Eleven Lines to Somewhere

by Alyson Rudd

  It always ended this way, her reminiscences of Joe. She would become angry at his incompetence and forget what it was she fell for in him in the first place. But she would never had had Tom if she had not fallen for Joe, and all that was good in her life now was a consequence of meeting him. All that was bad was down to him too and that was inevitably the trump card. She and Grandpa never spoke about him, not really, not unless Grandpa forgot he was dead. They did not need to speak; they were united in the pain of having sons who had been hit, squished, bludgeoned.

  She picked up her phone and, carefully, using just her index finger, sent a text message to Ryan.

  Is there anyone at your work who would like to be dating your sister? We need to cheer her up and I don’t know anyone who can

  Ryan was sat in the refectory, watching Naomi walk towards him with a tray of what looked like chips and baked beans.

  ‘Nothing else I fancied,’ she said. ‘How’s Cotton Lane without me these days?’

  ‘Different,’ he said. ‘We see an awful lot more of the neighbours.’

  He looked down at his phone.

  ‘My mum wants me to find Hana a man,’ he said absently and he did not see how Naomi blushed.

  ‘Cappi?’ she said and they both laughed a little self-consciously for the Italian now glowered when he spied Naomi and looked nervously at the floor whenever he passed by Ryan.

  Sylvie was on the Jubilee line contemplating changing to the Central line and having lunch at Liverpool Street. She had no idea why she constructed these elaborate plans. She was increasingly of the view that the most comfortable she felt was on the banquette at Waterloo where she would half hope and half dread Ryan appearing. She knew the menu intimately but chose more economically these days. She knew she really ought to make a sandwich at home and eat it on a train or a platform but she could not rid herself of the notion that to do so would be to debase her journeys. Her daily commute to nowhere was an honourable endeavour. She did not know why she should label it honourable, not when it was a form of punishment, but she knew it deserved better than for her to skulk in a corner munching at tuna on granary.

  The next day Ryan rubbed his hands together.

  ‘I’m being spontaneous,’ he said. ‘I’ve got the day off.’

  He looked at her intently. She met his eyes.

  ‘But I don’t have the day off,’ she said.

  There was a long silence in which she hoped he would smile, stroke her arm, leave it at that, but he sighed deeply.

  ‘This can’t go on,’ he said. ‘You know that, surely?’

  ‘Are you asking me to leave you, to move out?’ she said trying hard not to whisper but she could not summon the energy for anything that might constitute normal volume.

  Ryan groaned.

  ‘That’s just it,’ he said. ‘Why does it always have to be so dramatic? Why can’t you…?’

  The silence returned.

  ‘I’d like us to have a day together,’ he said at last, ‘a normal, slightly indulgent day. A day that does not revolve around the Tube.’

  She curled up, her arms around her knees, her nearly red hair falling over her face.

  ‘So would I.’

  ‘Well, then, let’s try, let’s see what happens if you don’t spend the day on trains.’

  Her chest tightened and she could feel pinpricks of sweat forming on her shoulders.

  ‘I mean,’ he continued, ‘you’re diluting the time already – you must feel stronger about it.’

  ‘Is this an ultimatum?’ she asked, trying not to cough.

  ‘Of course not, but I think you should try being more brutal about it, take the hit, accept it will be tough for a while but one day you’ll realize the Tube keeps going without you and you don’t need the Tube.’

  He was smiling with forced brightness and sat down next to her, gently crunching a strand of her hair in his hand.

  ‘Sound like a plan?’ he said.

  It sounded terrible but the alternative was also horrible. She did not want the relationship to flounder. Even if it caused her physical pain, she would remain above ground for the day. But it did not work out that way. Ryan noticed she was on edge, that she did not eat much of their brunch, that she had to ask him to repeat most of what he said.

  He sat back and folded his arms in the same place where he and Naomi had plotted out their love lives over a year ago.

  ‘It’s like being with someone who constantly needs a cigarette,’ he said. ‘Desperately needs one.’

  ‘I suppose it is like an addiction,’ she said, trying to smile, but she was close to tears now. She was sure she could hear the rumble of the trains. They were not taunting, they were reminding her, pleading with her.

  He shrugged.

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to put up with a week of the shakes or something and then be OK?’

  Without warning, she was cross. Her eyes flashed. His nonchalance was an act; he did not want her to know that he was really worried, but even so, his lack of understanding, even now, was insulting.

  ‘You know it’s not like that,’ she said. ‘I need to go there, there’s a reason as well as a compulsion.’

  ‘But there isn’t a reason any more,’ he said, keeping his voice level. ‘We saw where she was killed, we met her sister, we saw the baby. There is nothing else to be sorted.’

  ‘Well, apparently, there is.’

  ‘What? Tell me what it is or at least try to work it out. You must have some idea.’

  Her eyes softened. This was not an unreasonable question yet she rarely asked it of herself.

  ‘I’m waiting. That’s all I know. I feel there will come a time when I will be… released.’

  A police car sped past causing a cyclist to wobble into the kerb. He unleashed a tirade of expletives and then appeared to stare at Sylvie’s barely eaten pancake as if it was possessed. As he cycled off Ryan chuckled but he did not know why.

  ‘Waiting,’ he said. ‘Come on, then, let’s wait together.’ And they walked hand in hand to Ealing Broadway, the nearest station to the café.

  They sat in silence until they reached East Acton.

  ‘Does it work when I’m with you?’ he asked. ‘Is it a meditative thing, do you need to be alone?’

  She thought for a few minutes.

  ‘I’d rather be alone because there’s no need for you to suffer too but otherwise it sort of feels the same,’ she said.

  He squeezed her hand. He could not bring himself to say out loud that he would wait until her waiting was over, but he wanted her to know he was not about to abandon her. He remembered now that before he ever spoke to her she seemed separate to the other commuters and this was the reason why. She was endlessly waiting rather than travelling.

  They reached Marble Arch. A woman, rather beautiful, in a burnt-orange sari, entered their carriage.

  ‘Are you waiting to see Jaya again?’ he asked, feeling as if he had stepped into the film set of a ghost story. He did not tell her that behind the sari had been Ellen, staring at him sardonically.

  It was her turn to squeeze his hand.

  ‘I’ve wondered that too,’ she said, ‘but no, I don’t think so. I wish I could sound more rational or even knowledgeable. I’m sorry.’

  They travelled on, all the way to Stratford.

  ‘Now, this is a messy station,’ Sylvie said as she led them up some stairs whereupon they turned left and escaped the throng who were making their way towards the huge shopping mall. They sat at the front of the Docklands train and Ryan felt he was five years old and at the funfair on a ride he thought was thrilling but was in fact tame. He also felt a bit of a fraud, having already accompanied Sylvie on this very train – only she had not known she was being accompanied and he had never told her and he now believed it was too late to ever tell her. He had tried to, once, but she had been happy to think the weirdness of him ended with him checking which book she was reading in the stops before South Kensington, and maybe that was oddness eno
ugh for any relationship. He sighed as the sun streamed in and it made a pleasant change from being underground. If he was doomed to wander the Tube network, he thought, he would spend far more time above ground than below.

  She rose to her feet at Canary Wharf and he was almost seduced by her serenity. She did not rush or dash and to anyone watching them she would have been voted the most sane and calm and certain person on the line that day. A quarter-smile played on her lips. She was in charge and, chillingly, he thought, she was content because she was not fighting the compulsion. They would keep on trundling until at least 5 p.m. and nothing would happen to stop the waiting.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Why do you keep a sort of office-hours vigil on the trains?’

  ‘Because it was an office-hours day when it happened,’ she said without needing to ponder the question.

  They stretched their legs again at London Bridge and switched to the Northern line but, instead of taking the next train, she sat down on the northbound platform.

  ‘We’ll wait a while,’ she said.

  ‘Ah, yes, of course,’ he said.

  There was silence between them and after two more trains had been and gone she asked him what he meant by ‘of course’.

  Ryan did not grasp the mistake he had made.

  ‘Well, you sat for ages at Warren Street so I guess you do something like this every day.’

  This made no sense to her. She never talked through her day with him and she almost snorted at the thought of what that would sound like. ‘And then I changed at Embankment and took the Bakerloo line to Maida Vale and spent about an hour and a half there and then and then and then…’ but yes, she had lingered at Warren Street, maybe more than once. She stole a look at his face. It was not guilt-ridden, not embarrassed. He was bored. All the same, she could sense that pushing the issue of Warren Street might lead to her knowing something she would rather not know, so she let it go.

  ‘This is significant, isn’t it?’ he said in a puzzled voice. ‘I mean, this really is waiting. You must have some sort of sense of what for?’

  He wondered if he sounded nagging. Pounding her with questions that were obvious and unlikely to be helpful.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. He paused and decided to take away the pressure he was piling upon her.

  ‘I’ve struggled more than I have let on,’ he said. ‘When I was small, I wanted to save my brother, I wanted to wear a cape and swoop down and carry him away before he was crushed but I never told Mam because her eyes would wobble whenever I mentioned him. And then Ellen. Ellen, she died in a split second too, so I felt I was bad luck, and I want to make it right somehow.’

  She held his hand, grateful that he was vulnerable or at least understood vulnerability.

  ‘Listen, you go home,’ she said. ‘I have a book with me. Please.’

  She sat, elegantly, not slouched, and watched him head towards the exit. She half smiled as she pictured him as Superman, swooping down to save his sibling.

  And in that moment she knew.

  Ryan’s words had somehow pierced the fog. There was no sound of angels singing, no blinding light. It was enlightenment of a mundane kind, like realizing you’re not that fond of Earl Grey tea after all or discovering you stored your suitcase under the bed and not in the high cupboard. Of course, she thought, it makes perfect sense, but it brought her no comfort. Quite the opposite. It spelled out to her that she could be trapped for years. Forever. To tell Ryan would be to quash his dreams. She would have to keep it secret.

  She chewed at a ragged fingernail. Another train came and went. Sylvie let the trains rock her brain into some semblance of order. She wanted, very badly, to devise a way to reach the end of what had become a kind of commute into purgatory. ‘Knowledge,’ she whispered to herself, ‘is power. I know now what needs to be done.’

  Gradually she formulated a plan. Her love–hate routine needed to be modified. All those intersections. They were unnecessary. She rolled her shoulders. They were useful, of course, and gave her some exercise. She was particularly fond of changing at Embankment on the Bakerloo line in order to reach the Circle line. That was a bizarre little route of short staircases and corners and what always felt like backtracking. Up and down and all around – but to what end? The corridors were not platforms. It was the platforms that mattered. The platforms mattered even more than the trains. And her books. They would have to go. What was she thinking, burying her head in a novel all day? She needed to get busy. She needed to get a life.

  Instead of fiction, Sylvie burrowed into statistics. It was not quite as random an act of fate as she had supposed that she witnessed a death where she did. King’s Cross St Pancras Tube station had experienced the most suicide attempts of all the network’s stations in recent years. She sighed at all the hours she had spent on the platforms at Oxford Circus or Moorgate. She should have stayed behind at where it had, for her, all started. On the other hand, King’s Cross was only marginally leading the way in death tolls. Mile End, Victoria and Camden Town were close behind, close enough not to be rejected out of hand. One conclusion she believed she could make was to dump her travels on the Bakerloo and Jubilee lines as these recorded the fewest attempts.

  She turned away from the computer screen and wondered if there was a reason for this. Sylvie liked the Bakerloo and Jubilee lines but she doubted they were so pleasant as to change a desperate individual’s mind when it came to the desire to end their own life. Still, a fact was a fact. No more changing lines because of a hunch. She would need to be more scientific. The dangerous lines were the Northern, Central and Piccadilly. She would stick to those in future until she found what she was looking for. In some respects, she was being truer to herself. She was a planner and it had been strange to engage in such unplanned days underground. Now she could add a semblance of order to her compulsion. She could take a smidgen of control.

  Ryan noticed a change in her. She began to dress differently for her version of a commute. She wore jeans or linen trousers and a short jumper or short jacket. Gone was the large handbag, replaced by a small leather satchel she wore with the strap across her body. She bought herself a pair of navy suede trainers that she wore every day and declared to be comfy and with a good grip. Sylvie no longer looked like someone on her way to an office job. She was a student or a courier.

  He was hesitant to ask what had sparked the change. Ryan was becoming increasingly convinced that all he had done in an effort to help Sylvie was inadvertently do the opposite. It was as if he had discovered a wild and beautiful flower that thrived on weed killer. He decided to give it all of two weeks and then pluck up the courage to find out what she was up to. But on the ninth day he found her curled up on the sofa, paler than normal, staring into the middle distance.

  He gently sidled next to her and ran his finger along her forehead.

  ‘Want to talk about it?’ he said.

  She lowered her chin and swallowed hard.

  ‘Yes, but later. Give me a few minutes.’ She looked up at him and smiled. ‘Or hours.’

  He jumped up with deliberate good humour and left the room, as Sylvie clung ever tighter to her knees, trying to decide if she was near the end of her quest or would have to start all over again.

  Men, she knew, were more likely to jump, so she had been particularly interested in a man in a smart suit but creased tie who sat down almost opposite her and stared vacantly, if morosely, in front of him. He held no case, no paper, nothing, and he did not pay attention to where the Northern line train was stopping. He simply stared. Sylvie felt her veins fill with adrenalin. She kept tabs on the man by watching his knees and his feet. At last, at Camden Town, he stood. She stood too. He left the carriage but walked back towards the tunnel they had just travelled through and then sat on a bench. She decided to be bold and sat next to him. Two more trains entered and her nearly red hair blew across her face. He stood. She stood. She expected the worst, which would have been the best, for her, but he followed the signs for the
way out. She followed him until the point he placed his hand on the card reader and entered the ticket hall and at that moment she turned around and headed back to the bench, her heart thumping.

  He might come back, she thought. Or someone else might appear. Someone did. It was a woman with close-cropped brown hair dressed in dungarees worn over a fluffy purple jumper. She was all smiley and emanated a sickly sort of jolliness. She sat next to Sylvie and after a few moments turned to her and spoke.

  ‘Do you need someone to talk to?’ she said.

  Ryan was nodding but he did not understand, not really.

  ‘Who was she?’ he asked.

  Sylvie sighed.

  ‘She was me, only a trained and better version of me.’

  Ryan was silent, not wanting to be slow on the uptake, but this still did not make sense to him.

  Sylvie rolled her tongue loudly and clapped her hands together before taking his hands in hers.

  ‘Right. This is ridiculous. I’m talking in riddles. Sorry. I’ll sum it up, honestly, no frills. Ready?’

  He nodded, befuddled by the change in mood.

  ‘I decided that what I needed – to end this ridiculous trap I was in – was to save someone. I had what I think is called an epiphany.’

  She paused.

  ‘Epiphany, yes, that’s it. I realized that I have to physically save someone, pull them back from the brink the way I didn’t pull Jaya back. I did some research, so I could concentrate my search in the right places, and there was a man today – a man who looked desperate, or at least depressed – and he sat down at Camden Town, a station that is statistically likely to be the site of a suicide. I thought he might try, you know, but he didn’t, he left the station. So I sat where he had sat and this woman decided that I was a suicide risk. Me. And so what do I do now? I can’t even be left alone to try to save someone. And I know that would have worked. I just know it.’