Or the word aloof, which was a shipping term, came from luff, the word for the command to distance your boat from something too dangerously close to it. Or the word clue, too, which came from the word for a ball of thread and the coinage of which was probably something to do with the big ball of string Theseus took into the labyrinth with him to mark his way out and defeat the Minotaur. Ariadne got it from Daedalus, the inventor, and she gave it to Theseus, with whom she was in love, and the ball of string saved his life and made him a hero. Then he abandoned her on Naxos Island.
      She woke on the beach and she hadn't a clue where he'd gone, till she saw the sails of his ship disappearing over the sea's horizon. Now that's what I call aloof. I was walking the outside length of a dark, dead, switched-off train. Words were stories in themselves. Stamina was another good one, whose root and path I couldn't remember wholly but knew was something to do with the length of a person's life, the length of the life-force allotted to each of us at birth. Strength and fragility both, something lasting and something fearfully delicate, held there in the one word, and there in front of me was the door with the woman in the wheelchair behind it, who, when she saw movement below her - I say below her because I was down on ground level, quite different from platform level and platform perspective, and could look in through the dark glass of the door and make out her ankles on the chair's fold-out footrests - knocked what she could reach of herself and her chair against the glass with such eagerness, force and determination that I knew properly for the first time in my life exactly what the word stamina meant.
      Hello! I shouted up.
      I saw her mouth open and close. I looked high above my head at the buttons with which we usually open the doors of trains. They were unlit, as I'd expected. I stood back in the grass so she could see me more clearly and I waved my arms about. I realised I could say anything to this person and she wouldn't be able to hear; I realised that unless she could lip-read she'd not know what I was saying. I could ask herwhat happened to her, why and how she was in a wheelchair. I could recite the whole of Kubla Khan by Coleridge, or tell her all about Theseus and Ariadne, and she'd have to listen, while not listening at all, obviously. It had the makings of the perfect relationship. I could tell her endlessly, boringly, about words and how they meant and why they mattered, and what had happened in my life to make them not matter.
      Instead, what I found myself talking about was the place where my father had his workshop when I was a child, and how it had been at the back of the railway, so that I had spent a lot of my holiday hours in the grassy banks alongside sets of rails much like where we were now.
      It's been bulldozed, years ago, I said to the woman behind the glass doors. There's a furniture warehouse on it now, it's a shopping mall and a station car park where the old workshops were. It was a kind of nowhere, a nowhere before the new nowheres that shopping malls are now. It was quite a special place. The grass there was thick with clover, presumably it still is, if there's any grassy space there that still goes straight down to the earth. Finding four leafed-clovers there was pretty mundane. We found five- and six- and seven-leafed clovers there too, and once an eight. I put what I found in a book. I've no idea which book. They must still be somewhere on the shelves in the house, folded flat in there with their ridged green leaves arranged so you could see how many. I wonder if I'd find any if I were to go home and look for them tonight. Needle in a haystack. Clover in a shut book.

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