The Whole Story and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF

idea how to change this or make it any different.
    Then I noticed that the fast train was going very slowly. It slowed to a stop in the dark. This woke several people, many of whom stood up and struggled into coats until they realized they weren’t home at all. They sat down again. To the left of us was an Intercity 125, also full of people, also stopped. To the right, another stationary train crammed with people. Someone down the carriage told someone down a phone that we were going very slowly, that we’d stopped, that we were probably passing an accident spot.
    A voice came over our speakers. There had been a fatality at a station twenty or thirty miles down the line. All round me people began phoning people to tell them. I got my own mobile out to call you, then remembered and put it back in my bag. Will you tape it? a voice behind me was saying. It’s on at nine. Hello? the coughing girl was saying into her phone. Someone died, so we’re late.
    Just to repeat to passengers, the voice from the ceiling said, and it was a tired and wary-sounding voice. There is as yet no other information. As yet all the information there is is that a fatal incident of fatality has happened on the line, and that no other information has as yet been received, and that more information is awaited, and when it is received it will be told to passengers as soon as it is received.
    The man opposite me opened his eyes, sat up surprised, looked out of the window bleary and blinking, closed his eyes again and went back to sleep. The woman next to me had woken up. She settled herself inside her coat and opened her book. It was called Breaking the Pattern of Depression and had been written by a man with a PhD. I glanced at her face. She didn’t look depressed at all. She looked perfectly happy. There: I had momentarily cared about someone I didn’t know, had never met, would probably never see again after this journey. I looked at the girl, whose eyes were closed again, whose mobile was still in her hand and whose other hand clenched a handkerchief. I tried to feel sorry that she had a cold. Colds were horrible, especially when you had to go to work with one. Her cough was probably keeping her awake late at night. It was horrible to have a cough like that. I looked at the man slumped next to her, big and hopeless as a seal out of water. I had no right to think of him as a seal or as any other kind of simile or metaphor, I thought. I thought kinder thoughts. He must be very tired to be so asleep on a train. Perhaps he had to work very hard. Perhaps when he gets home, I thought, there’s something that keeps him awake all night so that the only sleep he gets is on the train. Maybe his wife and he have had a new baby. I looked at his suit. There were no signs of new baby on it. Maybe his wife, or life partner, or whatever he had, was depressed, and it had become an unbreakable pattern. Maybe he or she had a cough that kept them both awake at night. Maybe he lived on his own; maybe he didn’t have a wife or a partner; maybe this loneliness was what kept him awake all through the dark hours and meant he could only sleep on trains, on his way to and from work, surrounded by strangers.
    I began to feel guilty that I hadn’t even idly wondered about the person who had died at the station thirty miles ahead of us. Was it a man or a woman? How had he or she died? Had he or she had a heart attack? Thrown herself or himself in front of a train on a weekday evening on the mundane journey home, or the journey somewhere he or she couldn’t bring herself or himself to make one more time? I had heard somewhere, or read somewhere maybe, that spring was the time of the year when most people found it unbearable, the coming back again of the year’s light. Or had it been an accident? Had he or she been running for a train, trying to get home in time? Had one foot slipped off the side of the platform at exactly the wrong moment and the rest of her or him had