The Price of Everything

1.59 am

Jocelyn Thwaite thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his trench coat and let the numb ends of his fingers root out the comforting warmth of its thick, woollen lining. It was too pathetic. It really was. What was he doing here? Huddled against the wind in this sorry, little train station at such an ungodly hour. He started to hum the opening phrase from Erik Satie’s Gnossiennes No. 1. It was the piece that he had performed the day he passed his entrance exam to the Royal College and all these years later it still popped into his head at moments like these; the comforting theme tune to his life.

The air about him felt damp and a hard, bitter wind whistled along the platform, searching him out. Jocelyn lifted his collar and lowered his chin into his coat as though in a black and white film. If he had been wearing a fedora he would have pulled it down about his ears. The station was only small, but he had positioned himself as far away from the waiting room as he could – not that anyone had been in it when he had passed earlier. Indeed, he was amazed at how empty and lonely the station felt. But tonight that was fine; he was happy to be inconspicuous.

Jocelyn sidestepped the circle of muted orange light puddling the floor by his feet. Somewhere from the high street came the sound of shattering glass. Moments later the squeal of a siren cut through the darkness. He shivered and trapped his briefcase between his feet. Until now, he had never really given much thought to how intimidating the nocturnal sounds of urban life could be. The cottonwool comfort of his own village life gave him a cosseted sense of the after hours world. On a warm summer’s evening he and Elizabeth would leave the bedroom windows ajar to listen to the bats that nested in the redwoods behind their house. But the ambient sounds that filled this man-made habitat were wilder and more fearsome than anything you could find in the country.

A short, two-carriage train pulled up to the platform opposite: a local service, shuffling shift workers and late-night drinkers from town to town. There was something rather quaint about the stub-nosed engine that hissed and screeched its way into the station. It reminded Jocelyn of the Hornby set he had so lovingly assembled and polished as a child. The train paused only briefly to let its few passengers alight. Jocelyn turned his face away and peered far down the track into the darkened void beyond. The 1.54 was late. But that was to be expected in this day and age where nothing seemed to work as it should or fulfil the promises of the adverts. When he turned back there was just a single person left on the platform opposite. The figure shuffled aimlessly from one foot to the other, looking up and down the length of the platform as though expecting someone. He had a careless, stooped gait and even in the station’s intermittent half-light Jocelyn could see his hair was disheveled, his chin covered with patches of stubble.

Jocelyn stepped closer to the platform’s edge. The dead camera above his head stared vacantly, a single red wire trailing unattached from its belly. There was still no sign of the late-night Plymouth to Paddington service. He snapped the heels of his shoes together and began to hum again. He had tried many times to write a piece the equal of Satie’s. Or equal to any of the other great composers he revered. He would sit in awe with the sounds swirling around his head and every bar, every note would remind him of his own frailties as a writer. Forty years and he hadn’t even come close. Some of his sycophantic students might beg to differ; yet in his heart of hearts it was his own judgment that counted. He envied his students with their naïve, fledgling minds and boundless, unfettered belief that their lives would lead somewhere and mean something.

The scruffy man wandered back out of the shadows and looked across the tracks. In his hands he clasped a white polystyrene cup. Would Elizabeth be waiting at home for Jocelyn, delicately propped against plumped-up pillows reading one of her saccharine novels? He preferred historical books and biographies: stories of people who had done something with their lives – artists and soldiers, philosophers and politicians; people who had searched their souls and fought to shape the world. The man stepped towards Jocelyn and, instinctively, he tightened his grip on the case. Now he could see him clearly, a photo-fit he could sketch for the police; Caucasian, early thirties, with unkempt shoulder-length mousey hair and small, dark eyes. He was wearing a faded denim jacket and beneath it a T-shirt that Jocelyn was sure carried the logo of some beer brand. Which one, he couldn’t confidently say.

It was 1.59am when Jocelyn finally heard the spit and crackle of the metal tracks. He peered down into the gulley at the blackened chippings scattered with discarded fag ends and crisp packets. On the far side, thrust against the wall, was the small twisted body of a decaying pigeon. Jocelyn felt himself gently rock backwards and forwards as he stared at the pigeon’s distorted head. One cold, stony eye peered defiantly at him. Didn’t birds close their eyes when they died? In his periphery Jocelyn felt the man opposite moving towards the tracks. He thought he heard him shout something, but it was lost in the roar of the approaching train. Jocelyn lifted his head and watched as the train rushed towards the station, its lights casting a sweeping arc across the platform like a spreading fire. The man on the other side of the tracks was waving his arms, but Jocelyn pretended he hadn’t noticed, in the same way he might blank someone in Sainsbury’s. Briefly, Jocelyn wondered if the crashing noise was the rushing of blood in his ears rather than the train hurtling towards the station. The man opposite crouched at the edge of the platform with his hands on his knees as though he was calling to an errant dog. Jocelyn stepped forward and for a moment his right foot was suspended in space. The train struck his right shoulder first, spinning him one hundred and eighty degrees and propelling him along the track. Stuck like a piece of tissue to the nose of the engine, what was left of Jocelyn’s body slowly slid down between the tracks several miles further on. The train didn’t stop until it reached its next station, by which time the filmy residue of blood had long been jet-washed clean by the light drizzle that had started to descend just moments earlier.

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112 years before Jocelyn Thwaite’s death

Erik Satie gently closed the lid of the piano and leant his forehead against its worn surface. He felt drained of all emotion. This, the first of the pieces he would call Gnossiennes, was his most unrestrained. He had avoided noting the work’s 4/4 time signature in the score, or even using bar lines, for just that reason. It was not for him to prescribe how the pianist should interpret the work. Simply he would offer guidance, musical or otherwise. ‘Postulez en vous-même,’ he wrote in pencil along the margin: – Wonder about yourself.

1 minute, 20 seconds after Jocelyn Thwaite’s death

At that moment in his life Daniel Lunt felt little sympathy for the dramas of others. But however dark his own world had become, even he had to admit the other guy’s had just got a whole lot bleaker. With little thought as to why, and what he might find, Danny jumped onto the tracks. His blood pumped and his temple ached as he stumbled and jerked across the soot-soaked chippings, tripping as he did on the solid immovable sleepers hidden below the grit.

His feet hurt and the swathe of light from the station soon petered out. As his breathing deepened, he became increasingly aware of the cold, dark loneliness smothering him. He half expected others to come screaming from the shadows to help, but there was no one else around. He stopped and let his palms rest on his bony knees. His jeans felt grimy and damp, the sweat of sudden exertion oozing from every pore.

Danny couldn’t honestly say what he thought he’d find. It was only now that he paused to consider that a human body hit by the force of eight hundred tons at one hundred miles an hour was never going to look too good. As his pace slowed and he peered into the aching blackness, his mind taunted him with visions of arms and legs scattered along the tracks. The dismembered bodies from Jordan’s PlayStation game jumped and danced in front of his eyes. Was that really how a body exploded on impact? He stepped tentatively. A stone rolled beneath his foot and momentarily threatened to send him to the ground. He jerked himself upright and took a deep breath. He must have walked over three hundred yards and still nothing.

In a moment of surreal clarity Danny was left to consider the reality of what might have driven a man to such an extreme act. Was it so irrational to want to instantly and irrevocably draw to close a bad day – a bad life? Danny could sympathise; his had hardly been a resounding success; neither day nor life. An ex-girlfriend who refused to ever speak to him again, a friend who thought so little of him he had kicked him out of his house, no job to speak of and now the lone witness to a scene reminiscent of some late-night Hammer Horror. The cold night air gnawed feverishly at his skin. Maybe he was hallucinating and the stress of the last few hours had finally eaten away at him. Perhaps he would wake up in a stark white room with straps around his wrists and ankles and male nurses on guard by the door. Danny paced the edge of the tracks. There was no sign of anything even slightly untoward; no bloodstains, or fragments of clothing, no personal papers or notes scattered on the breeze.

The possibility that Danny wasn’t going to find anything was as disturbing to him as the prospect of what he might find. That a man’s life should end so abruptly and, in that moment, take with it even the evidence of his physical existence shocked him. The bottles of Stella and half bottle of whisky he had already downed that evening had the unnerving effect of both blurring everything and clarifying it. He breathed in the smell of burnt diesel and turned to retrace his steps. He felt tired and emotional; inside a voice begged him to scream into the night. To scream at the foolish man who had discarded his life so flippantly, but more than that, to scream at himself for being the man that he had become – pitifully alone and homeless. At least the suicidal man’s route to self-annihilation had been immediate and not drawn out and protracted like his own.

The station was still empty as he walked towards its orange glow. His eyes, which had sharpened to pierce the dark, now burnt under the lights’ glare. Danny felt his way across the platform and let the weight of his body collapse on to one of the wooden benches, as though all strength had been finally sapped from his aching muscles. The damp slats felt cold through his jeans. He tugged his denim jacket about him. He hated himself for letting his temper get the better of him earlier in the evening. He had swung his bag through Steve’s window and watched in horror as it bounced off the edge of the frame, shattered the glass and taken Jenny’s prized collection of pottery figures with it. Tiny dismembered heads littered the flowerbed. Danny had made good his escape like a naughty schoolboy playing ring and run, so that all he had left was the clothes that he stood up in, an empty wallet, driver’s licence and a passport he’d only ever used twice in his life. He could do with that jumper now. He rested his head back against the advertising hoarding behind him and groaned. Where the hell was he going to sleep? He would freeze here. It was only then, as he raised his head and looked again about him, that he realised he had returned back to the station on the wrong side of the platform. And there, just by the edge was a lone brown leather case.

Had the man left the case? Danny couldn’t remember seeing one in his hand. He tried to think back. He was fairly sure that that was the spot the man had been stood fifteen minutes earlier. If nothing else, it proved that Danny hadn’t been hallucinating. The responsible thing to do, of course, would be to hand the case in to the police and report the suicide. And that’s what he’d do. Wasn’t it? Danny looked up and down the platform. He scurried across to where the case stood and picked it up, peering about him like a wild animal about to drag a carcass back to its den. Danny pulled a plastic bag from the metal litter bin beside him. He shook an old crisp wrapper and empty bottle from its bottom and pulled it over the case. He didn’t dare examine its contents in the open yawn of the station. With his luck someone was bound to appear the moment he tried to open it. Anyway, he had more pressing concerns on his mind; like finding somewhere to sleep. It was well past two in the morning and the mercilessness of the day had finally brought him to his knees. Let Angie see him now: a shivering, unshaven down-and-out struggling to find a corner of a filthy train station to lay his head. Something in the martyrdom of the situation appealed to him. His only regret was that she wasn’t there to see it.

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5 weeks, 3 days before Jocelyn Thwaite’s death

Isabella eyed the familiar white calf below the hem of Angie’s skirt and made a beeline for it. Threading her tiny fingers in an unbreakable clasp she pressed her face against it with a ferocity that made Angie wince. Worse still, she knew the little girl would be attached to her for the rest of the day. Tanya raised her eyebrows and let a knowing, sympathetic smile pass between them. Having children glued to the leg was nothing more than an occupational hazard. Like falling debris for a roofer or sniper fire for a foreign affairs correspondent. Angie could cope, albeit with strictly limited movement in her right leg.

At twenty-seven, Angela Chase often wondered how she had managed to live at such a pace. It hadn’t been deliberate as far as she could recall. It sort of all just happened. One day she had woken up attached to all the same responsibilities her mother had complained about when Angie was a teenager. And she was knackered. She lifted down the plastic sheet and sugar paper from the art shelf and then opened the doors to the paint cupboard. The door was adorned with a collage of brightly splattered daubs of flowers and butterflies – although the casual observer would have difficulty identifying them as such. She pulled the miniature chairs aside and spread the plastic sheet with a great billow over one of the tiny tables. She’d noticed over the past few months how her back had at last started to familiarise itself with the constant bending this job demanded. When she had first started the pain was almost unbearable, the constant stooping to pick up things: crayons, toys, horizontal children.

Okay, who wants to make their Mums and Dads Easter cards? she asked, clapping her hands. The room continued to buzz with great indifference. Isabella peered up at her from below her skirt. Come on, Delilah, Monty … India, don’t put the Playdoh in Monty’s hair! Tanya wandered about the room gathering and shepherding children, turning them by the shoulders and gently propelling them in Angie’s direction. A small yellowish blur hurtled past her and ran straight into the wall. Up you get Joshua, she said with a sigh, as Joshua scrambled onto his hands and knees, rearranged his yellow, plastic builder’s helmet, wobbled for a moment, then ran full pelt into the wall on the other side of the room.

Haribo, Angie and Tanya muttered in unison.

Where’s Louise? Angie asked, standing upright and looking about her. Tanya studied the carpet.

Um, gone to get Hobnobs, she said.

Oh, for crying out loud, Angie hissed under her breath.

Tanya and Louise were sweet enough girls, Angie supposed, but my God were they unprepared for the real world. She blamed the boss for employing kids barely older than their charges. She may only have been ten years or so older herself, but at times she felt a gulf of responsibility between them. They barely seemed to have an ounce of common sense between them. And if Angie wasn’t corralling the children, she was cajoling her staff. The outside door clicked shut and then the inner playroom door creaked open. Five pudgy fingers curled their way around the edge of the door and eased it open, the familiar moony face finally followed the fingers. Louise clearly hoped Angie wouldn’t have missed her. Not easy to do with a fifteen-stone teenager in a short denim skirt, furry moon-boots and a bright pink figure-hugging crop-top that declared her to be a ‘Beautilicious Babe’. Angie just rolled her eyes and nodded to the chairs around the table. Louise scuttled into the room.

With ninety per cent attendance at the table, Angie began the painful process of handing out paper and brushes. The skill with any task like this was to keep it simple. Invariably, before they achieved anything even closely resembling Easter cards, there would be two tubs of paint tipped over, a hand-to-hand fight for glitter (probably between two of the girls), a tantrum about missing out on wobbly eyes, a thrown paint brush, a ripped sheet, and enough tears to fill a bucket. The whole process would keep the children entertained for less that ten minutes and result in Angie patching the remnants of what was on the cards into something vaguely passable. It amused her that her handiwork graced the fridge doors of most of the neighbourhood and that glowing parents pointed to her use of texture, space and colour with pride.

With two children of her own to wrestle with the moment she got home, she couldn’t argue with her sister’s opinion that she was mad taking the job in the first place. But she enjoyed it. She really did. For all her grumbling and moaning, it was the first time in her life that she had been given a purpose. Of course Danny had resented it. She knew he would from the moment she said she wanted to apply for the job. He had feigned indifference, but she knew by the way his shoulders tensed and his eyes narrowed that he hated the thought of her being the main breadwinner. That had always been the problem: he wanted her to stay at home and look after the kids but at the same time didn’t actually want to get off his fat backside and get himself a proper job. It made her irritable to think about Danny while at work. And if there was one set of people who didn’t deserve the backlash from her annoyance it was these wonderful bumbling, innocent, wide-eyed children that fell over, spilt things, cried, screamed and ran into walls.

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4 hours, 48 minutes after Jocelyn Thwaite’s death

It doesn’t matter where you wake up in the world – Hawaii, Reykjavík, a dirty little train station in middle England – you’ve still got your own thoughts, your own dreams, paranoias and worries rolling around the inside of your head. For some, the imagination is the only escape they need, for others it is a blank, dark, holding world that suspends them and then unforgivingly spits them back to life time and time again, like some playground bully waiting at the school gate for their lunch money every morning.

Danny lifted his head. The waiting room was barely warmer than outside, but at least it gave shelter from the wind that diligently blew up and down the tunnel of the station. He had fallen asleep hugging the only thing he could find, the plastic-wrapped case. Now as he awoke he realised he wasn’t alone. His back was turned to the room and he could hear people shuffling around and the sound of the Tannoy burping instructions outside. He drew the plastic bag closer to him and peered at his watch. It was nearly seven and the station was coming to life. He swung his legs around in front of him and squinted into the light. There were a couple of people in the room with him, but they stayed at the far end trying to avoid catching his eye. So, this is how the tramp in the doorway of Boots felt. Through the smeared glass he could see the shadows of commuters shuffling about with heads down, taking up their regular positions on the platform. Danny could, at least, comfort himself with the thought that he’d never been seduced by that robotic-life trap. To him, work was an irregular necessity, to be avoided where possible and only entered into in extreme circumstances — wherein he demanded maximum reward for minimum effort. Much to Angie’s frustration, of course.

A pretty, pale-skinned girl in her late twenties, with auburntinted hair and jangling bangles on her right forearm, held out a paper cup of half-drunk coffee for him. Involuntarily, Danny flinched. The look of hurt on the girl’s face startled him and he found himself taking the cup from her. The latte may well have been lukewarm and its initial froth already sipped from the top, but to Danny’s now achingly empty stomach it was like an elixir. Danny nodded and the girl shuffled away, her altruist deed done for the day. His heart fell; he felt pitiful. Had he become like one of those alcoholics that lose their families and homes and are discovered years later sleeping in a bus shelter on Brighton promenade? No. That wasn’t him. That wasn’t Daniel Lunt. He was a survivor, a battler. He had been here before, and no doubt he would be here again, but in the meantime he wasn’t about to let the world just spit on him because it felt like it. He stood up, wrapped his jacket around him, pulled the case from its plastic coating and marched out onto the platform.

Danny had no idea where the train was going. Nor did he care. He sat down at one of the few available tables and turned to look out of the window. He could feel eyes watching him. The leather briefcase, he was acutely aware, was out of register with his disheveled appearance. Let them stare, he thought: let their imaginations wander, they would never come close to dreaming up the reality. The reflection of his grey, hollow eyes shone back at him from the scratched glass. The station had emptied and the engine jerked itself alive. Danny half expected to see blue uniforms pounding their way down the platform and feel the train screech to a juddering halt. Surely he was playing with fire, holding the dead man’s case? He pushed it slightly away from his chest as though attempting to distance himself from the incriminating evidence. It wasn’t until the train had drifted past the next station that he let his