Page 65 of The Last Train Home
Tom
September 2007
‘Tom, will you take Samantha to be your wife? Will you love her, comfort her, honour and protect her and, forsaking all others, be faithful to her as long as you both shall live?’
‘I will.’ I mean it. Samantha and I love each other. We’ve committed to having a child together, a life together, a marriage together. I’m going to be thirty soon, as if this makes a difference. We’ve pulled out all the stops. She wants to be married. She wants Teddy to have parents who are married. This matters to Samantha. It’s important to her. And if it’s important to her, then it’s important to me too. That’s how this works, isn’t it? That’s how a relationship works. I’m a parent, a father, a family man, a husband. I need to give Teddy the kind of stability I never had; the kind of loving family environment my parents didn’t go in for. What happened with Abbie was a fuck-up.
I glance around the church while the vicar is busy doing his thing. Samantha replies, ‘I will’ in the right place and looks up at me from beneath her veil. She smiles, I smile back. This is happening. This train has well and truly left the station.
My side of the church looks pretty slim. A few work friends, my family. Mum and Dad flew over. There’s no Abbie, though. As I predicted. I’ll never see her again, although whether that’s because of what we said to each other or simply because it was the inevitable conclusion for us, I’ll never know.
She wouldn’t answer my messages or my calls. And when I phoned the last time, the number no longer worked. She must have a Singaporean number now. But she’s not told me what it is.
And so we’re back where we started, sort of: friends who don’t talk to each other, friends who hurt each other, friends who admitted they’re in love with each other, friends who have made the adult decision to do nothing about it, because it’s wrong and it will hurt people. So why did being with her feel so right?
I’ve mulled over that for a long time. I could have left Samantha. Abbie could have left Sean. We could have been together. But then I’d have seen Teddy only at weekends, because Samantha’s a lawyer and she would have taken me to the cleaner’s.
She’d probably have filed for sole custody and would have cited the occasion when I didn’t get Teddy from nursery when she went away. And then I might not even get to see Teddy at weekends. I look at Teddy in the front row, being held by Samantha’s mum.
I can’t lose him.
Chapter 44
Abbie
January 2008
I’ve been in Singapore for just over seven months. A lot can happen in seven months. A lot can happen in seven seconds. My mind jogs back to a different year, a different moment. It’s been over two years since the crash and it still happens when I least expect it: that flash of light. And then the darkness. I close my eyes and count to five. It helps shift the sudden unwanted memory of the train derailment. A bit. And I go out onto our balcony and let the heat and the humidity of the Singaporean night engulf me.
It never fails to surprise me, even after all this time, that outside means heat and inside means life-threatening pneumonia, thanks to the intense air-conditioning. I’ve had to rebuy a lot of winter clothes, after I foolishly stored all mine at my parents’. Everywhere is air-conditioned and Marks & Spencer has served me well out here, with its range of oddly out-of-place seasonal apparel. Sean and I laughed when we first saw Marks & Spencer in the malls. A little slice of Britain. And we laughed even louder at their range of coats and jumpers, laid out on a twenty-eight-degree day. And then aweek later I returned and handed over a lot of cash for a lot of jumpers, so that I wouldn’t risk hypothermia every time we went out to eat.
Our first apartment turned out to be a dud. But once we’d settled, after a few months we managed to move into a fantastic new, high-rise block. I’ve never seen so many shiny surfaces in one space. It’s all so white.
The rent is eye-wateringly expensive. But Sean’s new salary more than covers it, and our low living expenses and excess of money enable us to do anything we want, which is kind of amazing. I’m not used to living like this. My mum’s thrilled.
I stand here, on the balcony, watching another day roll into another night, nursing a faint hangover from a champagne-fuelled party that Sean and I had with some of the friends we’ve met through the expat network. How Sean went to work this morning is beyond me.
I stare up into the night sky and stars flicker and glare, brighten and diminish. All around me it’s an intense display. As if bright-white dimmer switches are being turned on and off by an invisible hand, adjusted up and down all over the wide expanse of sky.
Sometimes I stand here and see the flicker of Venus in the clear night sky and I’m reminded I’m in the eastern hemisphere, seeing a different constellation of stars and planets from everyone I love. Everyone except Sean, of course.
I hear the front door bang shut and Sean goes to the store cupboard, which is actually a bomb shelter. He dumps his bag, then cranks the air-con up. I’ve never quite understood why these apartments all have bomb shelters. We’re on the nineteenth floor. If a nuclear bomb goes off, we’re screwed, surely.
‘I’m so late. I’m sorry,’ he says, moving forward to kiss me. He looks tired, his jaw etched in stubble. His tie’s askew and he yanks at it, curls it into a ball and throws it in the direction of our bedroom, where it hits the floor, awaiting collection later.
‘You’re always late home,’ I say, but it’s meant consolingly, sympathetically.
‘It’s not my fault,’ he says. ‘It’s gone haywire.’
‘I’m not accusing,’ I say softly.
He slumps on the sofa, kicks off his shoes, sighs and closes his eyes.
‘Do you want a drink?’
‘Mmm,’ he says.
This is our nightly routine. So much so that I feel like one of the wives inMad Men, that I should be in a pinafore and have a shiny Martini ready to hand over to my hard-working man. Only I don’t know how to make cocktails that fast, so I pull a beer from the fridge and open it. Sean’s eyes open at the sound of the bottle top clattering onto the granite work surface.
