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      When, at last, she wakes up properly, Alice feels sticky and hot. The sun has gone down and the lights on the train have been switched on. She squints out of the window into the darkness, trying to work out how far they’ve got, but there’s now too little light for her to tell – just dark, indecipherable shapes whistling by. She looks for a second at her own face – pale, almost haggard in the dark glass. It’s not a flattering light; she runs a tired hand through her hair.

      She scans other faces in the reflection. The man opposite her is looking at photographs on his smartphone, running his fingers over the screen. Alice thinks she spies the flesh tones of naked skin and holds her gaze a little too long, trying to make out what the shapes are – porn? Glancing up, the man catches her looking at him in the window. The faintest of smiles flickers on his lips, but Alice frowns and looks away.

      On the other side of the aisle, a mother and her small daughter reading together cause her a twinge of pain. She still has them: phantom visceral experiences. Nothing dramatic like giving birth or breast-feeding – maybe because she doesn’t know what they would feel like – but other sensations. She’d bought a friend’s child a cardigan recently, a dear hand-knitted thing, and she’d had the sense, as she held it, of dressing an infant: pushing its arms into the sleeves, the wriggly feeling of resistance in the child’s limbs; it had been so strong, so clear, that she felt the weight of the baby in her arms for a moment.

      Alice’s gaze falls upon the girl who’d been chatted up, two seats behind the mother and child; she is sitting by the window, facing Alice. Her face is obscured by a curtain of hair and the angle at which she’s sitting. Her hair is an almost shockingly bright red and the sight of it – the feeling of envy Alice experiences as she looks at it – stirs a sense of déjà vu. Alice shivers, pulls her scarf tighter around her shoulders. She feels spooked. Just for a second she has pictured the girl’s hair under water – spread out like seaweed. Why would she think of that?

      The cadence of the train changes as they enter a tunnel. The world outside – smudged grey before – becomes reflective black. Alice glances at herself again. Her reflection now is sharper, harder-edged. She can see more detail on her face. She runs a finger along the rings beneath her eyes and thinks about an old university friend she’d bumped into at the family law conference. He had aged well. He was so thin at college but he’d grown into his face now; he still carried himself in the same way, though: calmly, lightly, as if he knew his place in the world.

      They had been close during Alice’s early days at university. He would fetch her for lectures and listen to her chat on the way there. In the morning light, St Anthony’s looked like a film set. There was no one else around to worry about or impress and he had a soothing presence.

      One morning, he had asked her to his room for a smoke and Alice, unused to marijuana, had giggled and giggled. They ended up lying on his narrow bed listening to reggae, their slender arms round each other, feeling almost weightless. Alice had never felt so relaxed. She had longed for him to kiss her, but he hadn’t.

      When she’d told Christie about him, her best friend had simply said, ‘Dopehead,’ screwing up her nose. And, not long after, Alice had got together with George. They passed the dopehead once after a black-tie do. Alice had had a couple of glasses of wine and was teetering on her heels. She had shrieked his name as he slunk past. ‘This is George,’ she said, proudly pushing her new boyfriend forwards. The boy never really talked to her after that and at the conference, though he had been friendly, that wariness had remained.

      Alice brushes a hand over her eyes. Later, she will wonder why her gaze returned to the girl with red hair. She looks back in the dark glass to where the girl had been sitting and sees she has moved into the aisle seat. She is reading and her hair is pushed back.

      She looks up from the book and towards Alice. Hers is a memorable face – not one Alice would forget. Her skin looks pale against the black backdrop of the glass. Her eyes are like black holes but, for a fraction of a second, there is a telling tension around them as she squints in recognition and then looks quickly away. Alice stares. She can’t move. For seconds she is frozen. As she stands and turns to look at the girl straight on, she notices the edges of her field of vision are starting to turn black, like looking down a tunnel. She takes a step and starts to speak, but her own voice sounds strange, as if she’s listening to it through water. Her ears feel like they need to pop. She says abruptly: ‘I think I’m going to faint,’ and feels her knees buckle.

      She slumps back in the seat, staring up at the luggage rack. The man sitting opposite her pops into her line of vision. ‘Are you OK? Can I get you some water?’

      Alice sits up slowly and looks over to where the girl had been. There is no one there. She feels washed out, diluted. She asks: ‘Did you see a girl with red hair, just opposite?’

      ‘No, I don’t think so.’ He smiles sheepishly. ‘But I was just looking at my baby.’ He waggles his mobile at her and Alice glances at a photo of a naked infant. ‘You look terribly pale.’

      Alice tries to control her breath. The man is looking at her closely.

      ‘I had a shock,’ she says quickly. ‘She looked so like someone I was at university with. But she …’ Alice lowers her voice so the little girl across the aisle won’t be able to hear. ‘She drowned – the girl – so it couldn’t have been her.’ She realises she sounds a bit mad.

      He smiles kindly. ‘Did you know her well?’

      Alice looks down at her lap. ‘Not particularly,’ she says eventually. She tries to recall the girl’s name. She used to know it. Christie would remember. She adds: ‘I’m not usually like this. I’m a lawyer.’ As if that makes a difference.

      On the tube home, it comes back to her: Ruth Walker. Alice murmurs the words to herself in the noisy carriage. It was a name she’d heard a lot the summer that Ruth drowned. She hadn’t really known her, but stories and superstitions about Ruth’s death had rippled through the student community at that time and somehow things had never been quite the same afterwards. Her name became a way of chiding a friend for staggering home alone drunk or turning down the suggestion of an impromptu night swim. It was as if a shadow had been cast over them – though, of course, her disappearance hadn’t been the only loss that summer.

      Perhaps for this reason, she promises herself she won’t say anything that night. But then a few glasses of wine loosen her resolve. It’s simply too good a story. It’s just a kitchen supper with Christie and Teddy to celebrate George’s first show, which they guffaw their way through after too much Sauvignon Blanc. Alice’s feeling rather giddy and emotional, and it suddenly feels important – imperative – to tell the story out loud, to someone other than George, who had merely held a hand to her forehead and asked how she was getting on with those tablets. She wishes she hadn’t told him about those either.

      So when she finally says it, her voice sounds strange – a touch too high – as she stands up to clear the plates. ‘You remember that girl Ruth?’ She talks over her husband’s shaking head and addresses the table beyond. Christie’s the only one really paying attention, as usual. George is looking rather pale and Teddy is holding an empty champagne bottle up to the light to see if there’s anything left. ‘The one who drowned,’ Alice adds.

      And that seems to get their attention: Teddy puts down the bottle, George murmurs, ‘Not now, darling.’

      Christie frowns. ‘What about her?’

      Alice leans her hip against the dresser, still holding the plates. ‘I had the weirdest experience,’ she says. Pronouncing the word ‘experience’ is a struggle: she is drunker than СКАЧАТЬ