Girl on the Train

“I wanted to ask you about what happened,” I say. “The night that I met you. The night that Meg—The night that woman disappeared.”

“Oh. Right. Why? What d’you mean?”

I take a deep breath. I can feel my face reddening. No matter how many times you have to admit this, it’s always embarrassing, it always makes you cringe. “I was very drunk and I don’t remember. There are some things I need to sort out. I just want to know if you saw anything, if you saw me talking to anyone else, anything like that . . .” I’m staring down at the table, I can’t meet his eye.

He nudges my foot with his. “It’s all right, you didn’t do anything bad.” I look up and he’s smiling. “I was pissed, too. We had a bit of a chat on the train, I can’t remember what about. Then we both got off here, at Witney, and you were a bit unsteady on your feet. You slipped on the steps. You remember? I helped you up and you were all embarrassed, blushing like you are now.” He laughs. “We walked out together, and I asked you if you wanted to go to the pub. But you said you had to go and meet your husband.”

“That’s it?”

“No. Do you really not remember? It was a while later—I don’t know, half an hour, maybe? I’d been to the Crown, but a mate rang and said he was drinking in a bar over on the other side of the railway track, so I was heading down to the underpass. You’d fallen over. You were in a bit of a mess then. You’d cut yourself. I was a bit worried, I said I’d see you home if you wanted, but you wouldn’t hear of it. You were . . . well, you were very upset. I think there’d been a row with your bloke. He was heading off down the street, and I said I’d go after him if you wanted me to, but you said not to. He drove off somewhere after that. He was . . . er . . . he was with someone.”

“A woman?”

He nods, ducks his head a bit. “Yeah, they got into a car together. I assumed that was what the argument was about.”

“And then?”

“Then you walked off. You seemed a little . . . confused or something, and you walked off. You kept saying you didn’t need any help. As I said, I was a bit wasted myself, so I just left it. I went down through the underpass and met my mate in the pub. That was it.”

Climbing the stairs to the apartment, I feel sure that I can see shadows above me, hear footsteps ahead. Someone waiting on the landing above. There’s no one there, of course, and the flat is empty, too: it feels untouched, it smells empty, but that doesn’t stop me checking every room—under my bed and under Cathy’s, in the wardrobes and the closet in the kitchen that couldn’t conceal a child.

Finally, after about three tours of the flat, I can stop. I go upstairs and sit on the bed and think about the conversation I had with Andy, the fact that it tallies with what I remember. There is no great revelation: Tom and I argued in the street, I slipped and hurt myself, he stormed off and got into his car with Anna. Later he came back looking for me, but I’d already gone. I got into a taxi, I assume, or back onto the train.

I sit on my bed looking out of the window and wonder why I don’t feel better. Perhaps it’s simply because I still don’t have any answers. Perhaps it’s because, although what I remember tallies with what other people remember, something still feels off. Then it strikes me: Anna. It’s not just that Tom never mentioned going anywhere in the car with her, it’s the fact that when I saw her, walking away, getting into the car, she wasn’t carrying the baby. Where was Evie while all this was going on?





SATURDAY, AUGUST 17, 2013




EVENING


I need to speak to Tom, to get things straight in my head, because the more I go over it, the less sense it makes, and I can’t stop going over it. I’m worried, in any case, because it’s two days since I left him that note and he hasn’t got back to me. He didn’t answer his phone last night, he’s not been answering it all day. Something’s not right, and I can’t shake the feeling that it has to do with Anna.

I know that he’ll want to talk to me, too, after he hears about what happened with Scott. I know that he’ll want to help. I can’t stop thinking about the way he was that day in the car, about how things felt between us. So I pick up the phone and dial his number, butterflies in my stomach, just the way it always used to be, the anticipation of hearing his voice as acute now as it was years ago.

“Yeah?”

“Tom, it’s me.”

“Yes.”

Anna must be there with him, he doesn’t want to say my name. I wait for a moment, to give him time to move to another room, to get away from her. I hear him sigh. “What is it?”

“Um, I wanted to talk to you . . . As I said in my note, I—”

“What?” He sounds irritated.

“I left you a note a couple of days ago. I thought we should talk—”

“I didn’t get a note.” Another, heavier sigh. “Fuck’s sake. That’s why she’s pissed off with me.” Anna must have taken it, she didn’t give it to him. “What do you need?”

I want to hang up, dial again, start over. Tell him how good it was to see him on Monday, when we went to the woods.

“I just wanted to ask you something.”

“What?” he snaps. He sounds really annoyed.

“Is everything OK?”

“What do you want, Rachel?” It’s gone, all the tenderness that was there a week ago. I curse myself for leaving that note, I’ve obviously got him into trouble at home.

“I wanted to ask you about that night—the night Megan Hipwell went missing.”

“Oh, Jesus. We’ve talked about this—you can’t have forgotten already.”

“I just—”

“You were drunk,” he says, his voice loud, harsh. “I told you to go home. You wouldn’t listen. You wandered off. I drove around looking for you, but I couldn’t find you.”

“Where was Anna?”

“She was at home.”

“With the baby?”

“With Evie, yes.”

“She wasn’t in the car with you?”

“No.”

“But—”

“Oh for God’s sake. She was supposed to be going out, I was going to babysit. Then you came along, so she came and cancelled her plans. And I wasted yet more hours of my life running around after you.”

I wish I hadn’t called. To have my hopes raised and dashed again, it’s like cold steel twisting in my gut.

“OK,” I say. “It’s just, I remember it differently . . . Tom, when you saw me, was I hurt? Was I . . . Did I have a cut on my head?”

Another heavy sigh. “I’m surprised you remember anything at all, Rachel. You were blind drunk. Filthy, stinking drunk. Staggering all over the place.” My throat starts to close up, hearing him say these words. I’ve heard him say these sorts of things before, in the bad old days, the very worst days, when he was tired of me, sick of me, disgusted by me. Wearily, he goes on. “You’d fallen over in the street, you were crying, you were a total mess. Why is this important?” I can’t find the words right away, I take too long to answer. He goes on: “Look, I have to go. Don’t call anymore, please. We’ve been through this. How many times do I have to ask you? Don’t call, don’t leave notes, don’t come here. It upsets Anna. All right?”

The phone goes dead.





SUNDAY, AUGUST 18, 2013




EARLY MORNING


I’ve been downstairs in the living room all night, with the television on for company, fear ebbing and flowing. Strength ebbing and flowing. It feels a bit like I’ve gone back in time, the wound he made years ago ripped open again, new and fresh. It’s silly, I know. I was an idiot to think that I had a chance with him again, just on the basis of one conversation, a few moments that I took for tenderness and that were probably nothing more than sentimentality and guilt. Still, it hurts. And I’ve just got to let myself feel the pain, because if I don’t, if I keep numbing it, it’ll never really go away.

And I was an idiot to let myself think that there was a connection between me and Scott, that I could help him. So, I’m an idiot. I’m used to that. I don’t have to continue to be one, do I? Not any longer. I lay here all night and I promised myself that I’ll get a handle on things. I’ll move away from here, far away. I’ll get a new job. I’ll go back to my maiden name, sever ties with Tom, make it hard for anyone to find me. Should anyone come looking.

I haven’t had much sleep. Lying here on the sofa, making plans, every time I started drifting off to sleep I heard Tom’s voice in my head, as clear as if he were right there, right next to me, his lips against my ear—You were blind drunk. Filthy, stinking drunk—and I jolted awake, shame washing over me like a wave. Shame, but also the strongest sense of déjà vu, because I’ve heard those words before, those exact words.

And then I couldn’t stop running the scenes through my head: waking with blood on the pillow, the inside of my mouth hurting, as though I’d bitten my cheek, fingernails dirty, terrible headache, Tom coming out of the bathroom, that expression he wore—half hurt, half angry—dread rising in me like floodwater.

“What happened?”

Tom, showing me the bruises on his arm, on his chest, where I’d hit him.

“I don’t believe it, Tom. I’d never hit you. I’ve never hit anyone in my life.”

“You were blind drunk, Rachel. Do you remember anything you did last night? Anything you said?” And then he’d tell me, and I still couldn’t believe it, because nothing he said sounded like me, none of it. And the thing with the golf club, that hole in the plaster, grey and blank like a blinded eye trained on me every time I passed it, and I couldn’t reconcile the violence that he talked about with the fear that I remembered.

Or thought that I remembered. After a while I learned not to ask what I had done, or to argue when he volunteered the information, because I didn’t want to know the details, I didn’t want to hear the worst of it, the things I said and did when I was like that, filthy, stinking drunk. Sometimes he threatened to record me, he told me he’d play it back for me. He never did. Small mercies.

After a while, I learned that when you wake up like that, you don’t ask what happened, you just say that you’re sorry: you’re sorry for what you did and who you are and you’re never, ever going to behave like that again.

And now I’m not, I’m really not. I can be thankful to Scott for this: I’m too afraid, now, to go out in the middle of the night to buy booze. I’m too afraid to let myself slip, because that’s when I make myself vulnerable.

I’m going to have to be strong, that’s all there is to it.

My eyelids start to feel heavy again and my head nods against my chest. I turn the TV down so there’s almost no sound at all, roll over so that I’m facing the sofa back, snuggle down and pull the duvet over me, and I’m drifting off, I can feel it, I’m going to sleep, and then—bang, the ground is rushing up at me and I jerk upright, my heart in my throat. I saw it. I saw it.

I was in the underpass and he was coming towards me, one slap across the mouth and then his fist raised, keys in his hand, searing pain as the serrated metal smashed down against my skull.





ANNA


• • •





SATURDAY, AUGUST 17, 2013




EVENING


I hate myself for crying, it’s so pathetic. But I feel exhausted, these past few weeks have been so hard on me. And Tom and I have had another row about—inevitably—Rachel.

It’s been brewing, I suppose. I’ve been torturing myself about the note, about the fact that he lied to me about them meeting up. I keep telling myself it’s completely stupid, but I can’t fight the feeling that there is something going on between them. I’ve been going round and round: after everything she did to him—to us—how could he? How could he even contemplate being with her again? I mean, if you look at the two of us, side by side, there isn’t a man on earth who would pick her over me. And that’s without even going into all her issues.

But then I think, this happens sometimes, doesn’t it? People you have a history with, they won’t let you go, and as hard as you might try, you can’t disentangle yourself, can’t set yourself free. Maybe after a while you just stop trying.

She came by on Thursday, banging on the door and calling out for Tom. I was furious, but I didn’t dare open up. Having a child with you makes you vulnerable, it makes you weak. If I’d been on my own I would have confronted her, I’d have had no problems sorting her out. But with Evie here, I just couldn’t risk it. I’ve no idea what she might do.

I know why she came. She was pissed off that I’d talked to the police about her. I bet she came crying to Tom to tell me to leave her alone. She left a note—We need to talk, please call me as soon as possible, it’s important (important underlined three times)—which I threw straight into the bin. Later, I fished it out and put it in my bedside drawer, along with the printout of that vicious email she sent and the log I’ve been keeping of all the calls and all the sightings. The harassment log. My evidence, should I need it. I called Detective Riley and left a message saying that Rachel had been round again. She still hasn’t rung back.

I should have mentioned the note to Tom, I know I should have, but I didn’t want him to get annoyed with me about talking to the police, so I just shoved it in that drawer and hoped that she’d forget about it. She didn’t, of course. She rang him tonight. He was fuming when he got off the phone with her.

“What the fuck is all this about a note?” he snapped.

I told him I’d thrown it away. “I didn’t realize that you’d want to read it,” I said. “I thought you wanted her out of our lives as much as I do.”

He rolled his eyes. “That’s not the point and you know it. Of course I want Rachel gone. What I don’t want is for you to start listening to my phone calls and throwing away my mail. You’re . . .” He sighed.

“I’m what?”

“Nothing. It’s just . . . it’s the sort of thing she used to do.”

It was a punch in the gut, a low blow. Ridiculously, I burst into tears and ran upstairs to the bathroom. I waited for him to come up to soothe me, to kiss and make up like he usually does, but after about half an hour he called out to me, “I’m going to the gym for a couple of hours,” and before I could reply I heard the front door slam.

And now I find myself behaving exactly like she used to: polishing off the half bottle of red left over from dinner last night and snooping around on his computer. It’s easier to understand her behaviour when you feel like I feel right now. There’s nothing so painful, so corrosive, as suspicion.

I cracked the laptop password eventually: it’s Blenheim. As innocuous and boring as that—the name of the road we live on. I’ve found no incriminating emails, no sordid pictures or passionate letters. I spend half an hour reading through work emails so mind-numbing that they dull even the pain of jealousy, then I shut down the laptop and put it away. I’m feeling really quite jolly, thanks to the wine and the tedious contents of Tom’s computer. I’ve reassured myself I was just being silly.

I go upstairs to brush my teeth—I don’t want him to know that I’ve been at the wine again—and then I decide that I’ll strip the bed and put on fresh sheets, I’ll spray a bit of Acqua di Parma on the pillows and put on that black silk teddy he got me for my birthday last year, and when he comes back, I’ll make it up to him.

As I’m pulling the sheets off the mattress I almost trip over a black bag shoved under the bed: his gym bag. He’s forgotten his gym bag. He’s been gone an hour, and he hasn’t been back for it. My stomach flips. Maybe he just thought, sod it, and decided to go to the pub instead. Maybe he has some spare stuff in his locker at the gym. Maybe he’s in bed with her right now.

I feel sick. I get down on my knees and rummage through the bag. All his stuff is there, washed and ready to go, his iPod shuffle, the only trainers he runs in. And something else: a mobile phone. A phone I’ve never seen before.

I sit down on the bed, the phone in my hand, my heart hammering. I’m going to turn it on, there’s no way I’ll be able to resist, and yet I’m sure that when I do, I’ll regret it, because this can only mean something bad. You don’t keep spare mobile phones tucked away in gym bags unless you’re hiding something. There’s a voice in my head saying, Just put it back, just forget about it, but I can’t. I press my finger down hard on the power button and wait for the screen to light up. And wait. And wait. It’s dead. Relief floods my system like morphine.

I’m relieved because now I can’t know, but I’m also relieved because a dead phone suggests an unused phone, an unwanted phone, not the phone of a man involved in a passionate affair. That man would want his phone on him at all times. Perhaps it’s an old one of his, perhaps it’s been in his gym bag for months and he just hasn’t got around to throwing it away. Perhaps it isn’t even his: maybe he found it at the gym and meant to hand it in at the desk and he forgot?

I leave the bed half-stripped and go downstairs to the living room. The coffee table has a couple of drawers underneath it filled with the kind of domestic junk that accumulates over time: rolls of Sellotape, plug adaptors for foreign travel, tape measures, sewing kits, old mobile-phone chargers. I grab all three of the chargers; the second one I try fits. I plug it in on my side of the bed, phone and charger hidden behind the bedside table. Then I wait.

Times and dates, mostly. Not dates. Days. Monday at 3? Friday, 4:30. Sometimes, a refusal. Can’t tomorrow. Not Weds. There’s nothing else: no declarations of love, no explicit suggestions. Just text messages, about a dozen of them, all from a withheld number. There are no contacts in the phone book and the call log has been erased.

I don’t need dates, because the phone records them. The meetings go back months. They go back almost a year. When I realized this, when I saw that the first one was from September last year, a hard lump formed in my throat. September! Evie was six months old. I was still fat, exhausted, raw, off sex. But then I start to laugh, because this is just ridiculous, it can’t be true. We were blissfully happy in September, in love with each other and with our new baby. There is no way he was sneaking around with her, no way in hell that he’s been seeing her all this time. I would have known. It can’t be true. The phone isn’t his.

Still. I get my harassment log from the bedside table and look at the calls, comparing them with the meetings arranged on the phone. Some of them coincide. Some calls are a day or two before, some a day or two after. Some don’t correlate at all.

Could he really have been seeing her all this time, telling me that she was hassling him, harassing him, when in reality they were making plans to meet up, to sneak around behind my back? But why would she be calling him on the landline if she had this phone to call? It doesn’t make sense. Unless she wanted me to know. Unless she was trying to provoke trouble between us?

Tom has been gone almost two hours now, he’ll be back soon from wherever he’s been. I make the bed, put the log and the phone in the bedside table, go downstairs, pour myself one final glass of wine and drink it quickly. I could call her. I could confront her. But what would I say? There’s no moral high ground for me to take. And I’m not sure I could bear it, the delight she would take in telling me that all this time, I’ve been the fool. If he does it with you, he’ll do it to you.

I hear footsteps on the pavement outside and I know it’s him, I know his gait. I shove the wineglass into the sink and I stand there, leaning against the kitchen counter, the blood pounding in my ears.

“Hello,” he says when he sees me. He looks sheepish, he’s weaving just a little.

“They serve beer at the gym now, do they?”

He grins. “I forgot my stuff. I went to the pub.”

Just as I thought. Or just as he thought I would think?

He comes a little closer. “What have you been up to?” he asks me, a smile on his lips. “You look guilty.” He slips his arms around my waist and pulls me close. I can smell the beer on his breath. “Have you been up to no good?”

“Tom . . .”

“Shhh,” he says, and he kisses my mouth, starts unbuttoning my jeans. He turns me around. I don’t want to, but I don’t know how to say no, so I close my eyes and try not to think of him with her, I try to think of the early days, running round to the empty house on Cranham Road, breathless, desperate, hungry.





SUNDAY, AUGUST 18, 2013




EARLY MORNING