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

was another old feeling, being treated like muck. He knew the role of the underdog, the outsider. And he knew very well where it came from – not only being black in England, but being small and bookish, he hadn’t fitted in at his South London comprehensive school, nor in his own family. He had learned to behave like the other children at school, swaggering, full of bravado to avoid bullying, and rushed home at the end of the day to shut himself in his room with his books. His brothers were both over six foot tall and half as wide and he’d had trouble getting to five foot eight. He had childhood asthma and had never been allowed to play sport. Gavin, the eldest in the family still called him Lilly Bud, Little Bird, and not in a nice way. Gavin intermittently drove a forklift. Samson was a sometime bouncer. Trevor was the only one in the family to go to university despite his school’s best attempts to quash his ambitions and persuade him to lower his expectations. He’d gone to Leeds to study English, and afterwards done a teaching diploma. He was proud to be a teacher and encouraged his pupils to aim high and believe in themselves. He loved everything about teaching, even marking assignments. Sure, there were kids who were unmotivated and didn’t hand work in, but he even loved the creativity they showed in their excuses for not having done it. Like young Peter the other day who told him he hadn’t been able to do the work set over the weekend because his parents had taken him to a nudist colony in Wales for the weekend and he wasn’t allowed to take anything with him. Trevor had laughed long and hard over that one. Wales, indeed!

He smiled to himself and forced his thoughts back to Veronica’s parents. They had requested that he meet them in their solicitor’s office but gave him no more information than that. Fortunately, it was half term but they would have expected him to take a day off anyway. They always treated him as if he was a man to be ordered about. Even when they finally gave their blessing for him to marry Veronica, his beloved Frostie, it had felt like it was given under duress, unwillingly, as if they viewed him as unworthy. Yet they were not racist, or so they said. And it was true, they also treated many white people the way they treated him – with a certain disdain, a distance, as if they were wearing gloves so as not to taint themselves. When he’d commented on it to Frostie after he’d known them for a while, she’d suggested that perhaps they were protecting others from themselves rather than the other way around. It made no sense to Trevor but when he pressed her, a pained expression crossed her face and she would say no more. It remained one of those mysteries he thought about in the early hours of the morning before even the rubbish collectors were about and the only sound was the occasional bark of a fox in the fields behind the house. And now Frostie wasn’t around to ask.

His grief hit him like a punch in the solar plexus, winding him and making him hunch forward, clasping his chest, panting. Not wanting to draw attention to himself, he coughed and opened the newspaper, holding it up in front of his face. Once upon a time he would have been mortified if anyone thought he was a Sun reader but right now he didn’t care. He needed something to hide his tears.

It had been three years since his wife had died. Three years of loneliness. Three years of anxiety that he wasn’t doing enough for Felice. Three years of walking the tightrope between loving his daughter and letting her go. There were days he was so grief-stricken all he wanted to do was hug her and keep her close, but she was almost twenty when her mum died, taking her first steps out into the world on her own. His job was to help her leave the nest not tie her to it. He sighed at the memory of how exhausting it had been to pretend to be coping better than he was, of not letting on to her that he cried himself to sleep at night and sometimes at school had to excuse himself from class to press his emotions back down into the dark, churning place they had to stay so he could function in the world.

The train still hadn’t moved. He would be late for the in-laws so he texted with apologies. He didn’t tell them the reason. Let them think he’d overslept and missed the earlier train, he no longer cared what they thought of him. He knew they loved Felice, and that was all that mattered.

He overheard one of the other passengers tell her neighbour there’d been a suicide on the line. Trevor shuddered. What a violent way to go. Any way was a bad way to go but some were worse than others. When they were younger Frostie and he had sworn to each other that if the need arose, they’d help each other along, whatever the consequences. When the time came and his wife asked him to get her the medication required to end her life, he couldn’t do it. He agreed wholeheartedly with assisted dying, understood Frostie’s desire to be free of the pain and degradation her life had become but he couldn’t be part of ending it. Every day she’d asked, and every day he had a different excuse. Felice was coming home soon, the doctor had mentioned a new medication, it was nearly Christmas, nearly her birthday, almost his. In the end, she stopped asking, and Trevor felt guilty about that, knowing he’d let her down. He simply couldn’t imagine life without her. It was selfish but that was how it was.