the girl on the train, MEGAN Thursday, 13 June 2013

MEGAN
Thursday, 13 June 2013
Morning
I CAN’T SLEEP in this heat. Invisible bugs crawl over my skin, I have a rash on my
chest, I can’t get comfortable. And Scott seems to radiate warmth; lying next to
him is like lying next to a fire. I can’t get far enough away from him, and find
myself clinging to the edge of the bed, sheets thrown back. It’s intolerable. I
thought about going to lie down on the futon in the spare room, but he hates to
wake and find me gone, it always leads to a row about something. Alternative
uses for the spare room, usually, or who I was thinking about while I was lying
there alone. Sometimes I want to scream at him, Just let me go. Let me go. Let
me breathe. So I can’t sleep, and I’m angry. I feel as though we’re having a fight
already, even though the fight’s only in my imagination.
And in my head, thoughts go round and round and round.
I feel like I’m suffocating.
When did this house become so bloody small? When did my life become so
boring? Is this really what I wanted? I can’t remember. All I know is that a few
months ago I was feeling better, and now I can’t think and I can’t sleep and I
can’t draw and the urge to run is becoming overwhelming. At night when I lie
awake I can hear it, quiet but unrelenting, undeniable: a whisper in my head, Slip
away. When I close my eyes, my head is filled with images of past and future
lives, the things I dreamed I wanted, the things I had and threw away. I can’t get
comfortable, because every way I turn I run into dead ends: the closed gallery,
the houses on this road, the stifling attentions of the tedious pilates women, the
track at the end of the garden with its trains, always taking someone else to
somewhere else, reminding me over and over and over, a dozen times a day, that
I’m staying put.
I feel as though I’m going mad.
And yet just a few months ago, I was feeling better, I was getting better. I was
fine. I was sleeping. I didn’t live in fear of the nightmares. I could breathe. Yes, I
still wanted to run away. Sometimes. But not every day.
Talking to Kamal helped me, there’s no denying that. I liked it. I liked him. He
made me happier. And now all that feels so unfinished – I never got to the crux
of it. That’s my fault, of course, because I behaved stupidly, like a child, because
I didn’t like feeling rejected. I need to learn to lose a little better. I’m
embarrassed now, ashamed. My face goes hot at the thought of it. I don’t want
that to be his final impression of me. I want him to see me again, to see me
better. And I do feel that if I went to him, he would help. He’s like that.
I need to get to the end of the story. I need to tell someone, just once. Say the
words out loud. If it doesn’t come out of me, it’ll eat me up. The hole inside me,
the one they left, it’ll just get bigger and bigger until it consumes me.
I’m going to have to swallow my pride and my shame and go to him. He’s
going to have to listen. I’ll make him.
Evening
Scott thinks I’m at the cinema with Tara. I’ve been outside Kamal’s flat for
fifteen minutes, psyching myself up to knock on the door. I’m so afraid of the
way he’s going to look at me, after last time. I have to show him that I’m sorry,
so I’ve dressed the part: plain and simple, jeans and T-shirt, hardly any make-up.
This is not about seduction, he has to see that.
I can feel my heart starting to race as I step up to his front door and press the
bell. No one comes. The lights are on, but no one comes. Perhaps he has seen me
outside, lurking; perhaps he’s upstairs, just hoping that if he ignores me I’ll go
away. I won’t. He doesn’t know how determined I can be. Once I’ve made my
mind up, I’m a force to be reckoned with.
I ring again, and then a third time, and finally I hear footsteps on the stairs and
the door opens. He’s wearing tracksuit bottoms and a white T-shirt. He’s
barefoot, wet-haired, his face flushed.
‘Megan.’ Surprised, but not angry, which is a good start. ‘Are you all right? Is
everything all right?’
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, and he steps back to let me in. I feel a rush of gratitude so
strong it feels almost like love.
He shows me into the kitchen. It’s a mess: washing-up piled on the counter
and in the sink, empty takeaway cartons spilling out of the bin. I wonder if he’s
depressed. I stand in the doorway; he leans against the counter opposite me, his
arms folded across his chest.
‘What can I do for you?’ he asks. His face is arranged into a perfectly neutral
expression, his therapist’s face. It makes me want to pinch him, just to make him
smile.
‘I have to tell you—’ I start, and then I stop because I can’t just plunge straight
into it, I need a preamble. So I change tack. ‘I wanted to apologize,’ I say, ‘for
what happened. Last time.’
‘That’s OK,’ he says. ‘Don’t worry about that. If you need to talk to someone,
I can refer you to someone else, but I can’t—’
‘Please, Kamal.’
‘Megan, I can’t counsel you any longer.’
‘I know. I know that. But I can’t start over with someone else. I can’t. We got
so far. We were so close. I just have to tell you. Just once. And then I’ll be gone,
I promise. I won’t ever bother you again.’
He cocks his head to one side. He doesn’t believe me, I can tell. He thinks that
if he lets me back in now, he’ll never be rid of me.
‘Hear me out, please. This isn’t going to go on for ever, I just need someone to
listen.’
‘Your husband?’ he asks and I shake my head.
‘I can’t – I can’t tell him. Not after all this time. He wouldn’t … He wouldn’t
be able to see me as me any longer. I’d be someone else to him. He wouldn’t
know how to forgive me. Please, Kamal. If I don’t spit out the poison, I feel like
I’ll never sleep. As a friend, not a therapist, please listen.’
His shoulders drop a little as he turns away, and I think it’s over. My heart
sinks. Then he opens a cupboard and pulls out two tumblers.
‘As a friend, then. Would you like some wine?’
He shows me into the living room. Dimly lit by standard lamps, it has the
same air of domestic neglect as the kitchen. We sit down on opposite sides of a
glass table piled high with papers, magazines and takeaway menus. My hands
are locked around my glass. I take a sip. It’s red but cold, dusty. I swallow, take
another sip. He’s waiting for me to start, but it’s hard, harder than I thought it
was going to be. I’ve kept this secret for so long – a decade, more than a third of
my life. It’s not that easy, letting go of it. I just know that I have to start talking.
If I don’t do it now, I might never have the courage to say the words out loud, I
might lose them altogether, they might stick in my throat and choke me in my
sleep.
‘After I left Ipswich, I moved in with Mac, into his cottage outside Holkham
at the end of the lane. I told you that, didn’t I? It was very isolated, a couple of
miles to the nearest neighbour, a couple more to the nearest shops. At the
beginning, we had lots of parties, there were always a few people crashed out in
the living room or sleeping in the hammock outside in the summer. But we got
tired of that, and Mac fell out with everyone eventually, so people stopped
coming, and it was the two of us. Days used to go by and we wouldn’t see
anyone. We’d do our grocery shopping at the petrol station. It’s odd, thinking
back on it, but I needed it then, after everything – after Ipswich and all those
men, all the things I did. I liked it, just Mac and me and the old railway tracks
and the grass and the dunes and the restless grey sea.’
Kamal tilts his head to one side, gives me half a smile. I feel my insides flip.
‘It sounds nice. But do you think you are romanticizing? “The restless grey
sea”?’
‘Never mind that,’ I say, waving him away. ‘And no, in any case. Have you
been to north Norfolk? It’s not the Adriatic. It is restless, and relentlessly grey.’
He holds his hands up, smiling. ‘OK.’
I feel instantly better, the tension leaching out of my neck and shoulders. I
take another sip of the wine; it tastes less bitter now.
‘I was happy with Mac. I know it doesn’t sound like the sort of place I’d like,
the sort of life I’d like, but then, after Ben’s death and everything that came after,
it was. Mac saved me. He took me in, he loved me, he kept me safe. And he
wasn’t boring. And to be perfectly honest, we were taking a lot of drugs, and it’s
difficult to get bored when you’re off your face all the time. I was happy. I was
really happy.’
Kamal nods. ‘I understand, although I’m not sure that sounds like a very real
kind of happiness,’ he says. ‘Not the sort of happiness that can endure, that can
sustain you.’
I laugh. ‘I was seventeen. I was with a man who excited me, who adored me.
I’d got away from my parents, away from the house where everything,
everything reminded me of my dead brother. I didn’t need it to endure, or
sustain. I just needed it for right then.’
‘So what happened?’
It seems as though the room gets darker then. Here we are, at the thing I never
say.
‘I got pregnant.’
He nods, waiting for me to go on. Part of me wants him to stop me, to ask
more questions, but he doesn’t, he just waits. It gets darker still.
‘It was too late when I realized to … to get rid of it. Of her. It’s what I would
have done, had I not been so stupid, so oblivious. The truth is that she wasn’t
wanted, by either of us.’
Kamal gets to his feet, goes to the kitchen and comes back with a sheet of
kitchen roll for me to wipe my eyes. He hands it to me and sits down. It’s a while
before I go on. Kamal sits, just as he used to in our sessions, his eyes on mine,
his hands folded in his lap, patient, immobile. It must take the most incredible
self-control, that stillness, that passivity; it must be exhausting.
My legs are trembling, my knee jerking as though on a puppeteer’s string. I
get to my feet to stop it. I walk to the kitchen door and back again, scratching the
palms of my hands.
‘We were both so stupid,’ I tell him. ‘We didn’t really even acknowledge what
was happening, we just carried on. I didn’t go to see a doctor, I didn’t eat the
right things or take supplements, I didn’t do any of the things you’re supposed
to. We just carried on living our lives. We didn’t even acknowledge that anything
had changed. I got fatter and slower and more tired, we both got irritable and
fought all the time, but nothing really changed until she came.’
He lets me cry. While I do so, he moves to the chair nearest mine and sits
down at my side so that his knees are almost touching my thigh. He leans
forward. He doesn’t touch me, but our bodies are close, I can smell his scent,
clean in this dirty room, sharp and astringent.
My voice is a whisper, it doesn’t feel right to say these words out loud. ‘I had
her at home,’ I say. ‘It was stupid, but I had this thing about hospitals at the time,
because the last time I’d been in one was when Ben was killed. Plus I hadn’t
been for any of the scans. I’d been smoking, drinking a bit, I couldn’t face the
lectures. I couldn’t face any of it. I think … right up until the end, it just didn’t
seem like it was real, like it was actually going to happen.
‘Mac had this friend who was a nurse, or who’d done some nursing training or
something. She came round, and it was OK. It wasn’t so bad. I mean, it was
horrible, of course, painful and frightening, but … then there she was. She was
very small. I don’t remember exactly what her weight was. That’s terrible, isn’t
it?’ Kamal doesn’t say anything, he doesn’t move. ‘She was lovely. She had dark
eyes and blonde hair. She didn’t cry a lot, she slept well, right from the very
beginning. She was good. She was a good girl.’ I have to stop there for a
moment. ‘I expected everything to be so hard, but it wasn’t.’
It’s darker still, I’m sure of it, but I look up and Kamal is there, his eyes on
mine, his expression soft. He’s listening. He wants me to tell him. My mouth is
dry, so I take another sip of wine. It hurts to swallow. ‘We called her Elizabeth.
Libby.’ It feels so strange, saying her name out loud after such a long time.
‘Libby,’ I say again, enjoying the feel of her name in my mouth. I want to say it
over and over. Kamal reaches out at last and takes my hand in his, his thumb
against my wrist, on my pulse.
‘One day we had a fight, Mac and I. I don’t remember what it was about. We
did that every now and again – little arguments that blew up into big ones,
nothing physical, nothing bad like that, but we’d scream at each other and I’d
threaten to leave, or he’d just walk out and I wouldn’t see him for a couple of
days.
‘It was the first time it had happened since she was born – the first time he’d
just gone off and left me. She was just a few months old. The roof was leaking. I
remember that: the sound of water dripping into buckets in the kitchen. It was
freezing cold, the wind driving off the sea; it had been raining for days. I lit a fire
in the living room, but it kept going out. I was so tired. I was drinking just to
warm up, but it wasn’t working, so I decided to get into the bath. I took Libby in
with me, put her on my chest, her head just under my chin.’
The room gets darker and darker until I’m there again, lying in the water, her
body pressing against mine, a candle flickering just behind my head. I can hear it
guttering, smell the wax, feel the chill of the air around my neck and shoulders.
I’m heavy, my body sinking into the warmth. I’m exhausted. And then suddenly
the candle is out and I’m cold. Really cold, my teeth chattering in my head, my
whole body shaking. The house feels like it’s shaking too, the wind screaming,
tearing at the slates on the roof.
‘I fell asleep,’ I say, and then I can’t say any more, because I can feel her
again, no longer on my chest, her body wedged between my arm and the edge of
the tub, her face in the water. We were both so cold.
For a moment, neither of us move. I can hardly bear to look at him, but when I
do, he doesn’t recoil from me. He doesn’t say a word. He puts his arm around
my shoulder and pulls me to him, my face against his chest. I breathe him in and
I wait to feel different, to feel lighter, to feel better or worse now that there is
another living soul who knows. I feel relieved, I think, because I know from his
reaction that I have done the right thing. He isn’t angry with me, he doesn’t think
I’m a monster. I am safe here, completely safe with him.
I don’t know how long I stay there in his arms, but when I come back to
myself, my phone is ringing. I don’t answer it, but a moment later it beeps to
alert me that there’s a text. It’s from Scott. Where are you? And seconds after
that, the phone starts ringing again. This time it’s Tara. Disentangling myself
from Kamal’s embrace, I answer.
‘Megan, I don’t know what you’re up to, but you need to call Scott. He’s rung
here four times. I told him you’d nipped out to the offie to get some wine, but I
don’t think he believed me. He says you’re not picking up your phone.’ She
sounds pissed off, and I know I should appease her, but I don’t have the energy.
‘OK,’ I say. ‘Thanks. I’ll ring him now.’
‘Megan—’ she says, but I end the call before I can hear another word.
It’s after ten. I’ve been here for more than two hours. I turn off my phone and
turn to face Kamal.
‘I don’t want to go home,’ I say.
He nods, but he doesn’t invite me to stay. Instead he says, ‘You can come
back, if you like. Another time.’
I step forward, closing the gap between our bodies, stand on tiptoe and kiss his
lips. He doesn’t pull away from me.