The Rise and Fall of the Wonder Girls. Sarah May

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       8

      While Sylvia lay in bed not thinking about Bill, Bill moved slowly through the fog on Hurst Road in the same direction and with the same frantic plod as the other commuters—towards the station that connected them with the country’s capital: London.

      The behaviour of the human traffic on the pavement was the same as the traffic on the roads, despite the fact that they didn’t have a vehicle. Bill had been classifying them over a long series of Fridays. There were the tailgaters who stayed on your heel and refused to pass even when you slowed down virtually to a stop; the centre crawlers who seemed to take up the entire pavement and refused to move over; the obsessive overtakers who insisted on accelerating past you only to immediately slow down so that you were forced to overtake in turn only to find them once more accelerating on your right in a repetitive pattern that could cover the entire Hurst Road stretch to the station itself.

      He never spoke to his fellow commuters—nothing more than shifting shapes in this morning’s fog—and yet over the past two years their faces had become more familiar to Bill than his own family’s: to the extent of noting absences on the platform, and wondering why. He’d filled in the hundreds of hours spent toeing the line along the front of Platform 2 while waiting for delayed trains spuriously christening his fellow commuters. There were Zombie Extra, Sid Steroid, The Obliterator, Super Slut, Hobo Becoming, War Criminal, and Dartford Tunnel (so-called for obvious reasons involving over-use by members of the opposite sex), who would have got the title of Super Slut if Super Slut hadn’t already been taken. For some reason they rarely showed together for the 6:08 train. Something that had initially led Bill to the conclusion that Dartford Tunnel was Super Slut on a bad day, which she in fact wasn’t.

      Super Slut always got a seat on the train, and Sid Steroid always stood as close to her as he could; close enough to share both his inherent and artificial body odours. If Bill ever stopped to think about it—which he didn’t—he’d realise that he spent a disproportionate quota of the day’s emotions on these commuter fictions: from wondering whether the festive season would bring about some sort of consummation for Sid Steroid and Super Slut to wondering how it was that Zombie Extra and The Obliterator always managed to get through the train doors first even when they’d been standing at the back of a platform cluster.

      He’d served up a few of his better stories to Sylvia—such as the time Zombie Extra took a seat vacated by a generous gentleman for Super Slut and how it had come to blows between Zombie Extra and Sid Steroid—but Sylvia wasn’t interested. Sylvia was only interested in the names of people at Pinnacle Insurance who held more senior positions than him.

      In fact, she hadn’t only been uninterested in his Zombie Extra versus Sid Steroid story, she’d looked worried and initiated one of her off-the-wall discussions on how St John’s Wort was a genuinely effective herbal alternative to Prozac for the treatment of depression, and how it had changed Barbara Phelps’s husband’s life. When he’d asked who the fuck Barbara Phelps was (let alone Mr Phelps who had a Life), she’d looked at him and said, ‘Precisely.’

      He continued to stalk through the fog towards the station.

      Sylvia had revisited the St John’s Wort conversation again last night and this had somehow run into a criticism of his lack of initiative when it came to Tom and spending time with Tom. Despite speaking to Tom on the phone and seeing him when he came home to visit and get his laundry done, Bill hadn’t yet chartered a yacht for the weekend and learnt to sail it across the Channel like Mr Phelps, who had a Life, had with his son—cross-Channel sailing being, apparently, the Litmus test for those who were, and those who weren’t paternally engaged. So their relationship was completely dysfunctional.

      He was still thinking about last night as he reached the traffic lights just outside the station and drew level with Zombie Extra. Poised on the edge of the kerb and ready with the rest of them to make a road-dash across now heavy traffic, he remembered what it was Sylvia asked him to do last night.

      ‘I forgot to empty the dishwasher.’

      It wasn’t until Zombie Extra turned to stare at him that he realised he’d said it out loud.