Trafika Europe 9/10 - UK in Europe

Adam Thorpe

Then she wakes up and is saved, beamed out of there into her real life. She feels even closer to actual death, like there’s a hailstorm inside her brain. The hammer drill was the noise of the train. Whump. Whump. Whump. Tea please. Now. One sugar. No such thing as a snacks trolley on this train. Jasper is having a shut- eye, too. His mouth is pursed again, as if he is thinking hard. She loves him very much. He is actually edible. No other boy like him. Seeing Jed with the kids made Suzie think about how Jasper might be with his kids. His and Suzie’s kids. It made her go all warm and at the same time scared. She fishes out her phone, flicking it open to check for messages, sending a couple of replies that have

less thought in them than her thumb. She leans out sideways a bit, into the aisle, and sees how the girl’s elbow is jigging about above the arm-rest, as if she is having a sit-down bop: listening to her music and bopping away in her seat. Retro eighties, or something. Something everyone knows, anyway. Suzie liked the way the girl called the person on the other end of the phone, male or female, ‘mate’. Suzie wishes she could be like the girl, a Londoner able to make jokes out of thin air. The train should have been leaving Stevenage by now but instead they are chugging past a sign saying Bedfordshire: County of Opportunity .Maybeweare secretly going backwards. You wouldn’t know. Who’s the girl going to give

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