The Sleeper Read Online Free PDF Page A

requisite number of smiles. The moment I stepped on to this train, however, I became a commuter.
    When someone knocks on the door, I am alarmed and annoyed. My first thought is that Sam has secretly booked himself on to the train to surprise me. I pray that he has not, and hate myself for it.
    I open the door, because I can hardly pretend I’m not here. A woman with short curly hair and a ruddy complexion leans on the door frame, looking at her list.
    ‘Hello, my love,’ she says cheerfully. ‘Miss Finch, isn’t it? Yes? Can I just have a look at your ticket, darling? What would you like for breakfast, my love?’
    I hand her the ticket and the reservation.
    ‘I get breakfast?’
    ‘Yes, of course you do.’
    ‘You know my name?’
    ‘On my list, darling.’
    If I am on her list, nothing terrible will happen. I want to take her photograph and send it to Sam, to prove to him that I am in good hands. If I asked, she would probably let me.
    Instead, I choose coffee and a croissant, knowing that they will be less appealing than they sound but certain, all the same, that they will do.
    As soon as she leaves, I go down to the end of the carriage to the loo, squeezing past one person on the way, a tall man who is perhaps in his early forties. He has dark hair, and is tall and well built. He looks like a commuter too, and he gives me a warm smile as we pass, closer together than you would normally pass because the corridor is so narrow. Our bodies brush against each other in spite of my best efforts, and I hurry on, embarrassed.
    I want to keep to myself on these journeys. Soon this will be a part of my routine, and I do not want to be having to stop and talk to people. This train could become a perfect decompression chamber between my two lives, two nights a week which involve neither work (nor, more specifically, staying at my sister’s flat, which is looking less breezily casual a prospect than it once did, as I rattle towards London) nor home, with all its guilt and determined loveliness.
    I lie awake in the narrow bed, feeling the train jolting over the rails as it takes me inexorably towards the city, and I grin, then laugh aloud in the near-darkness at the sudden change in my life. Six weeks ago I was aimless and bored: I was ‘Sam’s wife’ and ‘that woman in the waiting room’. I wandered around Falmouth and crossed to St Mawes on the ferry for no reason, even though I could barely afford the fare. Now I am myself again, dashing back into the city, turning my back on frustration and failure, and throwing myself into a job that I hope I am still good at. I pretend to myself that I am doing this solely for the money.
    I do not think I will sleep, yet I do, quickly, and when I wake up, the train is still. I can hear sounds outside, sounds that, despite the docks, we do not hear in Falmouth. They are the noises of Paddington station in full flow. There are engines and squeaky wheels, a voice suddenly raised in warning, abrupt laughter. There is a muffled announcement, unmistakably about a train even though I cannot hear the words. My closed blind is a grey rectangle, the morning lurking beyond it.
    As I reach for my phone, tucked into the mesh pocket beside my bed, there is a sharp rap on my door, and the friendly woman sings out: ‘Morning! Breakfast!’
    I reach across and unclick the door without leaving my bed, and she is in the room, putting down the tray table, making sure my tray is safely on it.
    ‘You’ll need to be off the train by seven,’ she says, as she leaves. ‘You can wait in the lounge at Paddington after that if you like. Do you know about the lounge on Platform One?’
    ‘Thanks,’ I tell her, ‘but I’ll go straight to work.’
    The coffee is train coffee, and the croissant comes out of a plastic packet, but all the same, I savour them both. I take a photograph of the tray, with my breakfast half eaten, and text it to Sam. That seems like a nice thing to do.
    At Paddington , I write.