The Girl on the Train: A Novel

MONDAY, JULY 15, 2013

MORNING

Cathy called me back just as I was leaving the flat this morning and gave me a stiff little hug. I thought she was going to tell me that she wasn’t kicking me out after all, but instead she slipped a typewritten note into my hand, giving me formal notice of my eviction, including a departure date. She couldn’t meet my eye. I felt sorry for her, I honestly did, though not quite as sorry as for myself. She gave me a sad smile and said, “I hate to do this to you, Rachel, I honestly do.” The whole thing felt very awkward. We were standing in the hallway, which, despite my best efforts with the bleach, still smelled a bit of sick. I felt like crying, but I didn’t want to make her feel worse than she already did, so I just smiled cheerily and said, “Not at all, it’s honestly no problem,” as though she’d just asked me to do her a small favour.

On the train, the tears come, and I don’t care if people are watching me; for all they know, my dog might have been run over. I might have been diagnosed with a terminal illness. I might be a barren, divorced, soon-to-be-homeless alcoholic.

It’s ridiculous, when I think about it. How did I find myself here? I wonder where it started, my decline; I wonder at what point I could have halted it. Where did I take the wrong turn? Not when I met Tom, who saved me from grief after Dad died. Not when we married, carefree, drenched in bliss, on an oddly wintry May day seven years ago. I was happy, solvent, successful. Not when we moved into number twenty-three, a roomier, lovelier house than I’d imagined I’d live in at the tender age of twenty-six. I remember those first days so clearly, walking around, shoeless, feeling the warmth of wooden floorboards underfoot, relishing the space, the emptiness of all those rooms waiting to be filled. Tom and I, making plans: what we’d plant in the garden, what we’d hang on the walls, what colour to paint the spare room—already, even then, in my head, the baby’s room.

Maybe it was then. Maybe that was the moment when things started to go wrong, the moment when I imagined us no longer a couple, but a family; and after that, once I had that picture in my head, just the two of us could never be enough. Was it then that Tom started to look at me differently, his disappointment mirroring my own? After all he gave up for me, for the two of us to be together, I let him think that he wasn’t enough.

I let the tears flow as far as Northcote, then I pull myself together, wipe my eyes and start writing a list of things to do today on the back of Cathy’s eviction letter:

Holborn Library

Email Mum

Email Martin, reference???

Find out about AA meetings—central London/Ashbury

Tell Cathy about job?

When the train stops at the signal, I look up and see Jason standing on the terrace, looking down at the track. I feel as though he’s looking right at me, and I get the oddest sensation—I feel as though he’s looked at me like that before; I feel as though he’s really seen me. I imagine him smiling at me, and for some reason I feel afraid.

He turns away and the train moves on.

EVENING

I’m sitting in the emergency room at University College Hospital. I was knocked down by a taxi while crossing Gray’s Inn Road. I was sober as a judge, I’d just like to point out, although I was in a bit of a state, distracted, panicky almost. I’m having an inch-long cut above my right eye stitched up by an extremely handsome junior doctor who is disappointingly brusque and businesslike. When he’s finished stitching, he notices the bump on my head.

“It’s not new,” I tell him.

“It looks pretty new,” he says.

“Well, not new today.”

“Been in the wars, have we?”

“I bumped it getting into a car.”

He examines my head for a good few seconds and then says, “Is that so?” He stands back and looks me in the eye. “It doesn’t look like it. It looks more like someone’s hit you with something,” he says, and I go cold. I have a memory of ducking down to avoid a blow, raising my hands. Is that a real memory? The doctor approaches again and peers more closely at the wound. “Something sharp, serrated maybe . . .”

“No,” I say. “It was a car. I bumped it getting into a car.” I’m trying to convince myself as much as him.

“OK.” He smiles at me then and steps back again, crouching down a little so that our eyes are level. “Are you all right . . .” He consults his notes. “Rachel?”

“Yes.”

He looks at me for a long time; he doesn’t believe me. He’s concerned. Perhaps he thinks I’m a battered wife. “Right. I’m going to clean this up for you, because it looks a bit nasty. Is there someone I can call for you? Your husband?”

“I’m divorced,” I tell him.

“Someone else, then?” He doesn’t care that I’m divorced.

“My friend, please, she’ll be worried about me.” I give him Cathy’s name and number. Cathy won’t be worried at all—I’m not even late home yet—but I’m hoping that the news that I’ve been hit by a taxi might make her take pity on me and forgive me for what happened yesterday. She’ll probably think the reason I got knocked down is because I was drunk. I wonder if I can ask the doctor to do a blood test or something so that I can provide her with proof of my sobriety. I smile up at him, but he isn’t looking at me, he’s making notes. It’s a ridiculous idea anyway.

It was my fault, the taxi driver wasn’t to blame. I stepped right out—ran right out, actually—in front of the cab. I don’t know where I thought I was running to. I wasn’t thinking at all, I suppose, at least not about myself. I was thinking about Jess. Who isn’t Jess, she’s Megan Hipwell, and she’s missing.

I’d been in the library on Theobalds Road. I’d just emailed my mother (I didn’t tell her anything of significance, it was a sort of test-the-waters email, to gauge how maternal she’s feeling towards me at the moment) via my Yahoo account. On Yahoo’s front page there are news stories, tailored to your postcode or whatever—God only knows how they know my postcode, but they do. And there was a picture of her, Jess, my Jess, the perfect blonde, next to a headline that read CONCERN FOR MISSING WITNEY WOMAN.

At first I wasn’t sure. It looked like her, she looked exactly the way she looks in my head, but I doubted myself. Then I read the story and I saw the street name and I knew.

Buckinghamshire Police are becoming increasingly concerned for the welfare of a missing twenty-nine-year-old woman, Megan Hipwell, of Blenheim Road, Witney. Mrs. Hipwell was last seen by her husband, Scott Hipwell, on Saturday night when she left the couple’s home to visit a friend at around seven o’clock. Her disappearance is “completely out of character,” Mr. Hipwell said. Mrs. Hipwell was wearing jeans and a red T-shirt. She is five foot four, slim, with blond hair and blue eyes. Anyone with information regarding Mrs. Hipwell is requested to contact Buckinghamshire Police.

She’s missing. Jess is missing. Megan is missing. Since Saturday. I Googled her—the story appeared in the Witney Argus, but with no further details. I thought about seeing Jason—Scott—this morning, standing on the terrace, looking at me, smiling at me. I grabbed my bag and got to my feet and ran out of the library, into the road, right into the path of a black cab.

“Rachel? Rachel?” The good-looking doctor is trying to get my attention. “Your friend is here to pick you up.”