The Train by Sarah Bourne (fiction books to read txt) 📕

buttocks and the sting of a ruler across the wrist when he was caught daydreaming.

He noticed he was feeling tight in the chest and closed his eyes. He recognised the signs of stress. He lived with it almost constantly these days. Right now he was unsure if he was more upset for the jumper or himself.

His doctor had said the cancer was discrete and there was no point in doing more than watching and waiting but Ray wasn’t happy with that. He had nightmares about being engulfed by alien beings, amorphous, ugly, voracious. It didn’t take Freud to work out what they were about. He was scared. Who wouldn’t be? So he was on his way to Harley Street for a second opinion.

He had asked around at work, men he thought might know about these things, who were of a certain age, and Michael Montague from Compliance had given him the name of this doctor.

‘He’s the man to go to for these things,’ Michael had said. These things being prostate cancer. He couldn’t even bring himself to say it.

‘How do you know?’ Ray had asked. He wanted the source, wanted to make sure it wasn’t his wife’s hairdresser who had mentioned him, or a friend who had since died from his cancer.

‘Remember Anthony Ballard? He had it, went to see this chap, now he’s right as rain. Fighting fit. Plays eighteen holes of golf twice a week and can still beat me at tennis.’

Ray noted that Michael still couldn’t bring himself to say the C word, or even the name of the urologist he was recommending. He’d written the name and number down as if not saying them aloud offered some magic protection from being affected. Infected.

‘Great, thanks,’ Ray had said, and entered the name and number into his phone before throwing the piece of paper in the bin.

‘Don’t mention it. Let me know how you go. See you on the golf course,’ said Michael.

That’d be right. Let me know if you get better but not if you don’t. Ray didn’t play golf and couldn’t imagine himself starting in celebration of being successfully treated.

Out the window the green fields and hedges were bursting with summer flowers. The cows in the field were being herded towards a milking barn, heads down, udders swaying, the farmer studiously ignoring what was happening not a hundred yards away.

Suddenly he felt like weeping. He was terrified and all alone. Russell was like Michael; he couldn’t talk about Ray’s cancer either. He’d got all tight-lipped and pale when Ray first told him he thought something was wrong and refused to go to the doctor with him. Ray had found him crying in the bathroom later and hadn’t mentioned it again. He hadn’t even told him he was taking the day off to see Dr Moncrieff today. He sighed, took more deep breaths.

The young woman sitting next to him wearing an army surplus coat several sizes too large, got her phone out and made a call.

‘Hey, Maddie – you’ll never guess what – the train ran into someone. Like a real person. And now we’re sitting in the middle of a field and no one’s told us what’s going on and when we’ll get going again or nothing.’

Ray winced and closed his eyes. What was the world coming to? What was so fascinating about a death it had to be broadcast in real time to your friends? And anyway, it was only rumour so far that there had been a suicide. Maybe it wasn’t even a suicide – maybe someone had wandered onto the tracks in a state of inebriation or under the influence of drugs. Maybe it wasn’t a person at all but one of the cows from the field.

‘Yeah, I know. Shit. Yeah, okay. Oh, yeah – thanks. I’ll let you know. I’ll call you back. Laters.’ The young woman put her phone down in her lap and picked it up again immediately, scrolling through her texts, sent a few back to chosen recipients, typing with her two thumbs as fast as Ray could type with ten fingers. How did they do that, these people who had been raised on a diet of phones and American sitcom ‘kulcha’? He shook his head and the woman looked at him, angled her phone so he couldn’t see what she was writing and shifted away from him as far as the seat would allow.

‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘I can’t read anything without my glasses.’ He smiled in what was meant to be a reassuring way but she rolled her eyes and got back to her phone.

Anyway, I wouldn’t want to read your mindless tosh, he added to himself. You probably can’t spell your own name, read trashy magazines and your mother’s looking after your children so you can have a day in the Big Smoke finding a daddy for the next one. God – where did that come from? He wasn’t usually so judgemental. It must be the stress. The cancer.

He felt like weeping again just thinking about those cells invading his body. It terrified him. What if they’d already spread, were even now eating away at other parts of him? He’d heard you don’t recover if it spreads to other organs like the stomach or the liver, but his doctor hadn’t even checked that. He’d just said he was sure the tumour was discrete. Discrete! Contained. Unattached. Separate. Different. Exactly how Ray felt these days. He and his tumour had that in common. He almost laughed at the irony. A cluster of cells had marched in and taken up residence in his body where they didn’t belong. Multiplying. Growing.

Ray took his handkerchief out again and wiped his forehead. Was it just him or was it getting hotter in the train? He wished Russell was with him. He wished they could always be together. He thought, as he often did, about their first meeting at the dismal party of a mutual acquaintance. They’d been in the kitchen