The Whole Story and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

followed? Was someone expecting him or her home right now, with food in the oven and a TV on, waiting?
    I thought of you. You would be imagining me somewhere I wasn’t. You would be thinking I was closer to home than I was. You would be phoning the Indian restaurant any moment. Maybe you already had. Maybe you were doing it right now. The thought of you blithely ordering food in the belief that I would be there on time, any minute now, to pick it up; the thought of it cooling down inside its tinfoil cartons in a takeaway bag on some sideboard or other in the kitchen of the restaurant; the thought of you sitting in our front room believing I’d be home any second made me feel worse than any number of imaginings about people I didn’t know, even imaginings of them dying.
    I got my mobile out but it was still dead. I turned to the woman reading the depression book.
    Excuse me, I said.
    She looked up.
    I wonder if I could borrow your phone, I said.
    No, she said.
    Oh, I said.
    Do you want to know why? she said.
    I realized, too late, that she was the kind of person who whispers loudly about rules and regulations at people who eat sweets in libraries.
    As a rule of principle, she said, I don’t carry a phone.
    Ah, I said.
    The link between mobile phones and brain tumours hasn’t yet been disproved, she said.
    Right, I said.
    So even if I did carry a phone, I’m not sure I’d lend it to you, she said. By even using one at all, I could be doing not just myself but you and countless others on this train and many hundreds of others I’ve never met in my life who live near a transmitter serious harm.
    Yes, I said. Thanks.
    She went back to her book. Her face was shiny with delight. I glanced at the girl opposite. She had one eye slitted open, which she closed quick, in case I saw she was listening. But I’d seen, and she knew it, and opened the eye again.
    I’d lend you mine, she said, but there’s not enough money left on it for any more calls even if I needed to use it myself. Sorry.
    Oh well, I said. Never mind. Nice of you to offer. Thanks anyway.
    She nodded and closed her eye. I looked over at the four people sitting at the table across from us. They all looked away, up at the ceiling or down to the floor or out into the dark at the other people sleeping, reading, on phones, on the stopped trains on the lines parallel to ours, and then our train, which hadn’t moved for over three quarters of an hour, jolted to life again and the parallel people in the windows of the trains on either side of us shunted backwards as we shunted forwards.
    People up and down the carriage cheered and began to phone people. Good, said the woman with the book. The girl opposite looked at me, looked at the woman reading her book, then looked away to the side as she pressed something on her phone, put her phone to her head and said, in a hushed voice, hello?
    We gathered speed. We lurched and rolled on tracks that we knew were precarious beneath us. We slowed down again. People up and down the carriage groaned.
    No way, the girl said into her phone, and coughed.
    It’s like this every bloody time, every bloody time I take a train, a man was saying behind me, probably into a phone but possibly just out loud to himself like a madman. Nobody takes responsibility, he said. Nobody’s responsible. Nobody does anything about it. Nobody’s in charge. Who’s to blame? Nobody.
    I saw the scuffed cheapness of the material of the seat I was sitting on. What, I thought, if there was nobody there when I got home? I walked in and you weren’t there. I opened our mortgaged front door and came in and took my coat off and sat down with the takeaway bag of food and you weren’t there. I didn’t take the greasy tops off the cartons, careful not to spill on the floor, while you didn’t bring through the plates and forks: you, lifted into the sky like in stories; gone, the way we expect people to vanish into thin air in faked magic, like something only