Didcot Parkway

Stopped in Didcot Parkway: engines off for twenty minutes now. Every few minutes the automatic announcements would apologize for the delay, out in the station and echoing across platform, and tracks, and platform.... The excuse had begun as a signal failure. Over time it mutated into vandalism, documented in its evolution by the occasional human announcer admitting sheepishly - but more reassuringly - to a lack of any clue.

Thomas was stuck on a crossword clue. He hated crosswords, but was simultaneously drawn to them. Cryptics just made him laugh with bemusement. As he stretched his legs out under the table he reflected that physical education at a public school had probably made him a masochist, desiring self-improvement at all costs. Now fat and late thirties, he was past resorting to cross-countries in the blattering rain, or lifting weights until his eyes popped out of his jowly head. Instead he pummelled and wrang his brain, like a retching feeling in his head, again and again, pretending to himself that he was sicking up in September rain at the side of the school football pitch. And those pretty legs, every time he half looked up. With those legs as an incentive Miss Schwartze had made him jog and then stagger, and one time even pitch onto his hands, shaking his head like a dog.

"I've seen one of those fall over once."

Immersing himself in word games every morning - even if they were just thirty-degree heated birthing pools, guaranteed urine-free - still purified Thomas. It took away the itching in the cracks of his brain, washing it clean and compensating in advance for his day at the office. During the inevitable delays he could shut out the rest of the world and try use the black and white squares to spread out his grey matter and squirt sense into the grooves before performing the complicated sequence of folds that made it all small enough to fit back into his head. It was better than cocaine, which he (almost) knew for a fact Richard was into.

"It folded up like a plastic cup, only really, really slowly. A bit like...."

Most mornings Thomas had at least the surrounding seats to himself. He gave off misanthropic vibes all the time, although only really wanted solitude before around 10am. Neither he nor any body else travelling to Swindon would benefit from Thomas at close quarters to another human being so soon after breakfast. So he caught an early train, and gave out signals to the relatively few other people in the carriage to keep away, and was in the office long before anybody else, soaking up the silence from the carpets like a hangover sucking at a cup of railway-station coffee.

"... Slow plastic."

No system is perfect, however. Certainly not one that relies on the punctuality of the railways. Every dozen or so journeys he would have to wait for the later train. Even this had been, until recently, a very little burden. From the outset he put himself two notches away from rush hour on the First Great Western timetable, so any problems always left him with a notch in hand. It would still be possible to find a large enough fraction of empty carriage. Indeed, most of the other early birds that Thomas encountered seemed to share his tendencies. In mutual empathy their nebulous, expanded, personal spaces would jostle - action at a distance - until they were comfortably far apart in each carriage. Not - and this is a big not - counting Richard, though: Richard was a talker.

"They tied explosives round the base of it, and set 'em off. Bang! it went. Kkkkrrrumphph. Ha! Unreal!"

Thomas sighed and broke his gaze away from the paper. It followed his concentration and landed on Richard opposite.

"Richard, what on earth are you talking about?"

His companion was sprawled over one-and-a-half seats, and was now looking back at Thomas. Like a child with ADHD he kept shifting position, then drumming his fingers on whatever bit of his body or the chair the pose required him to have his hands resting on. Looking left and right for something to interest him, he would eventually resume fidgeting if nothing came along in time.

"Cooling towers, Tom," he explained, nodding at something out of the window behind Thomas. "Aren't they great? You should see 'em close up. Fat bastards, they are." Thomas leaned forward, and looked round to see the stacks of the power station, squatting near the low horizon like grey-faced workmen, shitting. Thomas had seen them up close and they looked like even bigger workmen, still squatting and straining. "Thin brick, though. Ha. Collapse like paper, they do. You could poke your finger through them." Thomas raised an eyebrow. "Relatively, like," Richard mumbled, and shifted position. He jammed the heel of his right foot between his buttock and the seat, and stretched his left leg over to the seat opposite.

Thomas began thinking out loud: "They're structurally sound, of course. I think the whole thing is kept in tension, or maybe it's compression. I stood close to one once. The rings of bricks were like hoops, cooled onto barrels to fit tightly. It was like the whole thing was kept tense by forces within it...." He tailed off, as Richard was clearly getting bored. He'd looped his arms round his right calf to pull it closer towards him, and one eye had started to squint as his mind wandered behind it. "Like they were about to burst open," Thomas concluded, and got the reaction he wanted.

"Yeah!" cried Richard, grinning, and flicked his foot out from under him to join the other one. "Yeah, Tom, that's it. Like they're about to burst and go bang! Goh, it makes me wish I'd followed me dad and become a roofer, it really does. In the building trade, do a bit of construction, and then do a lot of demolition! Only when they paid me, like." He winked at the oncoming joke. "I wouldn't be that eager.... well, I wouldn't let 'em catch me at it!"

Thomas smiled dutifully and wished for either Swindon or a quick death. The announcement clacked away outside, regular as clockwork, far more regular than the trains themselves. But there was a buzz, then, a vibration, and Thomas realised that the train engine had just started up again.

"Hey, hey, hey, hey," said Richard warily. "Do you think we're about to head off, then? I thought they were going to send another train to come and pick us up. Better not count our chickens, I suppose." And to get rid of his eagerness he flung himself into a different shape on the seat, both arms bent at the elbow over the back of the chair, legs crossed slackly, ankle on thigh.

Thomas was still looking at the power station. Something had caught his eye on the towers.

"Richard, do you see that?" he asked, unsure whether his eyes were playing tricks with him. A migraine? He hadn't had one for years. But it looked like the tops of the towers were shimmering. Richard looked round, as if playing the cooling-tower game for the first time that morning and unsure of the rules. He finally found the power station again and then scrunched up his eyes to see what Thomas was on about.

"What? What is it?"

"The tops. Where the smoke is coming out."

"What...? Crikey, yeah. It looks like it's really hot or something. Yeah. I guess those gases must still be pretty hot." And he sat down again to wait for something to happen, frowning from side to side.

It didn't look just hot to Thomas. The shimmering had become bubbling, had become boiling. It was as though the brick was becoming molten, held in place by perhaps a steel superstructure (did they have a steel superstructure?) Any minute now it was going to start dripping off, like terrible, heavy wax. What had made this happen? What was going on? A terrorist attack, Thomas thought, it had to be. Terrorists had planted some sort of heat bomb in Didcot Power Station and it was about to explode and rain... molten brick on everything. It was a dirty bomb. It was packed with nails, six-inch nails that travelled twenty miles to embed themselves in Shotover Hill. Anthrax. Special, heat-resistant anthrax.... No, it couldn't be terrorists. Thomas kept looking, transfixed with horror. It was like hell was opening up in front of him, the first twitchings that were a prelude to the curtain being pulled aside, the sky torn apart like a sheet, and in would stride-

There was a sudden shock through the train. An explosion, Thomas thought. It had to be. The end times. Another shock. Another. They were moving - the wheels had engaged and the connection between each pair of carriages in turn had tightened until the train was once again a flexible rod of metal, a set of hollow chain links with flesh rattling distractedly inside them. And as the train pulled away, the power station moved relative to Thomas, and the rear engine was no longer between him and it. The heat haze rising from the engine's stack interfered with distant clouds now, and far off to one side, away from the mirage caused by the exhaust, the cool stone of the cooling towers was intact and quiescent in the morning sun.