The bedroom was small and hadn’t been decorated for far too long. Old chipped paint covered a multitude of bad memories. This room had never been a place filled with childhood laughter; it was just a room. In the corner across from the bed stood the old wooden table on which the train set had been painstakingly built. A nondescript chipboard base six feet by two. Not big enough for a loop of railway track, only enough room for one curve. One curve was all the boy wanted on his layout but the piece of curved track was buckled due to an unfortunate encounter with a vacuum cleaner. It wasn’t just one curve of twin tracks –it was ‘the’ curve. The curve which meant so much to him. Railway tracks running parallel between the platforms on a base of grey cork chippings with opposing platforms carefully crafted and very realistically created the station, every detail of which had been built from scratch. The station even had illuminated lamps which gave a little light to the dismal gloom within the four walls of Jake’s room. The main ceiling light hadn’t been working for a long time and the bedside lamp had never known anything stronger than 40 watts. The people stood silently on the platform waiting for the train; people grouped together under the station lamps wrapped up in the damp evening chill as light was fading.
One man clothed in an orange fluorescent jacket stood alone at the end of the platform under the last lamp, a little plastic model glued into position on the model platform, forever static and there forever. The train was a diesel, an old scratched Class 66 with a broken windscreen. “Not many of them about, son.” The man in the toyshop was busy putting the Class 66 back on the rails after a dramatic derailment caused by a dinky bus being pushed over the bridge by a visiting schoolboy from the nearby estate. “Bloody kids ! I will swing for them one day !” as if that was still an option.He remembered the owner of the toy shop; the way he looked at him when he said he wanted the Class 66. The bewildered owner knew Jake and his family, known them for years and had encouraged him to buy the gleaming new steam locomotive instead of the battered old locomotive.
Now,the Class 66 was Jake’s pride and joy; his favourite model. Even Jake would have to admit that it was kind of weird to replace the model carefully inside its dilapidated box every night after being deliberately crashed and catapulted onto the ragged threadbare carpet. As the daylight faded and late afternoon edged into night, the little station lamps glowed brightly, the glued man casting a dark shadow onto the track. The dark shadow appeared to be out of proportion compared to the height of the glued man, a dominating presence who didn’t and never would move.
The bulb in the bed-side table lamp flickered and died. A small light which glowed in the dark but was now extinguished and would have to be replaced, eventually. Jake thought of his dad. Jake knew that his dad would sort it; dad could sort anything. But deep down Jake knew his dad had not been able to sort the light by the track and now wouldn’t be able to sort the toy lamp, not now - not ever. Jake dried his tearful eyes with a linen handkerchief, the only one he possessed, which had once been white was no longer white being often used for cleaning the Class 66 especially after applying liberal splashes of oil to the undercarriage.
Jake knew that his dad had been called upon to repair the signal on that dreadful night, knew that his dad had been walking along the side of the track, wearing his orange fluorescent jacket, towards the signal when the Class 66 had come off the rails.
Jake raised his head from his model layout and looked out of the bedroom window which still had a defining crack in it as a result of impact with a football. Outside of Jake’s world, the sky was pitch black, even the moon had been turned off, probably deliberately as far as Jake was concerned. Just one more thing that didn’t make sense to him. Looking out into the darkness, Jake could still see the green glow of the signal just beyond the end of the garden where the old rusty iron fence had been but had been recently replaced with a wall. Jake grabbed his puffa jacket and opened the door of his room. The upstairs landing as well as the stairs were in darkness like everything else in his life. He inched his way downstairs knowing that his mum was probably watching ‘Coronation Street’ on the box which stood in the corner of the lounge.
Jake wasn’t the typical latch-key kid although he was used to coming home from school to an empty house when his mum was working the day-shift as a carer at Cedar View Care Home.The back door was in the small, permanently untidy kitchen which had seen more fast-food cartons than culinary ingredients. Even the microwave didn’t ping as much as it used to. Jake managed to open the back door as quietly as was humanly possible and opened it just enough to squeeze through the gap. He didn’t take a torch as he couldn’t remember the last time he saw such a thing in the house. Outside was cold, very cold, the wind biting into Jake’s face as he clambered blindly in the direction of the back wall. No need to worry about tramping over flower-beds, there was nothing blooming or even colourful in this urban wilderness. Even the grass which was only laid one year ago did not look as if it been cared for even in daylight. Jake could still see a light but the small light shining out from where the old platform had been. This was a new light, a new signal which had been erected near to where the station had stood. The old Victorian brick buildings with their carved wooden canopies or rather what had been left of them had been bulldozed soon after the accident. The powers that be decided that bearing in mind the declining passenger numbers that there was no justification in rebuilding the station. Even in the pitch black Jake managed to find the wall and climbed on to the top of its roughly hewn stone built from the rubble of the old station. The six-foot high wall obscured the track bed from the garden but Jake had always been able to see the view from his bedroom window. Looking around him he couldn’t make out much at all except the light. Always the light at the end of where the platform once was.
Further along the track on the up-line shone another green light from the lone signal which looked no larger than a pin-prick.It was usually green, even a year ago it had been green except that the locomotive never reached that far. Not even after it left the rails. The Johnston's at number 45 had been out for the evening at an award gala evening at the Assembly rooms near the town centre. When they returned home they never expected to see what they saw. Their front garden was full of day-glow jackets from all the Emergency services all coming and going along the path leading to the back of the house. The noise was horrendous. The radio in the Fire vehicle was loudly transmitting update details to the Commander on the ground from the police helicopter circling in the dark cloudless sky above, its strong white searchlight beaming down towards the row of back gardens where now lay a tangled metallic chain of 40 ton Tanker wagons.
The Locomotive, a large Class 66 was now laying on its side across two gardens, the old trellis fences between 31 and 47 being completely obliterated by the impact. Countless neat lines of herbaceous borders now churned into mud.A long and deep muddy trench had been gouged out of Jimmy Johnston’s back lawn as well as those of his neighbours.Jake remembered that night, seemed so long ago. He remembered the noise, the deafening screeching and the dreadful clanking and crunching of metal. He had jumped out of bed just as the fire started, the red glow dancing around the walls and filling his bedroom.He could hear the sirens, the wailing screaming sirens.He had always wanted a long garden, his friends at the secondary modern told him tales of cricket stumps on the back lawn. Only thing he sees now when he looks out into the garden are the tanker wagons.
Jake Knew that loaded tanker wagons don’t usually lie on the crease, certainly not at Lords. But this wasn’t Lords; this was the back garden of 41 Kirriemuir Drive. Now, sitting atop the wall Jake felt the cold night air cutting into his cheek. He wanted to be there; he wanted to feel something, anything to make sense of the year since it happened. The green signal still beams out from further down the line. Trains still thunder past. Life has returned to normal for everyone except Jake. As Jake looked towards the end of where the platform used to be he wanted so much to see the tall figure with the orange jacket but he wasn’t there. Just the darkness. With a tear in his eye Jake retraced his steps back to his house and made his way upstairs to his bedroom, threw off his clothes and got into bed, lay down and sobbed into the pillow.
Jake blamed himself for nor repairing his toy signal on his train set, and had no idea that the cause of the accident had been caused by the curved piece of buckled track that had been mangled by the vacuum cleaner.
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