Girl in the Dark by Anna Lyndsey Read Free Book Online

protection, hemming it neatly, and attaching a piece of elastic each side to hook over my ears. It covers my nose, mouth and cheeks. However, it does become damp and stuffy under the satin, and my spectacles steam up. Periodically, I pull the mask down for a while, in order to cool off. The whole ensemble co-ordinates well.
    The woman opposite ignores my friendly remarks. After staring at me suspiciously, she looks out of the window for five minutes as the train trundles through undistinguished suburbs under a flat grey sky. Then, casually, as if the thought had only just occurred to her, she picks up her child and walks to the other end of the carriage.
    I shake my head and smile behind my mask. I am becoming used to strange reactions to my garb, which I now must wear every time I go outdoors, unless I wait till dusk. It does not help, of course, that this is October 2005, three months after the 7/7 bombings, and everyone is on high alert for suspicious characters on the transport system. My close friend Jonathan was in the underground carriage next to the bomb at Aldgate—he escaped with only a badly jarred spine, but he can no longer handle his commute into town. “I saw things that no one should ever see,” is all he says on the subject, but in the night, he screams.
    We are falling out of the labour market together, in a graceful backward arc, he with a diagnosis of post-traumaticstress disorder, I with my mysterious skin. We compare notes by phone on the HR departments of our employers as, slowly and inexorably, long-term sickness absence moves towards careful, procedurally correct dismissals.
    Since July, I have been living in Itchingford with Pete. I have been eating healthily, and taking exercise. I have been going for runs through the estate in the summer evenings, smelling the twilight fragrances and coming continually upon cats, sitting enigmatically on gateposts, draped along kerbstones or shooting silently across my path. Investigating Pete’s bookshelves, I have been reading novels I didn’t know before—
Darkness at Noon
by Arthur Koestler, Joseph Heller’s
Catch-22
and the thrillers of Adam Hall. I have cleaned the house, and done our collective washing, and experimented with recipes from cookery books I’ve had for years but never used.
    And I have begun to wonder if, perhaps, the loss of everything I thought defined me—my career, my independence, the freedom to go where I want in the world—is not in fact the loss of self I feared. I have been finding parts of me squashed and crumpled, like favourite clothes that have fallen down the back of a chest of drawers and been forgotten, and now I have the chance to smooth them out and hold them to the light.
    I know I do not have much courage. If this had not happened, despite wondering, periodically, about life beyond the civil service, I would have stayed on that escalator until the end, never quite having the guts to climb over the side. Now, with this brutal shove, I’mbeing given the chance to see a different me develop, while perhaps, somewhere in another part of the multi-verse, a dedicated policy expert keeps trudging into the office, growing hoary and experienced in the subtleties of power.
    I had been obsessed with my flat, with the need to make my space and live in it on my own. But over the summer just gone, I have discovered that living with Pete has been … well, fun. The realisation came to me quite suddenly, one lunchtime, as I looked across the table and found the space before my eyes filled with his form, and something lifted up inside me, like a secret inner smile.
    I am thinking over this strange heightened summer as the train pulls into Clapham Junction. As I move through the crowd on the platform, a young woman looks at my mask and mutters behind her hand to her friend: “Just like Michael Jackson!” I smile again under the clammy material. “Well, I never knew that,” I say to myself. “So—I have a celebrity accessory.