Today I see a minor celebrity and laugh at a man with no hair who curses, who punches the air when his train, mine, left at 8:44:45 - fifteen seconds too soon. He was robbed, he will be late for work and in the current economic climate such faux pas are frowned upon.

I catch the train with plenty of time, only slightly distracted by the familiar face that isn't really real outside of a box in my living room. I catch the train alone. Company is unnecessary on such a hasty trip - I don't need anyone to talk to as I score across the countryside, my head is far too full of fast paced nostalgia. Steam trains, ghost trains, Christmas trains, Brief Encounter, The Lady Vanishes, the railway children standing on the line, waving branches like the congregation on Palm Sunday. Sing hosanna to the King of Kings. When I was seven someone told me that the clocks matched up when the trains were built - “we've travelled to the distant parts of this island with our steam contraptions in such a short space of time and we've noticed the time. Your sundials, you pagans, they don't match up - we'd like to inform you of Greenwich Mean.” Such progress, so innovative, quite dreadful, did you know you can fly from Gatwick to Manchester in half an hour? I don't belong in this century; I still can't understand how these tons of dolphin shaped aluminum stays up, I still think it hangs on the wind like a creature in a monstrous falconry display.

Her relatives are mistrusting of technology, we visited them a fortnight into the summer. The stones that built their house did not try to be brick, they were old and anchored, swatches of Kilimanjaro in deepest Yorkshire, samples of the real thing with mountain energy rooting them to the rolling hills and fresh air and sea breeze and parochial mentality. We took the train down that day and she was excellent company, my best friend in the world, silent as we read our superior tomes - the intellectual elite we were, lapping up Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare like lusty literate saucers of milk, while other passengers took in novels about magic and vampires and troubled policemen and ancient conspiracy theories. We were so scathing of them - they don't read like us, they don't really understand or even exist, perhaps.

“When I was little someone told me the clocks matched up when the trains were built,” I told her after we found our seats, collapsed into them; a late clock left us running along the platform. She rolled her eyes then and said I wanted to be a baby girl still. “When I was little, when I was little!”  she teased and we breathless laughed because she'd said it before and before I've replied, “It's not my fault my childhood was so perfect.” We laughed more and we knew the train was listening because we were so sweet, friends with private jokes, girls who make a little noise but not too much.

There was a cousin, that is the vaguest family term isn't it? A man flung off to some disant, thrice removed branch of the family tree. We talked about it - what is a second and third and fourth cousin? She had so many. It is such old imagery we said, and decided that my family was the traditional oak - strong and old with few, wide, thick branches. My family was human; ancient and civilised and little but hers was so much thinner, busier - a silver birch  perhaps, a spindly sapling with nothing but branches, branches everywhere that would snap, dry, uninterested things and scatter themselves across the floor. We resolved to research the origins of the metaphor, who first decided this blood pool of people were trees? Research, we said, discover. I would Google it and enjoy my guilty junk food knowledge.

Her cousin was old and balding and still young I suppose but his skin, his tired eyes weren't aware of this. He was loud and crude and cruel in the way that all people are - not like her with smiles and otherworldly girlishness, but very basely; he was taunting and masculine. If we were bored he declared us rude, ungrateful for the home cooked meals and the Radio Four conversation, the high walls, the long walks. I am cruel in the way that everyone is and I buzzed and muttered and wrote and missed the ants nest clusters of buildings, the convenience. I grew up in a place that was not convenient enough - corner shops with, “back in five minutes” signs, unreliable bus services, coffee shops confused by the word, “americano”, but there were no corner shops here. My new home was perfect, and then enough, just right, just enough, perhaps the Starbucks didn't stay open late enough but what could you do? I dreamt of mythical movie cities like New York that didn't sleep like me while she jigsawed in perfectly with this place. When we walked, we walked to a place we would turn back from. Our walks were not quests or missions, they did not achieve anything, we were moving to hear the sounds of our feet on the ground, to somewhere we would not stay at or in and return from when the time felt right: when our breath sounded and our knees burned. She fitted so very well there. She smelt of grass and damp dirt and high places and dry stone walls that stood so impossibly for years and years. It was the epitome of rural and countryside and nothing - there was nowhere you could reach without a half hour drive in a Land Rover.

As we walked up another pointless road the cousin spotted a dead rabbit and began to sing, a bit of Art Garfunkel, a familiar tune and she laughed, disgusted and delighted and said, “Oh no don't, how could you!” before seeing something else like a star or a stream, something wondrous and mind blowing and inspiring. The rabbit was perfect, a taxidermists model with wide, water smooth eyes. Utterly pristine and uninjured, not a mark on it, nothing at all but a slight pool of red in the ear. My best friend ran off happy while I had a moment of affinity with a dead creature that she didn't understand and I thought perhaps she doesn't really exist, this person that gets me, that I talk to, whose brain is Siamese twinned to mine, who makes me think that I'm not alone in a world full of people I hate quite frankly. I hate people, that was one of the first things I said, and I quoted to back myself up. Shakespeare I think, something from Othello, and she finished it off, the line and I thought, there is my best friend, she is not a person I hate, not a person who doesn't really exist. When I was little, my brain screams and it's not a joke at all. When I was little I sang the run rabbit run song in school with a teacher who used  to be able to hit the children but couldn't any more and I wondered if she minded. That and everything with rabbits in seems to be a point of importance in my life, points on a map. I know she'd say that's not how it is, I'm just throwing paint at a canvas and making an image in my head.

*

Today's train is taking me home. I will read something tattered, with no gloss on the cover while I drink my coffee and shiver outside and complain about the smoking ban. It is a violation of human rights I will say, live fast die young. I knew a girl who died at twenty one who wore a t shirt saying that, live fast die young.

In a few hours people will crawl around like insects in some terrible avant garde film nightmare; slimy maggot woodlice insects who cover the incident with tiny invisible legs and feelers. A man with no hair will speak into a microphone, he will say, “I missed the train by fifteen seconds, just fifteen, those poor people, that could have been me in fifteen seconds.” He will think about the bitch he saw through the window, the one that laughed at him. He will never tell anyone  but he will smile. She is dead, serves her right for laughing. Karma maybe. At this point, when there is almost a turbulence, a juddering and an unsteady feel to the way we are moving, no-one is sure if anything is really wrong at all and we come over all British. Half of the carriage, those louder, less proper perhaps, they risk a glance at the other passengers, an, “is this normal do you think?” moment of eye contact. The rest of them are embarrassed by this, “Really, why would you look at me,” they think at their knees, “there's no real call for that... I'm sure it can't be so bad”.

When it gets worse, the heart beat quickens in split seconds because it is nothing if not so fast and they are wishing that they did not take the train alone and I'm suddenly aware of the way I will be discovered and I hope I look perfect, my ear a crimson swimming pool and I hope that whoever finds me falls in love with me, dead me, and that the sadness, hopelessness of it makes them realise that no-one with a brain alive can really understand. A rabbit on the side of the road without milky diseased eyes or a body ripped apart, a rabbit just stopped while it was running, like it was running and kept that way. Exactly how a rabbit should look, a Plato rabbit, cookie cutter shaped, the rabbit that everyone knows. A cut out girl too perfect to forget, that is how I would like to be found.