AlexMcGilvery Array - Nano Bytes

He turned away flustered. His wedding band seemed to grow heavy on his finger. He shook his head, but still couldn't resist looking back. That was when he witnessed it for the first time.

A middle–aged business woman in a smart gabardine coat and silk cravat was shuffling through the crowd, earphones in, her gaze locked on the screen of her smartphone. Her face was slack and expressionless as she walked towards the edge of the platform.

The rivets of the rails began to tremble. Tiny clouds of dust rose into the air. A scrap of newspaper was blown forward by the wind from the approaching train.

The girl with the pink hair noticed something. Her expression changed. She surged forward, elbowing people aside. Then she tried to snatch the mobile phone, but the woman wouldn't let her, screaming something incoherent as she elbowed the girl away.

«Hey!» His voice was surprisingly loud, but it paled against the clattering roar of the approaching train. They were too close to the edge. «Watch out!»

At the sound of his voice, the girl with the pink hair seemed to return to herself. Raising her hands she stepped back away from the woman.

Two lights blazed in the tunnel, turning the people on the platform into a wall of shadows. Without a trace of reaction the middle aged woman took two steps backwards and plunged over the edge of the platform. The fall happened in a dreadful instant, a shadow passing in front of the lights.

The train thundered into the space. James stood dumbstruck as he struggled to accept what he'd seen.

Instantly a semicircle formed around the scene of death.

«Oh my god.» A whisper.

«Quick, get help.»

«What the hell happened?»

«She just walked off.»

James scanned the crowd, finding the pink hair vanishing up the south stairwell. Still trying to soothe the shock, he wriggled through the crowd, a lone ant travelling against an oceanic tide of onlookers drawn to the spectacle of a private tragedy. His legs brought him to the foot of the now empty stairs. Pinching the bridge of his nose, he clamped his eyes shut. He felt wired and shaky.

Pink had gone.

He stopped and tried to think rationally. There was no use staying here. He couldn't do anything to help that woman. No one could. And there was no way there was going to be another train for at least a couple of hours. Catching a bus was the only option at this point. Routine normality reasserted itself. He didn't have to think about the route. His job often involved overtime on Sundays, when the trains didn't run until ten o'clock. Habit guided him to the bus stop on autopilot.

Pink wasn't the kind of girl who snatched mobile phones.

That woman had been dumb–walking. She'd been so involved in her smartphone she hadn't realised she was walking too close to the platform edge. It wouldn't be the first time someone had caused an accident because they were engrossed in Facebook or Tinder or whatever it was people looked at these days. Pink had been trying to save her. That was the only logical explanation for what he'd witnessed. She'd seen the danger the woman was in, and tried to help, but it had backfired and the woman had fallen off the edge in the struggle. It was an accident.

The smell of cigarette smoke brought him back to himself. A teenager with undercut hair and a camouflage coat was smoking something he very much doubted was tobacco, the dense brownish cloud permeating the bus stop. James edged away, conscious the smell would be seeping into his suit.

«Excuse me.» James made eye contact. «Do you mind not?»

As the guy glared at him, James felt his hands shaking. Everyone at the bus stop, including James was shocked he'd said anything. The whole crowd was staring at them, the tension palpable. He knew they were all wondering why the hell he'd spoken out. It was the same question he was asking himself.

«Whatever mate," the teenager said, flicking the remnants of the spliff into the traffic. It sat there, still smoking, right in the middle of the lane where the passing cars wouldn't extinguish it by driving over the butt.

«Thanks," James muttered weakly, avoiding further eye–contact, grateful he hadn't been stabbed for his trouble.

The bus journey took an age, leaving James staring blankly out of the window at the endless sea of brake lights and unmoving scenery. Something wasn't right, and deep down he knew what was troubling him; she'd tried to snatch the phone.

If Pink had been trying to stop the woman walking off the platform, why hadn't she simply taken her elbow. That was what any normal person would have done. The lightest of physical contact would have been enough to get her attention, and then she could have warned the woman of the danger. But that wasn't what had happened.

The fear he'd seen on Pink's face was still etched in his memory. Of course, he'd yelled out and everyone had seen the scuffle. That was the simple explanation. He'd exposed a thief in the station, and she'd panicked. He rubbed a finger across his chin. It still didn't sit right in his gut. Pink wasn't like that. He didn't want to believe she was like that. Thinking back, Pink had looked terrified before he shouted at her. Her expression had changed the instant she'd seen the woman in the crowd, even before she was near the edge of the platform. And there was no mistaking that expression.

He'd only seen fear like that once before. It was one of those childhood memories that stuck. The room in the corner of the attic was technically a spare room, but it had slowly been taken over by clutter: The oriental fans from their trip to china, the old vacuum cleaner his father had promised to take to the charity shop, the surfboard that had been rashly purchased for his elder brother before he discovered he didn't like the sport, a heap of books his mother insisted didn't quite fit on the bookshelves in the living room. Normally, no one went in the spare room.

That day there was something else in the room. Something no one had put there; a pulsating beige mound, larger than James or his sister. It occupied almost the entire guest bed. Neither of them understood what the thing was at first. It was only after he'd reached out and touched the clay–like husk and felt the vibrating swarm within it, fear turned to horror. That was the moment he realised the truth.

Wasp nest.

His sister's face had been stony with terror. A single wasp was enough to make her scream. But this time she was silent. He ushered her out of the room, always keeping himself between her and the mound.

The nightmares lasted for years. In his dreams, the wasps would build a nest around him as he slept. They'd crawl in his mouth and out through his eyes. And he'd wake screaming, cocooned in the nest where he slept, trapped in the writhing swarm.

He knew that facial expression because he'd seen it before on his sister's face. It wasn't concern he'd seen on the face of the pink haired girl. It was horror. For some reason she was absolutely terrified of that phone.

James reached into his bag and pulled out his Nokia 5110. His mobile phone must have been twenty years old. He'd had it since sixth form. It weighed about half a kilo and the screen was green and black. The thing was so old it had acquired a sort of retro cool. His friends joked he'd got there before the hipsters. He'd never really thought about it much, but he didn't like mobile phones. Of all his friends, he'd been the last to cave into the pressure to buy one. As a basic principle, when he went out, he liked to be out - as in out of reach of work, and insurance salesmen, and ex–girlfriends, and his mother complaining he never visited.

And he didn't upgrade. It certainly wasn't entirely displeasing to watch his friends suffer every time a new Apple iOS came out and took six hours to install. He struggled not to laugh when popular apps got hacked full of malware and stole people's credit card details, or their toddler fed their expensive mobile to the toilet bowl. And all the time his trusty Nokia did what he thought phones should do; make and receive calls. It certainly didn't lead people to walk in front of trains. He jokingly wondered if that was an app, or if it came pre–installed in the hardware.