Five(66)
The driver has to say to her, “Your belt, please, love,” when the seat belt indicator bell in the car goes off, because she has not put it on yet. But he drives off anyway to make space for the queue of cars behind him.
“I’m almost done,” To Do List says, referring to the fact that she is almost done pulling off her restrictive high-waisted tummy control undergarment. She would not ordinarily do this in front of a man, but she no longer cares what anyone thinks of her. She just wants to breathe and restore circulation to her abdomen.
“Oh, thank God,” she groans in relief, when she finally shimmies the body-contouring undershorts down to her swollen ankle. “That’s better,” she says, as she presses the button to lower her window, throws her oppressor onto the side of the road, and fastens her seat belt. And then she stares out the window for the rest of the ride, wondering what it means that she wants to go anywhere but home.
Later, after she gives her presentation to a colleague to deliver for her at work, she goes for a drink at the bar in the luxury hotel next door to her office. She will meet a silver-haired gentleman, allow him to buy her several drinks, and then go upstairs with him to his room. She will feel appreciated and adored. She will feel free now that she has escaped the prison of her shapewear, and she will be in the arms of a stranger who will find it far more alluring that she is wearing no undergarments at all.
To Do List will arrive home the next morning, hungover and tearful, grateful to have forgotten the morning on the platform for a while but hit with the wrecking-ball memory of it when she enters her house. She will be home in time for her supermarket delivery. She will remember the silver fox she bedded, and the alarm she set off, Emma’s scream, and trying to help, and of course, the death, the awful death, and she will insist to the delivery man that she ordered Pink Lady apples, and she will be devastated to learn that she did not.
Bad Back, unfortunately, does not, like To Do List, simply walk away from the platform to have liberating sex with a stranger. He is taken out of the station on a gurney. All he can hear as he stares blankly at the sky is an argument between what sounds like an older lady and a police officer.
“But we have a brunch! At a five-star hotel!” he hears.
“Sorry, madam, there’s nothing I can do, take a taxi like everyone else, or go home,” he hears.
Bad Back can’t lift his head to see who’s speaking. It even hurts to close his eyes, so he tries to focus on the clouds and sees a bird fly overhead before he is lifted into the ambulance.
He was injured when he ran behind Emma and Gideon, who were struggling with Liam, and he broke their fall. Bad Back remembers grabbing them both, pulling them away from Liam and the edge of the platform. And no one was more surprised than he was. But when they all fell backward onto the concrete, he threw out his back in a very real way. He finally did something to help someone but then found himself on the ground in spasms of paralyzing pain.
As he looks at the bird flying free, Bad Back knows there is an important lesson for him in the irony of this moment, but he decides to put off learning it until the muscle relaxers kick in. Later, he will feel embarrassed by his pretense of pain on the platform, his inertia and cowardice until the last moment, but he will also remember that he helped. He will tell his wife that he almost died saving a mother and child, and she will postpone filing for divorce, in case the experience has made him a changed man. And it has, though not the man that either of them had hoped for.
For a while, with his marriage on the mend he will start to feel better about himself and life in general, because he has proof now that he is a good person, or at least not as shit as he thought he was.
But when the prescription painkillers they give him that make him feel this way run out, he will put one hand on his lower back and limp and overstate his pain and get another prescription, just to tide him over, just until he feels better. And then he’ll change doctors to get the next prescription. And then he’ll find other ways to get it because he needs it for his pain, which will no longer be in his back but in a place inside himself that he doesn’t know the name for.
As word spreads through the suburb that the station is closed, the crowd begins to recede behind the yellow caution tape as people find alternate routes to their destinations. Groups of teenagers meander toward the bus stop to get to school. They are young, and as they take their detours to the corner shop or the café for hot chocolate and let the first few buses pass, they do not realize the human cost of their morning’s unexpected leisure and enjoy the luxury of their youth.
The middle-aged commuters lined up for taxis outside the station at the taxi stand are annoyed, and tired, and acutely alert to any queue jumping. There are natural problem solvers among them who try to organize the group to share rides according to destination. There are solitary souls among them who would rather poke their own eyes out than have to share a taxi with a stranger, so they stand aside to wait. They pass the time by mentally reconfiguring their schedules, sending texts about being late, and asking for favors from other parents to pick up their children later. A few of them check the morning’s news on Metro and The Standard online and the railway website for live updates.
They read, “Severe disruption due to person hit by a train,” which they already knew. A few of them shudder, a few think, Bloody hell, a few imagine the body parts strewn on the track and try to banish the thought. A recent widow gives up on the taxi queue and heads for the bus stop, wondering about the people who love the person who died, and how they may not yet know their love is now in the past tense.