark on the bridge of her nose from wearing reading glasses. She looked nothing like the competent adults in school prospectuses. Yet she had made a plan for Thursday's school collection, filled in the travel paperwork and remembered that Leila needed time to draw. Competence, Leila was beginning to think, was not always a look.

She put Dad's timetable screenshot in a folder with the other documents. Then she closed it and helped Toby work out where the roof of his house had begun to lift.