Unless

Sound waves bounce and wiggle. A certain pitch, a certain frequency, a certain ratio of noises, and she can’t hear properly what is being said. She smiles and nods and hopes it is the right thing. Blank looks every now and then, and conversation stuttering to a close, tell her she has missed the point.

But the music is everything, with its depth and its range, and so what if this is the thing that has brought her to this point? What is making conversation in comparison with hearing notes on a page or inside someone’s mind make the leap to reality?

If she thinks of the things that might have been said, the things she might have missed, she could go mad with not knowing which opportunities have been lost. If she thinks like that, it’s only one step to thinking about all the conversations she’s never had, all the memories she won’t ever gather or remember, all the paths she’ll never walk down.

She walks down a path now, the same path she walks down every day, from the front of her house to the street. There are moments in her life, she knows, when it is convenient to not hear, or to mishear, or to otherwise twist the truth of the sounds falling against her eardrum.

The sky is high today, and there are smells in the air saying spring is on its way. There are buds of vibrant vivid green on the trees and on some bushes, and the grass on her lawn is beginning to look like it might need a haircut.

Halfway along the street, she remembers. But she carries on walking.

Halfway across the city, he remembers too.

She carries on walking, but her mind is on something else, something other than walking to the train station. She has left it behind in the house. The thing she is supposed to bring with her. Accidentally or deliberately, she’s not entirely sure. She carries on walking and doesn’t know what she should do. She should turn round and go back for it, carry out her side of the bargain, meet him as planned and get this finished once and for all. But she carries on walking. Her legs won’t let her stop.

She’s warm now, and she wishes she had fewer layers on. She walks along the main road as far as the next street on the left, then she turns back on herself, walks the triangle round, and goes back to her front door.

She stands there, like an idiot, for some reason unable to put her key in the lock. She doesn’t want to get it. She doesn’t want to go. She’s being stupid, and she knows it. It isn’t as though she can just ring him up and make an alternative arrangement. He needs it today. Yesterday would have been too early, tomorrow will be too late.

If she doesn’t take it to him, there will be a different end, and one that she will have no control over. At least with this end, she knows what to expect.

She hears a voice, suddenly, to her left, and she turns to see her neighbour leaning around the side of her porch.

“Are you okay, love?” she asks. “You’ve been standing there for a while. Have you lost your key?”

She smiles and tells her that she hasn’t lost her key. She waves the bunch of keys at her as evidence of their continued safe-keeping in her possession. She says that she’s fine, she’d just forgotten something. She lets herself into the house.

Her neighbour continues leaning around the side of her porch for a few minutes more, in case there are further developments. Then, disappointed, she goes back inside her own house.

She stands in her hall for a minute or two, to give her neighbour the chance to get bored of hanging around, waiting for something to gossip about. She makes a decision, and she starts to leave the house again. Then she stops. Again. She didn’t used to be like this. She used to be firm in her decisions, and precise in her actions. Somewhere she lost that precision, along with her direction.

He would be on his way now. She had already missed one train, and would probably manage to miss another, and consequence would follow consequence, but at least she would be there eventually.

She goes to the cupboard and she pulls it out, heavy in its wrapper. This isn’t the first time she has done this. She hopes each time that it will be the last, but this has been going on now for 19 years, and she can’t see it ending any time soon.

Unless. Unless. Unless...

She puts it into her bag, and for the second time today she leaves the house. She knows as she opens the front gate, steps through to the street, and closes it behind her, that her neighbour is watching from behind her living room curtains. She knows that her life is alien to her. Why would anyone who wasn’t born round here choose to live on this suburban street?

Because it was far away from the places she could be found, was why. Far away and still under their noses.

She walked at a normal pace towards the station. Twenty minutes it would take to get there, and now she didn’t know what time a train would arrive, or whether she would get there in the backwash of a departure. She does not hurry, there is no point. She is already late, and if he needs it so badly, then he will still be there. If he doesn’t, he will be gone, and this might well be over. One way or another.

It feels heavy. They always do, but today this one feels heavier than the others. She walks up the main road, past houses she thought about living in until she found her perfectly nondescript bolt hole. She cuts across to the A6 down one of the side streets cut in half by bollards to stop people using it as a rat run shortcut. She walks and walks and reaches the station. The ticket office is closed, and she goes onto the platform via the side path, under the bridge. A man is standing at the edge of the platform. She wonders whether, if she pushed him, he would fall easily onto the tracks, and if he would be angry or just confused by her action. She doesn’t push him, though, and he speaks to her.

“Just missed one, love.”

She smiles and carries her heavy load to the shelter. No Metro News left at this time of the day. She sits on one of the cold metal benches and tries to work out how long it will be until the next train.

Her phone rings in the depths of her bag. She knows which number will be showing on screen. She doesn’t have to take the phone from her bag to discover that fact. She sits, knees together, huddled in her coat, her bag now resting against her belly. Her phone rings on.

Of course, there is a simple way to end all this. She tucks her chin into her scarf and leans forward slightly, curling her body around her bag that is resting against her belly as though she is carrying an unborn child. Her hands are in her pockets. She feels no maternal instinct for the bag or its contents. Just as she feels none for the thing inside her.

She didn’t used to be like this.

She thinks of the way she might end all this. Domino effect, the cascade of events that would follow, one toppling into the other, and her above it all, beyond its grasp. She smiles. It would be good to be the first domino to fall, the one to cause the clatter.

She looks at the man on the platform, still standing close to the edge. He is looking down the tracks, down towards the south, as though doing this will make the train arrive sooner. She knows that looking down the tracks doesn’t make anything happen sooner. It just makes your eyes ache.

She looks away from him, and across to the other platform. The rails are whistle-humming, meaning a train is about to come through. There’s a man standing on the other platform. He is looking at her. She looks at him. They are too far away to make real eye contact, but they are both, without a doubt, looking. She cocks her head to the right. He does the same. She cocks hers to the left. The same. She sits head forward and stares at him. He turns away and walks further down his platform. The train that was threatening its arrival through the rails hurtles through the station, and when it is gone, so is the man on the other platform.

She looks up towards Manchester, along the platform, to see where he can be. The train went through too quickly for him to just disappear like that. He is no longer there, though.

An announcement is made over the tannoy. This time she can’t hear it properly, not because her ears have lost their accuracy, but because the tannoy is useless. She takes it to mean that there will be a train for her to get on soon. Or there will be a train for the other platform. Or there is a delay. Something. She does not move from where she is sitting. She just sits on, knees together, hands in pockets, chin tucked into scarf, her body bowed over the bag that rests against her belly.

She doesn’t hear him coming. She doesn’t hear the whisper as he pulls the gun from his jacket pocket. She doesn’t hear, see, think or feel anything.

There was more than one way that this could end, you see. More than one way for the first domino to fall.

© J R Hargreaves 2006