Kit watched out the train window: rinsed light over paddocks of stubble, hay bales in black plastic glittering after last night’s rain. She had turned off her phone. Simply to leave—astonishing that it was possible. She had the carriage to herself. Out there white birds flung up, turned messily in the sky, settled to feed again. She had sent the text from Anna’s phone and Scott had come, reticent, hopeful, unshowered, sleep at the corner of his eyes. An hour’s drive to the train station and he had not once mentioned the drawing she’d torn from his sketchbook. To slam the door on his talk, step out into distances of quiet…
On the platform a nurse in uniform, a man wrestling his paper from the wind, the tracks curving off. Down out of that shimmer the train had come. She had texted her father then, with the train turning real, tonnes of it pulling noisily into the station. Now she wondered whether he had known about Peter already. She heard again running water, Audrey and Treen in the bathroom murmuring grievances, that moment when she had rung her mother’s phone and heard it on the bed. She had held Anna’s phone in her hand—I knew then, she thought now. I knew even before I read their messages. What she had not known, could not have guessed, was the sort of person her mother would be in them: needy, wilful, placatory. Single, she thought. All those xxxxs…
She put her head back, closed her eyes. What was out there was indifference, scrappy and flourishing. The train’s continuous racketing was in her head; it took the place of thought. She saw her grandfather out in the garden, straightening up, looking back at the window: he was tiny, as if far off. She saw Miranda’s boyfriend running away up the road. She sat up, opened her eyes: long lines of fences, stripes in the fresh-cut grass. A road alongside the tracks now; they passed a ute filled with farm machinery, a black and white dog sticking its face into the wind. The train was going fast enough for the shadows on the road to look as though they were flowing backwards. How long was the flight from London? Her father would come. She was almost sure he would. After that—
Soon they would be entering the suburbs. Backyards, the backs of houses. Back, she thought, the train on rails. This week had happened—where? In another week it would be Christmas. That first morning at Sea House things had not known her: chairs, boxes, little tables. They were there still. They had not changed. She thought: If I had broken something…
They would have finished with the doctor by now. When people switched off life support was it an ordinary switch on the wall? Who were they, who would do that? They pressed the switch, the machine shut down, the body stopped on the bed. They walked out of the room, they left the body behind, they went on afterwards. She had left in time. She would not have to face them after they did that, at least. After they’d done that.
In an hour she’d be home. She stepped in thought into the silent house. To her right, the sitting room’s white sofas, greenish in leafy window light; through an arch the kitchen, with its backdrop of glass; and ahead of her, black stairs rising to her bedroom. She saw the house entire: already a wrecked house. The train window was not glass but perspex. Where someone had cleaned graffiti off tiny scratches made a cloud. Someone had written over it, a name scrawled with black pen. There was graffiti on her seat too. Like pissing dogs, people leaving their marks. An empty coffee cup on its side in the aisle kept rolling back and forth with the movement of the train. Her own bag had been on Treen’s bed with Treen’s things in it—too brutal to tip them out. She had all her stuff in a plastic bag still. She pulled Scott’s picture out of it. On her cheek still the pressure of his hand. Last night in the bathroom she had checked the picture; again this morning, before she shoved it in with her toothbrush and hairbrush, undies and socks rolled up in a T-shirt. Now though, she saw the picture in full daylight. The lake, opening out from a curved line, was there, and scrawny plants at the water’s edge. The tree she had put her back against was there. And there she was, close-shaded, her hair unbrushed; the way he had done her eyes showed that she was facing into the light. Smaller, more coherent, prettier than she was… The eyes were wrong. Flattening the picture out on her knees, what Kit saw, all at once, with certainty and impersonal happiness, was that it was not like her. It was not like her at all.