JAKE AND THE KID

Jake was sitting alone in the signal box, as he did every day. After the first month at his job he had decided to buy a new chair which he found very comfortable. It had cushions of a deep scarlet, similar to the sunset that Jake saw sometimes from his box, and revolved with a beautiful smoothness of action. Jake kept his chair secret because the rail company did not permit employees to have chairs of their own. Jake was very proud of his chair, and draped his arms complacently on top of it.

At that moment Jake was watching a kid, a boy of eight or nine years and great dirtiness. The kid was walking down a hill next to the railway track. He walked alone which surprised Jake, who remembered that as a child he had scarcely ever left the house without his brother - two years his senior - and at least one of his schoolfriends. Usually Felix, but Jake had lost touch with Felix. He had lost touch with everyone. Perhaps, thought Jake, Felix moved to the city. Hundreds of kids from Jake’s village had gone there after dropping out of school. No one could work in the country any more; the farmers had exhausted the ground, making it dry and useless.

But Jake had had some luck with his job. Working for the rail company seemed easy and he lived in an agreeable manner. When he had still had a family things had been harder but perhaps better, he thought. Jake wished his wife had not died. Sometimes he liked life alone: calm nights with a bottle and the TV, the meals in the pub, chatting with other drinkers. Most of the time, however, he missed his wife, and his son. How old was his son now, Jake wondered. It would be his birthday soon: the twenty-second of May. He needed to find a present. Perhaps the son would visit Jake but that did not seem likely: he would have more interesting things to do on his birthday. Jake had a vague recollection that his son had promised to visit but he might have dreamed it.

Jake dozed off for twenty minutes, dreaming detachedly about a Christmas years before when he had bought a bicycle for his son. His wife had worried that they could not afford it when she saw it, before Christmas day Jake had kept it secret. When the boy saw the bicycle he jumped on it straight away and rode off down the street, fell off after twenty seconds and cut his knee. The kid did not even cry; he just jumped on it again and sped twice round the block, grimacing with the pain. When he got back he tried to hide the blood with his handkerchief. Jake laughed but his wife almost screamed; she had always hated the sight of blood. She had always got stressed about things too; perhaps that explained all the diseases she caught. Jake used to tell her to relax a bit more but she never would. And now Jake was alone.

Meanwhile the boy was plodding down the slope, singing to himself. Jake knew the song: it had come out when he was young himself. He still remembered most of the words and he enjoyed listening to the kid. Now the boy had got near to the signal box and the railway line. Jake had often thought that they should build a wall or at least a wooden fence by the side of the track, because many kids played on the hills next to it. They would only have to fall or just wander down to have a horrible accident. He supposed he had told his boss once but nothing had come of it. The local boss was a lazy man like Jake, so nothing had changed either at the station or by the side of the line.

It does not matter, thought Jake; the kid will be able to hear the train when he comes then he’ll move. He decided to shout at the kid anyway, and shouted "Go away! The train’s coming soon." But the kid did not hear or pretended not to hear and carried on walking, now he reached the line. Jake looked at his watch: the train was coming in four minutes if it was not late. He was still sitting in his chair, thinking that the kid was about to move off the line. The boy had now walked about four hundred yards up the straight railtrack away from the signal box, in the direction the train would come from. Jake heard the train far away and waited. After a minute more the kid turned around so he faced Jake along the line. He sat down on the track and waited. He did not move when the train came; neither did Jake. At the last moment Jake stood up to shout again but this time he could think of nothing to say.

The next day Jake told the paper that the kid had ran onto the track a single moment before the train’s arrival. After the interview he returned to his chair in the signal box. What a weird kid! he thought for many months afterwards.