Titus Walker has always felt that he didn't fit in. There always seemed to be an invisible gulf between him and his peers. In his final year, he just wants to fly under the radar, graduate and get the hell out of his private, all-boys high school.
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Titus let the faint roar of the motors drown out his thoughts as the train accelerated, whatever other noises permeated into a tread brake Comeng trailer car, which by his reckoning was the second-quietest possible place to be on the entire train network. Third if you counted the secret entrance to Flinders St from Degraves St.
It smelled faintly of disinfectant and the perfume of the lady sitting next to him, framed by the bracing burnt undertone of ozone. He was sitting on the closest seat he could find to the first door of the fifth carriage. The last door of the fourth carriage was actually the closest to the escalator on Platform 5 on Flinders Street, but it lined up a bit too well; you often got caught in the congestion from the all-too-orderly queue for the escalators. He found it was often easier to slip into the queue sideways from an adjoining door. Maybe it would be like that today, but you never knew for sure.
He hoped that Fraser had understood somewhat what he had tried to explain the night before. He wasn't sure if what he had said had made sense. Come to think of it, he wasn't really ever sure whether what he was saying made sense. Nothing made sense. To be fair, nothing had ever made sense, but before it was less of a problem as he could just muddle through stuff with no discernible consequences. Now there were actual stakes with actual consequences and he wasn't sure if he liked it or not.
He was still wrapping his head around the fact that he was going to his birthday party. A younger him would have balked at the idea but now the curiosity far outweighed any reluctance on his part. Most of the people wouldn't know him and he would most likely never run into them again, so there was basically no long-term repercussions. Goddammit, he was overthinking this. Better not to think about it at all. In with the Other Things That He Refused To Understand, which were too numerous to list properly.
There was the clunk as the circuit breaker in the neighbouring carriage cut in, a burst of static as the next station was announced, and the roar of rheostatic brakes kicking in as the train slowed down on the approach to Anstey.
The rusty conduits had been replaced with shiny new metal channels. A lot of the sleepers were still ancient and wooden, though the concrete replacements had already been dumped en masse on the sides, ready to be side inserted. Once you got used to the usual things you could see things change day by day. Ditches would fill with the murky rainwater and evaporate to mud and bloom with green algae and dry into cracked dirt, whereupon the cycle would repeat. The creeks would swell with rain and dry down to a trickle in the summer. Buds would bloom into flowers which would be pollinated and grow into fruits which would ripen and wither and drop off the tree.
He wanted to ride on forever, until he felt he had seen enough, until he had reached some sort of absolution, until he had decided he had seen enough of the outside world from the distance of a railway embankment. He liked that feeling, the feeling of not exactly knowing where you were going, but also safe in the reassurance that you would be able to find your way. He liked the feeling of speed, of always being on the move.
