untitled short story
Suggestions welcomed, this has no title yet, and I'm all out of ideas. So anyway, enjoy.
Untitled short story
Did you... did you ever help your mother... making pastry, something like that?... You know, when you get flour in a spoon and, and you flip it over... and you get this dome... the shape of the spoon... in the flour... all smooth... It, it... it used to fascinate me. It seemed to be the whole object of... of what you were doing. Did you, did you ever have that?
Amy looked up at Sophy all angles and stillness. Although Sophy sat in the window a little way from Amy on the arm of the couch her face was huge, the centre of Amy's focus. And around her face odd angles, the frame of the window, the road behind and below the window, her legs, the edge of the carpet, a book. Amy noticed she and Sophy were holding hands though she didn't know when they started. She realised that when she spoke to Sophy she had looked at the floor and Sophy's shoulder. Sophy was beautiful but the light at present fell so her face was a bland cut-out. Studying her face closely Amy could see she didn't understand.
But why did it matter? Amy didn't know what she wanted from Sophy. Her eyes came back to Sophy's shoulder. Small. Her left shoulder, arm at her side behind her breasts. The folds in her shirt. Abruptly the scene smelled of fresh laundry. She wanted to grip that arm and kiss Sophy's ear and neck, push the shirt collar aside with her face. Instead she momentarily gripped Sophy's hand a little tighter then relaxed. Immediately their hands were uncomfortable, in the wrong position, and they let go. Amy tried not to think of lying in bed her hand resting on Sophy's belly. Sophy spoke.
My mum never really cooked. I... I remember though she had this, this smokers' toothpowder... rather than a toothpaste... Eucryl it was called I think... It, it came in like a plastic kind of compact... You unscrewed the lid... I used to like arranging that, the powder. The way once you'd broken the surface, disarranged it, it could never go back. The more you tried to smooth it the worse it got.
Although she cared and wanted to listen Amy somehow couldn't concentrate. She felt bad. She took Sophy's hand and Sophy withdrew it. She looked at Sophy's mouth, but words didn't make any sense. What if it's me, she thought, what if I'm being obtuse, if I don't understand what's really important? What was it like, the powder? she asked.
It was, it was pink. What I remember was pink. It may have been coarse, I don't remember. It was... you know, it was a powder. I didn't use it. It was, it was exotic.
Amy couldn't think how to answer. She had too many thoughts and felt so physically possessed by Sophy she didn't trust herself. So she stayed quiet. Sophy asked if she was ok and Amy said yes and gripped Sophy's hand. They smiled at each other. After a while Amy asked, why didn't you try the toothpowder?
Well... I wasn't very adventurous, and I, I didn't like the taste of toothpaste much... it was... If I'd been using one flavour... and we got, we got another I couldn't... it, it took ages to adjust.
Sophy could see that Amy was distracted. She stopped speaking then asked, what's wrong? Amy shook her head and smiled.
Nothing. I'm just a bit... distracted. I'm not... I'm not, sort of, feeling all there... Hey, listen... let's take tomorrow off... let's go, go out to the country.
Well... I... I've got work tomorrow...
Bollocks to work. What are you going to get from work... what, what's one day's work going to do for you? Come on... You can, you can pull a sickie... It'll do you good, it'll be great... I'll take you to where I grew up... hey?
Ok.
The train journey was endless. Amy tried not to talk about where they were going, it should be a surprise to Sophy. Sophy already knew a little about the village Amy grew up in but she wanted to know more. So Amy would drop a couple of facts then change the subject. She didn't intend to stop in the village anyway, rather to pass through and walk up on the hills behind. She didn't tell Sophy this.
As the train got further into the countryside Sophy got more involved in the landscape outside the window. Amy found herself watching Sophy's face. First how it relaxed and her natural smile. How intent she was and how unselfaware. Amy knew that falling-off of ego from her own experience. Times she had become part of the landscape and only recognised it afterwards. Once she lived for those moments when the self fled, but they'd become harder to achieve. And Sophy was there. Amy let her be. As well as allowing Sophy her meditation Amy could watch the light on her face. It was on Sophy's cheeks and forehead but separate from them. The way reflections seem to lift off some surfaces. Sophy absorbed the light and it infused her skin glowing with an impossible depth where it fell directly.
Where's the village? asked Sophy when they got off the train. It's over there, said Amy pointing at what might have been just stones visible through trees and below a small rise in the ground. A couple of kilometres. Are we going to have to walk? asked Sophy. Amy said yes and they set off.
Although the ground rose and fell and the station seemed quite high Sophy quickly saw they were on a valley floor. Behind the village vast stone hills rose like a wall. The whole horizon in every direction looked the same, like being in a giant bowl. Amy pointed at the village.
That hill... the one that looks sort of dome-shaped from here... that's a mountain... a low one... but officially a mountain. You, you can walk up it in a couple of hours... you just... you end up taking it for granted.
In the village Amy walked Sophy past landmarks from her life. Where she lived, where her friends lived, places she'd drawn frequently, where she'd had accidents, where she'd worked, where her parents had worked, the school, the church. She felt dissatisfied with this sequence of picturesque scenes like a set of postcards. The external beauty captured but drained of all life and meaning. And then they were through the village and a bridleway, at this stage a rough road of compacted stones, led up on to the hills. Sophy said, we're not going up the mountain are we? Amy shook her head and said, only part way.
The path climbed steeply through mossy walls and trees in a green tunnel. After ten minutes which felt an hour the path levelled the walls lowered and the trees stepped back. They stood right on the skirts of the first hill they'd seen behind the village. Close-up it diminished, appeared friendly. The mountain seemed no closer perhaps even further away. They could see more of it now from a slightly different angle. The dome which had been so dominant shrank to just one feature on the way to the summit. Stone and short coarse grass. They paused so Sophy could get her breath back and look at the view. A warm clear sunny day.
After a drink of water Amy said, well let's get on, and set off down the path as it dropped into a deep hollow before climbing again toward the mountain. Sophy followed. She couldn't judge distance here accurately. It took a fraction of the time she expected to cross the hollow. In only twenty minutes they had passed the smaller hill and stood on a downslope that shortly turned up and started to climb. Broad and muddy. Sheep stood around. The bridleway ended at a wall and a gate and worn-looking footpaths left in three directions then grew fainter and vanished. Here the horizon was close and gave no view. Amy started walking again and Sophy followed.
Sophy put her arm in Amy's and they talked together. Memories, speculation, an inventory of what they could see, jokes, Sophy asking questions, Amy pointing things out. They focussed on each other and the immediate place. As they did even in their closest conversation for months Amy remembered something. She remembered coming here aged eleven, twelve? Eleven probably. She and her friend Ben. They came on bikes, fast and tiring, had to lift them over some gates and stiles. Up to about fourteen they had that kind of relationship. Close like brother and sister. Then for a few years it was awkward, but since seventeen they'd grown closer again. Amy and Ben hardly needed words they could se into each other's mind without effort. When they did talk they easily entered that egoless fugue state Amy so loved, and had loved watching Sophy in that morning.
Aged eleven Amy and Ben came here on bikes on a similar summer day. They drank some sherry which was all Amy could steal and lay on their bellies looking at the horizon. They talked in a serious way about serious things. Ben wanted to travel to war-zones as an independent soldier on nobody's side. He would travel alone looking for injustices perpetrated on civilians by soldiers, murder, rape, torture theft, and he would punish the soldiers responsible. A battlefield angel, vigilante, or conscience made flesh. Amy would devote herself to preserve this landscape. It was so polluted and worn-out it needed repairs along many footpaths, and they needed to be left alone for a few years. The access of outsiders restricted.
Then they lay on their backs and looked at the high sculptured clouds. Amy described the landscape she saw and Ben joined in. They populated it with people and animals and made their actors move. At first Ben wanted sweeping battles on horseback. Violent action and movement. Amy had been looking at Japanese prints and saw something a lot stiller. She slowed and calmed the action. The horses were wild horses running for pleasure. Cranes flew and trees hung gently over rivers. People went about domestic business while steep wooded hills rose vertically behind them. Later they rode back on their bikes. Easier now it was downhill but bumpier. Amy vomited at the top of the green descent to the village.
Let's sit for a while, said Amy. She and Sophy had reached a place with wide views over the valley. I think this is far enough. Sophy nodded agreement and looked around, it's amazing she said. The mountain dropped down below them. And after that the valley floor opened out. Houses, fields in miniature, trees, streams and roads to the horizon of hills.
They're like waves, it's like surfing... except... everything's stone... It's weird... everything looks... it's, it's... You could step from here to those hills over there with, with just one stride. It's just really... there's something mythical about it, you know? I love the intricacy... everything's stone... this, this limestone, but it's... it holds things together... it sparkles... it's like a thread... But you know that, you grew up here.
Sophy looked over at Amy. Amy shook her head.
I used to know. I'd forgotten... I mean, I remember, but I... I needed your eyes. I wanted to... I wanted to share with you... you know, it's... I don't know... I always feel like it's insubstantial up here... like you said... the hills are like waves. There's... there's an ambiguity... At, at the equinox, spring... then late summer, early autumn... you get these huge clouds... like boiled marble forms... and, and, they're more solid than the ground... It's very weird.
They leant back staring up at the sky, only a few light high clouds. Amy spoke again.
At school I wrote this story... I used to come up here a lot... and, I wrote this story about being up here in the rain... And the clouds come... right down... If we were here there'd still be cloud overhead... it'd be raining... but we'd see cloud... or fog, mist below us... just surrounding the hill.
Like it was an island.
Exactly. I, I wrote this story about being up here... and this mist all around... and the rain... and having a boat... pushing it out on the mist, on this lake, and sailing between the mountains. What, what annoyed me, the teacher said, 'oh, that's really imaginative'... it wasn't imagination... It's... it's what I saw.
Sophy was looking closely at Amy's face. It's wonderful, she said. I haven't seen you so alive in months. Where have you been?
Back in the village after a slow easy walk Amy bought them lunch in one of the pubs. It was around two o'clock. Sophy's feet felt bruised and twisted out of shape, her legs tired. I can't walk another step, she said. Well you'll have to later, said Amy, we've got to get back to the station. Anyway, I'm off to the loo, watch out for our food.
While she watched for their food Sophy stared out the window. She liked the village and the hills. Like Amy said, good for a visit but you wouldn't want to live there. She felt so close to Amy today she hoped it could last. They didn't have an easy relationship. Deep but not effortless. They each had to work at it, wanted to work at it. Far different from Sophy's previous relationship.
Sophy and Sandra were friends before they got together and stayed friends after the breakup. Their bond was such they almost didn't need to speak. They liked the same things, thought the same things, felt incomplete together if they weren't holding hands. And yet Sandra would not have come out to the country today. She would have hated every second. She would certainly never have spent around three hours walking on dirty tracks and grass.
Though far from being an idiot Sandra liked things artificial and superficial. Sophy once spent an exhausting day with her visiting toy shops, novelty shops, cafes and more. They didn't buy anything other than coffee but that was the point. Whenever she thought about that day in general Sophy had impressions of running from shop to shop behind Sandra, throwing and catching soft toys, picking things they had no intention of buying from shelves, starting conversations with shop assistants and strangers, periodically stopping to sit and drink coffee or hot chocolate. And talking. She remembered a stream of conversation.
Sandra was generous. With her superficiality, her time, her intelligence, her ease, her fun, her articulacy. But you never saw her upset, exerting herself, reading, out of control, controversial. No hint of what maintained the surface. And now suddenly Sophy remembered the conversation. A tumble of brightly coloured balls bouncing prolific and careless. Fragments. A childhood anecdote, an incident from a book, a friend, this toy, wallpaper, her brother, a favourite quote. They resolved as she remembered. Not a cascade of trivia. They were a glimpse of Sandra's thoughts, her state of mind that day. Sophy always thought of it as a happy day, a high point. Sandra though had been unhappy and insecure, had fought it by making Sophy happy.
In the end Sophy hadn't had the strength to end their relationship, Sandra had to do it. They were closer friends than ever now. Sophy still couldn't be sure why, how she and Sandra became friends in the first place or what they had in common. Some magnetism. Conjoined, she once said, if they were together long enough. Amy arrived back at the table and asked, are you ok? Yes, said Sophy.
Although they managed to catch one of the rare buses to the station outside the village and had plenty of time to sit and talk once they got there Sophy fell asleep on the train. Amy took pleasure to watch her. She felt closer to her than she had in a long time. Amy started planning, daydreaming the evening ahead. She'd run a bath which they would share. They'd have takeaway pizza and wine, they lay about reading books and chatting. Like the journey out the journey back took two trains. Amy almost missed the stop, almost forgot to wake Sophy. On the second train Sophy slept again.
Untitled short story
Did you... did you ever help your mother... making pastry, something like that?... You know, when you get flour in a spoon and, and you flip it over... and you get this dome... the shape of the spoon... in the flour... all smooth... It, it... it used to fascinate me. It seemed to be the whole object of... of what you were doing. Did you, did you ever have that?
Amy looked up at Sophy all angles and stillness. Although Sophy sat in the window a little way from Amy on the arm of the couch her face was huge, the centre of Amy's focus. And around her face odd angles, the frame of the window, the road behind and below the window, her legs, the edge of the carpet, a book. Amy noticed she and Sophy were holding hands though she didn't know when they started. She realised that when she spoke to Sophy she had looked at the floor and Sophy's shoulder. Sophy was beautiful but the light at present fell so her face was a bland cut-out. Studying her face closely Amy could see she didn't understand.
But why did it matter? Amy didn't know what she wanted from Sophy. Her eyes came back to Sophy's shoulder. Small. Her left shoulder, arm at her side behind her breasts. The folds in her shirt. Abruptly the scene smelled of fresh laundry. She wanted to grip that arm and kiss Sophy's ear and neck, push the shirt collar aside with her face. Instead she momentarily gripped Sophy's hand a little tighter then relaxed. Immediately their hands were uncomfortable, in the wrong position, and they let go. Amy tried not to think of lying in bed her hand resting on Sophy's belly. Sophy spoke.
My mum never really cooked. I... I remember though she had this, this smokers' toothpowder... rather than a toothpaste... Eucryl it was called I think... It, it came in like a plastic kind of compact... You unscrewed the lid... I used to like arranging that, the powder. The way once you'd broken the surface, disarranged it, it could never go back. The more you tried to smooth it the worse it got.
Although she cared and wanted to listen Amy somehow couldn't concentrate. She felt bad. She took Sophy's hand and Sophy withdrew it. She looked at Sophy's mouth, but words didn't make any sense. What if it's me, she thought, what if I'm being obtuse, if I don't understand what's really important? What was it like, the powder? she asked.
It was, it was pink. What I remember was pink. It may have been coarse, I don't remember. It was... you know, it was a powder. I didn't use it. It was, it was exotic.
Amy couldn't think how to answer. She had too many thoughts and felt so physically possessed by Sophy she didn't trust herself. So she stayed quiet. Sophy asked if she was ok and Amy said yes and gripped Sophy's hand. They smiled at each other. After a while Amy asked, why didn't you try the toothpowder?
Well... I wasn't very adventurous, and I, I didn't like the taste of toothpaste much... it was... If I'd been using one flavour... and we got, we got another I couldn't... it, it took ages to adjust.
Sophy could see that Amy was distracted. She stopped speaking then asked, what's wrong? Amy shook her head and smiled.
Nothing. I'm just a bit... distracted. I'm not... I'm not, sort of, feeling all there... Hey, listen... let's take tomorrow off... let's go, go out to the country.
Well... I... I've got work tomorrow...
Bollocks to work. What are you going to get from work... what, what's one day's work going to do for you? Come on... You can, you can pull a sickie... It'll do you good, it'll be great... I'll take you to where I grew up... hey?
Ok.
The train journey was endless. Amy tried not to talk about where they were going, it should be a surprise to Sophy. Sophy already knew a little about the village Amy grew up in but she wanted to know more. So Amy would drop a couple of facts then change the subject. She didn't intend to stop in the village anyway, rather to pass through and walk up on the hills behind. She didn't tell Sophy this.
As the train got further into the countryside Sophy got more involved in the landscape outside the window. Amy found herself watching Sophy's face. First how it relaxed and her natural smile. How intent she was and how unselfaware. Amy knew that falling-off of ego from her own experience. Times she had become part of the landscape and only recognised it afterwards. Once she lived for those moments when the self fled, but they'd become harder to achieve. And Sophy was there. Amy let her be. As well as allowing Sophy her meditation Amy could watch the light on her face. It was on Sophy's cheeks and forehead but separate from them. The way reflections seem to lift off some surfaces. Sophy absorbed the light and it infused her skin glowing with an impossible depth where it fell directly.
Where's the village? asked Sophy when they got off the train. It's over there, said Amy pointing at what might have been just stones visible through trees and below a small rise in the ground. A couple of kilometres. Are we going to have to walk? asked Sophy. Amy said yes and they set off.
Although the ground rose and fell and the station seemed quite high Sophy quickly saw they were on a valley floor. Behind the village vast stone hills rose like a wall. The whole horizon in every direction looked the same, like being in a giant bowl. Amy pointed at the village.
That hill... the one that looks sort of dome-shaped from here... that's a mountain... a low one... but officially a mountain. You, you can walk up it in a couple of hours... you just... you end up taking it for granted.
In the village Amy walked Sophy past landmarks from her life. Where she lived, where her friends lived, places she'd drawn frequently, where she'd had accidents, where she'd worked, where her parents had worked, the school, the church. She felt dissatisfied with this sequence of picturesque scenes like a set of postcards. The external beauty captured but drained of all life and meaning. And then they were through the village and a bridleway, at this stage a rough road of compacted stones, led up on to the hills. Sophy said, we're not going up the mountain are we? Amy shook her head and said, only part way.
The path climbed steeply through mossy walls and trees in a green tunnel. After ten minutes which felt an hour the path levelled the walls lowered and the trees stepped back. They stood right on the skirts of the first hill they'd seen behind the village. Close-up it diminished, appeared friendly. The mountain seemed no closer perhaps even further away. They could see more of it now from a slightly different angle. The dome which had been so dominant shrank to just one feature on the way to the summit. Stone and short coarse grass. They paused so Sophy could get her breath back and look at the view. A warm clear sunny day.
After a drink of water Amy said, well let's get on, and set off down the path as it dropped into a deep hollow before climbing again toward the mountain. Sophy followed. She couldn't judge distance here accurately. It took a fraction of the time she expected to cross the hollow. In only twenty minutes they had passed the smaller hill and stood on a downslope that shortly turned up and started to climb. Broad and muddy. Sheep stood around. The bridleway ended at a wall and a gate and worn-looking footpaths left in three directions then grew fainter and vanished. Here the horizon was close and gave no view. Amy started walking again and Sophy followed.
Sophy put her arm in Amy's and they talked together. Memories, speculation, an inventory of what they could see, jokes, Sophy asking questions, Amy pointing things out. They focussed on each other and the immediate place. As they did even in their closest conversation for months Amy remembered something. She remembered coming here aged eleven, twelve? Eleven probably. She and her friend Ben. They came on bikes, fast and tiring, had to lift them over some gates and stiles. Up to about fourteen they had that kind of relationship. Close like brother and sister. Then for a few years it was awkward, but since seventeen they'd grown closer again. Amy and Ben hardly needed words they could se into each other's mind without effort. When they did talk they easily entered that egoless fugue state Amy so loved, and had loved watching Sophy in that morning.
Aged eleven Amy and Ben came here on bikes on a similar summer day. They drank some sherry which was all Amy could steal and lay on their bellies looking at the horizon. They talked in a serious way about serious things. Ben wanted to travel to war-zones as an independent soldier on nobody's side. He would travel alone looking for injustices perpetrated on civilians by soldiers, murder, rape, torture theft, and he would punish the soldiers responsible. A battlefield angel, vigilante, or conscience made flesh. Amy would devote herself to preserve this landscape. It was so polluted and worn-out it needed repairs along many footpaths, and they needed to be left alone for a few years. The access of outsiders restricted.
Then they lay on their backs and looked at the high sculptured clouds. Amy described the landscape she saw and Ben joined in. They populated it with people and animals and made their actors move. At first Ben wanted sweeping battles on horseback. Violent action and movement. Amy had been looking at Japanese prints and saw something a lot stiller. She slowed and calmed the action. The horses were wild horses running for pleasure. Cranes flew and trees hung gently over rivers. People went about domestic business while steep wooded hills rose vertically behind them. Later they rode back on their bikes. Easier now it was downhill but bumpier. Amy vomited at the top of the green descent to the village.
Let's sit for a while, said Amy. She and Sophy had reached a place with wide views over the valley. I think this is far enough. Sophy nodded agreement and looked around, it's amazing she said. The mountain dropped down below them. And after that the valley floor opened out. Houses, fields in miniature, trees, streams and roads to the horizon of hills.
They're like waves, it's like surfing... except... everything's stone... It's weird... everything looks... it's, it's... You could step from here to those hills over there with, with just one stride. It's just really... there's something mythical about it, you know? I love the intricacy... everything's stone... this, this limestone, but it's... it holds things together... it sparkles... it's like a thread... But you know that, you grew up here.
Sophy looked over at Amy. Amy shook her head.
I used to know. I'd forgotten... I mean, I remember, but I... I needed your eyes. I wanted to... I wanted to share with you... you know, it's... I don't know... I always feel like it's insubstantial up here... like you said... the hills are like waves. There's... there's an ambiguity... At, at the equinox, spring... then late summer, early autumn... you get these huge clouds... like boiled marble forms... and, and, they're more solid than the ground... It's very weird.
They leant back staring up at the sky, only a few light high clouds. Amy spoke again.
At school I wrote this story... I used to come up here a lot... and, I wrote this story about being up here in the rain... And the clouds come... right down... If we were here there'd still be cloud overhead... it'd be raining... but we'd see cloud... or fog, mist below us... just surrounding the hill.
Like it was an island.
Exactly. I, I wrote this story about being up here... and this mist all around... and the rain... and having a boat... pushing it out on the mist, on this lake, and sailing between the mountains. What, what annoyed me, the teacher said, 'oh, that's really imaginative'... it wasn't imagination... It's... it's what I saw.
Sophy was looking closely at Amy's face. It's wonderful, she said. I haven't seen you so alive in months. Where have you been?
Back in the village after a slow easy walk Amy bought them lunch in one of the pubs. It was around two o'clock. Sophy's feet felt bruised and twisted out of shape, her legs tired. I can't walk another step, she said. Well you'll have to later, said Amy, we've got to get back to the station. Anyway, I'm off to the loo, watch out for our food.
While she watched for their food Sophy stared out the window. She liked the village and the hills. Like Amy said, good for a visit but you wouldn't want to live there. She felt so close to Amy today she hoped it could last. They didn't have an easy relationship. Deep but not effortless. They each had to work at it, wanted to work at it. Far different from Sophy's previous relationship.
Sophy and Sandra were friends before they got together and stayed friends after the breakup. Their bond was such they almost didn't need to speak. They liked the same things, thought the same things, felt incomplete together if they weren't holding hands. And yet Sandra would not have come out to the country today. She would have hated every second. She would certainly never have spent around three hours walking on dirty tracks and grass.
Though far from being an idiot Sandra liked things artificial and superficial. Sophy once spent an exhausting day with her visiting toy shops, novelty shops, cafes and more. They didn't buy anything other than coffee but that was the point. Whenever she thought about that day in general Sophy had impressions of running from shop to shop behind Sandra, throwing and catching soft toys, picking things they had no intention of buying from shelves, starting conversations with shop assistants and strangers, periodically stopping to sit and drink coffee or hot chocolate. And talking. She remembered a stream of conversation.
Sandra was generous. With her superficiality, her time, her intelligence, her ease, her fun, her articulacy. But you never saw her upset, exerting herself, reading, out of control, controversial. No hint of what maintained the surface. And now suddenly Sophy remembered the conversation. A tumble of brightly coloured balls bouncing prolific and careless. Fragments. A childhood anecdote, an incident from a book, a friend, this toy, wallpaper, her brother, a favourite quote. They resolved as she remembered. Not a cascade of trivia. They were a glimpse of Sandra's thoughts, her state of mind that day. Sophy always thought of it as a happy day, a high point. Sandra though had been unhappy and insecure, had fought it by making Sophy happy.
In the end Sophy hadn't had the strength to end their relationship, Sandra had to do it. They were closer friends than ever now. Sophy still couldn't be sure why, how she and Sandra became friends in the first place or what they had in common. Some magnetism. Conjoined, she once said, if they were together long enough. Amy arrived back at the table and asked, are you ok? Yes, said Sophy.
Although they managed to catch one of the rare buses to the station outside the village and had plenty of time to sit and talk once they got there Sophy fell asleep on the train. Amy took pleasure to watch her. She felt closer to her than she had in a long time. Amy started planning, daydreaming the evening ahead. She'd run a bath which they would share. They'd have takeaway pizza and wine, they lay about reading books and chatting. Like the journey out the journey back took two trains. Amy almost missed the stop, almost forgot to wake Sophy. On the second train Sophy slept again.
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