Gulliver waits beside the railway tracks for a train

Gulliver waits beside the railway tracks for a train in a scene that brings his concealed distress into immediate physical danger. The Alien narrator finds him absent from school and follows as he walks to the tracks, where the approaching train turns the narrator’s uncertainty about Gulliver’s intentions into a crisis. Gulliver survives, but the narrator leaves without learning whether the boy had meant to die.

Discovery and pursuit

The encounter begins in a park, where Newton barks insistently and directs the Alien narrator’s attention toward a different road, lined with terraced houses facing the park. On the pavement, Gulliver walks alone, trying to hide behind his hair. He is supposed to be at school, but when he sees the narrator, he freezes, turns around, and walks away faster. The narrator calls after him; Gulliver does not respond.

Gulliver’s flight alarms the narrator for a reason beyond ordinary truancy. He knows that the world’s greatest mathematical puzzle has been solved by his own father, and the narrator fears that Gulliver might disclose this secret. The narrator had delayed taking action, telling himself that he needed to check whether Andrew Martin had informed anyone else. He had also been exhausted after his encounter with Daniel Russell. Gulliver had said that he had told no one and would not, but the narrator had not been sure he could trust him. His mother, meanwhile, believes he is at school. The boy’s absence therefore makes his whereabouts—and what he might do next—uncertain.

The railway line

The narrator follows Gulliver with Newton, but the distance between them limits what he can do: he is close enough to be seen if Gulliver turns, yet too far away for mind manipulation to work. Gulliver does not look back. They pass a Honda building with empty cars outside and a man in a shirt and tie watching from behind the glass. Gulliver then cuts across a grass field toward four parallel metal tracks stretching into the distance.

At the tracks, Gulliver stands perfectly still and waits. Newton looks from Gulliver to the narrator with concern, then whines loudly. The narrator tells him to be quiet, leaving the animal as the only one whose alarm is openly expressed. After a while, a train appears and grows nearer along the tracks. Gulliver stands only about a metre from its path. His fists clench; his whole body stiffens. Newton barks as the train reaches him, but its noise and closeness drown out the warning.

The train passes

The narrator reads Gulliver’s stance as potentially fatal. He wonders whether he might not have to intervene because Gulliver could do it himself. That thought records the narrator’s inference, not a confirmed account of Gulliver’s intention: the scene gives no explanation from the boy and does not establish that he has decided to kill himself. His clenched fists and rigid body, his stillness beside the track, and his refusal to respond to the narrator make the possibility terrifyingly immediate without resolving it.

The train passes. Gulliver’s fists unclench, and his body appears to relax; the narrator cannot tell whether this means relief or disappointment. The distinction matters because the same outward change can mark opposite responses to survival. Gulliver turns and begins to walk away, still offering no explanation of why he came to the tracks. The narrator has no direct access to the meaning of the moment and cannot make the boy’s silence into certainty.

Withdrawal and significance

Before Gulliver turns around, the narrator has pulled Newton back and moved out of sight. He does not approach or ask what Gulliver intended. The episode ends with the narrator’s admission that he has left Gulliver. The immediate danger has passed, but the uncertainty has not: neither the boy’s purpose nor his state of mind is disclosed, and the narrator’s withdrawal leaves their encounter unresolved.

The scene makes the railway line a threshold between suspicion and consequence. Until this point, the narrator’s concern centers on Gulliver as a possible holder of dangerous knowledge; beside the tracks, that concern is displaced by the prospect of the boy’s death. The train’s passage supplies no answer, only a narrow escape—or a reprieve the narrator cannot interpret. Newton’s barking registers danger that Gulliver may not hear, while the narrator, though watchful, remains unable to reach him in time to know what he needs. Gulliver survives the passing train, but the episode closes not with reassurance or explanation, but with distance.