She was travelling backwards and had the same view that she saw from the train yesterday when she arrived, but this time the flat familiarity of East Anglia was receding. She’d wanted to bury her face in Dad’s blue jumper that smelled of smoke and beer from the pub and hear him say, “s’okay pet.” She’d wanted Mum to give her a plate of cheese and tomato ketchup sandwiches cut into tiny pieces as a special treat and let her eat them in front of the telly.
Across the fields was a windmill with no sails, seagulls flying around its broken top. Jen felt she was looking down the wrong end of a telescope. Her body scooped up towards the ceiling of the train and her head swam with air as she looked down the tunnel of the carriage, at people munching food, slurping from polystyrene cups and calling crossly to their children. They were solid in their seats and far away. She wanted to draw her knees up to her chest, but the table top blocked her. It loomed up at her. There were tea rings marking the surface and her eyes followed the circles. She unscrewed the blue lid from her bottle of water and sipped. She watched her hand twisting, her arm moving, felt the cold swill of water in her throat. Nothing was connected. She looked back out of the window at the unrolling landscape.
Something was flickering at the edge of her vision. She turned her head quickly. Nothing. When she turned back it was there again. White and pointed, moving just out of her sight, frantic. She couldn’t tell if it was inside the train or outside.
She closed her eyes. Behind her eyelids sheets of orange light flashed across red. Then it was there again. The white thing. It was a lotus flower, and the points were the edge of the petals. It was rotating fast, as though it were caught in a whirlpool. The orange light got darker and deeper and red started to seep into the petals.
She opened her eyes abruptly. Two children across the aisle were fighting over a video game, both of them holding on to it and pulling. The smaller child, a girl, started to cry.
“Give it to me,” said their mother.
Reluctantly the girl let go, but the boy held fast.
“Now!” said the mother.
He relinquished his hold, hung his head in a sulk.
“You can take it in turns. Aleisha can go first.”
The boy shot his mother an angry glance.
Jen thought they probably had a similar age gap to her and Danny. When she was five, he was eight, and they played together in the garden. When he was twelve, he taught her the rules of cricket, but only let her play when his friends had gone home for tea.
Her favourite thing was watching films with him on Friday evenings. They would curl up on the sofa with plates of pizza slices and take it in turns to choose. He liked superheroes, and she liked Japanese anime. They watched the same films so many times they sometimes joined in with the dialogue, and then the lines slipped out into their everyday conversations and became their secret language.
She didn’t remember fighting like Aleisha and her brother. She saw him kick his sister under the table, and the little girl wailed loudly. Jen thought about moving seats, but they were nearly at Peterborough. She’d be changing trains soon.
They passed a field of dark brown cows grazing in a meadow. She remembered a conversation she’d had with Danny just before he went off on his walking holiday.
“I want to go somewhere with a bit of drama,” he said, “cliffs, mountains, sea.”
“They’re too obvious.” She knew it would wind him up. “Here the beauty is more subtle.”
“Hmmph!”
He’d done his Duke of Edinburgh in the Lakes the year before and had seen what a landscape could be. He’d been restless ever since.
The train pulled into the station. As she was standing up, the lotus flower flashed back into Jen’s vision, backed by vivid red, dripping from its petals. She stumbled and felt a hot rush of bile in her throat.
“Are you OK?”
The children’s mother.
Jen leaned on the table for a second, regained her balance. She nodded at the woman.
“I think I stood up too quickly.”
The woman smiled. “That happens to me sometimes. Low blood sugar. Here – take this.” She pulled a bar of chocolate out of her bag and handed it to Jen.
Jen was about to refuse when the boy said, “Is that mine?”
“Will we have to share?” wailed Aleisha.
“Thank you,” said Jen. She took the chocolate and made her way down the aisle. She could hear Aleisha crying and the boy’s voice grumbling. She and Danny were never that bad. There must have been times when they had fallen out, but she couldn’t remember them.
On the train to York she found a seat in a nearly empty carriage. She ate the chocolate and it made her stomach hurt. She remembered a time they’d gone to visit an old schoolfriend of their mum’s, and there was an orchard. She and Danny had been about the same age as the children on the other train. While Donna chatted to her friend, Danny and Jen had found the trees laden with fruit and helped themselves. The apples were hard and so sharp they dried your mouth, but there were loads of them, and they were just there, so they ate as many as they could.
In the car on the way home, Jen cried because her stomach hurt. Danny said he felt fine, but he didn’t look fine. His skin was the same colour as the flesh of the unripe apples, and he kept swallowing.
“That’ll teach you not to ask,” Donna said.
At York station a nun stood under the departures board, watching the passengers come down the stairs from the bridge. Jen slid her hand into her jacket pocket. The note was still there, folded up and softening. All will be well.
She’d seen a nun on campus a few times, but Rebecca said she was imagining it. Rebecca thought Jen should go and see someone, a doctor. Rebecca was in Ely right now, and Jen could have gone to find her instead of running away. Instead she was back here in York, seeing nuns again.
Taxis and buses were coming and going, and people waited with luggage piled next to them. One man had long grey hair tied back in a ponytail. He was muttering to himself and watching passengers leaving the station, as though looking for someone in particular.
Jen put her head down and walked quickly from the station towards the city centre. On the bridge, she looked back. The man was walking the same way, and now the nun was with him. She sped up, wove through the tourists, increased the space between her and them.
The pain was back. It was like someone had put a huge hand inside her and was twisting and squeezing. The sun on her head was hot and she felt lightheaded.
At St Wilfrid’s she was tempted by the dark interior, the high ceilings. But she remembered that when she’d been there before, the man with the ponytail had done his vanishing trick. The smell of incense that wafted out when someone opened the door made a vein throb in her temple.
She looked back. They were still coming her way. They were quite a way behind, and they weren’t hurrying. It looked like they might be chatting.
Jen walked past the front of the cathedral, past the bench where she’d met Finn. She didn’t want to think about him. He would be in London now with his parents. She could have been there too.
She turned into Goodramgate. A busker was playing a guitar on the corner, singing in a reedy voice, not quite in tune. She was nearly there. She would sit in the church and rest for a while. It was possible the man and the nun would find her there – that was the first place she’d seen the man, after all – but she didn’t really care anymore. The heat of the afternoon, the people milling about, the busker, the flies buzzing in the heat, the cathedral bells, her headache, the cut on her leg from the broken plate, the pain in her guts, the spinning lotus flower – her senses were screaming.
The verger was talking to some tourists at the back of the church. Jen slipped in quietly and made her way to the seat by the stone altar. The cool air immediately soothed her. She sat down on the bench and let her limbs relax. She thought about the statue of Etheldreda in Ely who was carved only on one side, and Mrs Shepherd who carried her worry in her shoulders. That had only been this morning. She felt in her bag and pulled out the tiny ship.
Once she had found a baby bird in the garden and tried to feed it. Danny said it needed grubs, and you could get them from the fishing shop, but it was evening and the shops were closed. Jen found an earthworm in the garden, but it was too big and wriggly and the bird didn’t even try to eat it. By the morning it had died. Her mum shook her head and said, ‘you should have left it where it was. There’s no good comes from interfering with nature.’ Dorothy helped her find a box to bury it in – a big cook’s matchbox. After they had dug a hole under the hedge at the far end of the garden, put the match box in and covered it over, Dorothy had given Jen a hug and not complained when her blouse got wet with tears.
Someone was standing in front of Jen. It was the verger, smiling apologetically.
“I’m really sorry, but we close up at four.”
Jen looked down. A dark patch of red was spreading across the top of her legs, staining her white shorts. The verger saw it too.
The vice in her guts clamped and twisted and she cried out with pain.
“Oh,” he said. “Sit still, I’ll phone for an ambulance.”
Jen tried to protest, but the blood was slicing out of her shorts and sliding down the skin of her legs like thick tar. She felt the snap of the ship in her fist, then the pain took fire and enveloped her body.