Eleven Lines to Somewhere

by Alyson Rudd

  Ryan did not say anything. He was waiting for her to share more but for Sylvie that was the end of the story.

  He opened his mouth and then closed it again and found himself shamefully wishing that the bloke sat next to Sylvie had tried to jump. He pictured her pulling at his arm or rugby tackling him to the ground. It was hard not to also picture it going wrong and the man shrugging her off and inadvertently pulling her under with him.

  ‘Well,’ she said at last. ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘I’m definitely thinking,’ he said with an embarrassed laugh. ‘I’m thinking it’s great you know what you need and… I’m thinking,’ he paused.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘And I’m thinking you should get a job on the Underground so you have a reason to watch people and save them.’

  Sylvie exhaled. Would that be enough? she wondered.

  ‘I could try that,’ she said and Ryan had to ask her to repeat it because he had been so sure she would agree to no such thing.

  Chapter 23

  Ryan had a hunch that Stocky Stan from King’s Cross would help. Stan tapped his nose, said he was owed a few favours and he could get the paperwork together and in the meantime allow Sylvie to shadow him in his office, which would let her to watch the platforms via his screens and watch the ebb and flow of the ticket hall.

  Ryan had a hunch that Stan would not be unsettled by the reason behind this rather peculiar request and, sure enough, as he related all that had happened – how she was stuck on the Tube until she found redemption – Stan simply nodded along as if he heard such tales most working days. For Stan, the Underground was everything, so it hardly surprised him that it could so dominate a young woman’s life; and he knew it was a place of light and shade, that it haunted as well as helped its passengers and workforce.

  ‘Sometimes we get people handing leaflets out about the Samaritans or depression and we – in the office – we get talks about spotting those at risk. It’s a blight on the system, actually. Drivers can be signed off for months – years if they get unlucky, get to be the one who sees it at its worst, so to speak. I knew a bloke who had two of them in the space of a year and he never came back. Heard he became a postie, eyes down, no drama.

  ‘Never occurred to me they might need this redemption thing, makes sense though. An eye for an eye, a life for a life, so to speak. You leave it to me,’ and here Stan laughed stockily, ‘although actually, when you think about it, what we’re hoping for is for someone to try to kill themselves and that’s not right, not really.’

  Ryan held his breath, wondering if Stan was about to change his mind.

  ‘But they might as well try it while your girl is there to save them than when there’s no one watching.’

  ‘Exactly right,’ Ryan said, relieved, although he too was very aware of the perverse nature of what they were all hoping would happen.

  The problem was that nothing did happen. Sylvie sat and watched and sometimes roamed but all she saw were commuters, tourists, backpacking students and school outings, long lines of children led and followed by anxious-looking teachers and volunteer parents, counting heads, issuing commands to stay in line, to stay away from the platform edge, to hold hands, to sit down quietly when they entered the carriage.

  She saw but did not notice Isak, now twenty-one years old, with his white-blond floppy hair and pale grey short stubble, who was on his way to Oxford Circus to buy swimming trunks. Isak loved and hated the big Nike and Topshop stores that greeted him when he emerged from the station. He loved that there was somewhere for him to shop right on the doorstep of the Central line, that there was always a new style, a new colour of swimwear or sports shorts waiting for him, but he hated the bustle, the cool dudes who stroked the black suede on the latest trainers, the staff who did not take kindly to his swimwear queries, and the resident DJs who would not look him in the eye.

  Isak was tall and thin and ethereal and looked cooler than any of the suede fondlers but was intimidated by them all the same. He paid with cash because the card was a connection and Isak could, if he closed his eyes, see the infra-red pathways that led from his card to the finance department, to the bank, to his mother’s savings account, to his stepfather’s platinum card, to his stepfather’s company where someone small and wizened would hear a ping and look at a screen and tut and say, ‘Isak’s been buying swimwear again.’

  He gave the cashier – who wore her hair in delicate dreadlocks and smiled at him kindly, he thought, without suspicion – two twenty-pound notes and neatly folded his purchase of bright turquoise trunks into his smooth black nylon rucksack. Isak returned to the Underground and travelled as far as St Paul’s. He would not visit the cathedral today, the man on the desk would need to search his bag and would see his swimming trunks and glance at him, maybe even make the joke he had heard too often before. ‘No pool in here, sonny.’

  Instead, Isak wandered Paternoster Square, which was busy but not crowded and where the air felt pure and the statues were clean – but someone had left a plastic tub with the remains of cold fusilli pasta, tuna and sweetcorn on one of the pristine benches and he flinched in disapproval. Two boys on skateboards encircled him and so he left the square and headed across the road towards the Millennium Bridge. This was a moment that never failed to make his heart sing. He had watched Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones many times and this bridge was part of those mystical worlds, the way it led into the mouth of the giant Tate Modern from the majesty of St Paul’s. He would often stand in the middle of the Turbine Hall and pretend he was a prince and the scurrying tourists and slow art lovers were his people, his subjects.

  He walked around the back of the Tate and through a small circular garden to an apartment block which required him to place an electronic fob on a pad to gain entry. He could take the lift but chose to climb the two storeys via the cream, matt marble stairs to the floor that belonged to his parents. His mother, also tall, also slim, also white blonde, was mixing together a horseradish crème fraîche to accompany the gravadlax all their guests seemed to expect to be served when they came to dinner. Ulla had never been drawn to the kitchen until she met Andrew, who had allowed her to reinvent herself, to make her nationality a personality trait rather than a dull fact.

  The vogue among Andrew’s set was for homemade food in a homely spot in their grand homes. Ulla suspected they all cheated to a degree although the Blakes had recently greeted them red-cheeked, aproned and glistening with Aga heat. Andrew did not join in the cooking but mixed a well-received gin and tonic and his wines were never without a narrative. They had met on a flight to Stockholm after Ulla had been upgraded to business class and told him she was so often rescued from economy that she had to assume she resembled someone famous.

  He was glad she was not famous but had to admit she had the aura of an actress or a model or a Royal. She saw a rugged, well-dressed man, who was hedge-fund rich but not arrogant like some Englishmen with money she had dated. They agreed to meet at her favourite café in Gamla Stam early the next morning, before his meeting, and neither expected the other to turn up but when she did he knew that this was what he needed, someone who spoke English perfectly but lacked nuance, lacked the proprietorial curiosity of his previous, Surrey-born girlfriend who had always wanted to know what he really meant, where he really went, what he really wanted.

  Isak did not like gravadlax. He did not much like eating and claimed he was supertaster, which meant he could eat the boring stuff at a fancy restaurant and not be chided for his lack of sophistication. He did, though, like a huge steaming bowl of spaghetti bolognese after a long swim. Andrew would be home soon and they could go to the basement and swim together after Andrew had said ‘Cool trunks’ as if it was perfectly normal to wear a new pair each time.

  The pool, at 6 p.m. on a Friday, was always quiet. Isak had hated public baths as a child but this was one of his favourite places. He did not mind if Ulla joined them but it was better when it was just him and Andrew, wh
o would compliment him on his muscle tone, his elegant breaststroke style, his powerful front crawl. They would race and it was always close and he did not mind if Andrew sometimes won but preferred it when he could shout, ‘Beat you!’

  ‘I fancy a long-distance slog today,’ Andrew said. ‘Thirty lengths. Been a tense sort of week. Fancy keeping pace with me?’

  It had been a tense sort of week for Isak too, full of cognitive behavioural therapy – or rather, full of another stab at another programme of it as if they were all different versions when to Isak they all seemed the same. Lots of nodding, lots of pauses, lots of looking at the ceiling at the tiny camera in the corner that might be sending images to his stepfather’s offices where the small and wizened man would tut and say, ‘He’s lying again. He needs more pills.’

  Chapter 24

  Narnia, Ed had said, and for the first few months it had felt magical. It had certainly felt almost pastoral but Naomi had begun to tire of sitting for so long on the District line to reach the land of limited fun.

  ‘Would you say you love your house?’ she asked him.

  ‘Why?’ he said.

  ‘Oh, you know why, I’m not sure about…’ She spread her arms. ‘All this. It’s a bit quiet for me.’

  Ed did not react straightaway. He sat very still, staring into the middle distance.

  ‘Where would you like to be?’ he said, finally, evenly.

  ‘More central. I like noise and lots of choice of bars and pubs and restaurants and big parks and grandeur on your doorstep, architecture, big architecture, and I never go to art galleries but I like the idea I could wake up one Sunday and just pop to one in fifteen minutes.’

  ‘And can you afford that sort of life?’

  ‘I coped OK living with Ryan. Ealing wasn’t perfect but it was closer to everything than we are here, and maybe together we could live closer still. I mean, if you fancied that. Do you fancy that? I honestly can’t decide if you are here accidentally or deliberately.’

  ‘It’s been a long sort of accident if that’s what it was,’ he said.

  ‘You’re the one who said you thought it would take a few months to renovate. I got the impression this isn’t what you always wanted, that’s all.’

  ‘I really don’t think we’d get this sort of space in the centre of town,’ he said, ‘but if you want to go looking, there’s no harm in that.’

  Naomi could not quite work out Ed’s tone. She was unnerved and was not sure why. She mulled it over and decided he was being controlling. He had no intention of moving anywhere and would veto any flat she found on the grounds it was too small for such tall lovers. He was content to let her waste her time.

  ‘Would we survive if I lived in a tiny room near Gloucester Road and you lived here?’ she said a few days later.

  ‘For a while, maybe,’ he said.

  She met Ryan for a drink the next evening.

  ‘Paul’s gone so are you renting out his room again?’ she asked. ‘Just while I find somewhere else. It might take a while, given my budget.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Ryan said, ‘he actually smelled really nice, so you’ve got to keep up his high standards.’

  Naomi kicked at his shin and wished, for the first time, that he was taller. She knew that most men would have frowned, have worried about what their girlfriend might say, and, after all, she would be gatecrashing love’s young dream. A second woman in the house – one who had known Ryan before he met Sylvie – was not an ideal recipe should Sylvie be the insecure or possessive type.

  ‘Hey, look, ask Sylvie first. She might not like the idea.’

  ‘OK,’ Ryan said, almost bored. It would be easier just to have Naomi back, paying some rent, but if she needed him to ask Sylvie, then so be it.

  Andrew was wearing the same red Speedos he wore the week before, and the week before that, but Isak did not think for one minute that he wore them to spite him, to make the point that swimwear could be worn and washed and worn again. Isak, his therapist had decided, adored Andrew more than anyone on this earth. They swam in unison as, under the spotlights, the quivering, mildly chlorinated water cast moving patterns on the walls and Isak imagined they were swimming in the Turbine Hall, in a work of modern art closed to the public. Turn and breathe, turn and breathe… until Isak was on his own, turning on his own, breathing on his own.

  He stopped and let his feet drop and swivelled to face the other end of the pool where Andrew was making strange, horrible, but muted, gasping, gurgling sounds and slipping under the water only to bob back up then disappear again. Isak was cross. They had only completed sixteen lengths and his body was itching to finish Andrew’s promised thirty but then he remembered that Andrew would never trick him, never tease him, that he must be ill, and so he dived under and slowly dragged him to the shallow end where he could more easily haul him out and he tried to—

  He tried but Andrew’s eyes were open and not blinking and Isak screamed the scream of a boy, much younger, at his first horror film until the brazenly wobbly Peta Parrish, who lived on the floor below Ulla, arrived with her extra-large fluffy white towels but no phone and tried to pull Andrew out of the water, but Isak would not help her so she was forced back to her apartment to call for an ambulance, knowing there was no point to one coming at all and now she had to weigh up whether to get dressed before knocking on the Swedish lady’s door or to arrive in her swimsuit. She grabbed her dressing gown and called the lift and Ulla found herself face to face with a damp and barefoot Ms Parrish, who, having had no time to rehearse what she needed to say, stood in the hallway opening and half closing her mouth as if about to release a monstrous sneeze.

  Amid all the anguish, the flapping of dead flesh on the side of the pool, the calm concentration of the paramedics, there sat, fixed quietly on the wall behind them, a landline, smooth and black and so stylish none of the residents had ever noticed it was there.

  Isak was disoriented by the sudden gap in his life and needed his mother to fill the void, to be loud and loyal and enthusiastic, to open a designer bag and bring out, wrapped in glossy tissue paper, a new swimsuit for her and new trunks for him so they could swim together, but Ulla was quiet and sad and displayed no enthusiasm for the pool whatsoever. She had no close friends in London that were not connected to Andrew. She had found women kept a distance and had assumed it was because she was a foreigner but it was in fact because she was too blonde, too stunning, too naturally stunning.

  The wives and partners of Andrew’s colleagues and friends, however, were all of a similar age and all very attractive and all capable of absorbing another beauty into their cabal but few of them were terribly practical when it came to a sudden death and it was the men who rallied to help with the administration of Andrew’s demise. The more they helped, the more distantly their wives behaved towards Ulla as she became more of a threat to their equilibrium. No one would ever leave rugged, rich Andrew but he had left them and now Ulla was a damsel in distress, a white-blonde, slender Swedish widow who might pluck away one of their husbands the way a sparrowhawk might prettily soar then swoop and dive, its claws ready to pin its prey to the ground without mercy. They imagined a glint in Ulla’s eyes that was no such thing. It was desperation not for a man to replace Andrew but to have him come back to her.

  She tried to hug her son but he refused and drummed his fingers relentlessly on the table, on the side of the sofa.

  ‘Come and swim with me, Mamma,’ he said and Ulla groaned in pain and left the room. She had not exactly forgotten about his clinic close to Cambridge, his routine, it was just that routine did not matter any more. It was Andrew who had found the therapists, paid their fees, paid for the four-night stays in simple luxury, paid for the medication, and who had always been there come Friday evening to swim with Isak, to provide him with fatherly protection. All she had done was sometimes drive him to the gate of the facility on Monday mornings and now she doubted she possessed the energy even to navigate her way out of the small underground car park
.

  They would have to return to Stockholm. It was unbearable here. Not one of the women who had eaten her meatballs and her gravadlax had pressed the buzzer to check if she needed food or a hug or a chat. They all stayed away hoping she would soon be in a far away country.

  Grace still baked. The starlings and sparrows were grateful. Every morning there was a sprinkling of barely stale golden-yellow sponge or deep brown demerara ginger cake on the small lawn. A squirrel appeared, a new arrival, who became a regular.

  ‘We’ll host rats next,’ Hana said as she stood at the kitchen window, scrolling through her phone messages. ‘Oh,’ she said, unable to prevent her hand from shaking.

  Did you see the email about the hike around Jersey? I’d like to go but only if you are too.

  She read it three times.

  ‘Oh,’ she said each time.

  ‘What is it?’ Grace said. ‘Shall I try baking drop scones? Might make a nice change.’

  ‘It’s a message from Ed,’ Hana said, ‘a message that is making me more angry by the second.’

  ‘May I?’ Grace said, trying hard to sound only moderately interested. Just in case. Just in case it was the wrong thing to be fascinated. Just in case it was the wrong thing not to be interested.

  ‘My, my, no wonder you are angry. Is this the first time he’s been in contact since…?’

  ‘Since I threw my coat in the bin? Yes, the first time. I’m so angry.’

  ‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ Grace said as her daughter left the room.

  Hana was physically trembling. She was angry, she was certainly angry, but mainly with herself because her cheeks were flushed and her breasts tingled. She was angry at how happy she was feeling, how like a teenager, but then she looked over her shoulder at her mother swirling hot water around the inside of her favourite teapot and thought, I’d rather this trembling than that.