With each year, fewer things were delivered to our door. Large book orders, which Sveva made every month, now had to be picked up at the train station. When I went to collect them, instead of going directly inside, I would go around the building, stand on the platform and watch trains arrive and depart, as though to reassure myself that people could still do this – come and go at will. Teenaged boys queued in a row along one side of the brick building, pants rolled to their ankles, smoking cigarettes. They didn’t see me as I passed. Why would they? I was invisible to them, an old woman – there was nothing for them to see. They felt dangerous to me. Dangerous and so fragile, as boys and men are.
I could hear a train coming, the daily from the coast. Even though I knew no one who would be o
