A couple more short stories with a little bit of back story to them. The first one – ‘There and Back Again.’ was written for a competition (that I failed miserably to win.) The story had to be about ‘Once Bitten, Twice Shy.’ The second story is entitled ‘The Very Last Train.’ and, like the first, was an entry into a competition where the story had to be about, surprise, surprise –  ’The Last Train.’

‘There and Back Again.’

It was the fourth of January nineteen seventy-four and I was twelve years old. Christmas had been consigned to the dustbin that was nineteen seventy-three and it was three months until my birthday. School didn’t start back for four more days and I was bored. I was always bored back then. I was sitting at the front window to our house and staring into the middle distance. It was colder than was good for you but it was time to go out. If you let the cold stop you playing back then you would be doing a stretch indoors that would make prison seem easy.

I pulled on my anorak. Too thin for the weather it was supposed to protect me from. I slid into my sandshoes – the most inappropriate footwear on the planet for a Glasgow winter. Gloves, scarf, wooly hat – none were available to me.

The air slapped my face hard and, my already chapped lips, stung as I licked them. I could hear my mum shouting after me – ‘Leave your lips alone – have you got Vaseline on them.’ The answer was no. You looked like a dork with Vaseline shining around your mouth as if you had eaten a handful of slugs.

I took our front stairs three at a time and then headed for the local woods. If there was any action going on it would be up at the woods.

I didn’t have many friends back then. Not surprising really given that I was the new boy in the area. We had only moved in at the tail end of last autumn and I was struggling to break into any of the local groups of kids. It was to be expected. This was my fifth school in as many years but there was hope that this was the last move for a while. At least that’s what my mum had said.

My dad had been in the army. He wasn’t really my dad. My mum had been a single mother with me when she met him but he was dad to me. He had been serving in Aden in sixty-seven, just before the final withdrawal when, on patrol, a local dissident put a bullet in his thigh. The wound would never really heal and he was on civvy street six months later. That’s when we started our tour of the UK.

The war had a profound effect on dad. He would barely get settled in one place when he wanted to move on. We had little money and dad couldn’t hold down a job. We got by on handouts from my gran and granpa on my mum’s side – who were, thankfully, loaded. But this only made things worse. My dad hated relying on the in-laws – still took the money though.

The lane to the woods is an old cobbled affair that is slippy in the extreme and bounded by the gardens of two houses. I can’t hear any voices – although that is no indication of the wood’s occupation. I flick a toe at a stone– a small stone – large ones hurt in sandshoes. The hard frost from last night is hanging on in there and the trees look like a photo shoot from a Christmas calendar. A scream and Gary Davidson rockets by me on a brand new chopper bike. My Christmas consisted of a board game that no one understands and a stocking full of sweets that were done by lunchtime. I reach the edge of the woods and head on in. Searching.

Our last house had been promising and I thought we might have at last found some roots. It was in a tiny village in the West Midlands called Tutbury – famous for its castle where Mary Queen of Scots had once been imprisoned – although that didn’t make it the rarest place on earth. It boasted a crystal works and had the benefit of being close to Fauld’s crater where, at the end of the Second World War, the largest land explosion in the UK had occurred killing seventy eight people – most of them unfortunate Italian POW’s who had been working in an underground munitions dump when four thousand tons of explosives blew up. As a kid this was fascinating. Thirty years after the event you still weren’t allowed in the crater because of fear of unexploded bombs. Now you tell me how tempting that is to a ten year old.

Three months later my dad got fired for hitting his boss. He did that four times in as many jobs back then. We upped sticks and mum insisted we move back to Glasgow to be near her parents. We had no money to buy a house and mum didn’t want to rent. To the rescue came my grandparents and bought us our new house. Boy did that piss off my dad.

I find the den. A place I was only shown just before the holidays. Not really a den though, more of a bunch of bushes that grow beside a fence and provide some shelter through a tunnel they form. The place is deserted and there is little sign that anyone has been there today. I crawl into the thicket and sit with my back against the fence. There can be a gang of twenty in here sometimes. Air thick with kid sweat and the odd puff of smoke from a cigarette. Today it is cold, lonely and depressing.

I sit. There are some footsteps and I wait for someone to enter the den but the footsteps retreat. A few minutes drift by and then there is a loud crack. I’m tempted to go out and look but I don’t. It’s probably just a fox or some of the younger kids mucking around.

When mum threw dad out of the house I was staying with my aunt. It turned out that my mum had planned this. As a result I was being force-fed space dust, sherbet fountains and Orkney fudge while my dad was finding his clothes strewn across our street. By all accounts, and there were a lot of accounts, my mum did a grand job in embarrassing my dad. She even threw his collection of adult orientated magazines into the next-door neighbour’s garden. Given our neighbour was in her late eighties, she had no desire to go out and clean up the filth. As a result the local kids magnanimously helped out and spirited most of the material away before their parents got wind of what was going on.

It’s too cold even in the den. No one is coming. I crawl back out and make my way home to find a police car sitting outside our house. I stop and look at it thinking it must be for one of the other semi-detached houses that make up our street but something tells me that it is for us. I bound up our stairs and burst through the front door.

Two policemen are sitting with my mum and tears are streaming down her face. One policeman is saying something in a soft voice and I rush to my mum asking what is wrong. The second policeman takes me by the hand and leads me to our kitchen. He sits me down at the kitchen table and in a voice that has told a thousand people bad news he informs me that there has been a fire at my grandparents home. Both of them are dead.

He leaves. I sit. The world spins.

I run back to my mum and bury my head in her lap. The second policeman tries to take me away but I scream and kick and he leaves me alone.

‘Have you seen your husband?’ he asks mum.

‘No. Not for weeks.’

‘Do you know where he might be?’

‘No’

‘You realise that the fire spread and has taken over thirty lives.’

My mum sobs so hard I can feel the pain.

‘Your husband was seen near the houses just before the fire started. We need to find him.’

Six months later and we are in a new town and a new country. I know no one and we are staying with my uncle. He moved out to Toronto years ago and, reluctantly, given the sheer army of media that had waited outside the church he agreed to take me and my mum in at my grandparent’s funeral.

My mum is a wreck. My dad was found hanging from a tree in my wood not ten yards from the den. He must have been there when I was squatting in the cold. He may even have killed himself while I was shivering under the bush. The crack I heard. He could have been responsible for the crack. His body falling to the ground. The branch that held the rope part giving way.

The fire he set didn’t just take my grandparents. It took the entire block of flats and thirty-seven lives. One of the worst tragedies of its type in the UK.

My dad was branded a monster by the media – no one in the flats had been under the age of seventy and most didn’t have the ability to get out in time.  My mum was hunted by the media, haunted by her neighbours and hounded by relatives of the deceased looking for closure. We had no choice but to leave.

Robin Bitten – the Fire Animal – that’s what they call my dad. The Fire Animal.

At night I can see my dad swinging from the tree. I could have helped. I could have stopped him.  I didn’t.

My mum changed her name back to her maiden name. An attempt to distance herself from her husband. My name changed as well. I’m Colin Shy. Not Colin Bitten. Colin Shy once more. Not Robin Bitten – the Fire Animal’s son.

Yet I will always be once Bitten twice Shy.

‘The Very Last Train.’

The last train passes over my head at exactly eleven oh one and seven seconds. There are only inches between my nose and the belly of the roaring metal monster and I badly need to be in the beast’s gut. I mean, I really  need to be nestled in the innards of that howling monster. But fate decreed that events were stacked against me and here I lie as the caboose zips into the distance, trailing a red light, as if to underline the fact that I wasn’t on board.

The stars above are bright and flicker in the frost ridden air. The moon is a day or two from full. A single, dirty cloud skits across its face and silence starts to fall around me. Behind me there is a clang and the main gate is closed. The station manager is locking up. You have to give him credit for efficiency – the train is mere seconds into its journey and the station will be bolted shut for the night in minutes.

The bushes next to me shake as a nocturnal beast goes about its business. The rails are singing from the passing of the train and if I touched them I could probably still feel the vibration. But I don’t and the track stills; the metal cracking and snapping as it begins to cool in the night air.

Then there is the squeal of brakes.

…

An hour ago I had been draining the last of a series of pints in one of the town’s many pubs. It had been a good night. A good day. Too good. It had started with a comfortable seat in a warm pub. A cold pint in front of a giant TV screen. The local derby brought to us through the miracle of satellite. All in glorious HD. We won and that was the start of my downfall.

I had planned to go home after the football. I needed to go home after the football but the win and the glow that the alcohol had generated encouraged me to stay for ‘just one more!’ This led to the curry house. This led to another pub and then I was on a roll. My friends dwindled in number. We started with ten and by the last pub we were down to three hard-core survivors.

Things were tight but I knew the time of the last train. I was still in control. I had caught the damn thing by the skin of my teeth on more occasions than I could count. Sprinting down the platform, liquid swilling in my gut, flinging myself through the door and collapsing into a seat as the wheels began turning.

I was an expert at it. Never a train missed in over ten years. Always the last train. Always the last minute. It had become something of a badge of honour. A game of dare. Almost a death wish. I had the time from every pub in town to the station down to a fine art. The Dog and Partridge was the longest at twelve minutes door to door. The shortest was the Queen’s Head – three minutes cold. I only ever got it wrong on the right side of the timetable. On those occasions I would slow my journey down. Drop my pace. Sometimes even stopping along the way. Not wanting to enter the station until the clock was screaming at me.

As my glass hit the bar and I said my goodbyes I knew I was pushing it. The Gibbering Monkey was a five minutes thirty second shot and my watch was now telling me that I had five minutes – no more. No panic though. A bit of jogging and I would claw back the thirty seconds.

As I left the pub some new customers bounded through the pub entrance, intent on making the bar before last orders was called. I was caught full in the face by the door and went down like a whale falling from a plane. The customers, two men and a woman, ignored my sprawled figure and I was left to claw my way to my feet – rubbing my face to try and dull the pain.

I was now a minute behind where I needed to be and once out in the night air I knew that sprinting was my only option. I put the pedal to the metal and ignored my watch. Time was now my enemy and I would gain no favours from the seconds I had left by looking at them.

As my feet slammed the pavement I felt panic begin to rise. The train was a ‘must make’. A ‘can’t fail’. A ‘have to be on’. There was no second prize tonight. Win or I was in the deep dark stuff. The railway line was on my right – high on an embankment and I could see the train’s nose sticking out of the station’s mouth – the driver sitting in the cab waiting for the signal from the stationmaster.

The entrance to the station was at the far end of the train and for the first time in all my time playing this game I knew I was on the losing side. Usain Bolt would have struggled and I had one final throw of the dice left. I leapt at the fence that guarded the railway embankment, grabbed a handful of chain link and began to climb. I had often considered this before but I had never been this close to missing the train. As I crested the top of the fence I looked up and saw the stationmaster holding up the paddle that signals the train is about to depart.  I threw myself off the fence and onto the embankment. I could not afford to miss this train. I just couldn’t.

As I scrambled up the slope I did the maths – thirty miles by train and nearly forty by road to my flat. The last bus had gone an hour ago and a taxi would skin me off sixty quid at this time of night. Sixty pounds that I did not have – neither in my wallet nor in my bank account. My hole in the wall card was maxed out. I didn’t have any money back at the flat. The bank called my parents lay two hundred miles to the north. My friends back at the pub didn’t have ten quid between them. I could get the taxi to go to my girlfriend’s house but that is not an option. Not tonight of all nights.

I started up the embankment and my heart fell through the floor. The embankment’s slope went from steep to vertical. There was a good eight feet of a dirt wall ahead. From the road it looked climbable. From close up it was impossible. There was no way up. To my left the brick wall of the station was a Victorian built insurmountable barrier. To my right there was a good couple of hundred yards before the slope leveled out enough to get up to the platform. I had no choice. I turned away from the station and ran. I heard the stationmaster blow his whistle and I screamed ‘No’ at the top of my lungs.

Ten pints and a curry reduced my running to little more than a fast limp as, with each step, the slope of the embankment tried to throw me to its foot. I hirpled on and was down to fifty yards from the end of the slope when the noise of the engine rose. The fluid coupling motor was being revved up and then the note dropped as the drive was engaged.

I could not miss this train. I just could not. Tomorrow was just the wrong day of my life to be in this situation.

I reached the end of the slope and scrambled up the last few feet of embankment and onto the concrete of the platform’s surface. I was hauling in breath with the vigour of a full on set of bellows in a furnace. The train was starting to gain momentum, emerging from the station  – the front would be on me in seconds. I staggered to the edge of the platform, beyond the yellow line that signaled the limit of safety, waving my hands in the air.

I saw the stationmaster turn away. He hadn’t seen me and my last hope rested with the driver. I waved and shouted, shouted and waved. The train continued to accelerate. I wanted to be on that train. Surely he would stop?

The driver’s face rushed towards me and I saw him laugh. I leapt high, holding my hands up, palms out, screaming ‘STOP’. My right foot came down on thin air and I fell towards the tracks. I saw the driver throw his hand to his mouth and then he vanished as I dropped towards the metal of the railway lines.

…

In the distance the train is rolling to a halt but I won’t make the last train. Not tonight.

Tomorrow was to be my finest day. My wedding day. The beginning of a new life with Rhona. But there will be no wedding. No tomorrow. No future.

Grooms don’t make it up the aisle in a coffin.

My body lies still. My lower torso and legs on one side of a rail. My chest, head and arms on the other. Blood is mixing with the oil and chips that lie between the tracks. The scene fades and I realise that I have missed the last train.

My very last train.