Crystal Clear

Have you ever sat on a bus, plane, train and tried to figure out the life stories of the strangers surrounding you?

Quentin Taylor does.

For him it became force of habit. At fourteen, he and his best friend, Jay Smithson, had taken a four hour train journey down to Cornwall. Two minutes into the journey, Jay had introduced him to a game. They spent the remaining three hours and fifty eight minutes forging the lives of other passengers and jotting them down in Quentin’s notebook. Innocent old women were transformed into prostitutes and business men weren’t speaking to their bosses on the phone, no, they were negotiating with sinister gangsters. Average looking people were re-moulded, given new names and more interesting occupations. The boy’s favourites were often exaggerated further, their characters gaining families, friends, accomplices and back stories.

It was the most fun Quentin had ever had during a tedious train journey. His notebook was full by the time he returned home from Cornwall. All manner of characters and their seat numbers were tattooed across the creamy pages. Jay moved away shortly after, so the game became a solo effort.

Quentin bought new notebooks and filled them with his characters. His little game carried on and on. The older he got, the less obscure they became. The man talking to himself was no longer talking to Harry Potter, hidden under his invisibility cloak. No, now he was most likely mentally unstable and awaiting a diagnosis. He labelled everyone in the carriage, forging new paths of life for each. It had become a habit and somewhat a talent. He’d never come across anyone he hadn’t been able to re-create.

That was until June 25th, 2010. A nineteen year old Quentin was heading for home after spending the weekend at his father’s house in the country. He’d worked half the carriage out and quickly scribbled everything down in his bruised notebook. Then his eyes landed on her.

She was pale. Her skin was milky, like it had never seen sunlight. Almost like a vampire. Quentin considered this idea. Maybe this girl was a blood sucker. He shook his head. That was daft, even for him. She had dark hair and big brown eyes. Her collar bone poked through her striped top. A linked bracelet glinted around her slender wrist. Her eyes scanned the page of a dog eared poetry book. Dylan Thomas. Quentin shuddered, memories of A Level English literature flooding through his brain. The girl was angular, her bones jutted out. If she moved, they might pierce her milky flesh, and seat 17A would be a bloody mess.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we will shortly be arriving in Derby. Make sure to collect all your luggage and be careful when stepping off the train. Thank you for travelling with Cross Country Trains.”

The announcement pulled Quentin out of his head. Dropping his notebook into his bag, he slung it over his shoulder and walked past the girl’s now empty seat. The train slowed into Derby station and passengers poured through the doors, drowning the platform.

That was the last he saw of the girl he couldn’t work out, as she disappeared up the steps and around the corner.

He spent weeks trying to figure the strange and beautiful girl out. None of his conclusions did her justice. Model, poet, writer, singer in a band. It was all so mundane. She was ‘take your breath away’ gorgeous, and she must be smart. His dreamy ideas weren’t right. He knew there was much more to her than met the eye. His ideas were nothing but silly, and judged on the surface of each person he came across.

After a while, Quentin gave up. He went back to his silly judgements. Men in suits became superheroes, teens plugged into iPods rockstars and pensioners spies for the CIA.

It was exactly two months later when the newsstand in the train station caught Quentin’s eye. She was on the front of every newspaper. She was smiling, her eyes sparkling. He walked over and picked up a newspaper, unfolding it and reading the front page.

Her name was Scarlett Roberts. She was eighteen. She’d disappeared on June 25th. She was last seen leaving Derby station.

Quentin dropped the paper and headed for platform one. The train to Reading wasn’t due for another five minutes. He fished his notebook out of his bag and flipped to the page he’d first started the game with her and ripped it out, letting it flutter down the platform and onto the track. He tore more and more pages out, erasing her from his judgements and forgery. She was no longer a pawn in his game.

The pages tainted with his boyish scrawl danced across the train tracks. Quentin breathed deeply, returning his notebook to his bag. He’d spent so many hours pouring over the possibilities of this girl. Wasted so much time. She’d made it so hard for him to choose her path, and then fallen off the radar.

Quentin flopped down on a bench and pulled his notebook from his bag. Flipping to an empty page, he wrote.

I have tried and failed to forge the lives of others who walk amongst me. Life is complicated. People can change their paths whenever they want. The men in suits are just that. They’re not superheroes. No matter how many times I write it, it’ll never be true. So here’s where it ends. The game stops here. Because whilst I’ve been sorting other ’lives’ out, I’d forgotten about my own. If you’re reading this, you’ve found the musings of Q. Taylor, the guy who’s life was so dull, he had to create one’s for other people. All except one. Scarlett Roberts, 17A to Derby chose to be lost, I didn’t do it for her.

He closed the book and tossed it into a nearby bin. By now, the Reading train had pulled in. Passengers masked his view for a moment, then the train pulled out of the station.

Across on the opposite platform, a girl was sitting on a bench, reading from a poetry book. Quentin’s heart skipped a beat. He blinked, and she was gone.

Missing forever.