Tubing

by K. A. McKeagney

‘This young lady is very distressed and needs to get out, so kindly move.’

  The fat guy turned back to look at her. He quickly moved out of the way when he saw the state she was in.

  Once she got to the stairs, things got moving again. Adrenalin coursed through her body, giving her a hit of energy. She wriggled free of the man’s grip and pushed her way through the crowd up towards the bridge over the tracks. On the bridge she broke stride momentarily to look behind her to see how close he was, but she couldn’t see him, he was nowhere in sight. She figured he was probably still stuck on the platform or at the bottom of the stairwell.

  She let out a long, shaky breath and leant against the wall. What was going on? Had she really just seen him push her under the train? It couldn’t be real. It suddenly occurred to her that no one had jumped up after him – was she the only one who’d seen? Impossible – someone must have seen what he did. Her head hurt; she didn’t want to think any more. All she knew was that she needed to get out of the tube station as quickly as possible. She wanted to be home.

  She pushed her way up the second, short set of steps towards the concourse, ready to go through the gates. She could see the exit to the street just beyond them.

  But there he was, waiting for her.

  She hadn’t noticed him running up the parallel staircase; she’d been too busy searching for him on the platform below. She yelped, then turned to run back across the bridge away from him, but it was rammed full of people. She tried to push her way back, but the crowd was unforgiving in their panic to get out. She was jostled and prodded with outstretched hands and elbows until she had no option but to face front again. The crowd moved slowly forward, presenting her up to him like a sacrifice. There was nothing she could do, nowhere she could go – only straight towards him.

  He stood smirking at her. She didn’t have to move her feet to get off; the press of panicking people delivered her straight into his arms. He grabbed her wrists and yanked her away from the crowd pooling at the exit gates. She fought back, pulling away from him, but he had her so tightly that every time she moved the skin on her wrists would twist and burn.

  The chaos from the platform was now filling up the foyer of the tube station. People were clambering on top of one another to get out of the station.

  ‘Help,’ Polly shouted. ‘Someone help me.’

  But no one listened. Her voice was drowned out by all the other cries for help as everyone tried to get away from the suspected bomb blast.

  He started to move forward, dragging her behind him. Suddenly, she felt a hand on her shoulder, pulling her back. They both turned to see the older man from the platform.

  ‘Are you all right,’ he asked.

  Her guardian angel.

  ‘No,’ she replied, pulling away from him and moving closer to the old man. ‘Please help me: he pushed — ’

  ‘Come on, now, Polly, I know you’ve had a nasty shock,’ he said.

  Polly turned to look at him, dumbstruck. How did he know her name? He hadn’t let her tell him her name.

  He tried to grab her back, latching on to the top of her arm. ‘She’ll be OK,’ he said to the man. ‘I just need to get her home.’

  ‘Well, if you’re all right,’ the man said to Polly, turning to leave.

  ‘No, I’m not all right,’ Polly said, grabbing on to his shirtsleeve, not letting him go. ‘I don’t know him. Please help me.’

  The old guy looked from Polly to him and then back to Polly.

  ‘Honestly,’ he said. ‘I can take care of her. She just saw that girl jump under the train. I think she’s in shock.’

  The old man was eyeing him with suspicion now. ‘What exactly are you to this young lady?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m her boyfriend,’ he replied without breaking eye contact.

  ‘No, he’s not,’ Polly protested. ‘I don’t know him.’

  Polly felt the older man’s hand return to her shoulder.

  ‘I think it might be best if I escort this young lady out of the station,’ he said. ‘She’s clearly distressed, probably in shock, as you said. If you don’t mind,’ he continued, moving his head to the side to indicate the vice-like grip he had around the top of her arm.

  He thought for a moment then relented with a forced smile and a nod. ‘You’re right,’ he said, then turned to Polly. ‘I’ll catch up with you later, Polly,’ enunciating the syllables of her name. He curtly turned and started making his way to the nearest exit.

  The older man wanted to take her all the way home, but she insisted he only take her as far as the bus stop. She was numb. He asked her several questions, but she barely heard him. Even if she had, she wouldn’t have been able to string a sentence together to answer him. Once at the bus stop they waited in silence until the next bus came. She didn’t care where it went – as soon as the doors opened, she got on and tentatively set herself down on a seat near the back. She didn’t thank her guardian angel or wave him goodbye as he stood and watched until she was safely on her way.

  The bus went north. It wasn’t until it terminated at Hackney that she realised she was miles away from home. She’d spent most of the journey staring out the window, wide-eyed and mouth agape. The image of him letting go of the girl and watching her slowly fall into the train’s path played over and over in her mind. It was like a bad dream. She kept shaking her head to try and wake herself up.

  She didn’t notice the bus enter the depot or the other passengers getting off. The driver sat in his cab, watching her in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘Hey, lady,’ he shouted. ‘You gotta get off.’

  She didn’t hear him.

  He heaved his rotund body out of his seat and trundled down to where she was sitting at the back.

  ‘Lady, time to get off.’

  Still no response. He tapped her roughly on the shoulder.

  Polly turned to look at him. ‘Where am I?’ she said, her eyes filling with tears.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ said the bus driver, rolling his eyes. His shift might have ended, but he wasn’t going anywhere right now.

  She was still crying when she got back to the flat. The bus driver had bundled her on to a bus heading back to central London and swiftly left her to it. She had wept the whole way. It felt as though every conceivable emotion was flooding out of her. She felt stupid and betrayed and scared, but mostly she felt totally bewildered.

  Oliver was sitting on the sofa watching TV when she finally got home. She dropped her bags and launched herself at him, head-butting him in the stomach as she fell. He responded immediately, wrapping his arms around her and cradling her like a baby.

  It took a full fifteen minutes for her to get herself under control long enough to get a sentence out.

  ‘I … I … saw … ’ hiccup ‘ … her … ’ she swallowed loudly ‘ … her … ’ She looked up at him. ‘She was killed.’ She was overcome by tears again and dropped her head down into his lap.

  ‘You what?’ Oliver asked, pulling her up so they were facing one another, panic etched all over his face.

  Polly’s breathing was stop-start as she choked through her tears. She was finding it hard to breathe at all – her throat was coated with gloopy saliva and her nose was completely blocked.

  ‘What did you see, Polly?’ he asked, cupping her face firmly between his palms. He was looking at her intently, waiting for an answer.

  She suddenly felt the most crushing guilt. What had she got herself involved in? How could she have done this to him? The way he looked at her made her heart break.

  He could see she was really struggling, so he went to the kitchen to get her a glass of water and some tissues.

  Once she’d taken a sip and blown her nose, he continued.

  ‘What happened?’

  Polly was sat upright now. He took hold of her soggy hand.

  ‘I was on the tube and … ’ She stopped. What should she say? She could hardly tell him the truth – that she saw the man she was infatuated with on a train with anot
her woman and decided to follow them, only to see him murder her.

  She pulled her hand away and looked up at him. ‘I’m so sorry, Oliver,’ she said.

  He straightened a little and pulled back slightly.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you’re so good to me and I’ve been such a bitch to you.’

  ‘All that doesn’t matter now,’ he said shaking the notion off. ‘Tell me what happened. You were on the tube, and … ?’

  ‘No, no … I was waiting for a tube and … the girl was … ’ She trailed off.

  ‘Was what?’

  ‘Pushed.’

  ‘Pushed? What do you mean, pushed?’

  Her mind was racing, was now the right time for honesty? Would there ever be a right time to tell him? It didn’t take her long to make her decision.

  ‘No, no, not pushed. I mean, she jumped,’ she looked up at him nervously. ‘She jumped in front of the train.’

  ‘God,’ he said.

  ‘I was practically next to her. If I’d moved quicker or made a grab for her, I could have … ’ She broke off as tears choked her up again.

  ‘Hey, hey,’ said Oliver, pulling her close. ‘This isn’t your fault. You couldn’t have done anything to stop her.’

  This made her cry even harder. She had seen what was happening – why hadn’t she tried to grab her? Stop him? The words she’d muttered on the train made her shudder: ‘Die, bitch, die’.

  Oliver held her while she squeezed her eyes shut, and fat, heavy tears burst from the corners. He patted her back and said soothing words: ‘everything will be OK’, ‘it’s not your fault’, ‘you’re safe now’. At first she resisted, but then she let go and absorbed his words. She knew his meaning was different from hers, but she took them at face value and fitted them to her purpose.

  That night they had sex for the first time in months. It was awkward and over quickly, but she just needed to connect with him, to be close to somebody. She lay awake all night, wrapped in Oliver’s arms. She allowed herself to be completely smothered in his warmth. She didn’t let guilt or shame or any other feelings hold her back. She felt calm, as though a tornado had just passed – it had been terrifying and dangerous, but she’d survived, and she was safe now.

  Twenty-six

  Polly thought long and hard about what to do next. The right thing to do was to go straight to the police – that much was obvious. But, if she did, she’d have to explain how she knew him. She couldn’t bear the thought of telling people what she’d been up to. What if Oliver found out? She couldn’t understand what she’d been thinking or how she’d even managed to get herself involved in the tubing scene in the first place. All she wanted now was to put it behind her and feel safe again.

  During the daytime this was easy. She was able to forget what she’d seen by busying herself with menial tasks. At work, she focused on the easy things that didn’t require too much effort, like filing and shredding. There was an enormous shredding machine in the photocopying room. She sat in the corner of the room, mesmerised as she fed the large mechanical beast sheet after sheet. It held her attention just enough so that no other thoughts could penetrate. At home, she went on a cleaning spree. She took out every plate, cup, pot, pan, knife, fork and spoon in the kitchen and fastidiously washed, dried and put them away again. She scrubbed every inch of the bathroom, including the plugholes and shower screen. She even ironed all of Oliver’s shirts, much to his amusement.

  But the nights were torture. In the dark there was nowhere to hide from her thoughts. She’d lie in bed reliving every second. Sometimes her subconscious would add extra excruciating scenes to the memory, like Polly reaching forward and grabbing the girl then being dragged down on to the tracks with her, or him grabbing her at the top of the escalator, marching her down to the platform and pushing her under the next train. She always woke up just as the train was about to hit. She was up several times a night, stripping off her sweat-drenched pyjamas. In the end she started sleeping with just a towel wrapped around her.

  She knew she couldn’t go on like this forever, but she clung to the hope that in time the memory would lessen and start to fade. That was, until she came face to face with the dead girl again.

  She was on a bus on her way to work. The tube was a ‘no go’ area – for the rest of her life, she hoped. She’d woken early. He’d been chasing her up a down escalator that she couldn’t conquer no matter how hard she climbed. She woke with a start, the towel stuck to her saturated body. It was 5.30 a.m. She knew there was no way she’d be able to get back to sleep, so she got up and made a start on her list of tedious tasks.

  By 7.45 a.m. she was leaving the flat with an armful of clothes that didn’t really need to go to the dry cleaner’s. Once she’d dropped them off, she stopped in a coffee shop and picked up an extra-hot soya latte. She kept herself occupied by closely scrutinising the barista to make sure her order was made exactly as she’d requested.

  The bus was packed. There were no seats available so she made do with a spot in the aisle near the back. The bus might be slow and jerky but she felt safe on it. There was no chance of anything dodgy going on. There were too many windows and too much daylight.

  She’d forgotten to pick up a paper on her way to the bus stop so she made do with reading that of the guy next to her. He carefully folded each page, which let her read the back section while he read the front. He seemed to be taking forever, scrutinising every page from cover to cover. Polly preferred to flick through newspapers, rarely stopping to read anything in detail. He seemed to have become stuck on page ten. Polly was beginning to get annoyed and was tapping her foot impatiently. If he didn’t turn the page soon, her mind would start wandering again, and she knew there was only one place it would go. But when he finally turned the paper round to move on to the next page, she wished he hadn’t.

  The page was split into two. The bottom part was taken up with an ad for a sofa company that had just cut its sale prices even further (but only until Sunday). The top half contained just one story. It had three columns of text and two photographs. The first was a picture of a pretty blonde in a graduation hat and gown, smiling straight at the camera. The second was a picture of an older woman holding the same photo, standing outside a court building. The headline read: Mother disputes transport police suicide verdict. The photo was of the girl – the one Polly had seen pushed in front of the train.

  Without thinking, Polly snatched the paper from the man.

  ‘Hey!’ he said. ‘I was reading that.’

  Polly ignored him and started reading.

  ‘Give me my paper back,’ the man said, making a grab for it.

  Polly pulled it back and looked at him, her face screwed up, an ugly combination of shock and horror. It was enough to scare him off. He grumbled something about having finished reading it anyway and sloped off towards the front of the bus.

  The article gave details of the girl falling in front of the train, but said she’d jumped rather than been pushed. The police were treating her death as a suicide and claimed they had no reason to think otherwise. But the girl’s mother didn’t agree. Her daughter had moved to London six months ago after landing a graduate job with a corporate bank. She had been living with a couple of girlfriends in a nice part of London and meeting lots of new people. According to everyone who knew her, she had been a happy, intelligent girl who’d had everything to live for. She’d even started seeing some guy.

  Her mother had presented all these facts to the police, but they hadn’t listened. The case was closed, her death declared a suicide. The girl’s mother was demanding an inquest.

  Polly read and re-read the story until she got to Holborn. She walked to work in a daze, unable to tear herself away from the girl’s picture.

  Her name was Sarah. She didn’t appear to be the bitch Polly thought she was. Polly had never for one second entertained the idea that she deserved to be pushed under the train, but her defence mechanism had kicked in and her thinking ha
d been along the lines of, if you played with fire, you sometimes got burned. Seeing her graduation photo and reading her mum’s story, she realised she wasn’t some coke-snorting party girl who probably would have ended up overdosing in a crack den. She was normal, went to work every day, had a boyfriend, hung out with friends. Polly felt ashamed for calling her a bitch, for wishing her dead, for thinking so little of her for tubing and for being with him. But mostly she was sickened that she hadn’t told anyone about what she saw.

  She made the mistake of googling her later that morning at work. The first couple of links took her to news sites covering the story she’d read in the paper. She winced as she flicked through more pictures of Sarah. One of the sites had a link to a Facebook page set up in her memory. She clicked on the link to have a look and instantly regretted it. It was full of messages from her family and friends all with the same sentiment; shock, disbelief, incomprehension. One friend had written, ‘My world is a lonely place without you. I miss you, Saucy. I love you.’

  Polly suddenly started shaking uncontrollably and had to stop for a minute. All the thoughts she’d been avoiding over the last week were suddenly trampling all over her. She reached for the upturned drawing pin on her desk and pressed her finger into it. She pulled away as soon as she felt it puncture the skin. A red blob quickly formed on the tip of her finger. She put it in her mouth and sucked it. She looked again at the picture of Sarah staring back at her from the crumpled newspaper on her desk. It was as if she had found her now, and wasn’t going to let her go until she did something about it.

  ‘Hey, hon.’

  Polly looked up. Alicia was standing in front of her desk.

  Polly quickly flicked back to her desktop as Alicia leant over to see what she was looking at on her screen. ‘What you so engrossed in?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she bumbled.

  ‘Fancy gettin’ some lunch?’

  Polly couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten anything proper. She’d drunk a lot of tea, but had little in the way of food. Her stomach was constantly churning.