Chapter 7
That hag is so lucky she was paid before the reading. As if she got twenty-five pounds to tell me I’m going to die. I was swept up in the experience but, hurrying back toward the tube, my sanity has returned. If she’s going to con me, I tell myself, she could at least tell me what I want to hear.
I get a text from Mum:
It’s quarter to ten . . .
I reply:
Sorry, will be a bit late tonight, coming!
She doesn’t reply. I start legging it home as fast as I can.
“It’s not real,” I whisper to myself. “It’s not real.”
I’m crossing the street toward Tottenham Court Road Station, when I hear screeching brakes and a loud horn. A car comes to an abrupt halt to my right.
I stand, dumbfounded. The driver gestures what the fuck? at me.
He rolls down the window and yells, “Lady! Get out of the road!”
I collect myself and run to the other side of the street. I could have sworn I looked. The pedestrian light was green, wasn’t it? How did the car appear so quickly?!
I’m filled with sheer horror, but shake if off immediately. I wasn’t paying attention, that’s all. I was too focused on pissing off Mum. Even in light of the news that I’m about to die, I still fear my mother’s wrath for breaking curfew more than potentially getting hit by a car.
There must have been delays, because it’s busy on the platform.
Five minutes until the next train, so it’s touch and go whether I’ll squeeze onto it.
I’m debating whether to let Mum know, when the man next to me turns around too forcefully, knocking me flying with his huge backpack.
I stumble toward the edge of the platform and teeter.
There’s a moment where everyone on the platform does a collective intake of breath, before I trip and fall onto the tracks.
There’s gasping. Someone screams.
“Oh my God!” a man calls. “Someone help that girl!”
I’m on the floor. My hand is grazed from where I stuck it out to break my fall and it throbs.
A rat scuttles off in surprise as I sit up, and a tangle of arms extends toward me from above.
I stand up, noting how I’m basically unscathed but how filthy my jeans are, and then think this probably isn’t the time to worry about my clothes.
My mind is blank; I’ve gone completely out-of-body.
Somehow, I manage to reach for an arm and watch myself get pulled back onto the platform, with four minutes still to spare before the next train.
“Are you OK?” people around me keep asking.
“Oh, yes, fine, thank you,” I repeat multiple times, in a daze. But I’m not fine. I’m literally in Final Destination.
Sue was right.
I stand for four minutes rubbing down my disgusting trousers. A woman passes me a wet wipe and I clean up my hands. The only benefit to my near-death experience is that, when the next train arrives, everyone stands aside to let me on.
One of the people on the platform explains what happened to me to the person in the priority seat, so I’m able to sit down. My mind continues to be vacant the entire ride home. I must be in shock. All I can think about is that I genuinely could have died. Twice.
The Death card is really coming for me. I’m toast.
I return at twenty past ten, and step inside like a prisoner returning from their break in the yard.
Mum doesn’t say anything when the front door shuts behind me, but I sense that she’s in the kitchen. I shuffle down the hall and enter cautiously. She’s standing by the fridge and peering inside it.
“Hi, Mum.” I wait for her to speak but she still doesn’t say anything. “You OK?” I ask.
“Have you eaten all the yogurt?” Her head is blocked by the fridge door.
“Um, yeah, it was going off,” I defend.
“Oh,” she replies after a beat. She shuts the fridge and moves toward the dining table, where she sits down. Her hair barely moves as she walks, and her spotless beige trousers and cream jumper don’t wrinkle as she sits down. How does she do that?
Normally, my heart would beat faster. My stomach would clench. Yogurty guilt would swirl in my belly and I would try to rationalize it away. The yogurt was going off. She wouldn’t have eaten it. I haven’t done anything wrong. It’s only some week-old dairy product.
Mum has this way of making you feel awful about the smallest of crimes when she’s angry about something else.
She will guilt me about yogurt, or the fact I’m twenty minutes past curfew, instead of addressing what she’s actually angry about, i.e.
, the fact I abandoned the party that she organized.
Usually I would work hard to try to thaw her: talk to her about her day, make jokes, offer to buy her a replacement yogurt, until she forgave me.
But tonight I simply cannot muster the energy.
I’m going to die, and she’s seriously worrying about a yogurt?
What if the yogurt is the thing that gets me? Can you be killed by moldy yogurt?
“Mum, I’m exhausted.” My voice cracks. “Can we talk in the morning?”
“If you like.” She places her hands one on top of the other, on her legs. “What happened to your jeans?” She eyes the dirty patches on my knees.
“I fell,” I answer, not wanting to talk about it. “Night.” I retreat.
I make it to my room and collapse on my bed. I know our argument isn’t over, but my head is too full of other things right now. Like my imminent death.
I roll over onto my back and stare at my ceiling. The same ceiling I’ve been gazing at my entire life, minus the time I spent at university. I know every little groove and mark. The years pass but it remains unchanged, just like me. My poster of David Bowie in Labyrinth smiles down at me.
Suddenly it feels like the walls are closing in. My familiar bedroom doesn’t feel cozy but stifling. David’s smile feels menacing. In that moment I’d rather be anywhere, anywhere, but here. I sit up.
Look at me. What am I doing?! Nothing. That’s what. But nothing is exactly what got me here. And here is nowhere.
And now I’m going to DIE.
It’s funny, but for years, I’ve known I’m not happy. I know this isn’t how I wanted my life to be. I want to be successful, in requited love, independent. But I stopped trying to change things.
Take Max. I guess I held on to some hazy belief that somehow we’d find our way back together.
Because ending up with the person you love is inevitable, right?
But how is that going to happen if I don’t tell him?
And my job. I always thought I’d find another one day, but I stopped applying for anything years ago.
I think through all the times, even just today, I had opportunities to take action.
OK, so I’m never going to throw milk over Margaret, but why didn’t I just resign?
Why don’t I ask Angie and Dami to talk about something other than their domestic bliss?
Why don’t I tell my mum that I’m a grown woman who’s ALLOWED to drink to excess until I vomit in a toilet and come home as late as I like?
Why didn’t I grab Max and tell him I would put my OWN pinkie in Ted’s bum if it meant we could get back together? !
Why haven’t I done any of these things, ever?
With sudden, painful clarity I realize that I, Becky Louise Alderton, am a coward. Life is hard so I started lying to people’s faces. Hiding my feelings. Avoiding conflict. Going along with things. Taking the “easy” route. But nothing about where I’ve ended up is easy.
What if this really is it? The end? If I had died tonight, if those people hadn’t hauled me back onto the platform, this would literally be the sum total of my life. And who knows how long they’ve bought me? Tomorrow I might not be so lucky.
For the first time in years I feel the urge to do something. Anything. And fuck the consequences. I pick up a pen from my bedside table and scrabble around for some paper. I can’t find anything except my childhood stationery set with dancing llamas on it, but it will have to do.
For the next five hours I write, and write, and write to the people I love.
At first the letters start off polite. I write a professional letter of resignation to Margaret, a reserved acknowledgment to Angie and Damilola that I’m sad we’ve drifted, an awkward suggestion to Mum that I might be too old for a curfew, a lukewarm admission of some “residual fondness” to Max .
. . Then I read back through them and tear them up.
Fuck it. If I’m not going to be alive, what will it matter anyway?
I’ll be too dead to feel any social anxiety.
It takes several drafts to get to the point where I’m not censoring myself, where I’m really letting it all out.
When all my shameful secret feelings are finally sitting exposed in front of me on the page, I sit back and think about my ticking clock.
How long do I have left? A month, a week, a day?
And fuck it, am I really going to die here in the UK?
If I’m going down, surely I want to do it on a beach staring at the sunset? !
I grab my laptop and start googling exotic locations.
Staring at pictures of places I’ve only ever dreamed of going.
Sri Lanka . . . the Maldives . . . Thailand .
. . California . . . Bali . . . I never go on holiday anymore because it’s a waste of money when you’re trying to save, which is true, but then I end up spending the money on stupid, smaller things trying to make myself less miserable anyway.
The cost of living is so ridiculous that unless I literally sat inside the entire time, I would never save enough to get my own place.
Maybe not even then. I should have just gone on holiday once in a while and bought fewer lattes.