9.51 am

The train is not for another forty-two minutes and it takes twelve minutes to walk to the station. That’s thirty minutes to make sure everything is perfect. Pen has a glass of water. Pen goes to the loo. Pen looks at everything in the silent house. Pen stands and listens to the silence. And then it is only eighteen minutes until the train.

In the hall, Pen looks in the full-length mirror (speculum in Latin). When they’d gone shopping for jeans, Alice had said she wished her thighs were smaller, her hips narrower. Pen just sat on the stool, holding Alice’s coat. Alice had pulled the sides of her legs back, trying to see what she’d look like if she could shave off the edges. ‘Like this, I’d be smaller, I could wear clothes from the boys’ section,’ she said. Then Pen said, ‘If you wear the baggy jeans no one can tell,’ and Alice smiled, a real smile, not like the fake-mirror-pose one. And Pen thought Aliciae Per Speculum Transitus in her head and smiled back because she could see Alice and her in the mirror at the same time. Alice and Pen are giving up shopping anyway – new clothes, basically – for the environment. Pen is happy with this arrangement, she hates shopping, rails and rails of things, all different and all the same.

‘You can go two ways,’ Claire says. ‘The world can be hard, and so you have to choose how to deal with that, hard or soft.’ When Claire says things like that Pen wonders if she knows how it sounds.

Pen takes her blue and pink mac, which is definitely not cool (why didn’t she get a yellow one?), but it’s what’s on the inside, blah blah blah. The house alarm narrates her progress, alarmed to away, thirty seconds to full alarm, she pulls the door behind her, double-locks it. She checks her travel pass, her money, her phone, and puts in her earbuds. Then she allows herself to look up. Here comes her perfect day. The walking playlist starts. It used to be whale song because that’s a type of pink noise. Who knew noise had colours, but nature is full of pink noise it turns out, like rustling leaves or heartbeats. Pen likes the flat, even kind of sound and the idea that whales sing at a unique frequency. But recently she read an article about how this one whale had lost her pod and that was just way too lonely. So Pen hit shuffle and found music on an upbeat kind of frequency. And for now, that’s Lizzo. Pen steps out onto the road, the pavement. No other pedestrians and the houses in their right places. Walking, head forward, Pen crosses Cross Avenue.

Pen’s mother says she can live at home when she goes to college, which is cool because Chloe at school says her mother is counting the days till she moves out and she’s going to turn her room into something, she doesn’t care what, a yoga studio maybe. Pen doesn’t really go to other people’s houses, not after last year, besides, Alice lives on the other side of the city. She has to get a train to school every day, she gets the train with different people than Pen knows. It’s one of the great things about Alice, everyone likes her. At first when Alice came over they just stayed in the kitchen but during the summer they started going to Pen’s bedroom and now it feels normal. Alice takes off her shoes without being asked and she doesn’t even say anything if the room is super-organised or super-messy, it’s as if it doesn’t bother her at all.

The singer sounds really confident and not lonely at all, but it’s not clear how you can be your own soulmate. Pen can’t imagine being so relaxed that you could sing out loud. It’s okay, that’s what Claire says, you don’t have to keep a tally of the things you don’t want to do, there’s so much other stuff to be great at. Like what, Pen wants to ask, though she knows her mother will say she’s great at listening, she’s great at being an older sister – but Pen wants to be great at kissing and laughing out loud and marching, she really hopes she’s good at that, at those, at all of them. (Is Alice already good at them?) Turning onto Marine Road, Pen reckons it would be hard to want more than one person at a time. It takes so much energy just to focus on even one person. Claire recently told her friend Jenny (also getting a divorce) that she was giving up on that for a while, anyway. Jenny was over for dinner and they’d had wine and they laughed out loud a lot. Their exes really were pieces of work.

There’s no queue at the ice-cream shop because everyone else is in school. Chloe and Sarah and Lauren and Aoife. Pen’s breath almost comes in short bursts when she thinks of them. They’re just bitches, Alice says, but it’s hard to agree when you used to want them to like you. Redirect, that’s what the woman-therapist says. So Pen looks again at the ice-cream shop and thinks, what can I think of instead, perhaps she should get an ice-cream too given that she is already biting off more than she can chew, Claire would find that funny. Pen collects idioms because they are greater than the sum of their parts. At first they are confusing, idioms and metaphors, but Claire’s work friend Naomi had spent a whole Sunday morning with her once explaining them, how they were one thing on the outside, but look again and they were much more interesting. Though, basically, some of them are always going to be weird, like if you want to mean, don’t make the same mistake twice, you can say a burned child dreads the fire. But Claire has asked her not to use that one because it’s a bit brutal, actually.

There are seventeen steps down, once Pen goes through the gate, and then she’s on the platform. She walks to the far end, past the real-time signs, past the shelter, the benches, towards the signal lights. This will mean she gets off the train right at the ticket gates in town and so she is one step closer to being perfect.

Last year in Lauren’s house. Just don’t think about it, Alice said. Why was she even there, Sandy asked, as if it was her fault for going.

The display screen says the train is in 3 MINS. Pen checks her watch (10:30) to see if it’s a real three minutes or the fake kind, which is really four or five, but they want you to think it’s on schedule because everybody wants to be on schedule. Sandy used to say that Mussolini made the trains run on time, not-like-in-this-country. Claire would roll her eyes at that one, pointing out the ‘disastrous privatisation of British Rail’ and another fight about the differences between Ireland and England would start. But Pen thinks maybe he was trying to make a joke, basically, and it just wasn’t funny (though it is funny-strange). I mean, if you think about it, she wants to say to her father, if you think about it, it’s never a person but fear that makes people do things, not more efficiently, or better, but faster because when you’re afraid you act in a blur. Isn’t it funny-strange, Pen thinks, that you can’t say words back to a person when you’re with them, but their voice stays in your head, and you hear it and talk to it when they’re not around.

People don’t really understand fear, how bad it is. Or that’s how it seems, because if they really knew, if they knew how painful fear feels, wouldn’t they do everything they could to stop it? Pen thinks about this every time she has to be part of a group project or is asked to speak in class. Even though she has a special sticker on her file, there are some teachers who don’t know or who don’t think, or who do think and still say things like, ‘It’s necessary she develop-some-public-speaking-skills.’ All those teachers who don’t care about Pen’s fear call on her in class. And then they’re the ones who panic when she doesn’t talk. ‘The girl won’t even say boo to a goose.’ (One teacher said this to Claire, and Pen almost looked round for the geese.) Anyway, all the teachers, even the kind ones, think that presentation skills are really important in Real Life. So Pen is sometimes made to speak, and fear drives her, and she hears her voice, fast and low and uncertain, not her real voice at all, not how she sounds in her head, not how she sounds when she makes her friends in Latin class smile, not better, not more efficient, just faster.

The display says 1 MIN, which is two minutes since it said 3 MINS, so maybe things could go how they were meant to even without fear. In Lauren’s house. That’s all she needs to think and then she has an image of the house and her walking up to it, like she sees herself from outside, which is impossible, though they had filmed parts of it, so she had seen herself. After. The school hadn’t taken it seriously enough, Sandy said. But that is also a bad thought, and she hears the woman-therapist’s voice. ‘Redirect, Pen.’

The boat-masts poke up over the wall, wrapped up for winter, though there are still people out sailing every weekend. The mirrored cladding of the lighthouse headquarters stares solidly back at her, she’ll look at it for the one minute left. Irish Lights. People work in there, the guide had said on the public tour, to maintain the lights and beacons in fogs and storms and darkness. There are no lighthouse keepers any more, it seems, not in the way there was in the story she’d had as a child. Pen’s mother had gone off script and invented adventures for Mrs Lighthouse Keeper, even though it wasn’t written in the book, and Pen had cried and when Claire asked her why, she’d said, ‘No, read the words that are there,’ and her mother had said, ‘What did I do to end up with such a literal child?’

To be in a lighthouse would mean constant fear, Pen thinks, would mean being responsible for the light crossing the waves, the weight of all those hulls, all those lives laying on you. She couldn’t have been a lighthouse keeper. It was all electronic now, programmed, but still it would be a burden, to make the programme work, so that your body might not be in the lighthouse, no, it would be sitting at a desk pushing buttons, but your mind, all the time your mind would be balanced out on a rock in the wide water.

In Lauren’s house. The girls had been sitting on Lauren’s bed, with their backs against the wall, and Pen felt like she was auditioning. ‘We’ll only let you hang out with us if you do something,’ they said. She nodded, and wished she had not come. She could hear Lauren’s dad watching TV downstairs. ‘Why did you do it?’ Claire had asked afterwards, then said, too quickly, ‘It’s okay, it’s not your fault.’

The train must be due, but the display screen has gone blank. It’s like there’s no train any more, or a train to nowhere perhaps. This is the problem with signs, people look to them for instructions but if they disappear, then everyone feels lost. Pen knows the blankness only means the train is nearly here. The timetable was clear: 10:33. ‘Don’t overthink it,’ people often say to Pen and then look smug. But most people actually under-think things, like not checking the timetable. Like that woman over there, tapping on her phone, is she afraid that ‘1 MIN’ was just a fiction?

‘First of all, you have to give us your phone,’ Sarah said. ‘It’s against the rules of the club to communicate with outside parties.’ Her face looked like a serious face. Sarah held out her hand and Pen didn’t want to but she took her phone out and gave it to Sarah.

‘Okay, freak, you can hang out with us if you get in the wardrobe,’ Sarah said then and Chloe was saying, ‘You know, maybe we should just leave it,’ but the others said, ‘No-o,’ and laughed. Lauren got up silently and held the wardrobe door open. There were clothes on hangers and shoes and stuff and the rail didn’t look very high. It was like they were all still for a second, just looking at the inside of the wardrobe. It looked small. Pen could have said, I won’t fit in there, but she wanted them to like her.

So she got in. And Lauren closed the door.

And then it was silent.

Pen sees the train light appear at the end of the tunnel, and for this second, it is both due and here, transporting them all from fiction to reality, and the synchronicity of that is strangely satisfying. As the train passes her, perhaps Pen imagines it, but the driver looks like he’s smiling at her. Why not, she thinks, allow herself to believe it? And when the train stops moving, it turns out that Pen is standing in the perfect place. The doors of the first carriage open when she pushes the button, and she looks for a seat, and there is one by the window and once she’s sitting, and before the doors close and the train starts again, she opens her phone, and types: ON WAY! and presses send.