by Alyson Rudd
‘I think perhaps we are,’ Hana said and she took off her coat and flung it in the next bin they passed.
Ed hung back and turned on his heel. He had tried his best, he thought.
She looked over her shoulder and watched him retreat. He looked like a film star in his long coat with his long stride and she felt the tears well up. Her only tissues were in her jacket and when Ed turned it was to see the distant figure of Hana retrieving her new coat from the bin and rummaging through its pockets. He was too far away to see how her tears began to sting her cheeks.
He took out his phone.
I am officially unattached but want to be attached to you
he texted without re-reading his words first. He was sure about Naomi, so sure that the genuine anxiety he had felt at hurting Hana evaporated at speed. A couple of teenagers on skateboards approached him as if in a game of chicken but he kept walking the same line and the boys parted with a stifled screech of their wheels and whizzed past him without even touching the tips of his flapping dark grey coat.
Sylvie texted Ryan the day after their walk over Waterloo Bridge. She told him she would like to take it slowly as there were things she needed to sort out. She politely added that she would quite understand if that was a frustration and he did not want to see her again.
Ryan texted her back that slow was good and would the suggestion they meet one Friday towards the middle of February be too impatient of him? He did not tell her so, but he vowed to travel at the other end of the train, to give her space. He would not tell her, either, that he spent long minutes of each day wondering what it was – other than a job – that she needed to sort out.
She was tiring of it. The responsibility had taken its toll. As she tapped her card on entering Eastcote station she was no longer on automatic pilot. She was choosing to do this and was not at all sure she was making the right choice. What, she wondered, if this is not what I was supposed to do and I have wasted all these months? She was cold and miserable. Nothing had changed. She had achieved absolutely nothing and, having kept at bay the idea that she was living a lie, she now was forced to accept it. The things she had to sort out, as she had put it, were hazy now and she wondered how she could wrap up this phase of her existence if she did not know what her task entailed. She was a woman on the move without an itinerary, without solid purpose, and yet she stepped onto the next train, settled into her seat and closed her eyes with a degree of relief.
Chapter 15
Grandpa said he did not want to go to the pub. He was busy.
‘You’re busy?’ Grace said. ‘Busy doing what, now?’
He grunted. He was, she saw, busy with the shopping channel. He never bought anything so it was a harmless enough pastime, financially, but he had entered a twilight world where the smiling, chirpy presenters had become his friends. Now and again he soiled himself rather than drag himself away from the TV to visit the bathroom. Grace wondered if this was the beginning of the end or if that had happened years ago.
She heard Hana place her key in the lock and she could feel the reluctance in the action, she could tell her daughter was sad.
‘How was Ed?’ she asked with forced brightness.
‘He dumped me,’ Hana said, ‘and I threw away my new coat. Twice.’
Grace opened her mouth then closed it again and gave her daughter a hug. At least it had not been Ed who had thrown away her coat. Hana’s ex would have done something like that.
‘I’ll make us all some tea,’ she said and Hana surveyed the scene and sighed.
‘Can’t he watch normal stuff, programmes we could watch with him?’
Grace was torn between the competing needs of those she loved.
‘When he drops off, we’ll watch a nice film together,’ she whispered but Hana had begun to weep and the helpless Grace noticed how, as the tears rolled down her daughter’s cheeks, she so resembled her grandfather and, it had to be acknowledged, her father.
Grace stood in front of the kettle. She was troubled. She had worked hard to keep the family from fraying but there was an unravelling now – she could feel it – and the memories she fought hard to suppress began to creep across the kitchen walls like fast-growing ivy. She was in the churchyard, the wind blowing in fitful gusts sometimes of rain, sometimes of sunshine, her black dress-coat rattling at her calves as Tom was lowered into the earth. She refused to hold Joe’s hand, refused to look at him, so he was held upright by Grandpa and Grandpa’s brother. Later she was disgusted by her husband’s tears, the way he was fed beer and whisky, the way he accepted the beer and whisky but refused the sandwiches.
‘I can’t eat,’ he had said but he could drink all right. She put up with him for another week and then told him to go and drink in someone else’s house. He could come back, she said, when he was ready to be a good father to his remaining children. He had stopped weeping and stared at her. She had not known it then but that was the moment Joe realized he would never be a good father in her eyes. He had let her firstborn die. His relatives and friends were welcoming at first but his inability to explain what was slowly destroying him meant they tired of his self-pity and long alcoholic hazes. He ran out of places to stay. His mother was poorly, his best friend’s wife was pregnant and superstitious and treated him like he was a bad luck charm.
He knocked on his own front door early one June morning and Grace, holding a heavy Ryan on her hip, answered. She did not ask him to come in.
‘You smell of drink,’ she said.
‘Of course I do,’ he said. ‘It’s all I have. It’s too hard for me, Gracie.’
She placed Ryan on the carpeted hall floor. He wrapped his arms around her leg.
‘Tom used to do that,’ Joe said in a gravelly whisper.
‘And you think I don’t remember,’ she said. ‘Well, I do remember but, amazingly, I manage to remember and not touch the drink.’
‘You pious bitch,’ he muttered as he walked away, swaying slightly.
Now, Grace wondered if she had heard him properly. He might have said ‘that’s a bit rich’. It was horrible if those were the last words she heard him speak. He had hated her as much as she had hated him. But she did not hate him now. She understood him better these days. His grief was double the dose of hers and hers had been bad enough.
‘Mam, he’s dropped off, we can watch something if you like,’ Hana said. Grace wanted to be alone, to go for a long walk, a long holiday, lie in the sun, meet new people, maybe dance, she used to be a good dancer.
‘Whatever you fancy watching, my love,’ she said, linking her arm through Hana’s and nestling into her shoulder. My poor Hana, she thought.
Paul was on his phone, sat on the sofa in Ryan’s house. His spacious flat in Hammersmith had looked too good to be true and it had turned out that was.
‘The noise,’ he groaned. ‘I’m living beneath the loudest and angriest of angry and loud drug addicts. I need some quiet moments to think and oh, yes, to sleep.’
Naomi, nursing a hot mug of coffee, sat down too quickly and spilled some of her drink onto her lap.
‘That sounds awful,’ she said. ‘Move in here while you sort it out. I’ve got a friend who, er, who has just split from her man and is begging me to keep her company, so my room is free.’
Paul sat up straight.
‘Really? When are you going?’
‘Shall we say Sunday?’
‘It’s a deal, and thanks.’
‘What’s a deal?’ Ryan said as he walked in, and he wondered why Naomi seemed so sheepish but soon forgot about it when he heard Paul would be moving in.
‘You do realize, the place will start to smell bad by day three,’ Naomi said.
‘Wouldn’t have it any other way,’ Ryan said, looking at the brown smudge on her trousers, ‘and Paul’s clothes aren’t stained.’
Naomi could not quite believe how sure she was that she wanted to be with Ed. She sat on the train and pondered her impulsiveness. It was all about the contrast,
she decided. All those young excitable students – and then in walked the mature, confident Ed. Cappi had been tall and shy, Ed was tall and composed and possibly a little unknowable. She almost shivered in delight.
‘This is not a flat,’ Naomi said as she walked through Ed’s door. She had tried to play it all down in her head. People shared all the time, it did not have to be a big deal and she was self-aware enough to know she was hungry for excitement, for a dash of recklessness, and being reckless with an older man had to be a safe sort of recklessness, didn’t it?
But Ed lived near Plaistow in what could reasonably be termed a big house. It had a front garden with an iron garden gate and one huge two-storey window running through the centre of it; it was unnervingly grown-up and serious that she was stood on its threshold with her belongings.
‘I never said I lived in a flat,’ he said. ‘But I would live in a flat. With you.’
‘Are you super rich or something?’
‘Sadly not. I am super old, that’s all. Got this place cheap at auction fifteen years ago and spent the next thirteen doing it up. I planned for it to take six months. I guess you could say I got side-tracked or I ended up quite liking it here.’
‘Are we really still in London?’
‘Narnia.’
She had one large suitcase and a laptop bag.
‘I’d have helped but you told me to stay away,’ he said.
‘Oh, we can never tell Ryan about us,’ she said matter-of-factly.
‘Right,’ he said.
‘Not unless we are still together in five years’ time and then we can have bumped into each other at a party, half recognized each other, that sort of thing.’
‘Five years,’ he said, ‘Or sooner if Hana gets married or something.’
‘I don’t regret being with Hana,’ he said, ‘if I hadn’t met her I would never have met you.’
They stood, facing each other, in a room with a very high ceiling, letting their lips touch as if on a dare to see who could remain still the longest.
‘I know nothing about you,’ she said.
‘I know almost nothing about you,’ he said.
‘I’m a homeless student of biodiversity,’ she said.
‘That, I already knew.’
Chapter 16
Sylvie had either patrolled, monitored or examined the platforms of Marble Arch, Mansion House, Hanger Lane, Golders Green and Arnos Grove between Monday and Friday of the second week in February. She had no checklist and was sure she had covered old ground. She wondered from time to time if she was possessed because the real Sylvie was a whizz at organization. The real Sylvie would have made notes of every route, every station sat at – but there was no order to her travels. It was always done on a hunch, a feeling. Sometimes she loitered with a book. Sometimes she paced back and forth. Now and again, a member of the station staff would ask her what she was doing.
If she had been completely honest she would have told them she had made a late diversion. That she had planned to be at King’s Cross but could not make it. She was beginning to understand that she would be underground forever unless she actually did patrol at King’s Cross but she had been procrastinating for months. It would soon be a year. A year since. She closed her novel and let the rumble of her southbound Northern line train calm her down. A year since she had stood at the end of the platform and the girl with the large brown eyes had recognized her, or so it seemed.
The girl was petite, her long skirt had billowed in the draught of the tunnels. It was not a parcel she was carrying but a baby. She scooped the baby out of the simple papoose that had kept it hidden and handed it to Sylvie.
Does anyone ever refuse a baby? Sylvie had thought, many times, subsequently.
Of course, she accepted the child. It had, at the time, felt predestined. There had been a connection between them, she had been almost mesmerized by the woman’s soft and vulnerable, warm brown eyes. The mother must need to find something in her bag or tie her shoelace or stretch her back, so Sylvie held the baby, a little nervously. She had not held one for a while, not since she had been a babysitter when she was seventeen for the Chappells who had lived next-door-but-one to her parents and liked to go out at least twice a week and to ease their guilt would pay a generous hourly rate to whichever teenager was available to look after their three children.
They had never been real to her, the Chappell kids; she had no view on whether they were cute or intelligent. They were little people to be looked after, little people who could fall out of bed or need a drink or have bad dreams, they were little people who could interrupt her watching Strictly Come Dancing or The X-Factor while nibbling her way through the stacks of patisserie strawberry tartlets, chocolate cakes and biscuits left by Mr and Mrs Chappell as if they thought she needed fattening up.
So she held the girl’s baby and the stranger had given her a sad and grateful smile and then jumped.
Someone had screamed but Sylvie was sure it was not her who screamed, and nor was it the girl. Sylvie instinctively held the baby tightly and stumbled back as if it was still attached to its mother and might be sucked onto the tracks, but a train now occupied the tracks, a train that had hit the girl.
There was much commotion but none of it made sense to Sylvie. A woman in a high-visibility vest placed her arm around her.
‘Can you come with me, please?’ she had said and so Sylvie had walked with her as other people in similar vests ran past them. Still she held the baby. They walked into a stuffy room with a battered sofa, thin-legged table and chairs. Still Sylvie held the baby and then she vomited so the woman took the baby from her grasp and handed it to a woman in uniform but no high-vis vest who cooed in a low voice and rocked it.
It took a while for Sylvie to remember her own name and address. She was sick a second time and someone gave her a cold flannel.
‘Lie down,’ the high-vis lady said.
‘Gillian and the baby will stay here with you. Take your time.’
Sylvie did not sleep on the battered sofa but fell into a strange state of semi-consciousness, hoping the smell, the noise, the image of the girl’s sad eyes would go away. She could hear groaning and realized, with a shudder, she was the one making the sound.
Yet another woman walked in and gave her a brand-new toothbrush and some toothpaste and guided her to a tiny sink.
‘You’re in shock, sweetheart,’ she said and then guided her back to the sofa.
‘How are you now? Are you diabetic?’
Sylvie shook her head and was handed a mug of sugared tea as the baby began to wriggle and make mewing noises like a trapped cat.
The high-vis woman reappeared wearing a serious, grown-up expression.
‘I know you feel awful,’ she said, ‘but is this baby your baby or the baby of the woman who jumped?’
‘It’s hers,’ Sylvie said. ‘But she wanted me to take it so maybe I had better hold it?’
‘Do you know the woman who jumped?’
‘No. She smiled at me like she recognized me but I’d never met her. I’m pretty sure I’d never seen her before. I thought she needed to tie her shoes or something.’
‘Did she say anything to you? Anything at all?’
Sylvie closed her eyes. The girl had said something. One word. She assumed she was saying thank you but maybe she had said something else.
‘Nisha. Yes, that’s it, she said “Nisha”.’
‘And did you, Sylvie, say anything to her?’
Sylvie frowned.
‘I didn’t know she was going to… so I just held her baby, I had no idea… I said nothing, nothing at all.’
‘That’s OK, Sylvie.’
‘Is she dead now, the girl?’
‘We think so,’ the high-vis woman said, ‘and perhaps if you had not been there, she would have jumped with her baby, so you have done a wonderful thing and saved a life.’
‘Why, though? Why jump at all?’
‘We might never know. She could have had
problems at home, been suffering a mental illness, post-natal depression, all sorts of sad reasons.’
There were forms that needed filling and when the questions were over, Sylvie looked around the room only to find the baby had vanished.
‘We had to get it to a paediatrician quickly for a health check,’ the high-vis woman said.
This made sense but Sylvie felt her views were being unnecessarily overlooked.
‘She gave the baby to me, I ought to do something to help it,’ she said.
‘You won’t be able to do more than the professionals,’ the high-vis woman said gently.
A police car took her home. It was her first time in a police car and the woman driving it was very nice, as was the man sat in the passenger seat, but Sylvie felt miserable. She did not deserve this VIP journey back to her flat. She had been remarkably stupid, it was now clear, not to have guessed what the young woman was about to do, and all it would have taken was one word of kindness to have changed her mind. That night Sylvie became convinced the manner in which she held the baby might have persuaded the young woman to jump. The baby is better off without you, she deserves better than you. The baby must be called Nisha, she thought. Nisha. The sound of her name was like the sound of the rush of air that arrived before a Tube train appears.
‘Where had you been heading to?’ the woman from the British Transport Police had asked her.
‘My, quite a day,’ she had said quietly when Sylvie explained how she had lost her job.
‘Otherwise I would have been nowhere near King’s Cross,’ she said, unsure if that was a good or bad thing from Nisha’s point of view.
‘Look, we’ll let you know when we know more,’ the constable had said. ‘We’ll let you know how the baby is and what we think happened, if we can. In the meantime, see your GP if you still feel sick, and don’t let this get to you. You were in the right place at the right time to save a baby. There was nothing more you could have done.’
Sylvie doubted that. The next time a stranger smiled sadly at her she would know what to do.