The Girl on the Train

You have to grow
around them, like tree rootsaround concrete; you mould
yourself through the gaps

even longer citation

The rain started to fall harder, and when I walked back through the churchyard I saw a man standing in the doorway of the chapel, and for just a second I imagined that he was Scott. My heart in my mouth, I wiped the rain from my eyes and looked again and saw that it was a priest. He raised a hand to me in greeting.

I half ran back to the car, feeling needlessly afraid. I was thinking of the violence of my last meeting with Scott, of the way he was at the end—wild and paranoiac, on the edge of madness. There’ll be no peace for him now. How can there be? I think about that, and the way he used to be—the way they used to be, the way I imagined them to be—and I feel bereft. I feel their loss, too.

I sent an email to Scott, apologizing for all the lies I told him. I wanted to say sorry about Tom, too, because I should have known. If I’d been sober all those years, would I have known? Maybe there will be no peace for me, either.

He didn’t reply to my message. I didn’t expect him to.

I drive to the hotel and check in, and to stop myself thinking about how nice it would be to sit in a leather armchair in their cosy, low-lit bar with a glass of wine in my hand, I go for a walk out to the harbour instead.

I can imagine exactly how good I would feel halfway through my first drink. To push away the feeling, I count the days since I last had a drink: twenty. Twenty-one, if you include today. Three weeks exactly: my longest dry spell in years.

It was Cathy, oddly enough, who served me my last drink. When the police brought me home, grimly pale and bloody, and told her what happened, she fetched a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from her room and poured us each a large measure. She couldn’t stop crying, saying how sorry she was, as though it was in some way her fault. I drank the whisky and then I vomited it straight back up; I haven’t touched a drop since. Doesn’t stop me wanting to.

It’s my fault. I was a drinker anyway—I’ve always liked to drink. But I did become sadder, and sadness gets boring after a while, for the sad person and for everyone around them. And then I went from being a drinker to being a drunk, and there’s nothing more boring than that.

the holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mould yourself through the gaps. All these things I know, but I don’t say them out loud, not now.

My head leaning against the carriage window, I watch these houses roll past me like a tracking shot in a film. I see them as others do not; even their owners probably don’t see them from this perspective. Twice a day, I am offered a view into other lives, just for a moment. There’s something comforting about the sight of strangers safe at home.