Once upon a time there was an old man and his youngest daughter who ran away from home together to live the rest of their lives in a train station. Well, the part about living the rest of their lives in a train station wasn’t their intention ever, they had only got off the train they were on at the little train station when the old man became too ill to continue their journey. When they entered the old wooden building to escape the cold on the platform, if they had been asked they would have said they were only stopping there for a few hours. But there was nobody there to ask such a question, at least not initially, before all the world’s newspaper people arrived with exactly such silly questions. In fact, it was only the old man who would spend the rest of his life in the train station, the young girl would soon be leaving it and continuing her journey, mostly alone, sometimes with others, sometimes with just one other, but always somehow with a whisper of the old man beside her. The old man, being old, didn’t have a long time left in his life to spend in the little train station. Just three days. During those days, which were largely like nights, it being mid-winter in the north, nobody knows what they talked about those three days but maybe they talked about the green stick on which all the truth of the world was written.

Outside, the newspaper reporters waited, clamouring for news. But the old man was determined to die without giving them any, and the young girl was resigned to keeping them away.

The mother of the young girl and the wife of the old man, who was the same person, and who was many other people besides, arrived on her own special train in a great hurry. She was in a great hurry as she knew the old man was dying, perhaps she knew it before the old man knew it himself. She was in a hurry because there were so many things the woman and the old man had to say to each other before he would be gone. When she arrived the reporters were there before her and so they asked her what did she want to say to the old man. She didn’t know she said, but that wasn’t true. She had always known what she wanted to say to the old man, just as he had always known what he wanted to say to her. That they didn’t say these things to each other out loud wasn’t really all that important in the end, since by the end they had spent so much time together that the answers flowed between them, unbidden and unseen, but understood. Even now, at the little train station with all noise damped by the heavy covering of snow and even the crunching footprints of the reporters walking to and from the village for hot drinks and nourishment, the woman in her own special train, and the old man in the little wooden building, were talking, in their way. The answers, only answers for now there were no questions, flowed over and back across the iron rails, the water tanker, the two platforms. Only the stomping of the station master’s boots as he tried to keep warm on the southern platform threatened to interrupt the flow of the silent conversation. The station master, sensitive to the gentle things, soon eased off this activity as he felt himself intruding on the flow. He had already given up his little room and its stove for the old man and the young girl. This is why he was outside, drawing chilled air into his lungs, returning it a moment later frosted and drifting. The truth was he didn’t mind giving up his room to the old man and the young girl, for he quite enjoyed being on the platform, with all the day’s trains gone and none to be expected until early morning. The first train would arrive with the first light, in winter a little before it but in high summer a lot later than it. In high summer the station master liked to think that the first train went a little faster, as if it was late already, inexcusably late behind the sun. The sun, of course, rose to its own rhythm and cared little for the train’s perceived tardiness. What is the schedule of a little rural train in comparison to the eternal timetable of the sun? One summons all living things to their place, the other merely carried a handful of peasants to market day, soldiers home from the wars, always the wars, the endless wars. The station master was prone to these musings; after all, there was a lot of time in the days of the little train station with little to do, and at night with no trains at all, it seemed to him sometimes that the train station with its five lights arranged two on the northern side of the tracks and three on the southern side where he stood, was like the vast dark plain yawning in gentle disobedience to the strictures of the night. An ellipse of light with the two metal rails gleaming in parallel to its semi-major axis, racing away in both directions out into the plains. Presumably running parallel, presumably forever, he mused again, before catching himself again, and came back from the platform’s edge. Switching off the five lights, he ended the insolent yawn of the plain, returning dominion to the dark, the absence of the sun. The action of the station master in setting the universe to rights in this way alway pleased him, but more so these last few days as it also sent the newspaper reporters away, to their temporary homes in the village. There was nothing now in the little train station, not the silent conversation, not the musings, not the young girl’s thoughts. Just the sleeping ones - the old man, the young girl, the woman, the woman’s maid, the two reporters who found places to sleep in the station master’s office. The last sound of the new night was the crunching of the station master’s boots making fresh footprints in the snowy field he was crossing to the house where he was lodging while his little train station was the centre of the world.

There’s a little light in the world that’s always there, when all the lights and the sun are gone. It’s the same glimmer you see when the lights go off, it seems to rise just a little, as if coming on to replace the leaving light. This light is stronger when no-one is there watching for it. And so it was on the night that was to be the old man’s final one.