First Aid (2 page)

‘I thought there were two of you kids.'

‘There are,' says the woman.

‘No. Two big 'uns, I mean. I see the little 'un.'

‘No,' says the woman.

He looks at her, but her eyes register nothing. He shrugs. The little girl tugs at her mother's hand.

‘Doesn't she talk?' he asks.

‘She's tired,' says the woman. ‘Once she starts, she doesn't stop.'

‘Where's your sister?' he says, bending over. ‘Has she left you?'

The child climbs on her mother's lap, puts in her thumb and stares at him over her curled-up hand. The man straightens up.

‘Let's see your tickets, then.'

The boy fumbles in his back pocket and hands over the tickets to be clipped. He watches as the ticket collector clips yours. A piece of thistledown that has blown in through an open window further down the train floats past. The little girl follows it with her eyes and just as it comes within reach she takes out her thumb and grasps it. She holds it in her cupped hands and looks at it. Then she puts it in her pocket and snuggles back into her mother's lap. The ticket collector moves off down the carriage.

‘Mum, I asked you,' the boy says.

The woman strokes the child's hair with slow, regular movements.

‘Mum, what are you going to do?' the boy says.

‘Nothing.'

‘You can't just do nothing.'

‘She wasn't hurt, was she? You saw her pick herself up?'

He nods.

‘Leave it. She'll be all right,' the woman says.

‘But, Mum. You should tell someone.'

‘Who?'

‘I don't know. The police. Someone at the next station.'

‘It wouldn't do any good.'

‘You can't say that.'

‘Let's get where we're going. Leave it.'

‘Mu-um.' The word collapses into two parts like the trite ending to a song.

The child looks at you. You don't react. Smiling at her wouldn't be right, sentimental complicity. She wouldn't have smiled back.

JO CLOSED HER
eyes again. She knew who was there. Annie and Rob. No other members of the family now. And a stranger, sitting in the corner seat, with her back to the engine. Most people prefer to face the way the train is going, though in a crash they are better off the other way round and she might have taken that into account. It wasn't an entirely stupid decision. There were more accidents on the railway than there used to be. Jo could feel the woman looking at her. She had looked several times already, and now she could do it thoroughly. The view under Jo's eyelids was restless and blotchy, not peaceful. She wished it would settle down. With the movement of the train her vision wavered – near, then receding – an indeterminate red. She could have done with her being human, the stranger. She tried to remember what she looked like. There was only redness now where she used to see – redness with wisps and filaments hatching and dispersing. She wanted to think of safe, material things. It would calm her. For a moment her mind's focus shifted. She imagined Ella scrabbling up an embankment, running over fields, growing smaller and smaller as the distance claimed her – then just redness.

Annie stretched up to her and pulled at the flesh of her arm, as if it were cloth in a sleeve. The action seemed experimental, not demanding. Jo went back to stroking the child's head. This seemed to soothe her and was less trouble than lifting her back on the seat. She thought, it's no good bothering about what other people think. They can think what they like. But she couldn't stop whatever came before bothering; the consciousness of the other person seeing and judging. The train was slowing down. Signals again. It was quiet outside. The instinct to open her eyes and check where they were had gone, but her thoughts steadied with the stopping of the train. She knew approximately where Ella had jumped off and, with less certainty, where they were now. She had never been to either place.

No one goes to the strips of land bordering the line between stations, unless their house and garden back onto them, and there were no houses. People don't clamber over a field to watch the trains as they used to, taking their children to wave. Jo had a picture in her mind of her mother waving. A girl with dark bobbed hair leaning over a fence. It was like a photograph, though no such photograph existed. Even after the steam trains had finished, the waving carried on. Habits endure for a while and then stop. Now kids chuck stones, or worse, at the railway lines; mess up the system and everyone's mornings or evenings. We apologise for the late running of such and such a train, they say, due to an incident. By then, the kids who did it are in school, or having their tea. We are sorry for the inconvenience caused.

Jo knew what she would have seen through the windows. She had often done the journey. On her own, or with her children – to visit the grandparents. Never with Peter. Journeys with her ex-husband involved a car. She and the children changed trains at London Bridge – up the stairs and over the footbridge to the other platform. Someone always wanted a drink. Someone always wanted the toilet. It seemed to her hopeless that she was still occupied with these wants. Other things came to an end. But children's demands continued.

She felt, as she always felt, that, having left the seaside towns behind, she was already at her destination. The territory behind the sea margin was hardly different from the edges of London. Brick terraced housing and in-filling from the first seven decades of the twentieth century – not the best samples. Streets that became their own likenesses when you turned the corner. No vistas. The pub isolated on a roundabout, the newsagent, the bookies and the take-away squashed up snugly together. The scene was similar to what greeted them when they left the station at the London end and walked to her grandparents' house in East Greenwich – an unmodemised district tucked in between old Thames wharves and the Blackwall Tunnel Southern Approach Road.

The Garden of England, they used to call it, her grandfather said, when Jo said she and Peter were moving to Kent. I don't know if you'd agree with that. What do you want to go and live there for, her grandmother said, aren't the jobs in London good enough for him?

Jo's former house, the one that had had to be sold when her husband left, had been cheerful-looking – flat-fronted, painted blue, with pretty railings that were rusty but more or less intact, only a few curlicues missing. Leaning out of the back bedroom window, she had been able to see the sea. She still missed waking up there. She wished that she and the children had been able to stay put but they hadn't been able to afford that. They had lost continuity. She had done what she could to keep ordinary family life going, but Ella and Rob had known the difference between a solid house and a sheet draped over a clotheshorse. Ella's carefully kept mementoes had suddenly seemed wrong in the new place and she'd thrown them away. She hadn't said what she was doing. Jo had found them in the bin, picked them out and hidden them in one of her own drawers under her jerseys: shells, felt mice, rings from Christmas crackers – nothing bigger than her now full-sized thumbnail. The objects had hardly covered the bottom of a plastic bag, because, although numerous, they were minute. She had kept them for nearly a year. Then she had thought she was being silly and had got rid of them. That was the last of Ella's tidiness. She never arranged her possessions again.

The flat they moved into was part of a low terraced house, further back from the sea, yellow stock brick – similar to the East Greenwich house where Jo had grown up. It had the same orientation – the hall to the right and the front room to the left. Jo hadn't even had to think about which path to walk up, as she would have done had it been the house next door. She had come home, though without the welcome party.

The entrances to the upstairs and downstairs flats were side by side at the end of the narrow hall. The builders had nailed a piece of plasterboard over the old door to the front room. On the inner side, they had left it looking like a door, only without the handle. When Jo viewed the ground-floor flat with the estate agent, she caught herself trying to get out that way, putting her hand out to turn something that wasn't there. She hadn't got far, she thought, ending up in a sliced-up version of her childhood home. She had wondered which half of the house to go for. It had seemed arbitrary. She liked to let a decision settle – to forget about it and then hope the answer would come to the surface, like cream on the old bottles of full-fat milk, but there hadn't been time for that. She and the children had needed somewhere to live. The estate agent had pointed out the good points of both halves and told her that other clients were interested. She had thought about feet crossing the floor above and cooking smells rising from below, as if there had been an extra intermediate floor designed especially for her, with nothing but disadvantages. She had imagined the interested clients. Up and down. She had seen them in her mind's eye: both men. The first was a bit good-looking and a bit ugly, with even teeth and said hullo when they met, in a neutral kind of way, and the second was rather similar. Her opinion of men was at a low point. In the end, she had chosen upstairs. If Annie had been her only child she would have had the flat with the garden, but Ella and Rob were too loud. Their voices would have travelled the length of the block. There were enough rooms for them to have one each as a bedroom, though Annie often ended up getting into Jo's bed in the night. They made do without a sitting room. The kitchen, off the first half-landing, had space for a table and chairs and an armchair.

The ground-floor flat had been occupied a few weeks later. A couple moved in. Dan and Megan. They didn't cook, or not thoroughly enough to cause rising smells, and they made no noise indoors, just discreetly revved their motorbike when they left for work in the morning. They had a text above the number-plate that said The Kingdom of God is Within You. Luke 17: 21. Their silence made Jo self-conscious about her children. She hadn't realised how disagreeable they always got in the hour before they ate, clumping about the place, falling out with each other. They hadn't improved with age. She had tried to keep them quiet.

‘Mum. The train keeps stopping.' That was Rob.

Jo didn't speak. And she kept her eyes closed.

‘Why does it keep stopping?' he said.

Annie, who had settled down, stirred.

‘Don't wake Annie,' Jo said.

‘Is there a
particular
reason, do you think?'

Jo shook her head.

‘What will happen when we get to the next station?' he said.

‘Nothing will happen.'

Rob was quiet again. Then he said, ‘I wish we could just be there.'

The next stop was a station. There were changes in the train's reverberations that came from being shut in alongside buildings and under a canopy. The colour under her eyelids deepened with the change in light. No doors banged. The train started up again.

‘Sit down, Rob,' she said. ‘Don't touch the window.'

‘I'm not opening it. I just want to look out,' he said.

But she heard him go back to his seat.

‘Anyway, how do you know what I'm doing?' he said. ‘Why have you got your eyes closed if you're not asleep?'

She didn't reply. I don't want to see anything, she thought, and I don't want to be seen. There had been the short period in childhood when she had believed she became invisible if she hid behind her hands or squeezed her eyes tight. It had left a defiant trace. She couldn't recall the moment when she realised that she could be seen – or whether it was one of disappointment or relief. It was no good asking her children things like that. They claimed not to know what she was talking about.

‘Hot drinks in this weather.'

‘Sorry, Rob?'

‘Hot drinks in this weather. She's got a point.'

Jo thought that was what he had said.

Rob's watch beeped. Jo didn't know which hour it was marking. The train moved slowly and absorbed more heat from the sun. Annie's face stuck to Jo's bare leg and the seat stuck to her thin skirt.

The day had begun all right. Though Jo had been reluctant to leave the comfort of bed, the sky, enticingly blue in the gap over the curtains, had encouraged her. Felpo had been beside her, stretched out long length as usual. There was only a sheet covering them – not tucked in – barely dipping between them. She liked his reckless use of space. Nine months in the womb was long enough to be trussed up, he had said when she had commented on how much room he took up. He was using the rest of his life to recover, he had said. She hadn't been complaining. She wouldn't have wanted to lie there without a part of him touching her. After they made love he always slept where he ended up – on one side of the bed or the other. He wasn't territorial. She appreciated that after all those married years of semi-detached owner occupation.

She had got up and left Felpo dozing. He was lazy as a cat until the moment when he had to move and then fully awake. In the kitchen Annie and Rob were already sitting at the table. The air coming through the open window smelled summery. Her bare feet felt at home on the floor. Dan and Megan shut the front door, and minutes later revved up their motorbike and sped down the street. Jo put the supper pans into soak and removed an empty wine bottle from Annie's reach. Breakfast was Annie's most exuberant time of day. She disowned her position as the baby in the family and saw herself as Rob's contemporary, engaging him in conversation as soon as he sat down. She tried to keep pace with what he ate, demanding the same amounts, spooning the stuff in, until it filled her mouth – seeping milk on to her pyjamas when she tried to talk. Rob ate his cereal and kept edging away from her, ending up with his chair tipped against the wall and the bowl on his knees. It was hard for anyone else to talk with Annie chattering on. Jo made toast, singeing it under the grill while she fed the goldfish a pinch of multi-coloured flakes. She watched it come to the surface and gulp. Then she cut off the black bits from the toast and told Annie not to fuss. The mornings had felt leisurely since Felpo moved in. He calmed her.