In the commanding cathedral of the train station everything is on the move save for statues and Old Benjamin.
OLD BENJAMIN : Pennies, prayers, poems!
He dreams, with eyes wide and bloodshot, of running through the building, with poems, a fine mist, rising from each step. Tears leave quicksilver tracks on his rugged face as he cries for
OLD BENJAMIN : The Gothic glory of Victorian taste. A Hymn! To industrial faith.
Yet between Old Benjamin's eyes and the fevers of his architecture-addled brain, he sees the station's true holiness, the nobleness, the ambition, and also the toil and sweat and soot, packages and heavy loads and broken half-dreams, hearts damaged and hopes twisted by time, housed under soaring ribs of golden stone and brightly painted steel...
The trains are running. Look, they move like bright meteors, the Taurids and the Leonids and fastest of all, the Geminids. They hoot and spark and rumble, they charge to their platforms and their loading bays in their eagerness to serve, while their too humans attendants, weary, wasted, turn their thoughts to the end of shift and dream of
A DRIVER : My bed
A FIREMAN : My bath
Many can only watch, from the crisp heat of the engine cab, while their colleagues leave as they are too clean yet for end of shift, though tired.
Robert Purefoy, chaplain, winter cold, fighting the lure of sleep, waits in the small station chapel to bring
ROBERT PUREFOY : Hope
but he needs
ROBERT PUREFOY : People.
Commuters pass by, all business, suited office grey and brown, ignoring his door, muttering
A COMMUTER : Damn work.
So Purefoy sits in his loneliness, and his prayers continue without piercing through the pattering footsteps on the platforms.
Yet Muna Lut the station porter
MUNA LUT : hurries to clean herself.
Dawn is coming and so prayers
MUNA LUT : must be said in the little station chapel with the lonely old Christian watching and wishing for company in this ornate and overbearing masjid to industry, as she's just had shift handover with the night porters, and there are still bins to be emptied, and there are facilities to check and clean, and passengers to help on and off with their luggage that weighs like they're smuggling lead from wherever they're from to wherever they're going, and there's the Station Lass who called in sick and one of the Lads has hurt himself on a trolley again. There's no time for the family mosque.
On a platform, in proper tweed, a man, a gentleman, a passenger, a pilgrim who has travelled far with further to go laments to his valet.
JOHN LOVELL : It's archaic. Imagine! Telling us to get a cab to the docks!
But they do. Loudly. Complaining.
The cab driver stays quiet, knowing he won't be heard.
And the horse trots on.