His wife brings in his dinner: jerk chicken and sweet potato mash, his favourite. He thanks her and picks up his knife and fork, but there’s little chance of him eating, and when he turns to see her looking back from the doorway, smiles and says thanks again, he can see that she knows it, too.
He’s been picking at his food ever since it happened. He’s also been sleeping a lot during the day, which he thinks is strange, because he’s always been so active, and when he wakes to find his wife standing over him, he can tell that he has not been sleeping peacefully.
‘Shush,’ she tells him. ‘Why don’t you ask the doctor for something?’
But he doesn’t believe in popping pills for this and that; never has. He knows that it will pass eventually; and, anyway, he would worry about what kind of a man he was if he were not changed by it. If he were dreaming sweet dreams and eating like a horse.
‘It’s always worse underground,’ another driver told him. ‘You were lucky in a way. Easier than when you come barrelling out of that tunnel into a station, see that flash of colour as some nutter jumps at the last minute.’
Michael nodded, kept his own council, same as always. The man doing all the talking had never had ‘one under’, but he claimed to know plenty of drivers who had.
There was no shortage of war stories. Myths and misinformation.
‘Yeah, definitely rougher underground,’ the man said.
Two, though. Two of them…
‘How high’s that bridge up there, anyway? Forty, forty-five feet? They were probably both dead before you came along. Nothing you could have done, mate, not a bloody thing. That’s something you can rest easy about.’
That driver and several others poured whisky down his neck the day after. He let them, although all he wanted was to go home, crawl between his sheets for a while.
He simply nodded and took another drink.
But he had seen it, seen the woman. Had seen an arm move and seen her raise her head, turn away when the train was almost on her. That was when he had closed his eyes, waiting for the bump. It had been no more, not really, than that time he’d hit a fox on the last run north up to Mill Hill East.
He sits in the front room. The television is on, but the sound is muted. Dinnertime already? It was only half- past ten last time he looked at his watch. He thinks it might be a good sign that the days are moving by a little faster now. The first few felt like they would never end. All the advice and talking in lowered voices.
He needs to ring in and ask when he can come back. Someone from the union came round, but it was all so damned fast and he didn’t really take it in. Two weeks’ compulsory ‘rest’, was it?
His daughter called the day after and offered to come home, but he didn’t want to drag her away from college so told her he was fine. Now, he wishes she was there. He could talk to her in a way he could never talk to Lizzie, which was stupid, but there you go. He knew his daughter would cope with it all better, with how he was.
‘It was their choice, Dad,’ his daughter said on the phone. ‘You were unlucky, that’s all.’ That was before it all came out in the newspapers, of course. Choice had nothing to do with what happened to that woman and her boy.
He saw the bodies dropping, of course, the arms and legs, the woman’s skirt blowing up around her waist. Just enough time for the wrench in his belly before he was on them, bracing himself for it.
There’s a mess of papers on the floor by the side of his armchair, and half a dozen paperbacks piled up on the dining table. He’s always loved reading, would come home on a Monday with four books from the library, regular as clockwork. Lizzie had gone and fetched this lot for him, told him it would help to take his mind off things, but he only picked at them, same as the food. The books he likes, thrillers and whatnot, don’t seem fitting somehow, and he can no more read one of Lizzie’s romances than fly.
‘All hearts and flowers and kissy-kissy,’ he said to her once.
‘Nothing wrong with that.’ She pulled a face. ‘Better than all that blood and badness you seem to like so much.’
She comes in ten minutes later and takes away his untouched plate. Says it doesn’t matter. He’s wondering whose job it is to clean up the front of the train afterwards. Thinking that there’s always someone worse off than yourself.
‘I think I’ll take the paper to bed,’ Michael says.
He goes up and gets into bed in his underpants, shuts his eyes and hopes there won’t be any dreams. He hears a door close somewhere downstairs, feels it through the bedroom floor.
Just a bump. No more, not really, than when he hit that fox.
MY JOURNAL
16 October
So, all over bar the shouting and famous last words’ time. Last words in these pages at least, whichever way things turn out later. I should probably try to think of something deep and meaningful, but it’s hard to focus at the moment, feeling like this. Ironic that today of all days the headache should flare up this badly. I should probably lie down in the dark for a while, but there isn’t time. Things are going to kick off soon.
A nice, friendly card game.
All through this, I’ve been wondering what my father would have said about what I was doing. I can only hope that he would have approved, but I’ll never know for sure. He didn’t really want to talk about what he’d done, those women that he went inside for. Maybe it was because he didn’t understand it, at least not until the tumour was discovered. But either way, he preferred to keep it all to himself and, much as I was desperate to know, I had to respect that. He decided to keep quiet. That’s where we differ.
If the worst happens and I end up in the same situation, they won’t be able to shut me up. I’ll be happy bending any sod’s ear. It’ll be solitary confinement for me, just to give everyone else in there a rest!
Have I made a point doing this? I think so. Has it changed anything? It’s changed me, which I’ll probably have to settle for. Those last words? Well, I suppose it depends on who I’m writing them for. The select few who will ever get to read this. It will probably get read out in court, nice and dramatic, so the more sensitive members of the jury can catch their breath or fight back a tear or two. The juicier bits will almost certainly be picked out as headlines in the red-tops, which will be worth a few quid extra to my old mate in the newsagent’s. And I know every page is going to get pored over endlessly later on by the shrinks and the documentary-makers.
Best of luck.
The thing is, though, I’m not sure I care about impressing any of them. Any of you.
At the end of the day, especially a day as important as this one, I can’t waste valuable time trying to come up with something profound.
So, fuck it.
Fingers crossed.
FORTY-FOUR
Thorne laid down the final page of the file; a thick sheaf photocopied from the dog-eared notebook found among Dowd’s things at Grass-up Grange. The journal dated back to the day of Raymond Garvey’s death in Addenbrooke’s Hospital after the operation on his tumour. The day when everything had changed.
The day when Anthony Garvey had begun making plans.
Thorne reached for his beer and drank deep from the can. He needed it.
‘What’s going to happen to Jason?’ Louise asked.
‘It’s down to Social Services,’ Thorne said. ‘Foster care in the short term, I suppose.’
‘Their history’s not great with him, though, is it?’
