Free Ostrich Boys by Keith Gray

had a weird little mustache and a twitchy eye, but he’d been less intimidating than the one on the Cleethorpes train. He’d listened to us as we’d fallen over each other trying to explain our predicament. And even agreed that it was indeed an unfortunate predicament to be in. But he’d still said Kenny couldn’t travel on his train without a ticket.
    We’d waved the return part at him, Sim and I had shown our tickets with matching times and dates printed on them, we’d argued hard. Maybe Sim had argued that bit too hard. The upshot was, Kenny had to get off at the next stop and go see someone at the station’s travel center who might be able to issue him with another outward ticket—it wasn’t something the conductor could do himself. We’d tried to explain about our connections, said we were pushed for time. We’d begged. For a second or two I’d thought he might crack, might let us stay on all the way to Newcastle. And then Sim had called him a miserable jobsworth git. And now here we were.
    York. A long way from Newcastle. A longer way from Ross. Staring at the place where our train used to be.
    Sim’s tirade finally ran dry. He took a deep breath, blew it out. “Right. Okay.” He shook the anger out of him like adog shakes water off its coat. He gathered himself, put his sunglasses back on. “When’s the next bastard train?”
    York’s a large, good-looking station compared to Cleethorpes. Several long, wide platforms with a huge, arching roof high above them. An ornate footbridge spans the tracks. Some of the shops and cafés are either really old or just made to look that way. It’s a hectic station too. Always a train coming in as another’s going out. Loads of people milling around. Sim strode straight through the crowds; Kenny and I followed, weaving in between them. The massive electronic departures board is on stilts in the middle of the main concourse. The three of us stared up at it.
    “There’s another one in just over half an hour,” Sim said, pointing. “Twelve-forty-six to Aberdeen. Stops at Newcastle.”
    I nodded. “Let’s hope it gets us there in time.”
    Kenny hovered, looking anxious. “What about my ticket?”
    “Well, you’d better be quick,” I told him.
    “What d’you mean?”
    I was looking around. “It’s over there,” I said, pointing.
    “What is?”
    “The travel center. You’ve got thirty-six minutes.”
    “Thirty-five,” Sim corrected me.
    Kenny was worried, confused. “But I don’t know…. What if …?”
    “Run!”
    He leaped away from me, his face stuck somewhere between shock and misery. “But …”
    “Run, shithorn!
RUN!
” Sim shouted.
    And Kenny ran, edging and dodging through the crowd toward the travel center.
    Sim and I watched him go. Then Sim said: “We should’ve left him. Me and you—we should’ve stayed on the train.”
    “You reckon?”
    “Yeah.”
    “But you never would have, would you?”
    He sighed. “I’d never drown a puppy either.”
    We picked up our rucksacks and followed the way Kenny had gone.
    This was meant to have been a straightforward kind of journey, after all. Kind of there-and-back-again before anyone noticed we’d gone. But the problems seemed to be piling up on top of one another, higher and higher, building a big wall of hassle to block our way. I was surprised and then disgusted at myself when I wondered whether it was all going to be worth the effort. I crushed the thought. I remembered I had my dead best friend in the bag over my shoulder.
    And for a split second I thought I saw him. Just in front of me, through the crowd. Out the corner of my eye. The back of his head.
    It stopped me in my tracks. But when I looked again itwas a much older bloke—just the same color hair, same height, kind of.
    Not that this was the first time I’d thought I’d seen him. It threw me to begin with, sent a genuine streak of icy lightning up my spine. Now I reckoned it was something I was just going to have to