Hello Stranger

by West, Jade

  A sadness.

  I felt a sadness.

  “Is it your favourite novel?” I asked him, and he shook his head.

  “Is that yours?” he asked, gesturing to the novel in my hands.

  I shook my head and held the cover up. “No.”

  “Gone with the Wind,” he said. “Quite a classic. I saw you reading it yesterday.”

  I blushed some more. “I like the old ones.”

  “Me too,” he said.

  We were both sitting there with open books on our laps, staring hard at each other as the train pulled into Eastworth. The bustle of people getting on made no difference, I couldn’t look away from him.

  The shuffling passengers eased along, and I felt weird as we pulled away again, wondering how I’d feel if he upped and left right there and then without me even knowing his name.

  But it didn’t seem like it would make any difference. Not to him. He wasn’t even looking in my direction. Not anymore.

  He turned his attention to a noisy bunch of lads on the seats across the aisle, then dropped his eyes back to his novel.

  What is your favourite novel?

  That’s what I wanted to ask him. The question looped over and over in my head, but I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t talk over the stupid jeering idiots across the aisle and call his focus back to me.

  I pretended to read, but I was crap at it. The words blurred on the pages, making no difference at all as my heart bounced in my chest.

  What is your favourite novel?

  I wanted to ask him. I wanted to spit out the question and tell him all about my favourite just as soon as he’d answered, and how much I loved reading it and how he should read it too.

  But I didn’t.

  I couldn’t.

  Idiot boys kept jeering, and the stranger kept on staring at his pages, flicking them over and over, and I was all a fluster. All a fluster with no common sense and a strange sickly squiggle of feelings way down deep.

  What is your favourite novel?

  He coughed and cleared his throat at Newstone, glancing up at a guy walking up the aisle who had the messiest blond beard I’ve ever seen, but still his eyes went back to the pages.

  He stared up at an old lady who got on at Churchley, and who scowled at the idiot boys like she wanted to kill them from beneath her crazy bright flowery scarf, but still his eyes went straight back to the pages.

  What is your favourite novel?

  I was going to ask him. I was going to pluck up the courage to ask him. It was right there in my throat, blown out of ridiculous proportion by the fact I’d held it back for so long on the journey when I should’ve just piped up at the beginning.

  What is your favourite novel, stranger?

  But then the train pulled into Harrow. Just like that. And like a moron I hadn’t been prepared for it, or made myself ready for the dash to the hospital.

  Crap, crap, crap.

  My nerves were back on a mission as I leapt up from my seat and gathered myself to go.

  Finally, the stranger’s eyes met up with mine. But only for one final second. Just long enough for me to blurt out one last thing to him before I zoomed away.

  “Thanks again,” I said, and I meant it.

  And with that I was gone.

  5

  Logan

  The white rabbit was off in another flurry, up and out of the station in a flash. Too frazzled to even glance back along the platform.

  There was one sunken part of me that regretted the final part of that train journey. One solitary flare down deep, wanting to ask one pointless question that would never make any difference to my life.

  What is your favourite novel, Chloe?

  But no.

  The bustle onboard had intervened.

  A rowdy bunch of boys causing chaos, a bundle of people boarding at every stop, and no reason to. No reason whatsoever to seek out conversation with Chloe with the shimmer in her hair.

  I made my way slowly towards Harrow District Hospital, soaking up the last of my quiet time in easy steps. I needed to. From the very moment I stepped onto Franklin Ward, my day was always an unrelenting blur of focus. An oxymoron at its finest.

  Maybe I should have picked up my pace a little, and put my efforts into the walk ahead, just to stop thinking about Chloe with Gone with the Wind.

  At least one of my questions from the night before had found an answer. Yes, she had read Master and Margarita. Many times over, it seems.

  Extraordinary.

  She really was an extraordinary little bookworm with a zing in her step.

  Much, much different to mine.

  The hospital arrived in front of me and the unrelenting blur of focus swallowed me up.

  The ward had its highs and its lows that day. We lost one old guy as he met his end and helped make a few ladies comfortable as they faced up to theirs. I spoke with relatives, and managed pain, and supported the nurses as they did their best to bring light into the darkness for the people finding it so hard to see ahead.

  I did my job.

  Wendy Briars knocked on my consulting room door at just past lunchtime. The head of hospital nursing had a clipboard in hand, ready to talk to me about Gina Salzaki from my ward, who was about to head off on maternity leave post her trainee placement.

  “We’ll assign you a new nursing member,” she told me, and her cheeks were freckled and her hair was bound up loose in a bun with a few strands flowing free.

  Only Wendy Briars’ hair was red, not mousy brown with a shimmer of gold.

  “Please make sure they are fully prepared for the ward,” I asked her. “This department can be intensely emotionally challenging.”

  “That’s your way of saying people can’t handle the upset,” she said. “Don’t worry, Dr Hall. I know. We’ll get it right.”

  I flashed her an apologetic smile. “I’m sure you will, Wendy. Thank you.”

  But I wasn’t sure. I was never sure.

  People professed wholeheartedly that they wanted to work in the palliative care team, only to be a broken sobbing mess just a few days after they started. People felt they could watch others take their last breaths without a fluster, and not lay scared in bed all night in the aftermath.

  I’d seen it plenty of times. I doubted Gina Salzaki would be back after her maternity break. I think she too was finally reaching her limits.

  “I’ll send you some employee files for you to take a look at,” Wendy said, and I nodded my thanks.

  “I appreciate it.”

  She was cut short by her nursing alarm bleeping and I was cut short with a shout in my direction from the corridor outside, and the day returned to normal.

  I brought someone back from the Reaper’s clutch, so he could spend a few more days with his family. I helped a young lady work through her medication options, and left her with a smile on her face, optimistic she would live for a few more months than she was expecting.

  And then, far too late in the evening, just like usual, I made my way back home.

  I read The Master and Margarita, but didn’t really soak in the pages.

  I wondered if Chloe was already long home – wherever her home may be. Eddington, most likely. I didn’t know Eddington all that well.

  I wondered if she’d finished Gone with the Wind, and would pick up a fresh old classic before I’d even made my way through another chapter.

  I wondered if I’d see her again.

  I shouldn’t care, but I did. I did care whether I saw Chloe on the Harrow-bound train again.

  My mother was struggling when I got through the door that night. Her morphine driver had been misfiring, leaving her chest tightening up with the pain through the evening.

  I could feel it. I could feel every wheeze she made. It tightened up my own chest the very moment I stepped into her bedroom.

  “Thanks,” I said to Olivia, and told her to go home.

  “I’m here… If I can help…” she replied, but I shook my head, and must
ered a smile.

  “I’ve got this.”

  And I did have it.

  I made sure the morphine was delivering right and made sure her oxygen was fixed up properly. I poured her a fresh, cold juice by her bed, and squeezed hold of her fingers while she wheezed some life back into herself.

  Finally, her eyes opened and she was right back there with me, a smile lighting up her face.

  She pointed to the folded-up newspaper on the bedside table, before she found any words, and I picked it up, casting my eyes over the crossword.

  The pen was right there waiting for me, along with Olivia’s scrawled answers in the little boxes.

  I smiled at her right back.

  “Let’s get through these clues.”

  I talked her through the answers, and she nodded and shook her head without so much as mustering a word, but still she kept smiling, her eyes fixed bright on mine.

  When we were done, she gestured to her mask, and I freed it from her face, loose enough for her to suck in a breath and grab my hand in hers.

  “Meet… Amy…” she said, but this time her eyes were serious.

  Mine were serious back at her as I shook my head.

  “Drink some drink, and dream sweet dreams.”

  She gripped my hand a little tighter.

  “Logan… please…” she paused. “Meet Amy. Please don’t…” Another breath. “Please don’t make me leave you on your own.”

  I kissed her forehead. “So don’t leave me. Not yet.”

  She let go of my hand and drank some juice, then dipped down into her pillows as I fitted the mask back snug for her.

  “Amy isn’t right for me,” I told her. “She never would be. She never will be.”

  “So find someone… who is…” she rasped, so loud I heard her over the oxygen.

  “Maybe one day,” I told her, and her eyes were so full of pain as I stepped away.

  She knew I was lying as much as I did.

  There was no maybe one day about her prospect of getting a daughter-in-law. There was no maybe one day about me finding someone who would ever be right for me.

  I spent enough of my life trying to fix pain, without causing more of it.

  I hovered in the doorway, watching Mum’s pale moonlit petals falling right in front of my eyes.

  So soft, but so firm.

  There were hardly any left, and I knew it.

  She knew it, too.

  “Sweet dreams,” I said.

  6

  Chloe

  I couldn’t rest easy that night.

  My feet were pooped, and my brain was too, and my thoughts were running riot with all the new stuff I was soaking up from Kingsley Ward. But it wasn’t just that.

  It was something weird. Something that gave me shivery flutters.

  Something about the stranger on the train.

  I tried to sit in with Liam and chat through his day, but he wasn’t interested.

  He ate some dinner I made up, with his plate on his lap on the sofa. Then had a couple of beers and sat watching some shit on TV after finishing up his crappy online game.

  I had my feet up on the sofa next to him, and my book in my hands while the TV blared away in the background.

  This allegedly passed as the pinup of a relationship in your early twenties with the guy you claimed to love at high school, and my optimism was convinced I was loving life.

  Except I wasn’t.

  My mantra of this is great, I love it, just wasn’t cutting it that night. I was just trying to convince myself it was.

  The words on the pages of Gone with the Wind were blurring and I couldn’t keep my head clear. It was muddled. Really muddled.

  Eventually, I gave up.

  I rubbed the leather of my bookmark between my fingers and thanked the universe again for bringing it back. But it wasn’t the universe I had to thank this time, was it? It was the stranger on the train.

  The stranger with the folded corner paperback.

  The stranger who was different to anyone else I’d ever met, even though I’d only known him for one random train journey.

  Liam didn’t notice when I got up from the sofa and headed over to my bookshelf wall at the back of the room. I pushed Gone with the Wind back into its slot and knelt down lower, my finger brushing the spines, until it stopped in place.

  The Master and Margarita.

  There it was.

  There was a tingle of a glow as I held that book in my hands. Behemoth and the Devil and Pontius Pilate. Nobody I’d ever met as par for the course in my daily life had ever read it. Nobody ever knew what the hell I was talking about, let alone finished up a quote with me.

  I wondered what else he might know quotes to.

  I scanned my paperback collection and wondered just how many of the same books were stacked in his.

  “Babe, get me another beer while you’re up, will you?”

  Liam’s voice cut through my pondering. I shot a glance back his way and saw his hand in the air, so lazy.

  I didn’t even bother replying tonight, just headed on through to the kitchen and put the kettle on to boil for myself. I flicked open Master to the title page and slipped my bookmark in ready, and I read.

  I read all the while I was making a tea and taking enough sips to finish it. I read propped against the kitchen counter, without caring for how bruised and battered my feet were beneath me.

  I sank into the Patriarch’s Pond with Professor Woland, and smiled to myself at hog-sized Behemoth, and I loved it. I loved every word.

  “Babe! Where’s my beer?” I heard, but ignored it, just kept turning the pages.

  “Fine, I’ll get it myself,” I heard a few minutes later, as Liam came bursting in, but I didn’t care.

  “Bloody books,” he groaned as he headed on out.

  I didn’t bother sitting back down on the sofa with the guy who’d never met Behemoth or the Devil and would never meet them in his life. I got ready for bed, picking up the book every chance I got between stages. It was at the side of the bathroom sink while I showered, and face down on my bed while I changed. It was it in my grip, being consumed under the covers, until Liam came bursting in there too.

  “Still bloody reading?” he asked, and I managed a nod. “Can we get some dark, please?”

  I checked the time.

  Gone midnight.

  I should give him dark, but I didn’t want to. Couldn’t bear to leave the words.

  He knew it and rolled over with a groan.

  “Fine, just keep going, then.”

  He rolled away and pulled the covers up around his head, and I kept going.

  I kept on going right the way until I was done. Until I reached The End.

  My heart was beating happy. My soul was alive. The words were my everything.

  My head was full of Russia and the Devil’s midnight ball, and I wanted to be there.

  I knew I was an absolute idiot when I checked the time on my phone and set the alarm for the morning. Day three of my new job looming and I was awake into the early hours, like a complete moron. But this was it. This was always it. Disorganisation, and lateness, and not getting to sleep on time. I’d been like this since a tiny girl, battling my parents constantly over reading past bedtime, and I’d never stopped.

  I’d never stopped but I needed to. Right now, I needed to.

  My new job depended on it.

  I flicked off the bedside lamp and tried to sleep, but I couldn’t. The tumble of Behemoth danced with the stranger’s face in my thoughts. Both of them spinning and whirling.

  I wondered where he lived and where he was going on the train that morning, and if I’d ever see him again.

  I wondered if I’d ever find the courage to ask him the question I hadn’t been brave enough to voice out loud.

  What is your favourite novel?

  I didn’t know if I could ever summon up the voice to ask him that.

  Even the thought gave me tingles in my tummy.

 
; Before I finally got some sleep, I made myself a promise. A real promise that I’d really keep to myself. Cross my heart.

  I promised that when I got on the train in the morning I’d walk right the way through from beginning to end, and if I saw him there, the beautiful bookworm stranger, I’d sit by him. As close as I could get.

  Then one day, maybe – maybe even that same day, I’d ask him the question.

  What is your favourite novel?

  I realised just how much of an idiot I’d been when the alarm went off the next morning and I pressed snooze one too many times. Liam was already long gone to work when I shot out of bed like a crazy and pulled my clothes on and dashed out of the front door.

  But still, I found time for one thing.

  One thing I couldn’t do without, even if it meant a literal sprint all the way to the train station.

  I was still tugging my sweater down over my new blue blouse as I raced through the streets, but I had my next novel gripped tight under my arm, and my bookmark was pride of place within the front cover.

  The train was already at the platform when I dashed up the stairs. I darted onto the nearest carriage and the whistle sounded barely seconds after.

  My heart was racing. Thumping like a drum roll, and I told myself that was because of the rush and the race and the stupidity of me oversleeping. But it wasn’t.

  It wasn’t just that.

  I collected my breath before I started my walk through the carriages. I acted as casually as I could as I made my way up the aisle, checking out every single person who was sitting there. But I wasn’t casual. I felt anything but casual. Every step felt tickly and weird.

  Just not as tickly and weird as my tummy felt when I saw him sitting there, at the end of the second carriage.

  And nowhere near as tickly and weird as my tummy felt when he did a double take and looked up at me with those crazy serious eyes of his.

  The seat opposite him was empty. Thank you, universe.

  I felt like a complete clutz as I dropped myself into it, and I knew my cheeks were on fire as he stared across at me.