1
Why was the train going so slowly? Alice wondered, peering through the window into the late-afternoon pitch darkness, using her hands to block out the glare from the carriage lights overhead. All she could make out was a vague sense of big black mountains against a big black sky.
‘Next stop, Kingussie. Next stop, Kingussie,’ came the woman’s voice over the speaker.
It was the same voice that had asked her if she’d wanted to buy, ‘A wee cup of tea?’ a few stops back as the trolley wheeled down the aisle. The woman had smiled so concernedly at her, Alice wondered if she looked as ghostly as she felt. She’d picked a tartan-labelled bottle of water and tried to smile reassuringly as she paid, hoping to convince the stranger (like she always wanted to convince everyone) that she was absolutely fine and totally in control.
Sleety January rain cast horizontal dots and dashes along the pane. A wet weather Morse code. Alice imagined each line an SOS. That’s what this race north was: an emergency. One last effort to save herself and prove she was cut out for the medical life after all, and that her years of expensive, wearying training hadn’t been for nothing.
The train rolled on through the dark, a few pinpricks of light suggesting farm buildings or tiny villages out in the gloom.
Until now, she’d thought of her hometown of Manchester as ‘North’, where everyone joked it was ‘grim’, where you needed your ‘big coat’ well into March or sometimes even late April. But this? This was north of North, and yet the train kept rattling up the track with as long as forty minutes between stops.
They’d called at so many tiny villages since leaving… what was it called? Something beginning with B? Birnam? Blair Atholl? The place names announced over the speakers had become a wash of sonorous Scottish vowels and rolled, rhotic consonants, the words growing stranger as the landscape grew less familiar the further she ventured from home.
By now, her suitcase was the only one in the luggage rack and so heavy she doubted anyone could nick it even if they tried. She didn’t have to keep an eye on it now. Her stop was somewhere called Aviemore at the very end of the line so she wasn’t going to accidentally end up at the North Pole or anything. She should try to get some sleep.
Sleep didn’t come, however, even after that chilly, dark departure from Manchester long before dawn. Even after changing trains at Carstairs, then again at Edinburgh, she’d stayed alert, fighting every instinct to jump out at the very next station and turn for home.
It was way too late for that now. She was down the rabbit hole. This was where curiosity got you.
She really should close her eyes and rest. The other doctors she’d trained with seemed to have a knack of being able to sleep anywhere they could grab a rare break: across the mess sofas with the lights on and the telly blaring, slumped on armchairs in the on-call room, even on the floor in the supply cupboards or laundry store, or out in the hospital carpark after the night shift, reclined behind the steering wheel because it was safer to nap there than risk the bleary-eyed drive home only to have to come back a few hours later.
Alice hadn’t the knack of switching off, even when exhausted, and sheknewshe was exhausted now. The glimpses of her reflection told her so: sallow white skin, dark-circled eyes, her fringe needing a trim, and the little lines at the edges of her mouth that wouldn’t go away no matter how much she spent on miracle cure moisturiser.
The train had stopped and started again while she’d been looking at her rain-streaked reflection. She had the vaguest sense of her carriage having emptied and being left alone.
Whenever the carriage doors opened, a gust of air, unfathomably fresh and clean-smelling, had swept in. Compared to what she was used to on her cross-Manchester commute (petrol fumes and foody smells, fruity vapes and great clouds of weed smoked on the streets) this may as well be the high Himalayas.
She checked her phone: 16.37.
She fidgeted with her settings. No signal.
The mountains must dampen noise because all she could hear now was the heavy rumbling of the carriages over the tracks. No sirens. No voices. No distractions.
Alice didn’t do well when left alone with her thoughts. Her brain liked to play tricks on her.
Within minutes of sitting slumped, staring out the window, her eyes glazing, her brain was already showing her a scene-by-scene derailment, her body thrown from her seat, glass smashing, bodies spilling on the track, fire and smoke everywhere. Alice as the lone survivor, desperately dragging the nice lady with the trolley out from beneath the twisted metal wreckage, performing CPR all by herself in the dark out on the rails, barely able to see straight, each burning lungful blown into the woman’s strange, cold mouth sending her dizzy…
No. She shook her head to dispel the horror she’d conjured. Not here. She wasn’t going to succumb to her brain’s worst behaviour here.
Be present, she told herself.Mindful. Thinking fast, she reached into her bag and drew out the two envelopes she’d found yesterday on the mat while she was packing up her room in her trainees’ flatshare.
Tomorrow, Saturday, the third of January, would be her birthday. She’d open her parents’ cards now; separate cards, now that they were getting divorced. Inside, there were separate cheques, both made out for the same amount. They’d consulted one another. Like they had with all aspects of their painfully recent separation. They prided themselves on how amicable it had been. Meanwhile, Alice had felt like a frightened child witnessing them calmly divvying up the belongings they’d bought together over the last thirty years.
‘We simply… fell out of love,’ her father had explained at Boxing Day lunch, as he stood by her mother’s side at the Aga; a smiling united front, breaking the news to their youngest child. Si and Rich, her brothers – both surgeons and living in London and Melbourne respectively – had been on shift and far away over Christmas. Si led a cardiothoracic team and Rich was in vascular surgery. She assumed they already knew about the separation; that was how things usually went in the Hargreave sibling pecking order.
‘But we still love each othervery much,’ her mother had put in, gripping her wine glass a little too tightly.
Then they’d all eaten cold turkey salad at the kitchen table and pretended there wasn’t a great seismic shift taking place while Alice wondered (but couldn’t bring herself to ask) how long they’d been pretending to be happily married. Had she missed them falling apart since she’d been living away?
The next day her dad had moved into a house fifteen miles from her childhood home, where, it emerged, he had already installed a beautiful young surgical registrar.
Alice hadn’t had a chance to speak to either of her parents since the Boxing Day bombshell. She tried not to feel too bad about it; it was only a week ago, and her parents were busy people. Consultant cardiologists always are. Cue as many jokes as you like about being the ideal couple to heal their own broken hearts. Her dad had cracked them all over that last family lunch.
‘Twenty-eight years old!’ her mother’s card said inside, and, ‘Good luck in Scotland, my darling.’
‘Stiff upper lip,’ her dad’s read.
