by J. A. Baker
Her heart thuds in her chest at the mention of her name. She blinks repeatedly to clear the grit that seems to have settled behind her lids and fixes her eyes on the man looming over her. He’s taller than she expected. And better looking too. She imagined him as a sad squat old man with a portly belly and a receding hairline yet here he is looking more like a film star, standing right in front of her, hand outstretched, teeth glinting like diamonds as he gives her his best smile.
Rachel’s stomach flips. She would have worn make-up if she’d known, done her hair, put on some nail varnish or something. As it is, she has barely dragged a comb through her hair. Still, at least she brushed her teeth this morning. That’s got to count for something, surely?
‘Yes,’ she says quietly, her throat as dry as sand. She makes to stand up, her trembling hand meeting his.
He flaps his other hand at her and smiles. ‘Stay seated, please. I’m not royalty. Far from it. What I am is thirsty and in dire need of caffeine.’ He flashes her another winning grin and pulls out a chair. ‘What can I get you? I’m having one of those mahoosive cappuccinos and an even bigger slice of chocolate cake.’
Rachel tries to swallow down the flurry of nerves that have gripped her. The thought of eating and drinking makes her feel slightly sick but knows she can’t just sit here watching him while she spills her story. ‘Erm, just a small latte please.’ Her voice sounds disembodied, the words disjointed.
‘Oh, come on, Rachel,’ he says, winking at her and patting his stomach. ‘I make it a rule to never eat alone. How about one of those flapjacks? Or a slice of carrot cake? I’ve heard that they make the best cheesecake here too. All homemade. You can’t go wrong.’
She feels her cheeks flush. Her skin prickles, a thousand sparks lighting up her face as he watches her, waiting for her reply. She isn’t used to this level of attention. When they were together, Luke her ex-boyfriend, barely uttered two words to her. She became used to his sullen abrasive manner, thinking all men behaved in this way and that it was how relationships were conducted. And now this. All this attention. All these smiles and generosity. Her stomach contracts and expands and she finds herself relaxing after all despite her initial misgivings.
She returns his smile. ‘Okay. I give in. I’ll have a latte please and since you’re obviously an expert on desserts, I’ll let you choose the cake.’
She watches as he swaggers his way to the counter, confidence oozing out of every pore while she sits, wracked with nerves at what she is about to do and say.
By the time he arrives back at their table carrying a large tray stacked with enough sugary snacks to keep an entire classroom of children hyper for the rest of the day, she has decided that she will be truthful. That’s all she is going to do – tell her story exactly how it happened, no lies or embellishments. What can possibly be wrong with that? She will stick to the truth, not be led into any dark corners with his questions.
‘So, Rachel, I got you the special of the day – key lime pie with a splash of fresh cream. And a latte. There you go,’ he says, handing over her cup of creamy frothing coffee. ‘And chocolate cake for me. Can’t go wrong with a bit of good old stodge, can you? Helps to kick-start the day.’
He sits and tucks into his cake with all the passion of a man who hasn’t eaten for days. She is all fingers and thumbs, her dexterity abandoning her as she carefully spoons a piece of pie into her mouth, almost missing and placing it in one of her dimples. He’s right. It is amazing. The citrus of the lime sizzles across her tongue, hitting the back of her throat with a punch. She takes another spoonful and another and before she knows it, her plate is empty save for a scattering of crumbs.
‘That’s better,’ he says, leaning back and dabbing at his mouth with his napkin.
‘Sorry,’ Rachel says, her usual reserve settling back down in her gut. ‘I’ve forgotten your name.’ In her haste to get here, wracked with nerves, she didn’t pick up her notebook or her phone that contained his details and now her mind has gone blank. She holds her cup stiffly to disguise the tremble in her fingers, and takes a sip of the steaming liquid, wincing as it catches her tongue with a scorching bite.
‘Keith,’ he says as he hooks his finger through his large cup and lifts it to his mouth. ‘Keith Rayner.’
Rachel nods. As soon as he says it, something clicks in her mind, a sudden recognition. Why is she so useless and so bloody nervous about this whole thing? She’s doing nothing wrong. People do this sort of thing all the time. They get rich on it, telling whopping great lies and having their faces splashed all over the newspapers and the internet. All she’s doing is speaking the truth, enlightening those who weren’t there and have no idea what happened that day. It’s a story, a simple story that makes her feel lucky to be alive, and if it gives others a modicum of comfort knowing we’re all here just by chance, then why not?
So why does she still feel so damn worried? Why is her stomach doing somersaults and her heart dancing about beneath her ribcage like an Olympian gymnast?
‘Okay,’ Keith says, his smile, his eyes, everything about him giving off an aura of poise and sureness, the likes of which she has never seen before. ‘I think with stories like this, the best place to start is at the beginning.’ He pulls out a phone, fiddles with buttons and places it on the table between them. ‘So, Rachel, let’s start with the basics. Tell me a little bit about yourself – you know, where you’re from, what your interests are, what you get up to in your spare time and then we’ll get down to the nitty-gritty. The day of the accident and how you managed to survive. That’s the bit people want to hear about.’ He leans forward, touches his phone and sits back with a smile. ‘Right. Ready when you are.’
42
‘Okay. So you say that you changed seats with this woman, yeah? You were meant to be in seat 26B but due to suffering from travel sickness, you swapped with her?’
Rachel swallows, wishes she could look elsewhere. His gaze is piercing, his eyes the deepest blue, like an ocean. She nods and clears her throat. ‘Yes, that’s right. She very kindly changed seats with me. And then–’
Keith holds up his hand to silence her, something in his eyes switching, altering, becoming darker. ‘Hang on, Rachel,’ he says, softening his voice as he uses her name, ‘we’ll get to that bit in a minute. Softly softly, catchee monkey. One thing at a time, eh?’ He gives her one of his winks, his face creasing as he settles himself back in his chair and crosses his arms over his chest.
She feels herself shrink just a tiny bit. She wants to tell him that she doesn’t care for that phrase, that it has its origins in British colonialism and makes her feel uncomfortable. She visualises her Granddad John’s face, how he would laugh at her political correctness if he could hear her now, telling her to lighten up and reminding her that she makes everyone too worried to talk to her for fear of offending her ideas of what constitutes fair and free speech. Maybe Granddad John was right. Maybe she is too uptight and needs to chill out and not concern herself with what is right and wrong but she can’t seem to relax. The little amount of confidence and surety she had about doing this interview is slowly ebbing away.
‘So,’ Keith says, his usual affable manner returning. ‘You swapped seats. Did you chat with her? What sort of things did you talk about before…’
‘Before the crash?’ Rachel says a little too loudly. That’s why they’re here, isn’t it? She has no idea why he is being so coy about the accident. If it’s for her benefit then he can stop it right now. She’s the one who lived through it, not him. Something inside her bristles. She suppresses it, thinking of the money, how an injection of cash would make her life so much easier. Since breaking up with Luke things have been tricky. She has moved back in with her parents and is keen to get her own place. She’s too old to be living back with her mum and dad. They have their own lives, their own rigid routine, and she has impinged on it. And then of course, there is her student debt. Always there, never decreasing or lessening.
Her
recent promotion at the hospital was welcome but her salary increase has seen her monthly take-home pay rise to the point where she has to pay back her student loan. So she is worse off than she was before. The money she will receive for this interview, this small trivial interview, could be life changing for her. As well as reducing her student loan, she could use part of it as a deposit for her own place. She has been trawling estate agents’ windows, imagining what it would be like to have a property of her own. Nothing too grand, just a small townhouse with a spare bedroom and maybe a nice little courtyard. It was Luke’s house that they had lived in together, not hers. He had owned it for two years before she had moved in. When she discovered he was having an affair with one of their close friends, she packed up her things and left, telling him to shove his house where the sun don’t shine and shouting over her shoulder that she hoped they would both be happy there. Word on the street was the pair of them split-up just two weeks after she left. Good enough for them. She’s better off on her own. Nobody to moan at her for using the last of the milk, nobody clomping around in the early hours of the morning after coming in late from the pub doing God knows what with God knows who.
‘We didn’t chat too much,’ Rachel says, snapping back to the present. To this interview. She catches the look of disappointment in Keith’s expression. ‘We spoke briefly about the weather.’
‘As people usually do,’ Keith says, his interest suddenly renewed. ‘A favourite British subject, the weather. Something that binds us all together.’ He has a nasally twang as he speaks. How did she not notice it before? And a slight southern inflection in his tone. The twang is starting to irritate her.
‘And then I mentioned an article in the paper about a woman who had been attacked in Durham. We were pretty quiet after that,’ Rachel says, averting her gaze.
The next part is the bit that haunts her, makes her realise that life really is for living. ‘I just keep thinking that if I hadn’t swapped my seat for hers… well, I might not be here. I saw the photos in the paper of the people who died and she was one of them. I recognised her straightaway. It’s all so awful.’ Rachel bites at her mouth pensively, her front teeth resting on her bottom lip. ‘I can’t stop thinking about it. About her. That poor woman who lost her life because she was kind to me and allowed me to take her seat. Everything could have turned out so badly for me. As it is, I’m here, alive, and she isn’t.’
She averts her gaze, counting the crumbs on her plate before looking up again to Keith. He is nodding and smiling. Why is he smiling? Has she said something amusing?
‘Sorry,’ he says, suddenly changing his expression to one of concern. ‘It was just something you said that caught my attention.’
‘What?’ she replies, desperately thinking over what she has just said and wondering if all of this is a scam, a phoney attempt to get her on his side, his initial pleasant demeanour and mischievous grin now slipping to reveal the real Keith underneath. The one that preys on vulnerable people. The one who uses the suffering of others to further his career.
‘You mentioned that there was an article in the paper you were reading, about an attack?’
Rachel nods, wondering what is coming next. Her hands are ice cold but her face flushes hot. What now? And how could such a thing ever be construed as funny or amusing?
‘I’ve been doing some investigating,’ Keith says excitedly, as if what he is about to tell her will take her breath away, make her sit up and suddenly start paying attention to his words, ‘and the woman in question, Leah that is, is linked to the person who was in that story, the victim of the attack. Talk about coincidences, eh? I can’t disclose how she is linked as yet but I’m pretty sure it will soon be common knowledge. At least it will once I get this story out there.’ Another wink. Her guts flip about like a fish on dry land.
Rachel can’t manage to summon up any strength to respond to his revelation, or to match his enthusiasm with even the weakest of smiles. Despite the pie she has eaten, her stomach suddenly feels hollow as if the contents have been scooped out and her innards scraped clean. She has never been one for getting excited about somebody else’s misfortune. It hits her in her solar plexus when she hears of the suffering of others.
Clearly, Keith doesn’t feel the same way. His eyes are twinkling, his complexion pink with excitement. ‘Obviously, I can’t reveal my sources but I know a fair bit about your lady, the one you swapped seats with. I’ve been doing a bit of digging around and without sounding too disrespectful, she has some backstory, I can tell you, and not a pleasant one at that.’
‘Her name is Leah Browne,’ Rachel says sourly. That much she has remembered. She saw it in the paper, pored over it, cried and then cried some more. She, Rachel, left that train with minor grazes. Leah died. It could have been her and she will never forget that fact. Ever. Leah could have said no, could have ignored Rachel’s request to change seats and turned away, but she didn’t. She was kind enough to do it and that fact will never dim in Rachel’s mind. She will be forever grateful to her, be forever in her debt.
‘So anyway, apparently the police are investigating a link from Leah to the attack in Durham. And there’s something else.’ Rachel can feel Keith watching her. He’s baiting her, wanting her to get all excited like he is, all wound up and frenzied like a toddler who has been promised candy if they can behave. It’s not going to happen. That’s not who she is. Getting fired up by gossip and malicious rumours isn’t her thing at all. ‘Her brother died when he was a teenager. And get this – he threw himself on the train tracks at Durham, the same station where Leah boarded the train.’ His voice has gone up an octave, his skin now shimmering with beads of perspiration that glisten under the glare of the overhead lights. ‘Now that,’ he says, almost beside himself with exhilaration, ‘is a story!’
Rachel says nothing, unwilling or perhaps unable to share his joy at this finding. The key lime pie swirls and sloshes about in her belly. She doesn’t feel cut out for this – this spreading and smearing of dirt in the name of selling papers. Leah is dead. She can’t defend herself. And what about her family? Where do they fit into this awful turn of events? She came here to publicly thank Leah for saving her life, to let people know that she, Rachel, is alive because of the generosity of another human being. Not this. She didn’t come here for any of this.
As if he can read her thoughts, Keith pitches in, his voice now calm and measured. ‘She fell out with her parents and didn’t see them for many years. Do you want to know why?’
She doesn’t. She really, really doesn’t, but feels frozen, her body glued to the seat, her feet nailed to the floor. She can’t do anything except listen to these stories. Gutter gossip about a woman who inadvertently saved her life.
‘The brother, according to what I’ve gleaned from people who know the family, pushed a little girl over a cliff. Leah told everybody she saw it but then retracted her story to the police saying she couldn’t remember what actually happened. There was nobody to corroborate her story but apparently even after her retraction, people continued believing that he was a murderer.’
‘Hence his suicide,’ Rachel says quietly, sorrow welling up in her chest for these people. For this poor blighted family who have lost so much.
‘But what a story and what a coincidence, eh?’ Keith struggles to conceal his delight. Rachel imagines that many journalists go through their entire career never coming across a story with so many bizarre events and horrible coincidences and now here he is with one and he can barely hold himself together. He is delirious at the prospect of managing such a scoop. ‘I’ve already got the bare bones of the story written and when I found out about your link to Leah and the thing about swapping seats, I was jumping, I can tell you! Stuff like this happens so rarely. I just about bust a gut getting here today. Hence the need for cake and coffee.’
He smiles at her, that broad glinting smile that now she has seen beyond his façade, isn’t sitting so easily with her. In fact if she is being perfec
tly honest, it repulses her. He repulses her with his fake smile and boyish charm and complete lack of integrity.
‘I mean, she’s probably travelled from that station hundreds of times since her brother died there, but for her to die further up the line is just so unbelievably freaky, isn’t it? This is the sort of stuff people love to read about. It sells newspapers big time, I can tell you.’
Rachel doesn’t doubt for one minute that stories involving the misfortune and distress of others, sell; that there are people out there who adore seeing folk dragged through the mud, their horribly blighted lives made public and their dirty laundry held bare for the world to gawp at and pick through. But she isn’t one of them and never will be. No amount of money will turn her head. She has heard enough. She stands up. This is too much. It’s all too much for her. She needs to leave.
‘I’ve changed my mind,’ she says suddenly. ‘I don’t want to do this story. I don’t want the money and I definitely do not want my name or my conversation with Leah to appear in your paper.’ Her heart hammers around her chest, her extremities tingling with both fear and anger as she glares at him from under her brow. ‘If my name or anything to do with me appears in your paper, or any paper for that matter, I will sue you. You’re the only person I’ve spoken to about this, so I’ll know if anything gets out. It will lead straight back to you. I haven’t signed any sort of contract and you haven’t given me any money so you have no right printing anything that I’ve said.’
She doesn’t wait for his reply, for him to shout after her that she is turning down a massive amount of money, the sort of windfall most people only ever dream about. She turns and heads to the door, leaving him sitting there, surrounded by empty coffee cups and plates and a handful of stale crumbs. A metaphor, she thinks, for the life he leads.
His voice calls after her, his southern drawl that even after her words, after her acerbic manner, still oozes charm and confidence. He isn’t fazed by what she has just said. He’s used to it. He is used to being turned down and insulted because of his profession. He is used to being threatened with legal action and told no by people who are poor enough to be tempted by the wads of cash thrown their way for the stories they have to tell. She supposes that many do fall for it; taking the financial remuneration and running as fast as they can in the opposite direction. Everyone has their price. But not her. Not this time. Being alive is her reward. Not being Leah and breathing clean air is enough for her. No amount of money will ever make her think otherwise.