Doll. Nicky Singer

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      “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.