How It All Goes Down
- Okay, so Christopher's standing in the train station, and he's totally overwhelmed, just as he predicted.
- He's dizzy and nauseous, and feels like he's standing on the edge of a cliff. He's having a really hard time thinking straight with all this, and he just wants to go home.
- He finds a table in a corner, closes his eyes, and tries to do some math problems to calm down. (That's Shmoop's favorite calming trick, too…)
- When he opens his eyes again, there's a policeman standing above him. It turns out Christopher has been sitting there for two and a half hours now. Time flies when you're doing math.
- Christopher wonders if he should tell the policeman about his father killing Wellington.
- Instead, he tells him that he's going to see his mother in London, but doesn't know how to get there.
- The policeman helps him use his father's bank card to get some money – thank goodness for the help. Christopher doesn't even know that "quid" is slang for "pounds," (kind of like "buck" and "dollar").
- Christopher leaves the policeman and goes to buy his train ticket. But it turns out that isn't so easy either.
- The man behind the window tells him where to go to catch his train. Christopher is still feeling terribly uneasy, so he imagines a red line along the floor that he can follow to the train, and says "left, right, left, right" quietly to himself, to try and calm down (191.104).
- A couple of people bump into him on his way to the train and he barks at them like a dog.
- Finally, he finds the train, gets on it, and, well, he's on his way to London.