Trains

©  2009  Rose George

My brother has been building a model railway set forever. For as long as I can remember, there were always days and nights when I had to go out and yell upwards towards a draughty loft that food was on the table. It has moved when we have moved, from an outdoor garage in a big Victorian house to the loft above the outdoor toilet and freezer in a house partly built in 1731 that my aunty Hilda swore had ghosts in the back room, which was a hundred years older. Smaller bricks. The model railway never seemed to be finished, though he worked at it so much. Eventually I began to wonder whether he was a trainspotting version of that story I can’t remember, where a beautiful girl was told she would be killed when she finished her tapestry, so every night she secretly unpicked what she had done until her captor fell in love with her. Or something. Anyway the model railway with its midget hedges and stations and embankments and sidings was dismantled in the latest move. I don’t know what happened to it and now it’s not there. There is nowhere for it to be. Now I only have to shout upstairs to a warm room where my brother is using my mother’s computer, I miss it.