Chapter 12 #2
The comments are an echo of many others like it, that she’s heard before.
Instantly it stirs the dreadful memories of times when she truly believed that if she could just restrict what she put in her body, then everything would be better.
Of a seventeen-year-old who couldn’t make sense of why she loathed herself, but was sure that her physical body was the most likely place she would find the answer – in a more pronounced clavicle, a more jutting hip bone, a less rounded bum, a more concave stomach.
She did not want to be the kind of person that men looked at and accused of having anything as unseemly and unladylike as an appetite.
She didn’t want to be the kind of woman that blokes described as ‘liking her food’, or that a grandparent might refer to as having ‘child-bearing hips’.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I said that your bun eating is awfully impressive!’ He is relentlessly cheerful, it clearly not occurring to him that there might be a world in which a woman sitting alone on an empty train might not want to be provided with a running commentary on her snack choices.
‘I’ve been watching you savour it from the other end of the carriage, and I thought to myself, “She looks like the kind of jolly girl who is in need of some company,” so I took a gamble on coming over and saying hello. ’
His right hand slips on to her left thigh.
Olivia knows, in this moment, what she would do if this had happened four days ago.
She would have turned and smiled politely, keen not to make a scene, or offend this man she doesn’t know and hasn’t asked to know and whose hand she certainly doesn’t want to feel creeping up her thigh.
Then she would have made up some sort of excuse about needing the toilet, bundling up her stuff and scurrying off to another carriage where she would spend the rest of the journey desperately hoping that he hadn’t followed her, questioning what she had done to invite his attention – was her bun eating unnecessarily suggestive?
Did the way she licked her fingers signal some sort of proposition?
– before coming to the conclusion that she was almost certainly the problem for reading too much into his innocent gesture.
The man was probably just trying to be nice, he was only a product of his time and circumstances and, honestly, it wasn’t as if he had done anything too invasive, and why did she have to go and make it awkward by getting up and moving seats?
But this has happened today, and Olivia Greenwood will not do any of these things. She will not let this thoughtless man impinge on her personal space in the name of being polite and remaining cordial. Where has being polite and remaining cordial ever got her, anyway?
She will not be made to feel uncomfortable for simply existing.
She will not punish herself for having the audacity to relax as a solitary woman on an almost empty train in the middle of the day.
She will not be a welcoming thigh for an entitled old man.
She thinks of Rose, the feminist angel who now sits on her shoulder, and decides to use the powers the mysterious young woman has bestowed on her for the greater good.
Just as Superman found that the destruction of his home planet and subsequent death of his parents had given him the power to help people on Earth, so Olivia Greenwood will accept the extinction of every people-pleasing bone in her body and turn that fiery energy against all the perverts who blight the UK’s local train services.
She clears his hand from her leg roughly and looks at him straight in his slightly bloodshot eyes, notices the poppy on his Barbour jacket, even though it’s April.
‘There’s no need to be quite so hostile!’ he says, putting his hands up in a manner that suggests she has pointed a gun at him.
‘I think you’ll find there is, actually,’ says Olivia.
‘I was just trying to be friendly,’ squirms the man.
‘Do I look like I need a friend? Do I look like I’m sitting here crying out for friends?’
‘Well, we all know that a woman losing herself in sweet treats usually needs a little TLC.’
‘Oh, do we now? Do they teach that at dickhead school?’
‘I beg your pardon!’
‘No, it was me who was begging the pardon a moment ago, when you so rudely sat down and put your hand on my thigh, as I innocently sat here eating a bun because I’m hungry.
And do you know why I’m hungry? I’m hungry because for my entire life, I’ve been told that women are only allowed sweet treats when they’re having a bad time.
When they’re suffering. When a man dumps them, boo hoo hoo.
’ Olivia mimes crying with her fists. ‘Why else would a lady dare ruin her figure, unless she was in a significant amount of distress? Because, as we all know, women must eat dainty little rabbit food or risk looking unattractive to the opposite sex.’
The man rolls his eyes, huffs at her. ‘I was only trying to be civil.’
‘Civil!’ She removes her feet from the seat in front of her, goes to gather her bag from under the table.
‘Is that what you call it? If you truly wanted to be civil, you’d have stayed in your seat and stopped staring at me as I was eating my cinnamon bun.
You’d have left me well alone instead of coming over here and feeling me up, you dirty old pervert.
Do you spend your day riding up and down the Southern train line so you can target women on their own? Shame on you!’
‘How dare you!’ Now he stands up, as the train slows down in its approach to a station.
‘I am not a pervert, I’m just a retired man going about his day trying to make polite conversation.
I wasn’t feeling you up and nor would I want to.
’ He spits this out, as if his rejection might somehow provide the final, wounding blow.
‘Honestly, what has become of this world, when you can’t even say hello to a lady and accidentally brush her leg without being accused of impropriety! ’
‘Oh my god, are you for real?’ Olivia stands up too now.
‘Do you have daughters? Granddaughters? Have you ever thought to ask them how often they are bothered by men just going about their days, trying to make “polite conversation”?’ She does quote marks in the air as he stands in the aisle, looking terrified.
‘You know, when I was about twenty-nine, I was walking down the street looking absolutely miserable because guess what? I’d just had a miscarriage.
The second in a year. I was feeling absolutely wretched, as I’m sure you can imagine, but obviously I couldn’t take time off because, you know, women’s trouble.
’ She does jazz hands. ‘I mean, I’d basically given birth to a blood clot in the toilet two days before, and I was telling myself that it was OK because at least I didn’t have to have a D&C this time.
Do you know what a D&C is, sir? Has anyone ever explained to you what it involves?
’ Olivia moves across the seats and into the aisle, because she needs him to hear this, she needs him to hear this on behalf of all the people who haven’t heard it.
‘A D&C stands for dilation and curettage. Sounds good, doesn’t it?
It basically involves a nurse scraping out your uterus. ’
He winces and moves back as the train pulls into the station. ‘I don’t need to know, thank you very much.’
‘Oh, you do, you absolutely do. Because if you know this, then maybe you’ll think twice about invading a woman’s space to say a jolly hello.
Anyway, there I was, walking down the street near the office, and I’m crossing the street at some traffic lights, and a man in a fluorescent yellow tabard is coming towards me, in the opposite direction, and do you know what he says to me? ’
The man in the corduroy trousers and woolly jumper continues backing up the aisle towards the door, Olivia following in his wake, despite the fact that she is easily a head shorter than him.
He backs into the glass doors to the vestibule, and now Olivia is standing right in front of him, her cappuccino in one hand and the empty Gail’s wrapper in the other.
‘He says, “Cheer up, love, it might never happen.”’
Olivia stands in silence, unexpected tears now pricking her eyes.
‘You’re mad,’ says the man.
Olivia lets out a deranged cackle. ‘Wouldn’t you be?’
‘I was only trying to be nice,’ he says, pressing the door button. ‘Can someone HELP?’ He is shouting down the train. ‘Please, I’m being harassed!’
Olivia continues her demented laughing. ‘You’re being harassed!’ She tries not to spill her coffee as she clutches her stomach in mirth. ‘I’ll give you harassed!’
Then she throws the remainder of her cappuccino over the man, just as the British Transport Police appear on the platform.