The Stranger on the Train (11 page)

A tiny, faint curl of the lip.

Distaste.

It took him less than a second to recover.

“I won't ask the obvious question as to how it happened,” he tried to joke.

Emma was still reeling. She was floppy, gasping, like a fish slammed against a wall. If he'd hit her, it couldn't have been worse. She saw herself in the window, dressed in her tracksuit and runners, lank-haired and lumpy around the middle. This was the woman who had just been caught stalking someone in their garden at night. Spying on the man who had dumped her for someone else. Emma compared herself to the cool, slim girl who had slipped so discreetly into the other room, and wanted to crawl through a crack in the floor. You knew it, she told herself. You knew he'd be like this. Just get away. Get away now. Don't stay here any longer.

“You needn't worry,” she said. “You don't need to be involved. I just wanted you to know.”

“I feel very bad about this, Emma.” Oliver pushed his hair back from his face with both hands. “Whew. Should I ask if you need some money?”

“I don't need anything,” Emma said. She turned for the hall.

“Can I give you a lift somewhere?”

“No. Thank you.”

Emma kept moving towards the front door. Low music wafted from the living room. The door was tightly closed. Oh, how truly perfect Sharmila was. So very clearly
not
eavesdropping.

Oliver followed her, accompanying her to the outside gate.

“What do you think you'll do?” he almost whispered. The cold air made everything louder. “About the pregnancy?”

“I hadn't decided yet.” The thought of it stopped Emma. She stood there on the path, cupping the backs of her arms with her hands.

Then, very deliberately, she looked at Oliver and said: “Probably the best thing will be to get rid of it.”

That would shake him. It would force him to contact her. He might not be happy about a baby, but no one could make a decision about an abortion, just like that. No matter what Oliver thought, he'd have to say:
Wait. Let me think about this. Don't make any hasty decisions. I'll call you and we'll talk.

An abortion—well. It would be so final. There would be no reason for Oliver ever, ever to contact her again.

“You're right,” he muttered, not looking at her. “That's probably best.”

Emma didn't feel anything. Just numbness. So that was it. That was really, really it. She turned away.

“I'm really sorry about this, Emma.” Oliver sounded upset. “It's just that Sharmila and I . . . It seems a bad way to end things. We had a good time together.”

“Yes,” Emma said. “We did.”

She pulled open the gate. The bottom of it screeched as it caught against a tile.

Oliver said: “And you'll be all right with, you know . . . er . . .”

“Absolutely fine,” she assured him. “Well,” she said. “Good-bye.”

And she left him standing there, pallid in the streetlight, and walked off down the road.

• • •

How she got herself home, she never knew. There must have been a bus, and she must have sat on it. But she never knew.

In bed, she lay and waited for the pain to hit.

“Gone,” she kept saying to herself. “Over.”

Funny, after the first shock, she was surprised the pain wasn't worse. She prodded her mind for damage, like an athlete checking each limb after a fall. But everything stayed numb. The pain would come later; the race still had to be run. She had a decision to make. She was four and a half months pregnant.

“What now?” she whispered into the cool side of the pillow. “What do I do?” But no one answered.

The obvious thing was to do as she'd said to Oliver and get rid of it. How on earth could she have a baby? She had no idea how to look after one. Never even seen one, hardly. She had no money. No one to help her. The very thought was ridiculous. But the days went by, and every time she picked up the phone to book a doctor's appointment, she ended up putting it down again.

This wasn't just any baby. This was Oliver's. All she had left of him. And the difficulty was, she still loved Oliver. You didn't get over people, just like that, just because they wanted you to.

There was another thing. This baby was her mother's grandchild. The only part of her she had left too.

Emma became very short-tempered. She couldn't even talk to Joanne because Barry was always around, stuck to her like a snail. One evening Emma came in from work, her back killing her after a crowded tube journey, and found Barry on his own in the sitting room, sprawled on the couch with his fly open. A pizza box and two beer cans lay on the floor. The telly was turned to the football, loud enough to rattle the windows.

“Where's Joanne?” Emma asked.

“Working late.” Barry's eyes were glued to the box. According to the scoreboard at the bottom of the screen, Arsenal were playing Wigan.

“How did you get in?”

“Wuh?” Barry's eyebrows scrunched as he concentrated on the screen. Then he shot into the air and waved his fist at the TV.

“Come on,” he roared. “Get past him. You could fit a bloody bus through there.”

“I
said
,” Emma raised her voice. “How did you get in?”

The sharpness of her tone forced Barry out of his football trance. He looked at her as if he had only just now realized that another person was in the room.

“I've got a key,” he said.

A key! He had a key! Who the hell did he think he was?

“Can't you watch the football in your own place for a change?” Emma snapped. “You're in here blimmin' every evening. Is it too much to ask that I can come home to my own flat after work and have some peace?”

Barry looked very shocked at her outburst. Without another word, he stood up and walked past her, out of the room. Emma heard the floorboards rattle as he went on down the hall to Joanne's bedroom. The door slammed.

Later, when Joanne came home, she bypassed the sitting room and went straight to her room. Voices floated through the wall. Emma thought she heard her name being mentioned. Neither of them came back out for the evening.

And then, before Emma knew where she was, she was five months pregnant. The button on her jeans wouldn't close. She seemed to be going to the loo all the time. One day, standing waiting for the kettle to boil, she felt a sharp stab just below her rib cage. Surprised and alarmed, she dropped her tea bag and stepped back. Then she felt it again. A brisk, thumping sensation.

Like a foot.

A foot kicking her.

Emma put down her mug. She crept her hand to the spot where she'd felt the kick. There it was again. A determined bumping against her fingers.

Could she even have an abortion now? Wasn't there a law about how late you could have one?

Over the evening, Emma became very calm. All right, then. All right. So she was going to have a baby. In a strange way, the decision cleared her mind. Four months to go. There was suddenly very little time to get things sorted. Money. Her job. She didn't have a clue. How did you find out these things? But they were practical issues, issues you could actually do something about, and Emma was nothing if not a practical person.

Her first step, the next day, was to book an appointment with the GP in Clapham. Maybe she could begin by asking some of the questions there.

She was as taut as a wire going to the surgery. The last time she'd been to see a doctor was years ago, in Bath. Doctors and hospitals made her nervous. She hoped the GP wouldn't have a go at her for not having come in sooner. In a magazine in the waiting room she found an article: “My 45-Hour Childbirth Hell.” According to the article, the woman who'd given birth was twenty-nine. In the accompanying photo, with her blood-spattered NHS nightgown and stare-eyed smile, she looked at least fifty. Emma gawped at the photo.
She'd
have to go through labor. Was she off her head, having a baby? Maybe it still wasn't too late to change her mind. She turned to another page: “How to Hold on to Your Man.” An elderly woman looked at Emma's stomach and beamed. Emma managed a thin-lipped smile in return.

“Emma Turner,” the receptionist called.

A nurse showed her into the surgery. Dr. Rigby was tiny and red-haired and looked as if she should still be at school. She was busy writing something at her desk and waved at Emma to sit down. The surgery smelled of lemon. A row of Teletubbies sat along a shelf over the weighing scales.

Dr. Rigby finished her writing and turned to Emma. It didn't take long for them to establish why she was there.

“Pregnant!” Dr. Rigby said.

She gave a warm smile.

“Congratulations,” she said.

She made no comment that Emma should have come in sooner. She asked her to lie on a table covered by a paper sheet, and came around the desk to examine her. Her small silver earrings dangled as she felt Emma's stomach with gentle hands. She listened near Emma's belly button with a black thing shaped like a horn.

“I can hear the baby's heartbeat,” she said.

Emma's eyes filled with tears.

Back at her desk, Dr. Rigby asked: “What about the father?”

“Won't be involved,” Emma said shortly.

“Oh.” Dr. Rigby looked sympathetic. “What kind of arrangements have you made for after the birth?”

“Well, I'll have to give up work for a while, obviously,” Emma said. “I have some savings but . . . I was going to ask you . . .”

“You should be entitled to maternity leave, to start with,” Dr. Rigby said. “And Child Benefit. That will give you some breathing space.” She made a note. “I'll put you in touch with a social worker. There may be other help you're entitled to. Will you have somewhere to live?”

Emma still hadn't told Joanne about the baby. A pregnant flatmate. And a screaming infant. Emma bit her lip. It was a lot to ask. But she didn't have any choice. Where else could she go? She'd have to stay on in the flat, at least until after the baby was born.

Joanne would help her, though, she knew she would. They'd been through a lot together. Boyfriends, exams, holidays . . . all the usual stuff, but maybe, in their case, these things had meant a little bit more. Joanne, like Emma, had never seemed very close to her family at home. She was secretive about the details, but there'd been something about her dad having a problem with alcohol. Her friendship with Emma and Karen, Emma knew, was what had kept her going through uni. In Australia, when Karen had announced she wasn't coming home, Joanne had become very emotional after a couple of Bacardi breezers and clutched Emma's hand and made her promise that no matter what happened, the two of them, at least, would always look out for each other.

“Yes,” Emma told Dr. Rigby. “I'm sharing a flat with my friend.”

“That's something, anyway,” Dr. Rigby said, smiling.

Coming down the surgery steps into the yellow morning, Emma felt happier than at any time since she'd found she was pregnant. She put her hands over her stomach. Dr. Rigby was really nice. Emma was glad she was going to be her baby's GP. The knowledge that she would have money coming in and wouldn't starve relieved the worst of her anxiety. She felt the waistband of her trousers digging into her bump. She'd been using a safety pin for the past week to keep them closed. This weekend she'd go shopping and she'd buy some proper clothes.

And tonight, Barry or no Barry, she would break the news to Joanne.

When she got home from work that evening, Barry and Joanne were sitting side by side on the couch, surrounded by takeaway cartons from the Star of the East.

“Hi, Ems,” Joanne greeted her. “Haven't chatted to you for a while.”

“That's right.” Emma made herself sound cheerful. “I've hardly seen you.”

Barry bent his head and concentrated on his biryiani.

“What've you been up to?” Joanne asked. “I've been meaning to catch up. We must have a girl's night out soon.”

She seemed in a great mood.

“Wine?” she asked, waving a bottle.

“No, thanks.”

“Not like you not to have a drink,” Joanne said.

“Yes, well,” Emma began. “I've been meaning to have a talk with you—”

“Listen, Ems,” Joanne interrupted. “There's just something. You know our lease is coming up soon?”

“Yes?”

“Well, have you thought about what you're going to do? Because Barry's flatmate's moving out, and he's going to need someone to help him with the mortgage.”

Emma's knees began to wobble. Joanne slid along the couch and took Barry's hand.

“Well,” she beamed. “We might as well tell you. Barry and I are moving in together.”

Emma sank onto the arm of the couch.

“I hadn't thought what I'd do,” she said. The palms of her hands were slippy. “I assumed we'd renew. There's only a month to go on the lease, Joanne.”

“Yeah, sorry about that,” Joanne said. “But you can get another person in here, can't you?”

Not likely. Emma tried to ignore the fluttering sensation under her ribs.

“How many bedrooms does Barry's flat have?” she asked.

Barry's head shot up from his biryani. Joanne gave him a quick look.
I'll deal with this.

“Well,” she said. “I
think
three, but the flat's quite small—and the thing is, we don't know yet what we'll do with the rooms, do we, Bar? We'll need a study, anyway, and storage. I'd make other plans if I were you, Emma, honestly.”

Barry, clearly sensing that things were about to get sticky, removed his hand from Joanne's and muttered something about needing the bog. This was Emma's big chance. As soon as Barry had left the room, she said to Joanne: “I'm pregnant.”

The effect on Joanne was electric. A lump of bhuna fell off her fork. Her mouth opened; her head jerked from side to side as if she was a puppet.