Arrow with Rise lettering design

The 6.40 was cancelled again, so I've been sitting on the bench under the clock at Hollins Junction writing this on the back of a timetable. The lad at the ticket window says the signal box has been kept busy since Tuesday, and the stationmaster keeps tapping that brass arrow on the board as if it might point the trains into line. You'd laugh. Nobody here trusts anything with a diamond point on it anymore.

You asked in your last letter whether I'd gone through with the thing on my wrist. I haven't, not yet. The drawing still sits folded in my coat, the one with the chevrons fanning out like a pheasant's tail and the word Rise curled through the middle in that proper copperplate your mother used on the Christmas cards. I keep telling myself the shaft is the important part, the line that carries the point forward. Mr Oakes at the printers said the diamond was a bad choice for a man who moves about so much, that it would catch on everything. I said that was rather the point of a diamond.

The last train came in at ten past nine, half empty and smelling of wet coal. I watched a porter lift a crate of dead geese from the van and wondered who in the world was expecting them. Then I stood, brushed the crumbs from my lap, and walked the platform's length without once looking back at the clock. The air on the far side of the footbridge tasted of rain and cut hay, which is more than Hollins ever offered me.

I'm going now. The ticket is in my pocket and I've decided the diamond head points toward the road, not the sheds. Write to me care of the Carlisle post office. I'll find you.