by Alyson Rudd
ALYSON RUDD was born in Liverpool, raised in West Lancashire and educated at the London School of Economics. She is an award-winning sports journalist at The Times and lives in South West London. She has written two works of non-fiction and The First Time Lauren Pailing Died was her debut novel.
Eleven Lines to Somewhere
Alyson Rudd
ONE PLACE. MANY STORIES
Copyright
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2020
Copyright © Alyson Rudd 2020
Alyson Rudd asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Ebook Edition © July 2020 ISBN: 9780008278335
Version 2020-06-17
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Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780008278588
Dedicated to the memory of Bob Dylan Willis
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Note to Readers
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Acknowledgements
Extract
About the Publisher
Prologue
In profile he is mesmeric, carved from white oak, a long and slender marionette. More than one model scout had approached him only to withdraw as they noted his eyes, full of mistrust and confusion. Isak watched as a woman, only last week, strode towards him purposefully, her lips glossy, her smile wide, her handbag bigger than her torso.
‘Not me,’ he mumbled, and let his head drop. They must have sent her. He had just spent £95 at Harvey Nichols. It was cash, he had made sure it was cash, but there are cameras everywhere. It was becoming impossible for him to pay for anything surreptitiously. The woman’s smile waned as she half opened her mouth to address him and then closed it to turn on her heel. He exhaled. There must have been a glitch but even so he needed to be more careful. He sighed. He had six days to wait until he could swim again and most of those would be filled with pointless conversations about his feelings. They were, in the main, trick questions but when Isak told them he knew they were tricking him, they reminded him that he was there with his mother’s blessing and that of Andrew. That gave him plenty to mull over, which usually prompted them to tell him how much progress he was making.
That pleased him. Progress was, for Isak, a march through dense forests, a dagger in his belt, the beating wings of a dragon overhead. Progress was another cloud-covered mountain climbed, another black river crossed so that he could fall onto a bearskin blanket next to an open fire and be hailed a hero.
He looked up and scoured the street. He had reached Gloucester Road Underground station. He would hide in the tunnels for now, the tunnels that could take him anywhere he pleased. He would peer into the mouths of them as the wind slapped his face and made the litter scurry away in fear. He sometimes wondered if he was meant to walk through the tunnels but no one else ever did so he was nervous about trying it.
Ducking under his arm, for Isak is very tall, and preparing to leave at South Kensington station, is the relatively diminutive and punctual Ryan, his cheeks a warm red for he has just touched a girl’s shoulder. She had swung around with a startling degree of indignation and glared at Ryan, who had, naturally, been embarrassed but also a little indignant himself that the girl had been wearing just a cable-knit jumper and no coat on a chilly morning. Ellen had never worn a coat and he had assumed she was the only girl in the country who avoided them. He had, therefore, concluded that the commuter must be Ellen even though it could not possibly be her.
Ignoring this tableau is a woman in a dove-grey trench coat whose bag is placed on her lap and who has closed her eyes in the manner of one who sees more when not looking. A schoolboy weighed down with a rucksack and a violin case is lost in the music piped through his too-big earphones but he notices the woman and wonders why it is that her hair makes him wish he had a bag of sweets in his pocket. He turns towards Isak and wonders how he fits into the carriage at all. He does not notice Ryan, who slips through the doors, determined not to dwell on the girl he had, for a moment, thought was someone else. His day will hold no empty minutes in which to consider the reasons he was so stupid to have tapped the shoulder of this stranger in a cable-knit jumper. His will be a day of mildly interesting routine for he has yet to set eyes on the woman in the dove-grey trench coat.
Later, when Isak’s mother asks him how his day has been, ignoring the bag which so clearly contains yet another pair of swimming trunks, he tells her he has just travelled on nine of the eleven lines, and she nods, but Andrew beams. ‘Nine!’ he exclaims. ‘We’ll have to go exploring in Egypt or the bush,’ he says. Isak does not understand but likes how Andrew is impressed and retreats to his room, contented. He runs his finger over the remote control for his stylish and large TV screen. Fantasy beckons. He will be lost in Middle-earth until the early hours and when he wakes it will be with annoyance that someone might have watched him sleeping.
Chapter 1
The Piccadilly line train swept into North Ealing station with a degree of impatient majesty. So many commuters and so little time. The bodies pushed and squeezed and held screens to their noses, then disgorged, sweating sometimes, sometimes panting, or with grace and familiarity. Among those stepping aboard was Ryan Kennedy, a man in his early thirties, slightly on the short side, with thick black curls and the demeanour of being with a companion even when alone.
He scanned the front carriage from habit, searching for the peculiar passenger or an intriguing one. Today, the main attraction was the chap sat with a Labrador at his feet. The dog had its head on the man’s left foot and the man, wearing sunglasses, was rubbing a patch in front of the animal’s left ear. It was hypnotic. Most passengers were watching. The dog was not in need of reassurance in the crowd. It was relaxed, almost playi
ng dead. The man was, Ryan decided, using the journey to repay the guide dog for the hours of duty that lay ahead as he traversed the Underground and then the busy streets above.
Ryan half turned as if to whisper to a friend that he felt the urge to bend down and pat the Labrador himself but he said nothing. Only if you looked closely would you notice that his face possessed an added note of amusement as if he had indeed just confided in someone and they had smiled or nodded or whispered back, ‘Why no guide cats?’
He returned his gaze to the man and his best friend. Next to them was a wiry teenager in Lycra and startling indigo trainers and next to him was a young woman whose hair, he realized, was a colour he did not know. He wondered what he would tell the police if forced to describe her and settled on ‘nearly red’. He would be dismissed as pretentious if he said it was the blended colour of a summer sky’s orange and pink sunset clouds. Her hair was the colour of dark candyfloss or wild strawberries – but not quite. He was quite bewitched until he alighted at South Kensington, leaving the woman, and the dog, behind.
A week later he wondered why he felt on high alert as he noted that the front carriage was almost airy and without a whiff of last night’s garlic. That was often the advantage of the front carriage at this time in the morning, that and the fact that it was the only carriage in which he had seen her. Three times he had seen her and he understood, now, that he would keep on using the front carriage just to see her again. And he did, on and off, and it brightened his day, giving him a false sense of being proactive when in fact he did nothing but catch the Tube to work just as he usually did.
She always had a seat, so Ryan guessed that she started her journey towards the top of the line, at Uxbridge, or perhaps she began her commute at Rayners Lane, the station he used when visiting his mother. He assumed the girl with the nearly red hair favoured, as he did, the front carriage. Always the front carriage – although this was, he admitted, false logic as he did not see her every day and on those occasions when he did not see her, she might very well be in a middle or end carriage. Still, he felt it to be true, that they had this in common at least, which was not a connection to be scoffed at given they had not exchanged a single word in the three months and thirteen days since he first saw her. Ryan was not even sure they had exchanged a smile. So keen was he not to appear creepy that he suspected his expression when they did make eye contact was one of a man badly needing to scratch the inside of his thigh, which was not ideal, not when she was his only, if marginal, love interest.
He had an idea that his hand had brushed the side of her dress before he had seen her face, that he had sat next to her and felt only her warmth, detected her scent without knowing it but the knowing of it, well, that amounted to the whole of spring. He wondered how Ellen would describe his fixation. This had not been how their relationship had begun. Theirs had been instantaneous, a deep-sea dive, a jump from a plane, revving engines and abrupt acceleration. He caught sight of her through the carriage’s window and half lifted his hand before dropping it, his brow furrowing. He always fell for it; he always caught his breath when he glimpsed Ellen before understanding he could not have seen her, not really.
Catching the right train became part of his routine. He would leave the house at 7.55 a.m. instead of 8 a.m. and peer inside the front carriage of the first train to arrive. If the candyfloss girl was not there, he would wait for the next and then, if necessary, the next. Once he let five trains pass him by. More than five attempts felt pathetic and on a more practical level meant he was late for work. Once he was unable to retreat, the sheer weight of commuters forcing him to climb onto a train he did not want to catch.
He wondered if it was a sort of addiction or a spell that could be broken the instant he heard her speak or saw her kiss another man. And then, on a damp May midweek morning when they had pulled into Hammersmith, a breathless mini-skirted student wearing a rucksack asked the carriage in a general way in poor English and in some panic if this was the right train for Victoria.
She had looked up and smiled and told the student to cross the platform. The student froze and so she stood up and took her arm and walked her the four steps to the adjacent platform just as the District line train pulled in. She guided her on and then calmly re-entered the same carriage she had momentarily left. Ryan had watched this unfold with an intensity most people reserve for footage of cheetahs tearing at the neck of a pretty impala. The doors shut immediately and her seat had been taken but she was too far away for him to offer her his. Instead he offered it to a stout woman with a small bald patch and moved slowly towards the candyfloss girl as they approached Barons Court.
He had no plan in mind and knew he would not speak to her but the variation on a theme was welcome; to be standing together, rather than sitting nearby. He was maybe two inches taller than her and he was close enough to see pale freckles across the bridge of her nose. She did not grimace at having to stand and instead held the pole with a curious sense of serenity. As always, Ryan left the train with her still on board.
As he filed onto the escalator his shoulders suddenly drooped in exasperation. He could have smiled and told her he had seen her help the student, told her that her timing, to have managed to get back on the train, was impeccable; and if he had said that then tomorrow he could have said: ‘Hello again.’ And then the day after they could have smiled at each other and then the day after that… who knew how it could have unfolded if he had spoken. If.
The girl with the nearly red hair stood as far as Green Park and left the train surprised at how much the journey had begun to jolt and jangle at her. She rarely stood for quite so long and wondered if she had to stand every day whether it would, in the end, make her ill. It was quite a relief to walk on firm concrete and then sit down on the Jubilee line. She looked at the time on her phone. She had nine hours of work ahead of her but she felt she had already achieved one tiny thing by being helpful to the young student who had been a in small panic of disorientation. She looked at the map on the wall, trying to see it from a novice’s perspective. The Underground could be mystifying to anyone if new to the capital. It could also be quite distressing.
Ryan’s nine hours were punctuated with grimaces of self-hatred, ruing his missed opportunity. That had been his chance. He had blown it, he thought, as he walked home after what some might regard as a dull, sedentary day. Ryan, though, liked the steady rhythm of his hours and his duties. They were his glue; they had been his glue since leaving university, since embarking on life in the real world without Ellen.
Ryan lived in the sort of house that made people pause before entering.
It is so very vertical, Ryan thought when he bought Number 4, and he never stopped thinking it.
It even had stilts, which framed what was supposed to be a carport but Ryan did not own a car so that was where he kept his bike and the washing-machine he hoped someone would steal as it no longer worked other than for its front display to flash angrily if asked to spin or even wash some sheets.
Number 4 was part of a short row of modern townhouses that had narrow back gardens and their kitchens on the first floor. His neighbours all had different uses for the room behind the carport but Ryan used his to house a lodger whose rent helped to cover the mortgage.
Naomi was also very vertical and studying for a Masters in biodiversity, which meant, as Ryan saw it, that she was much smarter than him as well as being taller. As he worked as a laboratory manager at the same university, sometimes they travelled in together on the Tube, but that was often an accidental journey and one that made him feel slightly self-conscious as Naomi, who liked two-inch heels, was five feet eleven barefoot and he was five feet eight in his trainers.
On one side of Number 4 lived Theo and Jenny, who were in their fifties, Ryan assumed, and who always beamed genially whenever their paths crossed. On the other side lived a younger couple who had arrived from Warsaw in their late teens and who were now fully aspirational with two young and immaculately dresse
d children. They were as uptight as Theo and Jenny were sunny and carefree, always frowning, always harassed, always washing the windows or tidying the carport. They were polite towards Ryan, though, relieved he had bought Number 4 to live in rather than to rent out to people who would allow the carport to fill with so much rubbish that it would spill out onto the paved driveway and undermine the whole of Cotton Lane’s townhouse appeal. They all made assumptions as to how it was that Ryan could afford to own such a home. Theo and Jenny decided he had an inheritance; Naomi believed he must have charmed his mortgage lender; and the Mizwa family assumed that he was a very important, well-remunerated figure at his university.
Ryan would have preferred any of those routes to home ownership to the one that had propelled him up the housing ladder. He had simply saved. He had saved somewhat slavishly because he had little else to do with his average salary. His carefree days had ended abruptly before he had even graduated. Ryan and Ellen’s would have been a profligate partnership had it lasted but it did not last long at all. Ryan without Ellen was, it transpired, a thrifty state of affairs. Ryan without Ellen was quiet and rather inexpensive; he simply had no desire to spend his income on anything much at all.
Sometimes Ryan would arrive home, pause, and wonder at how suburban his supposedly urban life had become and how, when Grace, his mother, had clubbed together with his sister to buy him a small lawnmower, he had been touched and grateful rather than appalled.
Ryan’s mother struggled to understand Naomi. Initially she failed to comprehend how a man and a woman could share a house without there being some romance attached to the arrangement.
‘Was it love at first sight, eh, Ryan?’ she had said, her eyes gleaming.
‘No one else was interested,’ Ryan replied.
‘But what luck that it was a girl, eh, Ryan?’
And then, once she had, briefly, met Naomi, Ryan’s mother was baffled by her height, her composure, her evident complete lack of adoration for her son.
