I turn and look at him again. Perhaps he fell. Maybe I am mistaken. Maybe it’s not as important as it feels right now. Maybe I have misread it somehow. He was pursuing me. He was a pervert, a sexual predator – and he fell. Yes, that’s what happened.
For a moment, my body longs for Reuben, the way it sometimes does, unexpectedly, while I’m shutting the skylight at work, or boiling the kettle when he’s away. That strong, silent soul of his. The way he always stands closer to me than he does to anyone else. That he lets only me in. That he takes great pleasure in sexting me from across the room at parties, and watching me blush. Nobody would believe what he’s like, privately, even if I told them.
Oh, Reuben. Where are you now? Why didn’t you come tonight? Can you help me? I think of him on the sofa at home, alone, and wish.
Sadiq is still motionless. I can’t do it. Not without Reuben. Not alone. It’s better if I just … it’s better if I leave.
Someone will find him soon. It’s London. They’ll think him drunk or disorderly. Clumsy. He’ll be okay.
I stagger backwards, two steps, and then I do what I do best: I avoid it. I turn around and walk away.
I take one step across the bridge to Warwick Avenue. That’s all it takes. One step, and then I’m off. Another step follows. And then another, as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow.
My heels – those lovely shoes I put on so optimistically just hours previously – make hollow thumping sounds on the bridge. Two minutes ago they were followed by Sadiq. Now I’m alone. And so is he.
I pause twice, but I don’t turn around. As I approach the brightly lit entrance to the tube, though, I am crossing the Rubicon. It’s the point of no return, the Rubicon. Is that right? Didn’t Reuben refer to it once, laughing just a little, in his understated way, when I didn’t know the reference? Not patronizingly. Just … him. I had looked it up privately, when he had left the room. I had spelt it with a k in the middle, and not a c.
And now I’m inside the tube station.
This is it, forever, I tell myself. Always acting. Nobody can ever know. Perhaps if I spend enough time with the lie, in both the telling of it and my own thoughts, I can become it. Like a chameleon, taking on the colours of things next to it. I try not to run, not to draw attention to myself, but I’m hurrying, my walking becoming running, until I remind myself to slow down again.
A man selling crisps and cans of Coke and slowly dying flowers ignores me, staring down at his phone.
I’m safe. Sadiq’s gone now, I tell myself. Far behind me. My breathing slows as I look straight ahead. At the fluorescent lights and the posters for musicals, the billboards for books I’d usually be wanting to read. I descend underground, and the air takes on that synthetic, hot, dusty quality. My heartbeat is slowing down now. I close my eyes and picture him lying there, but I push the image away, looking instead at the platform as I arrive on it.
A woman is already standing there. She’s alone. She’s wearing faded grey skinny jeans, beige boots, a pink coat. Her clothes are neat, her hair absolutely, perfectly straight at this, the end of the day. I imagine she has ‘offline weekends’ and reads post-modern literature.
Why not her? I think to myself. Why me? How come it’s always me?
I look up at the sign. 1 min, it says. And then I see it’s to Harrow, and I cross the platform to the other side.
This platform’s empty, though I can still hear the echo of the woman’s boots across the way.
I can feel my brain trying to figure it out, to package everything away into little boxes, but I don’t let it. The selfie from the bar, it says. That’s evidence. That woman with the pink coat: she’ll say I looked distressed.
Instead of listening to these thoughts, I turn my head and look at one of the posters. She’s watching you, an advert for a psychological thriller reads. A pair of eyes, brown like mine, look out, until they are obscured by the stopping tube.
A call from Reuben lights up my phone as I emerge from the underground. Shit. I didn’t even let him know I was okay.
I don’t answer it. When he rings off, I can see he’s left two voicemails and a text. An unprecedented amount of contact from my often non-communicative husband. I stand outside the tube at Hammersmith, listening to them.
‘Hi. Only me. You alright?’
‘Hi, me again … just getting a bit worried now.’
‘Jo – call me?’
I could call him now, and tell him.
But I know what he would do. I have known – and loved – him for seven years, and so I am certain of what he would say.
He would hand me in. I know he would. And I can’t … I can’t. I can’t go back tonight. I can’t be marched to the police tonight, and back to that man lying on the pavement. Back to that sweaty, claustrophobic panic. I’ll tell him tomorrow. When nothing good could come of handing me in. Sadiq will be fine. He will get up, and he will be fine.
It is familiar – comforting – to me, to procrastinate. I’ve been doing it my whole life. Preparing for nothing. I will start the essay when I’ve made a cup of tea. When I’ve read the Guardian. I will cancel that direct debit next month. Definitely before the next payment. Definitely.
Nobody follows me. Nobody says anything to me on the way home. I pass a few people near the Hammersmith flyover and none of them looks at me. The universe has changed, for me, but nobody knows. The molecules of the air are the same. The rain is the same. But somewhere, a man lies on a slab of concrete because of me. It feels far away, now I’m nearly home, a tube ride away from it all. As though it’s theoretical, an abstract concept. As though, if I can just turn it around, and look at it differently, it might be different.
I send Reuben a text. Almost home, all fine :) x
I guess that is why I start running. Because I’m away from the scene, and don’t have to act normally any more. And because I keep seeing Sadiq’s face in the bar, imagining him behind me, chasing me. Imagining the police. A manhunt.
I trip on an uneven paving slab, and I can’t stop myself. I hit the ground, and skid along it, my wrist mangled, trapped underneath me.
I sit for a second in the road, tempted to cry like a child, but get up. I check my hands. Only a slight graze. My left hand throbs, but I ignore it.
I keep running and now can almost see our basement flat. My parents and Wilf think we are stupid, that we should shell out for a two-up two-down in Kent and commute in, but we like it. We like to be in London, we say, like it is a friend we don’t want to move too far from.
I descend the stairs to our door – there are only five steps – and I wonder if I will always think of this when I am walking down them; if I will always remember this night. But I shake the thought away. Reuben opens the door before I have to rifle through my messy bag for my key – he knows these things about me, and he is always trying to help.
‘Hi, alright?’ he says, and I see that I have worried him.
He pauses for a second, framed in the light from the narrow hallway, his eyes taking me in. I must look wild.
I pat my hair down, trying to appear normal. ‘Yeah – sorry,’ I say.
He turns and ambles into the kitchen where he opens our large silver fridge, waving a pint of milk at me.
I shake my head. ‘I want wine,’ I say.
‘Oh, oh no,’ he says, setting the milk down and coming straight over to me.
I almost wince as he takes my hands, but manage not to.