Page 7 of The Last Train Home
‘Do you feel groggy or … anything?’
‘No. I’m fine. It hurts. But I’m fine.’
I touch her face, tipping her head down so I can look at her wound. ‘It actually looks a bit better, now you’ve cleaned the smeared blood off.’
Her hair’s wet. She’s used my eucalyptus and pine shampoo. It smells better on her than it does on me.
‘I should shower,’ I say as the news reporter repeats something they’ve said already.
Abbie sits on the edge of the sofa, looking uncomfortable in clothes that aren’t hers.
When I emerge from the bathroom, feeling so much better than I did a few minutes ago, she’s fast asleep. I watch her every now and again to check she’s breathing and sit back down in fresh clothes, watching the endless reports running.
Chapter 4
Abbie
I’m woken up with the words ‘Your parents are on the phone.’
I open my eyes to find a man’s hand on my shoulder. He’s smiling down at me and I look up at him, for a moment too confused to remember who he is, where I am. And then I realise and I run to the bathroom to be sick.
‘She’s just gone to the bathroom. I’ll get her to call you back in a sec,’ I hear him say calmly.
He runs in, pulls my hair back and holds it as I throw up into the toilet.
‘This is definitely not good. We’re going to hospital.’
‘No,’ I snap. ‘I’m not throwing up because of—’
‘Concussion?’ he volunteers, still holding my hair.
‘I just … I couldn’t work out who you were or any of it, and then I remembered. I thought it was a dream. Or a nightmare. I don’t need to be sick any more.’
‘OK,’ he says, letting go of my hair and standing. He opens his bathroom cabinet and reaches for mouthwash. ‘Here,’ he continues, handing it to me along with a clean tooth mug.
I wash my mouth out and then emerge from the bathroom, feeling ridiculous. I’m struggling to remember the finerdetails of what happened. I was sitting on the train. And now I’m here. Everything in between is in danger of vanishing. This man – I can’t remember his name – pulled me out. I do my best to recall something, anything. And then his name comes to me. ‘Tom,’ I say to myself.
‘Yeah?’ he replies, lifting his head from his task in the kitchen. The kettle boils.
I shake my head. ‘Nothing.’
‘I’ve made tea,’ he says, pouring hot water into two mugs.
‘How long was I asleep?’
He hands me a steaming mug, and even though it’s about a hundred degrees in here, I wrap my hands around it comfortingly.
‘You’re shivering,’ he says, removing the cup from my hands and guiding me towards the sofa. He pulls a throw off the back and puts it over me. I look at the tea on the glass coffee table longingly and he hands it back to me, not quite letting go.
‘I won’t drop it,’ I say. Though I’m not sure of that at all. I stare at the TV. He’s muted it, but the breaking-news banner streaming along the bottom of the broadcast is giving an estimated number of severely injured. It’s into the twenties now. I can barely speak. Emotionally I feel numb as I ask, ‘Can you turn it up?’
‘They’ve been saying the same thing for ages now.’ He sits next to me and worries at his hand. He’s got cuts, and I want to ask him what he had to do to get me out of the train, but he speaks first. ‘Call your parents. Tell them where you are.’
Chapter 5
Tom
‘Dad dialled 1471,’ she tells me after she finishes the call with her parents. ‘That’s how he knew your number to ring me back …’ She trails off, then starts up again. ‘He’s on his way to get me. It’ll take him an hour or so to get in from Enfield, I think.’
