'Wanderer above the sea of fog' Caspar David Friedrich, 1818.










Main terminal, his stop. The whoosh of automatic doors and the sweep of steel and glass excited him. There were no curtains, no occasional tables, no kitchen utensils. No heaps of laundry or drawers filled with tartan pyjamas. There was no letter box. No milk on the doorstep. nothing domestic, cosy or familiar; nothing with his scent or his name or his NHS number on it.

       Why hadn't he realised it before? The problem was all around him. The stuffy little room. The conventional parents, the dismal house. The street. The school. Here, all the litlle threads that connected him to earth could be broken. He was in transit, on the lam. He was Gulliver, Neil Armstrong, Bonnie and Clyde, all rolled into one.

                                                                        (... extract from 'Just in Case' by Meg Rosoff).

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