The Girl on the Train (7 page)

C
ATHY CALLED ME BACK
just as I was leaving the flat this morning and gave me a stiff little hug. I thought she was going to tell me that she wasn’t kicking me out after all, but instead she slipped a typewritten note into my hand, giving me formal notice of my eviction, including a departure date. She couldn’t meet my eye. I felt sorry for her, I honestly did, though not quite as sorry as for myself. She gave me a sad smile and said, ‘I hate to do this to you, Rachel, I honestly do.’ The whole thing felt very awkward. We were standing in the hallway, which, despite my best efforts with the bleach, still smelled a bit of sick. I felt like crying, but I didn’t want to make her feel worse than she already did, so I just smiled cheerily and said, ‘Not at all, it’s honestly no problem,’ as though she’d just asked me to do her a small favour.

On the train, the tears come, and I don’t care if people are watching me; for all they know, my dog might have been run over. I might have been diagnosed with a terminal illness. I might be a barren, divorced, soon-to-be-homeless alcoholic.

It’s ridiculous, when I think about it. How did I find myself here? I wonder where it started, my decline; I wonder at what point I could have halted it. Where did I take the wrong turn? Not when I met Tom, who saved me from grief, after Dad died. Not when we married, carefree, drenched in bliss, on an oddly wintry May day seven years ago. I was happy, solvent, successful. Not when we moved into number twenty-three, a roomier, lovelier house than I’d imagined I’d live in at the tender age of twenty-six. I remember those first days so clearly, walking around, shoeless, feeling the warmth of wooden floorboards underfoot, relishing the space, the emptiness of all those rooms waiting to be filled. Tom and I, making plans: what we’d plant in the garden, what we’d hang on the walls, what colour to paint the spare room – already, even then, in my head, the baby’s room.

Maybe it was then. Maybe that was the moment when things started to go wrong, the moment when I imagined us no longer a couple, but a family; and after that, once I had that picture in my head, just the two of us could never be enough. Was it then that Tom started to look at me differently, his disappointment mirroring my own? After all he gave up for me, for the two of us to be together, I let him think that he wasn’t enough.

I let the tears flow as far as Northcote, then I pull myself together, wipe my eyes and start writing a list of things to do today on the back of Cathy’s eviction letter:

Holborn Library

Email Mum

Email Martin, reference???

Find out about AA meetings – central London/Ashbury

Tell Cathy about job?

When the train stops at the signal, I look up and see Jason standing on the terrace, looking down at the track. I feel as though he’s looking right at me, and I get the oddest sensation – I feel as though he’s looked at me like that before; I feel as though he’s really seen me. I imagine him smiling at me, and for some reason I feel afraid.

He turns away and the train moves on.

I’m sitting in A&E at University College Hospital. I was knocked down by a taxi while crossing Gray’s Inn Road. I was sober as a judge, I’d just like to point out, although I was in a bit of a state, distracted, panicky almost. I’m having an inch-long cut above my right eye stitched up by an extremely handsome junior doctor who is disappointingly brusque and businesslike. When he’s finished stitching, he notices the bump on my head.

‘It’s not new,’ I tell him.

‘It looks pretty new,’ he says.

‘Well, not new today.’

‘Been in the wars, have we?’

‘I bumped it, getting into a car.’

He examines my head for a good few seconds and then says, ‘Is that so?’ He stands back and looks me in the eye. ‘It doesn’t look like it. It looks more like someone’s hit you with something,’ he says, and I go cold. I have a memory of ducking down to avoid a blow, raising my hands. Is that a real memory? The doctor approaches again and peers more closely at the wound. ‘Something sharp, serrated maybe …’

‘No,’ I say. ‘It was a car. I bumped it getting into a car.’ I’m trying to convince myself as much as him.

‘OK.’ He smiles at me then and steps back again, crouching down a little so that our eyes are level. ‘Are you all right …’ he consults his notes, ‘Rachel?’

‘Yes.’

He looks at me for a long time; he doesn’t believe me. He’s concerned. Perhaps he thinks I’m a battered wife. ‘Right. I’m going to clean this up for you, because it looks a bit nasty. Is there someone I can call for you? Your husband?’

‘I’m divorced,’ I tell him.

‘Someone else then?’ He doesn’t care that I’m divorced.

‘My friend, please, she’ll be worried about me.’ I give him Cathy’s name and number. Cathy won’t be worried at all – I’m not even late home yet – but I’m hoping that the news that I’ve been hit by a taxi might make her take pity on me and forgive me for what happened yesterday. She’ll probably think the reason I got knocked down is because I was drunk. I wonder if I can ask the doctor to do a blood test or something, so that I can provide her with proof of my sobriety. I smile up at him, but he isn’t looking at me, he’s making notes. It’s a ridiculous idea anyway.

It was my fault, the taxi driver wasn’t to blame. I stepped right out – ran right out, actually – in front of the cab. I don’t know where I thought I was running to. I wasn’t thinking at all, I suppose, at least not about myself. I was thinking about Jess. Who isn’t Jess, she’s Megan Hipwell, and she’s missing.

I’d been in the library on Theobalds Road. I’d just emailed my mother (I didn’t tell her anything of significance, it was a sort of test-the-waters email, to gauge how maternal she’s feeling towards me at the moment) via my Yahoo account. On Yahoo’s front page there are news stories, tailored to your postcode or whatever – God only knows how they know my postcode, but they do. And there was a picture of her, Jess,
my
Jess, the perfect blonde, next to a headline which read CONCERN FOR MISSING WITNEY WOMAN.

At first I wasn’t sure. It looked like her, she looked exactly the way she looks in my head, but I doubted myself. Then I read the story and I saw the street name and I knew.

Buckinghamshire Police are becoming increasingly concerned for the welfare of a missing twenty-nine-year-old woman, Megan Hipwell, of Blenheim Road, Witney. Ms Hipwell was last seen by her husband, Scott Hipwell, on Saturday night when she left the couple’s home to visit a friend at around seven o’clock. Her disappearance is ‘completely out of character’, Mr Hipwell said. Ms Hipwell was wearing jeans and a red T-shirt. She is five foot four, slim, with blonde hair and blue eyes. Anyone with information regarding Ms Hipwell is requested to contact Buckinghamshire Police.

She’s missing. Jess is missing. Megan is missing. Since Saturday. I googled her – the story appeared in the
Witney Argus
, but with no further details. I thought about seeing Jason – Scott – this morning, standing on the terrace, looking at me, smiling at me. I grabbed my bag and got to my feet and ran out of the library, into the road, right into the path of a black cab.

‘Rachel? Rachel?’ The good-looking doctor is trying to get my attention. ‘Your friend is here to pick you up.’

S
OMETIMES
, I
DON
’
T
want to go anywhere, I think I’ll be happy if I never have to set foot outside the house again. I don’t even miss working. I just want to remain safe and warm in my haven with Scott, undisturbed.

It helps that it’s dark and cold and the weather is filthy. It helps that it hasn’t stopped raining for weeks – freezing, driving, bitter rain accompanied by gales howling through the trees, so loud they drown out the sound of the train. I can’t hear it on the tracks, enticing me, tempting me to journey elsewhere.

Today, I don’t want to go anywhere, I don’t want to run away, I don’t even want to go down the road. I want to stay here, holed up with my husband, watching TV and eating ice cream, after calling him to come home from work early so we can have sex in the middle of the afternoon.

I will have to go out later, of course, because it’s my day for Kamal. I’ve been talking to him lately about Scott, about all the things I’ve done wrong, my failure as a wife. Kamal says I have to find a way of making myself happy, I have to stop looking for happiness elsewhere. It’s true, I do, I know I do, and then I’m in the moment and I just think, fuck it, life’s too short.

I think about that time when we went on a family holiday to Santa Margherita in the Easter school holidays. I’d just turned fifteen and I met this guy on the beach, much older than I was – thirties, probably, possibly even early forties – and he invited me to go sailing the next day. Ben was with me and he was invited too, but – ever the protective big brother – he said we shouldn’t go because he didn’t trust the guy, he thought he was a sleazy creep. Which, of course, he was. But I was furious, because when were we ever going to get the chance to sail around the Ligurian Sea on some bloke’s private yacht? Ben told me we’d have lots of opportunities like that, that our lives would be full of adventure. In the end we didn’t go, and that summer Ben lost control of his motorbike on the A10, and he and I never got to go sailing.

I miss the way we were when we were together, Ben and I. We were fearless.

I’ve told Kamal all about Ben, but we’re getting closer to the other stuff now, the truth, the whole truth – what happened with Mac, the before, the after. It’s safe with Kamal, he can’t ever tell anyone because of patient confidentiality.

But even if he could tell someone, I don’t think he would. I trust him, I really do. It’s funny, but the thing that’s been holding me back from telling him everything is not the fear of what he’d do with it, it’s not the fear of judgement, it’s Scott. It feels like I’m betraying Scott if I tell Kamal something I can’t tell him. When you think about all the other stuff I’ve done, the other betrayals, this should be peanuts, but it isn’t. Somehow this feels worse, because this is real life, this is the heart of me, and I don’t share it with him.

I’m still holding back, because obviously I can’t say everything I’m feeling. I know that’s the point of therapy, but I just can’t. I have to keep things vague, jumble up all the men, the lovers and the exes, but I tell myself that’s OK, because it doesn’t matter who they are. It matters how they make me feel. Stifled, restless, hungry. Why can’t I just get what I want? Why can’t they give it to me?

Well, sometimes they do. Sometimes all I need is Scott. If I can just learn how to hold on to this feeling, this one I’m having now – if I could just discover how to focus on this happiness, enjoy the moment, not wonder about where the next high is coming from – then everything will be all right.

I have to focus, when I’m with Kamal. It’s difficult not to let my mind wander, when he looks at me with those leonine eyes, when he folds his hands together on his lap, long legs crossed at the knee. It’s hard not to think of the things we could do together.

I have to focus. We’ve been talking about what happened after Ben’s funeral, after I ran off. I was in Ipswich for a while; not long. I met Mac there, the first time. He was working in a pub or something. He picked me up on his way home. He felt sorry for me.

‘He didn’t even want … you know.’ I start laughing. ‘We got back to his flat and I asked for the money, and he looked at me like I was mad. I told him I was old enough, but he didn’t believe me. And he waited, he did, until my sixteenth birthday. He’d moved, by then, to this old house near Holkham. An old stone cottage at the end of a lane leading nowhere, with a bit of land around it, about half a mile from the beach. There was an old railway track running along one side of the property. At night I’d lie awake – I was always buzzing then, we were smoking a lot – and I used to imagine I could hear the trains, I used to be so sure I’d get up and go outside and look for the lights.’

Kamal shifts in his chair, he nods, slowly. He doesn’t say anything. This means I’m to go on, I’m to keep talking.

‘I was actually really happy there, with Mac. I lived with him for … God, it was about three years, I think, in the end. I was … nineteen when I left. Yeah. Nineteen.’

‘Why did you leave, if you were happy there?’ he asks me. We’re there now, we got there quicker than I thought we would. I haven’t had time to go through it all, to build up to it. I can’t do it. It’s too soon.

‘Mac left me. He broke my heart,’ I say, which is the truth, but also a lie. I’m not ready to tell the whole truth yet.

Scott isn’t home when I get back, so I get my laptop out and google him, for the first time ever. For the first time in a decade, I look for Mac. I can’t find him, though. There are hundreds of Craig McKenzies in the world, and none of them seems to be mine.

I’m walking in the woods. I’ve been out since before it got light, it’s barely dawn now, deathly quiet except for the occasional outburst of chatter from the magpies in the trees above my head. I can feel them watching me, beady-eyed, calculating. A tiding of magpies. One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret never to be told.

I’ve got a few of those.

Scott is away, on a course somewhere in Sussex. He left yesterday morning and he’s not back until tonight. I can do whatever I want.

Before he left, I told Scott I was going to the cinema with Tara after my session. I told him my phone would be off, and I spoke to her, too. I warned her that he might ring, that he might check up on me. She asked me, this time, what I was up to. I just winked and smiled and she laughed. I think she might be lonely, that her life could do with a bit of intrigue.

In my session with Kamal, we were talking about Scott, about the thing with the laptop. It happened about a week ago. I’d been looking for Mac – I’d done several searches, I just wanted to find out where he was, what he was up to. There are pictures of almost everyone on the internet these days, and I wanted to see his face. I couldn’t find him. I went to bed early that night. Scott stayed up watching TV, and I’d forgotten to delete my browser history. Stupid mistake – it’s usually the last thing I do before I shut down my computer, no matter what I’ve been looking at. I know Scott has ways of finding what I’ve been up to anyway, being the techie he is, but it takes a lot longer, so most of the time he doesn’t bother.