The Other Passenger

by Louise Candlish

  ‘Kit loves that Hashtag Commuter Hell thing on Twitter.’

  ‘That’s still going strong, is it?’

  ‘Yes, he says people are really witty.’

  ‘Believe me, it’s not so witty when you’re the one they’re trolling. Did the article you read mention that it was the train in front that broke down? Nothing to do with me. And did it mention that we’re unbelievably lucky not to have had a mass crush in one of our stations? The platforms are as overcrowded as the trains. There’s literally no margin for error, one person could trip and fall and that would be it. Hundreds could die.’

  She shuddered and took my hand. The backs of our hands were a portrait of age: mine crinkled, discoloured skin and raised blue veins, hers pale and smooth. Was her blood brighter, too? Were her bones glossier? ‘Maybe you should have cycled?’

  I explained about my bike having been stolen. ‘It was out of range of any CCTV, but even if cameras had picked up the thief, I’d never have got it back.’

  ‘Have you thought about moving somewhere else? Where you could drive to work.’

  ‘Maybe. But Clare would never leave London. Her business is here. That trumps any of my concerns,’ I added, displaying more pique than I’d intended.

  There was a silence. Sometimes with Melia it felt as if her silences were messages in invisible ink; you applied the magic fluid and revealed the words at your own risk. This time, I read: What’s Clare got to do with anything? Though I’d asked her if she’d considered leaving Kit, she’d never asked me if I’d leave Clare.

  Dropping my hand, she ran her fingers over my chest, fluttery as moth wings. ‘I quite like crushing up against men on the Tube. Sometimes, you can feel, you know.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That he’s getting excited.’

  I had to laugh. ‘You’re admitting you’re a sex pest? Careful I don’t report you.’

  She shrugged. ‘It’s not a crime if the victim doesn’t object.’

  ‘You’re on shaky ground there, darling, legally and morally.’ I wondered if she’d given any thought to the short-term nature of her sexual power. In a decade or two, she might press herself against some guy and be called out for it, humiliated. A new generation of Melias would be quick to deride her.

  ‘I had a panic attack once,’ she said.

  ‘Oh yeah? When it occurred to you that you were cheating on your boyfriend and he might find out . . .’ That reminded me of something else. ‘Clare said you think something’s going on between him and Gretchen?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ she said, displeased.

  ‘Was that why you got so upset at our place?’

  No reply.

  ‘Come on, Melia, even if he is, you’re not really in a position to object, are you?’

  She turned, eyes furious. ‘He hasn’t got a clue about us. What I object to is he thinks he can do whatever he likes. Say whatever he likes.’

  It was hard to reconcile her assessment with my own: to me, Kit was a man perpetually frustrated by what he couldn’t do. I said no more and she returned to the story of her panic attack.

  ‘It was on a flight. There was really bad turbulence and I freaked out. I only stopped when they threatened to restrain me. I was still whimpering and I could hear people saying, “Can’t she shut the fuck up.” People are so mean; that was almost more upsetting than the turbulence.’

  As she began to detail individual examples of hatefulness, as if it were hers that had been the career-ending, life-altering trauma, it was hard to tell whether her original aim had been to empathize or simply to talk about herself.

  ‘There’s a reason “Melia” gets shortened to “Me”,’ Clare said, later, on a cold morning in Edinburgh. ‘It’s because she’s a complete narcissist.’

  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  *

  The Tube drama wasn’t the only thing about me that Kit and Melia had been discussing. Or the water rats.

  I remember Kit and Steve were bonding over terrible bosses one morning, a well-worn topic – Kit disliked his line manager, called her the Cold Fish, and over time this was abbreviated to the Fish; Gretchen, out on the deck, worked for the Psycho; and now they’d settled on a name for Steve’s, a fitness freak: Iron Snake.

  ‘What about you, Jamie?’ Kit asked.

  ‘Oh, my line manager’s a great girl. I really like her.’ There was an echo of our conversation about fathers: his a waste of space, mine decent.

  ‘It’s probably you that’s the one with the nickname,’ Steve said. ‘Come on, spill. What do they call you over at Starbucks?’

  ‘It’s not a Starbucks,’ I muttered.

  ‘Maybe they call you the Escort?’ Kit said. ‘They do know you’re a kept man?’

  I felt myself flush. So Melia had told him. What had I expected? Presumably, she’d given him the impression the information had come via Clare.

  The two of them guffawed. As they riffed on other words absurdly unsuitable for a middle-aged bloke – gigolo, playboy, cocksman – I gave up and went to join Gretchen outside. Under a fresh spring sky, the river shimmered with light, almost as if it were heat, almost as if the temperature, which was low enough to cause cold water shock all year round (yes, I’d read up on it), wouldn’t cripple the strongest limbs and cause a gasp reflex that drew filthy water into the healthiest lungs.

  She was sitting with her eyes closed and head back, hair lifting onto her face in the breeze.

  ‘Gretchen? Are you asleep?’

  ‘No.’ She acknowledged me through a squint. ‘If you close your eyes, you can pretend you’re on holiday, not on your way to spend the day with a nest of vipers.’

  Jesus, the trip was a real pity party this morning. ‘Is work really that bad? Why don’t you move somewhere else?’

  Gretchen opened her eyes and I expected her to take the opportunity to talk once more of the gin distillery of her dreams, but to my astonishment, tears brimmed. ‘Oh, I’m looking, don’t worry. I wish I could take time out in between, but I can’t afford to. There’s no one to bail me out.’

  So she knew too. They’d discussed my unusual situation, and far from considering me an asset-free vulnerable as they might if I were the woman in the relationship, they’d decided it was unfair that I should be subsidized when they were not.

  ‘It’s not a bailout when you’re a long-term couple who care about each other,’ I said, and it was surely the hypocrisy of my own words that took my breath away and not the bracing river air. Clare still believed I was attending sessions with Vicky, a ruse I’d extended by claiming to be interspersing them with networking events, but their usefulness as an alibi was due to expire. I’d need a new hobby of some sort, something Clare wouldn’t be tempted to join me in (taxidermy, perhaps).

  Gretchen was not to be roused from her gloom and so I went back inside, slipping into a seat at the back rather than rejoining the men. Melia’s disgruntlement with work was one thing – I shared her pain because I was besotted with her – but to hear constantly how these young adults thought themselves entitled to jobs more prestigious and better paid than those they’d actually earned was tedious. Grow up! It was a reminder, I supposed, that friendships born of convenience were as flimsy as the pages of our Metros.

  As we approached Tate Modern, a series of reflections in the glass made the city tip to the side, the Millennium Footbridge like a ladder to the sky, the people climbing, heads down, unable to escape the slanting water.

  I could see it would start to scare me, the river, if I let it.

  *

  If I was a little glum at work after this commute, Regan trumped me – and Gretchen. She trumped all of us. ‘I’m being thrown out of my room next week. The original friend is coming back from travelling.’

  ‘Well, a curse on Original Friends,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know it was a sublet.’

  ‘They’ve said I can sleep in the utility room but there’s no window and the boiler’s dodgy.’ Regan pushed up
her sleeves. She had a tattoo of a spider on her left forearm, its legs encircling her arm like binds.

  ‘No, you don’t want to die of carbon monoxide poisoning.’

  ‘I know someone with a spare room, but it’s right near where that kid was just shot. Did you read about it? In a car park in Plumstead? That’s why it’s cheap, I suppose. You might get gunned down.’ She earned, I knew, precisely 40p an hour more than I did, but that did not raise her rate to the living wage, which in London was currently £10.55 an hour. ‘My mum wants me to leave London and come home. She thinks there are gangs going around stabbing people every second of the day.’

  ‘It does feel like that at the moment,’ I agreed. ‘But you probably need to have provoked them in some way and I don’t think you’re in any danger of doing that, are you?’

  There were a succession of coffee orders and we lost ourselves for a while to the grinding and hissing and thumping of the machine – it got noisy in that café, sometimes you’d think we were bricklayers or electricians. When we were clear again, I said, ‘Let’s put a notice up here. Room Wanted.’

  As Regan hooted at the notion of a physical, handwritten notice stuck with a pin to a board, and asked if maybe I had a spare room, ideally one with an actual window, I wondered what she would say if I showed her a picture of 15 Prospect Square, with no fewer than nine windows visible from the street. No, if the water rats’ reaction was anything to go by, I was better off keeping the grandeur of my accommodation to myself.

  ‘People still read things on paper,’ I told her. ‘Otherwise we wouldn’t have a shop full of flyers and leaflets, would we?’ As if to disprove this, I took a card payment from a customer who apologized for not having cash for a tip. People used contactless for purchases in the pennies. We’d turned money invisible, rid ourselves of the vulgarity of its metallic chink, and yet I’d never heard people talk about it more. I’d never known it so hungered for, so fetishized.

  On the way home, alone for once, I noted Clare’s text about ordering a takeaway while remembering with a stab of guilt the leftover bread and pastries Regan took home most days. As we passed One Blackfriars, its silver-blue skin bruised with evening shadow, I studied the commuters around me. Who of them had just been paid a bonus and who was spiralling into debt? Could the woman in the floral silk wrap dress reading the Booker Prize winner pay her rent? Was the balding guy covertly watching porn on his phone set up for a comfortable retirement? What did they make of me? It was impossible to tell a pauper from a prince in this city.

  *

  ‘Should we take a lodger?’ I asked Clare, as we unpacked a dozen tacos delivered from the food market by a boy who didn’t speak English. I’d tipped him a fiver.

  ‘Why would we do that?’ she said.

  ‘Just, you know, there’s a housing crisis. We’ve got spare rooms.’

  She grimaced. ‘Yeah, but we help in other ways. We pay forty per cent tax.’

  ‘You do.’

  She took a bite of taco, expertly keeping the contents from dripping down her top. ‘Do you seriously want a total stranger wandering around the place?’

  ‘They wouldn’t be a stranger for very long. Or we could have a friend.’

  ‘That’s worse. Everyone always falls out and then you can’t get rid of them.’

  I swallowed half a taco without chewing the contents, felt it slithering in my gut like something still alive. Scooping guacamole with a fat bubbly chip, I made a point of chewing the next mouthful properly. I tried a different angle. ‘Does it make you feel bad, knowing there are all those apartments along the river sitting empty while sellers and landlords hold out for crazy prices and yet we both work with people who are living in horrible conditions?’

  ‘They’re not empty for long, not if I do my job properly.’ She twitched her eyebrows, but I no longer felt willing to share her hubris, however droll its expression. ‘Speaking of people we work with, I had an interesting chat with Richard today.’

  ‘Oh yeah.’ My heart drummed. He couldn’t have discovered Melia’s abuse of her duties, could he? We were always meticulous about leaving our meeting places precisely as we found them.

  ‘Given that you’ve decided against teacher training, and the coaching sessions and networking events haven’t led to anything concrete—’

  ‘Yet,’ I interrupted. ‘They’ve been really useful, though. I’m miles ahead of where I was psychologically. Confidencewise.’ I didn’t need Clare spreading the word that poor Vicky Jenkinson was a charlatan or, worse, demanding a refund from her.

  ‘What I was going to say is there might be an opportunity in lettings soon and I suggested Richard has a chat with you. I know you haven’t got any experience, but nor did Melia when she started and she’s doing fine.’

  I spent a moment ordering my objections to this latest proposal. First of all, of course I couldn’t work for my partner alongside my lover. Second, it was one thing to be a ladder’s worth of rungs below one’s partner when in separate professions, but another in the same company. Third, I wasn’t keen on the salesman’s confidence with which Clare had raised the suggestion, as if there could only be one reaction to it and it was the same as her own.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  She selected her next taco. ‘No what?’

  ‘No, don’t put Richard in that position. It’s not fair. You wouldn’t like it if he asked you to employ his wife.’ Sour cream slopped onto my T-shirt and I smeared it with my fingers.

  ‘Actually, I’d snap her up, but since she’s an independently wealthy interior designer with clients all over Europe, he’d be unlikely to do that.’ She passed me a square of kitchen roll. ‘The thing is, I already said you’ll call him. I thought we could do a practice interview this weekend.’

  It was the face that did it, the casual assumption that I would fall in line: I was suddenly enraged. ‘Clare, I said no. The coaching sessions were a very generous gift, but will you please leave it to me now to sort out my employment and stop acting on my behalf all the time. Have some sensitivity to my feelings!’

  As her gaze grew opaque, I tried to examine my own fury, which I could see as well as she did was a wholly ungracious response to an offer of help. Perhaps it was referred pain, a manifestation of my guilt in the wrong location (it should have been in the balls), or perhaps fear – God, had she emailed Vicky with this job idea of hers? Would she soon receive some baffled reply? – but whatever the case I could express only so much moral indignation before my nose grew. Before the gods sided with the innocent and left clues for her to find.

  I muttered an apology.

  ‘No, it’s fine,’ she said. Her cheeks were stained pink under her makeup. ‘I should have consulted you. I’ll tell Richard you’ve got other plans.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Maybe you’ll share those plans with me some time,’ she added, because she had to have the last word and who the hell was I to deny her that?

  I pushed my food from me, no longer hungry.

  16

  July 2019

  Melia and I developed a rhythm to our liaisons, an agenda for our meetings no doubt familiar to anyone conducting an affair: drink and small talk, sex, proper conversation – ‘big talk’, we called it because we were saying all the cute stuff I’d completely forgotten got said in the early days and that Melia loved.

  Sometimes the most important things were said as we were dressing, as we were one July evening when something happened outside of the normal routine. The meeting place was a penthouse apartment with smart technology, wide-angle views of the Dome and Canary Wharf erased and magicked at the press of a button, and I would have enjoyed lingering, but Melia had other ideas.

  ‘You know we were talking about our panic attacks that time? I had such a good idea and I think we should do it right now! It will be good for both of us – like, I don’t know, therapy.’

  ‘What therapy?’

  ‘You’ll have to pay, though,’ she continued, merrily.
‘I’m completely broke. My bank card keeps getting rejected, I must have gone over my overdraft limit.’

  ‘How much will it cost?’ I asked, mindful of my own minimum-wage limitations.

  ‘We’ll find out. Come on, have you got another half an hour?’

  We left the building and walked towards the O2. There was some cool Euro DJ playing and everyone we saw seemed high, naturally or chemically, maybe both. Though we didn’t pass Steve’s building, and in any case I knew from the morning commute that he had a work event this evening, being outside together felt like a much more daring game – and I knew that daring gathered momentum and turned into recklessness.

  ‘Here we are,’ Melia said. ‘Your claustrophobia, my fear of flying. Two birds with one stone.’

  It was the station for the cable car that linked the peninsula with the north side of the river. Nearly a hundred metres above the water, the gondolas were alight against feathered grey cloud. I’d never taken it before, had had no need; I considered those glowing square bulbs to be purely decorative.

  ‘I thought your great fear was boredom?’ But I could see the fever in her excitement: there was no getting out of this. ‘Do you even know what’s on the other side?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter because we won’t get off. We’ll come straight back over. They call it the Three-sixty.’

  We’d had a bottle of wine together in the apartment and I was just about relaxed enough to pay for the tickets and follow her through the turnstile without protest. Long after the rush hour, it was easy to claim a gondola to ourselves.

  ‘How long does it take?’

  ‘Ten minutes there, ten minutes back. So, the point of the therapy is to take our minds off our irrational fears.’ She pressed herself against me, her breath hot as she dropped the words in my ear. ‘What can we do in twenty minutes?’

  As the terminal building shrank below us, to my appalled amusement she sank to her knees. ‘Melia.’

  Her voice rose from between my legs. ‘What, not your thing?’

  ‘Cameras,’ I said. ‘Right at this moment, some guy is sitting in front of a bank of monitors watching us.’