The Blackberry Walk

Chapter 1 The 6:18 train to London St Pancras is a depressing journey in winter. You stand on the platform whilst Boreas blows his wind at your face, and at any other part of you not covered in fleece, coat, glove, and hat. It’s dark. Dark as night, though it is morning; and still, quiet, everyone standing like living statues. Every morning I take this train, and every morning I see the same few faces: the man in his Hi-Vis with his bicycle, his flowing shoulder-length hair, and crow-like face; the short, hunched lady, so short she’d only come up to my sternum, who looks as if she’s not as old as she looks; and the suave, grey-haired man, always standing cockily, who I’ve seen around town talking to any number of women. All still, like living statues on an open-air set, all waiting without movement, waiting for the train’s deliverance. Just as I do every morning, I walked down the steps towards the platform, holding onto the cold, metal banister for fear of slipping on the ice. I walked along the platform, found my usual spot, and froze myself in place in the winter cold, joining this avant-garde art collective of living statues. For how long I waited on the platform, I couldn’t even tell you. Time passes differently waiting for a train. Sometimes it moves ever-so-slowly, like when you see that the train is delayed, and the time of arrival gets later and later each time the delayed time approaches; other times station-time moves exceptionally fast as you enter a kind of monk-like trance for half an hour and there, the train has arrived. The duration of time which passed couldn’t have been too long, since it wasn’t before long that the train’s two little eyes could be seen beaming in the distance. The sound of the train approaching became louder and louder until, disrupting the stillness of the platform, came the great metal wyrm rumbling and groaning, blaring it’s own bright lights, before screeching to a halt. Then on command it opened its doors so as to invite us cold statues in. This piercing of our peace ought to be shocking. After all, the great Leviathan has emerged from our Sargasso Sea; but it’s not. It’s no longer a shock. If you too saw it day after day, you too would be conditioned this way. Stepping aboard, everyone gropes for a seat. There are reservations above each chair, which are more often than not followed, but for a shorter journey like mine they needn’t be followed. I don’t follow them, at the very least. Others take this quest to find their seat a little too seriously. I saw one lady, dressed in red, a red business dress with the matching lipstick, staring at each seat’s number, meticulously searching for her assigned seat. You see many such people, staring at the allocations so hard that it seems as if they only want to look as if they’re looking, look as if they’re following the right custom. And if someone else happens to be sitting in their allocation, a kind of very English altercation may ensue. Today, such an event occurred. The rouged lady came up to me, pursed her lips ever so slightly with a nervous look, and with righteous timidity said, “I think you might be sitting in my seat.” The train car was empty. I replied with the obligatory apology, and sat elsewhere. As risky a choice as it may sound, many on this early-hours commute rest their eyes for the duration to prime themselves for the long day awaiting them. But I want to confirm, I am not among their ranks. For one, my journey is short, only fifteen minutes, so it the sleep won isn’t worth the risk; and for two, I haven’t the command over my sleep not to sleep past my stop. Some regular commuters whose journeys take them to the South day after day have no doubt developed the super powers necessary to time their sleep to perfection, as if in their mind was the retired bell of a Benedictine monastery. Well, at least I hope they have such powers; it would be quite a tragedy if they regularly missed their stops. We passed fields, all grass fields with livestock, cows, a few sheep, and wound past to East Midlands Parkway station where our train stopped. Right behind the station is the old Ratcliffe power plant, the last coal power plant to close down in England, closing down only last year. Stopped at the station, you see the great cooling towers up close. Even in the dark you can see the hatch of concrete supports holding up these marvels of engineering. These hatched bases, to me in the hypnagogia of night, have a mycelial feeling; the cooling towers then feel like great fungal towers, pluming out noxious clouds of spores. But alas, the cooling towers belch out their spore no more. Only the carcasses remain. We came to the confluence of the Trent and the Soar, and the Trent had once again burst its banks. Not on the scale of years prior, mind, when the flooding was such that the fields surrounding the tracks were submerged, leaving only the trees sticking out above the waterline reminding you the fields were still there. A few cattle grazed by the Trent, and I could just about make out the farmer in his four-by-four herding them? Tending to them? Feeding them? I couldn’t quite tell. The train continues moving, not permitting me to see anything too closely. You see houses, vehicles, people, animals, geological formation, all pass too fast to process, accept, or properly consider; perhaps this is why one never gets bored of staring out the window, even when making the same commute each day, and even when it’s so dark little can be made out. Chapter 2 Yawning without restraint, overcome by the work-week’s weariness and my own poor bedtime routine, I squinted my eyes ever-so-slightly as we entered the tunnel. Not sleeping - certainly not sleeping - only half resting my eyes. The darkness of the night outside the train made way for the true darkness of the tunnel. The timbre of the wheels rolling along the tracks changes in a tunnel. I haven’t the vocabulary for sounds, but if I were to describe the change it would be to say the sounds become more rounded. The sounds, no longer escaping into the wide expanse, are rolled around the tunnel like some kind of ball mill, giving them a smoother sounds. Maybe you could describe it as a muted treble? The train continued in the tunnel. Too long in the tunnel. This tunnel is only short, usually we speed through in around ten seconds, but nearly a minute had passed and there was no sign of leaving. Though it was night, even the LED-illuminated night would be a lighter kind of darkness to the tunnel. Another minute passed. Again, we hadn’t left the tunnel. I could still hear the round sound of the tunnel tracks, and I could see true darkness out of the window. I was confused, but there was little to do other than raise my right eyebrow in suspicion. I scanned the car. The lady in red who sat across but two from me was asleep, her eyes closed. The only other in the car was an older, greying gent far down the train wearing a blue suit. His eyes too were tactically shut, squashed down by his matching blue bowler hat. I sat back in my seat. I sat back in my seat, and stared deeply into the blackness of the tunnel wall, almost fed up with its persistence. And then, a sparkle. A flicker. The wall was strewn with small dashing lights- no, not LED lights, but the kind of light found in reflection. As if the tunnel were strewn with veins of silver and gold- but no, not veins, they were like glitter, sparkling. Like stars. And then I noticed: the timbre of the train’s rattling had changed. What was a rounded sound made way for this hollow sound, a sound wholly unlike the rattling of rails in the open air. It sounded as if there were no bass, as if there was no ground against which to reverberate, leaving only the once-absent treble of each clink and clank to ring. This was becoming alarming. Looking out the window once more, I could see not just a few flecks, but a vast sweep of stars covering a night sky. There were no houses, no vehicles, no people, no animals, and most worryingly, no geological formation. No land to speak of. Whether I looked above or below, as it was above, so it was below: it was all the night sky glittered with stars. “Am I in space?”, I spoke aloud. “Yes”, I answered myself, this time in my head. I must be in space. Where else could I be? Where else would there be nothing other than black space and twinkling little stars? Did I fall asleep then? The pinch test returned a negative result. Hm. I then felt it necessary in this emergency to break all train protocol and talk to the other passengers. Either I was in a lucid dream, a lucid dream in which I can feel pain, and such embarrassments are without consequence, or it was a true emergency and action had to be taken. I went over to the older man first. Though further away, I felt less awkward waking him than the red lady. First, I tapped on his shoulder with my finger tips, and in a meek tone said, “Excuse me sir.” This had little effect on the sleeping man. Emboldened, I tapped harder, now with my whole hand, and spoke a little louder, “Excuse me sir, could you wake up, there’s an emergency.” He didn’t budge. That would surely wake anyone up, however deep the slumber. Raising my right eyebrow, I sighed in anticipation for what was to be done next. I clasped each shoulder and shook the man, shouting, “Wake up!” But the man didn’t stir. His limp body simply fell to the neighbouring chair, his bowler hat falling from his head in a twirl. Horrified, I propped him back up and rethroned his hat. Then, placing two fingers to just below his jawbone, I took his pulse. He was still living, thank goodness. Something awfully peculiar was afoot, and I couldn’t quite place what. The train continued at the same pace, the stars hardly moving from their fixtures; no word over the tannoy from the conductor either. I moved at pace to the lady in red. She too was still sleeping, but by this time my patience - and more importantly, my inhibitions - had worn thin. Placing a hand on each shoulder, I gave this poor lady a car crash of a shake, shouting into her ear, “Wake up! Emergency!”, mouthing each syllable in an almost patronising tone. No response. Taking her pulse, she too was in the realm of the living, but like the gentleman remained in this unconscious state. I returned to my seat and pondered. Then, after pondering for a little while, I gave up pondering, and played about on my phone for a little while to distract myself. No signal though, of course. Time passed. Much time passed. Until I half-jolted from my chair as I heard the tannoy begin. Speaking wasn’t the driver who had announced the stops prior to our interstellar departure, but a different man, a man who spoke in a thick accent. The origin of the accent was discernible - European, no doubt, but where in Europe, I, nor our greatest linguists, I’d wager, could locate. He spoke thus: “Thank you for boarding this 6:18 train to The Firmament. Our next stop will be The Moon.” I see. The moon, eh. To my surprise, even the LED dot-matrix signs above the doors between cars which state the next stop and the terminus had been updated to these new destinations. Though such a destination may’ve shocked me, any such shock was subdued and subsumed by joy. The joy of discovering there was someone on this train, someone who knows where we are going, and most importantly, someone who knows what’s going on. I scrambled up from my seat, and dashed forth to the front of the train to try and find this new conductor. I pressed the button to open the compartment which connects the train’s cars, but the button did nought. I kept pressing the button, somewhat violently, to try to convince the door to open by abuse and sheer will. Again, to no avail. Okay, if I can’t open the door by electronic means, it will have to be opened by force. I plunged my fingers into the seal of the door and began to pull- “Sir!” That same voice with that same peculiar accent spoke just behind me. Removing my fingers, I turned around and saw a very strange figure. What I saw was no person, but some kind of shadowy form dressed in EMR purple-and-black garb. And by shadowy, he was no mere stationary shadow, but a kind of flaming shadow, the shadow’s perimeter flickering and crackling, even sometimes casting embers. How his EMR uniform and hat stayed upon his vaguely transparent form was beyond me, and at first sight, stupefying. “Sir! What on earth do you think you’re doing! We’re in space you know, sir! Do you know what this means? Did you not learn in school that space is a vacuum? Do you want to all the air to vanish from the car and for all the passengers to suffocate? Sir!” Thoroughly scolded, my tail firmly betwixt my legs, I swallowed my wounded pride and looked up to his quite frightening face. “Sorry sir. But please answer me. I was en route to work before we went to a tunnel, and all of a sudden we appear to be in space travelling to the moon. Please tell me what on earth is going on.”