It had been a good day. Scarborough. The whole school on one hired train, children full of it, the journey home just the last part before the end. Then the train stopped. Not at a station. I looked out at the flat fields and the bare trees and the cold sky and I waited for someone to explain it. They did not explain it. The carriage lights stayed warm. The world outside stayed wrong. And then the smell arrived — faint, barely there, gone almost before I registered it — and I sat very still and understood, without having the words for it yet, that something had happened out there in the dark that I would carry for the rest of my life.