The Mystery Train

John Foulcher

There’s one in every school. Ours was

Richie, always out of class, his hands

perpetually raw from stern bamboo tuition.

I knew him at a distance, recall that Friday

watching as he slouched into the weekend,

raising to the deputy a calloused middle finger.

But on the Monday after, we were hustled

into the hall and told in weighty whispers

that Richie had ‘passed’, in ‘an incident

on the train’. Nothing more, though

rumours soon congealed: he’d thrust his head

from a window, too late to see the engine

crashing along the opposite track.

As we sat in cotton silence, our grim

principal warning us about ‘larking around’,

I thought of my father, three years gone.

The days clattered on, and no one talked

about Richie. But at night, I thought

of his head and that thundering,

unyielding steel. I wondered if it sheared

off, neatly. Or were there teeth strewn

across the rails, streamers of bloodied scalp?

The things we build are so much stronger

than we are. I dreamed of a different earth

where Richie’s face was shining

and untouched, a halo of metal shards

about his unmarked skin. I dreamed of iron

crumpling under flesh. That train rattled

on through the night, filled with the dead

I had known, slowing towards dawn.

I woke beside my father in the last

carriage, standing beside his bed,

and the world full of sunlight and dust.

JOHN FOULCHER’S next book, The Night Stair, will be published by Pitt Street Poetry in 2025. His previous volume, Dancing With Stephen Hawking, was shortlisted for the 2022 Prime Minister's Awards for Poetry.