Why is it that no matter what hour or which day of the week you simply never get a train seat to yourself? Liverpool is the end of the line and I'm always complacent thinking I'll have my pick of chairs all the way back to Sheffield. Always mistaken. My best bet was a spot up at the front slumped down beside some young lad in a little pair of shorts and a football jersey. Overhearing the prattle of two guitar-clutching students nearby ("that French film's gid. . . yeah have you seen that one. . . it's really gid. . . oh there's this other one you should see, well gid") I thanked my lucky stars that I had escaped the obligation to talk.
Then fantasy was punctured by my little companion through a series of hints that he intended some breed of conversation.
There was a great almighty exhalation followed by a loud harrumph followed by an endless desultory fidgeting with the window. "Bloody cold!" he announced, grandly.
I looked up and there we had it. He wasted no time getting the juice. What was I reading, where was I going, did I smoke and had I a boyfriend. I could feel his elbow edging towards mine with every query, his plea for a ciggy radiating a desperate heat against my arm, that temperature seldom experienced outside of a cinema during puberty.
I returned timidly to my book, did my best to extricate my arm from his blood vessels.
"How old are you?" he wondered.
"Tw-twenty."
The child flinched, its eyes ghastly agog.
"What!"
"I do get ID'd quite often," I quavered.
"No way! I'd'a thought you were my age! Younger!"
"How old are you then?"
"I'm sixteen." He wasn't. He was a fawn, a big-eyed baby-faced fawn. His voice lumped out unevenly, his legs were bald, his umbilical cord was trailing out a yard behind him. He wasn't in the least bit sixteen.
"Here's your stop," the lad attempted in his manliest baritone as Sheffield came gloriously into view.
I thanked him, wished him luck getting cigarettes and left the train with the slightly sick feeling in my stomach of one who has been making lambs' eyes in a crèche.
