Tuesday, 9 July 2013
Morning
The pile of clothes from last week is still there, and it looks dustier and more
forlorn than it did a few days ago. I read somewhere that a train can rip the
clothes right off you when it hits. It’s not that unusual, death by train. Two to
three hundred a year, they say, so at least one every couple of days. I’m not sure
how many of those are accidental. I look carefully, as the train rolls slowly past,
for blood on the clothes, but I can’t see any.
The train stops at the signal as usual. I can see Jess standing on the patio in
front of the French doors. She’s wearing a bright print dress, her feet are bare.
She’s looking over her shoulder, back into the house; she’s probably talking to
Jason, who’ll be making breakfast. I keep my eyes fixed on Jess, on her home, as
the train starts to inch forward. I don’t want to see the other houses; I particularly
don’t want to see the one four doors down, the one which used to be mine.
I lived at number twenty-three Blenheim Road for five years, blissfully happy
and utterly wretched. I can’t look at it now. That was my first home. Not my
parents’ place, not a flatshare with other students, my first home. I can’t bear to
look at it. Well, I can, I do, I want to, I don’t want to, I try not to. Every day I tell
myself not to look, and every day I look. I can’t help myself, even though there
is nothing I want to see there, even though anything I do see will hurt me. Even
though I remember so clearly how it felt that time I looked up and noticed that
the cream linen blind in the upstairs bedroom was gone, replaced by something
in soft baby pink; even though I still remember the pain I felt when I saw Anna
watering the rose bushes near the fence, her T-shirt stretched tight over her
bulging belly, and I bit my lip so hard it bled.
I close my eyes tightly and count to ten, fifteen, twenty. There, it’s gone now,
nothing to see. We roll into Witney station and out again, the train starting to
pick up pace as suburbia melts into grimy north London, terraced houses
replaced by tagged bridges and empty buildings with broken windows. The
closer we get to Euston the more anxious I feel; pressure builds, how will today
be? There’s a filthy, low-slung concrete building on the right-hand side of the
track about five hundred metres before we get into Euston. On its side, someone
has painted: LIFE IS NOT A PARAGRAPH. I think about the bundle of clothes
on the side of the track and I feel as though my throat is closing up. Life is not a
paragraph and death is no parenthesis.
Evening
The train I take in the evening, the 17.56, is slightly slower than the morning one
– it takes one hour and one minute, a full seven minutes longer than the morning
train despite not stopping at any extra stations. I don’t mind, because just as I’m
in no great hurry to get into London in the morning, I’m in no hurry to get back
to Ashbury in the evening either. Not just because it’s Ashbury, although the
place itself is bad enough, a 1960s new town, spreading like a tumour over the
heart of Buckinghamshire. No better or worse than a dozen other towns like it, a
centre filled with cafés and mobile-phone shops and branches of JD Sports,
surrounded by a band of suburbia and beyond that the realm of the multiplex
cinema and out-of-town Tesco. I live in a smart(ish), new(ish) block situated at
the point where the commercial heart of the place starts to bleed into the
residential outskirts, but it is not my home. My home is the Victorian semi on the
tracks, the one I part-owned. In Ashbury I am not a homeowner, not even a
tenant – I’m a lodger, occupant of the small second bedroom in Cathy’s bland
and inoffensive duplex, subject to her grace and favour.
Cathy and I were friends at university. Half-friends, really, we were never that
close. She lived across the hall from me in my first year and we were doing the
same course, so we were natural allies in those first few daunting weeks, before
we met people with whom we had more in common. We didn’t see much of each
other after the first year and barely at all after college, except for the occasional
wedding. But in my hour of need she happened to have a spare room going and
it made sense. I was so sure that it would only be for a couple of months, six at
the most, and I didn’t know what else to do. I’d never lived by myself, I’d gone
from parents to flatmates to Tom, I found the idea overwhelming, so I said yes.
And that was nearly two years ago.
It’s not awful. Cathy’s a nice person, in a forceful sort of way. She makes you
notice her niceness. Her niceness is writ large, it is her defining quality and she
needs it acknowledged, often, daily almost, which can be tiring. But it’s not so
bad, I can think of worse traits in a flatmate. No, it’s not Cathy, it’s not even
Ashbury that bothers me most about my new situation (I still think of it as new,
although it’s been two years). It’s the loss of control. In Cathy’s flat I always feel
like a guest at the very outer limit of their welcome. I feel it in the kitchen,
where we jostle for space when cooking our evening meals. I feel it when I sit
beside her on the sofa, the remote control firmly within her grasp. The only
space which feels like mine is my tiny bedroom, into which a double bed and a
desk have been crammed, with barely enough space to walk between them. It’s
comfortable enough, but it isn’t a place you want to be, so instead I linger in the
living room or at the kitchen table, ill at ease and powerless. I have lost control
over everything, even the places in my head.
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