The Girl on the Train (3 page)

I pull the filthy plaster off the end of my finger and look at the pale, wrinkled flesh beneath, dried blood caked at the edge of my fingernail. I press the thumbnail of my right hand into the centre of the cut and feel it open up, the pain sharp and hot. I catch my breath. Blood starts to ooze from the wound. The girls on the other side of the carriage are watching me, their faces blank.

I
CAN HEAR THE TRAIN
coming; I know its rhythm by heart. It picks up speed as it accelerates out of Northcote station and then, after rattling round the bend, it starts to slow down, from a rattle to a rumble, and then sometimes a screech of brakes as it stops at the signal a couple of hundred yards from the house. My coffee is cold on the table, but I’m too deliciously warm and lazy to bother getting up to make myself another cup.

Sometimes I don’t even watch the trains go past, I just listen. Sitting here in the morning, eyes closed and the hot sun orange on my eyelids, I could be anywhere. I could be in the south of Spain, at the beach; I could be in Italy, the Cinque Terre, all those pretty coloured houses and the trains ferrying the tourists back and forth. I could be back in Holkham with the screech of gulls in my ears and salt on my tongue and a ghost train passing on the rusted track half a mile away.

The train isn’t stopping today, it trundles slowly past. I can hear the wheels clacking over the points, I can almost feel it rocking. I can’t see the faces of the passengers and I know they’re just commuters heading to Euston to sit behind desks, but I can dream: of more exotic journeys, of adventures at the end of the line and beyond. In my head, I keep travelling back to Holkham; it’s odd that I still think of it, on mornings like this, with such affection, such longing, but I do. The wind in the grass, the big slate sky over the dunes, the house infested with mice and falling down, full of candles and dirt and music. It’s like a dream to me now.

I feel my heart beating just a little too fast.

I can hear his footfall on the stairs, he calls my name.

‘You want another coffee, Megs?’

The spell is broken, I’m awake.

I’m cool from the breeze and warm from the two fingers of vodka in my Martini. I’m out on the terrace, waiting for Scott to come home. I’m going to persuade him to take me out to dinner at the Italian on Kingly Road. We haven’t been out for bloody ages.

I haven’t got much done today. I was supposed to sort out my application for the fabrics course at St Martins; I did start it, I was working downstairs in the kitchen when I heard a woman screaming, making a horrible noise, I thought someone was being murdered. I ran outside into the garden, but I couldn’t see anything.

I could still hear her though, it was nasty, it went right through me, her voice really shrill and desperate. ‘What are you doing? What are you doing with her? Give her to me, give her to me.’ It seemed to go on and on, though it probably only lasted a few seconds.

I ran upstairs and climbed out on to the terrace and I could see, through the trees, two women down by the fence, a few gardens over. One of them was crying – maybe they both were – and there was a child bawling its head off too.

I thought about calling the police, but it all seemed to calm down then. The woman who’d been screaming ran into the house, carrying the baby. The other one stayed out there. She ran up towards the house, she stumbled and got to her feet and then just sort of wandered round the garden in circles. Really weird. God knows what was going on. But it’s the most excitement I’ve had in weeks.

My days feel empty now I don’t have the gallery to go to any longer. I really miss it. I miss talking to the artists. I even miss dealing with all those tedious yummy mummies who used to drop by, Starbucks in hand, to gawk at the pictures, telling their friends that little Jessie did better pictures than that at nursery school.

Sometimes I feel like seeing if I can track down anybody from the old days, but then I think, what would I talk to them about now? They wouldn’t even recognize Megan the happily married suburbanite. In any case, I can’t risk looking backwards, it’s always a bad idea. I’ll wait until the summer is over, then I’ll look for work. It seems like a shame to waste these long summer days. I’ll find something, here or elsewhere, I know I will.

I find myself standing in front of my wardrobe, staring for the hundredth time at a rack of pretty clothes, the perfect wardrobe for the manager of a small but cutting-edge art gallery. Nothing in it says ‘nanny’. God, even the word makes me want to gag. I put on jeans and a T-shirt, scrape my hair back. I don’t even bother putting on any make-up. There’s no point, is there, prettying myself up to spend all day with a baby?

I flounce downstairs, half spoiling for a fight. Scott’s making coffee in the kitchen. He turns to me with a grin and my mood lifts instantly. I rearrange my pout to a smile. He hands me a coffee and kisses me.

There’s no sense blaming him for this, it was my idea. I volunteered to do it, to become a childminder for the people down the road. At the time, I thought it might be fun. Completely insane, really, I must have been mad. Bored, mad, curious. I wanted to see. I think I got the idea after I heard her yelling out in the garden and I wanted to know what was going on. Not that I’ve asked, of course. You can’t really, can you?

Scott encouraged me – he was over the moon when I suggested it. He thinks spending time around babies will make me broody. In fact, it’s doing exactly the opposite; when I leave their house I run home, can’t wait to strip my clothes off and get into the shower and wash the baby smell off me.

I long for my days at the gallery, prettied up, hair done, talking to adults about art or films or nothing at all. Nothing at all would be a step up from my conversations with Anna. God, she’s dull! You get the feeling that she probably had something to say for herself once upon a time, but now everything is about the child: is she warm enough? Is she too warm? How much milk did she take? And she’s always
there
, so most of the time I feel like a spare part. My job is to watch the child while Anna rests, to give her a break. A break from what, exactly? She’s weirdly nervous, too. I’m constantly aware of her, hovering, twitching. She flinches every time a train passes, jumps when the phone rings. They’re just so fragile, aren’t they? she says, and I can’t disagree with that.

I leave the house and walk, leaden-legged, the fifty yards along Blenheim Road to their house. No skip in my step. Today, she doesn’t open the door, it’s him, the husband. Tom, suited and booted, off to work. He looks handsome in his suit – not Scott handsome, he’s smaller and paler, and his eyes are a little too close together when you see him up close – but he’s not bad. He flashes me his wide, Tom Cruise smile, and then he’s gone, and it’s just me and her and the baby.

I quit!

I feel so much better, as if anything is possible. I’m free!

I’m sitting on the terrace, waiting for the rain. The sky is black above me, swallows looping and diving, the air thick with moisture. Scott will be home in an hour or so and I’ll have to tell him. He’ll only be pissed off for a minute or two, I’ll make it up to him. And I won’t just be sitting around the house all day: I’ve been making plans. I could do a photography course, or set up a market stall, sell jewellery. I could learn to cook.

I had a teacher at school who told me once that I was a mistress of self-reinvention. I didn’t know what he was on about at the time, I thought he was trying it on, but I’ve since come to like the idea. Runaway, lover, wife, waitress, gallery manager, nanny, and a few more in between. So who do I want to be tomorrow?

I didn’t really mean to quit, the words just came out. We were sitting there, around the kitchen table, Anna with the baby on her lap, and Tom had popped back to pick something up, so he was there too, drinking a cup of coffee, and it just seemed ridiculous, there was absolutely no point in me being there. Worse than that, I felt uncomfortable, as if I was intruding.

‘I’ve found another job,’ I said, without really thinking about it. ‘So I’m not going to be able to do this any longer.’ Anna gave me a look – I don’t think she believed me. She just said, ‘Oh, that’s a shame,’ and I could tell she didn’t mean it. She looked relieved. She didn’t even ask me what the job was, which was a relief, because I hadn’t thought up a convincing lie.

Tom looked mildly surprised. He said, ‘We’ll miss you,’ but that’s a lie, too.

The only person who’ll really be disappointed is Scott, so I have to think of something to tell him. Maybe I’ll tell him Tom was hitting on me. That’ll put an end to it.

It’s just after seven, it’s chilly out here now, but it’s so beautiful like this, all these strips of garden side by side, green and cold and waiting for fingers of sunshine to creep up from the tracks and make them all come alive. I’ve been up for hours; I can’t sleep. I haven’t slept in days. I hate this, hate insomnia more than anything, just lying there, brain going round, tick, tick, tick, tick. I itch all over. I want to shave my head.

I want to run. I want to take a road trip, in a convertible, with the top down. I want to drive to the coast – any coast. I want to walk on a beach. Me and my big brother were going to be road trippers. We had such plans, Ben and I. Well, they were Ben’s plans mostly – he was such a dreamer. We were going to ride motorbikes from Paris to the Côte d’Azur, or all the way down the Pacific coast of the USA, from Seattle to Los Angeles; we were going to follow in Che Guevara’s tracks from Buenos Aires to Caracas. Maybe if I’d done all that, I wouldn’t have ended up here, not knowing what to do next. Or maybe, if I’d done all that, I’d have ended up exactly where I am and I would be perfectly contented. But I didn’t do all that, of course, because Ben never got as far as Paris, he never even made it as far as Cambridge. He died on the A10, his skull crushed beneath the wheels of an articulated lorry.

I miss him every day. More than anyone, I think. He’s the big hole in my life, in the middle of my soul. Or maybe he was just the beginning of it. I don’t know. I don’t even know whether all this is really about Ben, or whether it’s about everything that happened after that, and everything that’s happened since. All I know is, one minute I’m ticking along fine and life is sweet and I want for nothing, and the next, I can’t wait to get away, I’m all over the place, slipping and sliding again.

So, I’m going to see a therapist! Which could be weird, but it could be a laugh, too. I’ve always thought that it might be fun to be Catholic, to be able to go to the confessional and unburden yourself and have someone tell you that they forgive you, to take all the sin away, wipe the slate clean.

This is not quite the same thing, of course. I’m a bit nervous, but I haven’t been able to get to sleep lately, and Scott’s been on my case to go. I told him, I find it difficult enough talking to people I
know
about this stuff – I can barely even talk to you about it. He said, that’s the point, you can say anything to strangers. But that isn’t completely true. You can’t just say
anything
. Poor Scott. He doesn’t know the half of it. He loves me so much it makes me ache. I don’t know how he does it. I would drive me mad.

But I have to do
something
and at least this feels like action. All those plans I had – photography courses and cookery classes – when it comes down to it, they feel a bit pointless, as if I’m playing at real life instead of actually living it. I need to find something that I
must
do, something undeniable. I can’t do this, I can’t just be a wife. I don’t understand how anyone does it – there is literally nothing to do but wait. Wait for a man to come home and love you. Either that, or look around for something to distract you.

I’ve been kept waiting. The appointment was for half an hour ago, and I’m still here, sitting in the reception room flicking through
Vogue
, thinking about getting up and walking out. I know doctors’ appointments run over, but therapists’? Films have always led me to believe that they kick you out the moment your fifty minutes are up. I suppose Hollywood isn’t really talking about the kind of therapist you get referred to on the NHS.

I’m just about to go up to the receptionist and tell her that I’ve waited long enough, I’m leaving, when the doctor’s office door swings open and this very tall, lanky man emerges, looking apologetic and holding out his hand to me.

‘Mrs Hipwell, I am so sorry to have kept you waiting,’ he says, and I just smile at him and tell him it’s all right, and I feel, in this moment, that it will be all right, because I’ve only been in his company for a minute or two and already I feel soothed.

I think it’s the voice. Soft and low. Slightly accented, which I was expecting, because his name is Dr Kamal Abdic. I guess he must be mid-thirties, although he looks very young with his incredible dark honey skin. He has hands I could imagine on me, long and delicate fingers, I can almost feel them on my body.

We don’t talk about anything substantial, it’s just the introductory session, the getting-to-know-you stuff; he asks me what the trouble is and I tell him about the panic attacks, the insomnia, the fact that I lie awake at night too frightened to fall asleep. He wants me to talk a bit more about that, but I’m not ready yet. He asks me whether I take drugs, drink alcohol. I tell him I have other vices these days, and I catch his eye and I think he knows what I mean. Then I feel as if I ought to be taking this a bit more seriously, so I tell him about the gallery closing and that I feel at a loose end all the time, my lack of direction, the fact that I spend too much time in my head. He doesn’t talk much, just the occasional prompt, but I want to hear him speak, so as I’m leaving I ask him where he’s from.