It is the pale strand of hair moving gently in the breeze that makes it real. That, and not the beating of helicopter wings or the fluorescent flash of boots crunching past on gravel.
Just a simple lifting and dropping of a blonde lock, a skein of summer from beneath a make-shift body bag.
Fifteen minutes ago the train lurched to a halt, the tang of hot metal shrilling underneath. A few irritated mutterings, then abandoned newspapers were picked up again and MP3 players re-scanned.
Then the buzz begins.
‘Suicide’ someone whispers, and a teenage boy pushes his elbows and head through an open window. The train guard, his tie loosened and a cigarette cupped in his palm, wanders through the carriage unfazed.
I ignore it at first, calculating only how long I can afford to be delayed before missing my flight. I am already running late, and my heart hasn’t stopped hammering since the early hours of the morning.
On the bank opposite a group of people collect, frowning in huddles. Dog walker, jogger, parents and children in matching boiled-sweet cycle helmets.
Then more official jackets going past. Walking this time. No hurry then.
I glance back at the activity just outside the carriage, but don’t stare. I don’t need to.
I have never understood those rubber-neckers who crave that salacious glimpse of death, that almost pornographic split-flesh of the human tragedy. I avert my eyes from road kill, and those odd shoes in lay-bys always fill me with a spiralling sense of loss.
So when I leave my seat, and push myself softly and silently through the standing passengers to the window at the back of the train, I am surprised by my morbid curiosity. I have finally become the voyeur, gorging on the sight of another’s misfortune.
She reminds me of the broken wing of a bird long dead and flattened into the tarmac, lifting its grey fingers only briefly into the rush of passing traffic, before dissolving again. Waving to say goodbye.
I feel sickened by my own unexpected excitement, the rush of adrenalin, like the marching of some tiny breathless army within my blood.
Part of me, the decent respectful part, wants to look away, to return to my seat and re-check my airline schedule. But the other part whispers to me. It urges me to stay and look more closely, to peer at the corners of the bin liner, willing the edges to rise slightly in the summer ripples. Is that her arm? The crease of a knee, perhaps? Who is she? How old?
The attendants are soon gone and the redundant medical kits are resealed. All that momentarily remains is the shiny black plastic shroud. A shape too flat, too awkward to suggest that what lies beneath it was once a young woman.
I want to feel sad, sorry for her, but the scene is too remotely picturesque. Cabbage white butterflies flirt in silent pirouettes, fresh straw bales fragrance the air.
I think about the girl’s family, the friends who are currently bolting their morning coffee or drying their hair in steamy mirrors. Will they clutch somebody’s arm on hearing the news? Fall to the ground at the horror of it? Nod with guilt?
By the time the newspapers report it I will be on the other side of the world, and won't read about how she was ‘a lovely human being with everything to live for’ or how ‘unexpected this senseless and tragic act’ was.
At her funeral her parents will show blurred photographs of her as a dimpled-kneed little girl, standing proudly next to a pram with her dolly in it. One of her former secondary school friends will play “Wonderwall” and they’ll all cry and remember how at the Christmas party that time she sang it very badly on the karaoke and then threw up in the toilets. By the time they get to the dwindling cheese straws and Jack Daniels they'll be remembering her peculiar dress sense and will ask each other drunkenly if they really hadn't noticed anything different about her recent behaviour. And then they’ll admit that, actually, they hadn’t seen much of her for ages, and she always was a bit on the weird side any way.
Like this, as smoothly as oil passing over wheels, she'll slip from the present tense into the past.
And I won’t even know her name.
I only wanted to know why she she had chosen today, with it’s sky blue ceiling and the chime of sunshine against the tracks, to finally say enough?
When I stirred under the navy blue hood of this morning, it wasn’t meant to be a day for Death.
I had awoken at four, although in truth I hadn't slept since his return, the pain from my split eyebrow preventing me from moving onto my side. Flat on my back, I had gripped the edge of the bed like a castaway on a raft circled by sharks, monitoring his breathing until it was as stable as I dared hope for.
Then, willing myself into thin air so as not to creak the bed, and sucking in breaths so hard my ribs hurt, I navigated the broken glass on the floor. My head pounded, and congealed blood had glued together my eyelashes, but I tiptoed like a gossamer tooth fairy around his sleeping form.
The bag was hidden, full of reckless necessities and a passport that was burning like a talisman. It may as well have had a flashing light and siren for all the energy it emitted, and every second the silence continued, I expected all the elements of the universe to conspire against me at the last moment.
The hardest part was the front door. With trembling fingers, and complicated locks I was poised to ram him in the throat with the torch should he surprise me from behind, like last time. But he hadn’t and I didn't. When I finally got to the downstairs hall I almost passed out with relief.
Don’t look back at the window, I told myself as I crossed the street where the milkman was beginning his rounds. If he’s there looking at you it means you’ll never leave.
Now I am twenty minutes from the airport, trying not to imagine the possibility of missing that flight.
The paramedics and railway maintenance staff are returning to the front of the train, exchanging instructions and speaking into walkie talkies. Winding it up.
The onlookers are making moves; the jogger back in training, the children wobbling once more along the cycle track. Somebody behind me says something trivial and another person titters. Conversation has already moved on.
I think about her final moments. Did she wait, hidden perhaps, twisting the hem of her cotton print skirt into her fingers, listening to the insects in the brittle bobbing grasses and the distant rumble on the line?
Very soon she will become just an operational number on a clean-up list, the cause of some inconvenience and much sighing. But for the moment the strand of hair continues to sway coquettishly in the breeze, as if trying to free itself from its tedious situation.
“Happens all the time out here,” says a man in a pastel pink shirt which is rolled to the elbows. He is tearing toilet roll from the loo to wipe his sweaty brow with.
“It’s that tunnel.” He nods back to a place that is no longer in sight. “They come from the estate and wait there because it’s dark and the train drivers can’t see them 'til it’s too late. Then bam!”
I move away from him and further down to the back of the train, where the luggage compartment is gossip free.
Leaning on the window, I notice something in the gravelly weeds below. A small hair-clip, plastic pink, sprayed on glitter. The kind of thing a child might wear to a party. It winks at me in the sunlight.
I look around then put my fingers guiltily on the metal door handle. It would only take a second. No-one would even notice. I could easily take it and put it in my pocket. It isn’t too late. She could come with me.
As I slowly squeeze the handle to unlock the carriage door, the train creaks and shunts forwards, and I freeze. Do it. Do it now.
But my shoulders are shaking and I am paralysed.
Back in their seats, passengers are animated with the anticipation of finally moving, heading to the office with a new tale to tell. The train guard has straightened his tie.
The flight will be calling for passengers to go to the gate any moment now, and yet something compels me to stay here for a few seconds more. With that girl back there on the tracks, without family or friends to stroke her cooling fingers. The train groans again, and the brakes are released. We start to move.
Nobody will ever find that hair-clip. Out here in this nonsensical tangle of nature it will remain hidden, until one day, perhaps, a magpie might carry it away. But soon the autumn rains will be here, and the sparkle will fade and the magpie will choose something else more interesting, and it will be buried forever.
I feel a hot dry prickle, inexplicably tight at the back of my throat, as the train picks up speed and our two bodies, mine and hers, became further and further apart.
Back at my seat, which is oddly still warm from remembering my shape, I open the bag to check if my new life is still inside. It is. I finger the ticket for a flight I know, at a push, I could still make. The wound above my eye has re-opened and I hurriedly search for a tissue in my bag before the other passengers notice. Blinking away the hot wetness, I am shocked to see tears and not blood splashing down.
Great oily drops onto my hands. Fat and salty and shameless. I am crying and it is coming from nowhere. Great guttural sobs and stringy snot, pouring from me like an exorcism. I am so helpless to it, it is almost funny.
I feel sorry for my fellow passengers in their initial mortification. I really do. Watching this strange woman with palms outstretched and wildness playing in her bruised and bloody eyes. Overcome, they think, by the circumstances of the morning perhaps. Until my sobs bubble into laughter and their concern turns to horror. And this makes me laugh all the more. Hysterical, uncontrollable belly laughs that have me rocking in my seat, until they look away disgusted.
Crazy cow, they are thinking. I can see it in their eyes. No respect.
© Beverley Sims |
