The Pure in Heart Read Online Free PDF Page B

counter, gone through and signedfor; he was given his money, his train pass, waited in the passage with the others and then across the strip, and out through the gate. The jangle of keys for the last time.
    Rain, driving into your face and a gale knocking you almost off your feet.
    ‘They’d a car completely overturned in Simpson Street.’
    ‘Eight trees down somebody said.’
    ‘Can’t have been, there ent eight trees in the bloodytown!’
    ‘Kids haven’t gone to school, too dangerous.’
    ‘St Nicholas church roof was ripped half off.’
    Andy sat holding the mug between his hands. He felt unreal. People talked and got up and sat down and came in and went out through the buffet doors and no one took any notice of him. No one knew where he’d just come from.
    What would happen if they did?
    It wasn’t being out on his own, buyinga mug of tea and a doughnut, waiting for a train, none of that fazed him. It was nobody watching him, nobody taking any notice. He hadn’t been invisible for four and a half years but he was invisible now.
    The gale hurled itself suddenly at the doors swinging them wide open, crashing an empty chair on to the floor. A child in a red anorak screamed.
    He remembered his mother. She’d only been tosee him half a dozen times, scurrying into the visitors’ room, head bent and eyes on the floor for shame, and after that she’d been in and out of hospital, then too ill. He didn’t think of that crumpled-looking person as his mother, he thought of the one he had run to when friends of Mo Thompson’s had slammed his fingers in the doorfor fun and the one who had finally found him when they had takenhim down the Wherry to one of the sheds and locked him there in the dark, but not before telling him that the scratching sounds in the roof were rats. That had been his mother, with thick arms and red hands ready to beat the lights out of his tormentors and a voice like a foghorn you could hear three streets away. She had shrunk. There had been grey stains on her coat and dirt in the folds ofher neck. When she had leaned over the table between them in the visitors’ room she had smelled.
    The woman behind the buffet counter was trying to wedge one of the doors with newspaper but it kept coming away from her hand and now the rainwater was sloshing under it and over the brown linoleum floor.
    Three men went to help her. She fetched a mop and plastic bucket and started to try to pushback the tidal wave of rain water.
    The child was eating a chocolate bar and screaming at the same time as the windows rattled in the gale.
    Andy wanted to go back. Here it was unsafe, the ground seemed to be moving beneath his feet and the fact that nobody knew his name scared him.
    Somewhere outside, part of a tin roof sheared off and crashed on to concrete.
    Mam, Andy Gunton muttered underhis breath, and it was the woman with the strong arms and red hands he was talking to, Mam.
    A confused echo came out of the speakers, possibly announcing his train, possibly announcing the end of the world.
    The lights went out then and for a second everyone froze, everyone was silent, even the child.
    The weather had caught them out. Heavy rain and high winds had been forecast but not a virtualhurricane, bringing such damage and chaos at the height of a Monday morning. The electricity did not come back on in the station buffet and the trains did not run again until the middle of the afternoon.
    ‘How the hell am I going to manage?’
    The woman with the child had a baby in a pushchair and two cases. An emergency platform alteration meant that she had to cross the iron bridge. She was intears, the children exhausted, the rain still lashing down.
    ‘Come on, my love,’ Andy heard himself say. He took the cases and after carrying them over the bridge, came back for the pushchair. The far platform was dangerously crowded. Rain was coursing along the gutterings and down in a stream.
    ‘You hold on to your little girl, I’ll get the