Monday Morning Seven Fifteen
Sometimes she can still hear it. The rush of air that swept through the station that morning.
Everyone had blinked and taken a step backwards as the train powered through.
And as they blinked, he jumped. The train coming to halt five hundred meters up the line.
Later, the driver explained that he hadn’t even seen him. All he heard was a thump. Then a few seconds of confusion before it registered. Before he realised he had hit someone.
That was the funny thing about the whole incident. No-one on the platform could recall seeing a thing.
It was only that thump, followed by the screech of breaks that had alerted anyone to the fact that something unusual had happened.
Because the seven fifteen express never stops at this station.
Later, when they were questioning people on the platform, she’d heard one of the police officers comment on it, as if he couldn’t quite believe it.
How could something so horrific happen without anyone seeing it?
They’d handed out cards anyway, just in case. Just in case it was the shock that was blocking it from their minds. Trauma they explained. It can do things like that to you.
She’d thought about that. All those people on the platform, having a split second of their lives obliterated from their memories like that. It seemed such a strange idea. As if they’d all died together for an instant.
The train came in. Everyone blinked. The man was gone.
What she’d seen was this.
She never saw his face. Just his back. He was wearing a long black coat, unbuttoned. And when he stepped from the platform, it opened up, like the wings of some strange black bird.
There was something dreamlike about it. Something graceful and quiet. Serene even.
A macabre, beautiful dance.
That strange black bird is still so vivid, still so graceful as it glides down from the platform into the path of the oncoming train, that it hardly seems like a death at all.
Sometimes, when she remembers it, she wonders if perhaps it was an accident. That what he’d meant to do was simply catch the air and glide a while alongside the train as it sped along. That death wasn’t on his mind at all.
And that split second, that moment it happened, with the train rushing through, and sucking out the air, it was like a vacuum. Soundless. Airless. Empty.
Making it a strangely quiet death. That was what she kept thinking. That was what she would have difficulty explaining to anyone.
Because they had all heard the noise of him when the train hit. The shrill shriek of the breaks as the train came to a halt. And they had all imagined, each in their own way, the sheer bloody horror that lay on the tracks.
So she said nothing.
In the paper a few days later, there was a small paragraph detailing the incident.
Forty-five. A wife. Three kids. Just a regular guy on his way to work. No hint of what was to come.
“Son of a bitch”.
She said it out loud when she read that. Because almost immediately the images came. The scene in his home that morning. The apparent ordinariness of it.
Cups and plates on the breakfast table. The smell of coffee. Kids laughing. The wife busy and oblivious.
And all the while, him knowing what he had planned. Putting on his coat. Saying his goodbyes. No-one thinking much about it, because it’s just another Monday morning and everyone’s in a rush.
But he would have known. She can’t imagine it any other way. That he would only decide, in those last moments before the train arrived, that he was going to jump.
Damn it and she wasn’t even supposed to have be there!
Monday’s are her day off, but that day she’d been standing in for Eileen as a favour, so when he jumped, she stood there thinking “I wasn’t supposed to see this.”
There was nothing attached to the thought. No anger. No questions. Nothing like that.
Just the thought about how strange it was, that the two events should collide like that. Her being there. Him jumping.
“Son of a bitch.”
Jerry had looked up at her then.
“Who, me?”
“Hmm? Oh, no…no just something I was reading in the paper.”
“Yeah? What?”
“That man. The one that jumped the other day. He had a wife. Three kids.”
Jerry doesn’t say anything. Instead they simply look at one another.
When she’d come home that evening, the day the man jumped, she’d told Jerry about it. That she’d been late for work because someone had jumped in front of the train.
Jerry had almost choked in disbelief when she mentioned it.
“Shit, really? What, a suicide you mean?”
“I guess so.”
“Did you see it?”
“No. No-one saw anything actually. We all heard it though. There was this really terrible thump. Really awful. I think that’s when people realised something had happened. When they heard that noise.”
“My God.”
“Yeah.”
“Could they not have let you come home? Work I mean?”
“Yeah, Julie said I should go home. I think she was a bit worried the whole day actually, that I was suddenly going to break down or something. She kept coming up to me and asking if I was all right. Telling me it was okay to go home if I started to feel it was all a bit too much. I think if it had been her she would have gone home.”
“Well, that was pretty kind of her, no?”
“Yeah, I guess.
“But I wasn’t the only one on the platform. I mean plenty of other people had been there too when it happened. But they all went into work. What else is there to do? If you go home you just end up thinking about it over and over again, and I didn’t want to spend all day thinking about it. Letting it get me down, you know?”
“I suppose….”
He was doing that thing with the skin at the side of his thumb. Picking at it. Pinching it between thumb and forefinger. Something he always did when the conversation took a turn he couldn’t follow. When she said or did something that made him uncomfortable or that he disagreed with.
He never said anything. Just started picking at that little piece of skin. Sometimes until it bled.
She was going to tell him what she had seen. Tell him about the coat, the silence. All of that.
But when she started recalling the noise the man had made when the train hit, it was almost a shock. The two things just didn’t seem to match. What she heard and what she saw. And she thought that if she was to start describing, how strangely quiet and graceful the man’s descent had been, it would somehow seemed distasteful. Make her seem strange or something.
So she said nothing.
And now there was this news in front of her there in the paper. Reminding her of so many things she’d care to forget.
Like the way fathers leave.
It wasn’t really a surprise when they found him. He’d been slowly disappearing, drop by alcoholic drop, for years. So the end, when it came, had an inevitability about it that came as no surprise. If anything, it was a relief.
She’d always thought of it as a good death, her father’s. Sitting quietly one warm afternoon, out in the garden. When she’d shaken his arm to try and wake him, to let him know that it was time to come in, because dinner was ready, that was what she had thought. That he had fallen asleep. Just as he always did.
But there was something about the feel of him, even through the cotton of his shirt, that alerted her, almost as soon as she brushed her hand across the sleeve, that he was gone.
And when she looked at him, head to one side, mouth open very slightly, he looked okay. Not as terrifying as she had thought such a sight would be.
There was a looseness about the expression that she had never seen on him before, and she had wondered if perhaps this was what he had looked like when he was younger. That it was this that her mother meant when she talked about what he had been like when he was young.
The way they used to dance together. The fun they had. His energy. The way she loved him.
“He was quite a man, your dad, in his day.”
She would reminisce. Almost sad looking. Before catching herself with a brisk tsk, tsk, annoyed at her own sentimentality.
“You wouldn’t think it, to look at him now though. But really, he was something else.”
Which was something she began to say more and more often, over the years, her mother.
As if she had to repeat this half forgotten fact to herself as a reminder that at one time, this other man really had existed. But when she said it, it was always as if she wasn’t sure how she felt about the memory. Whether she was happy to remember this man she once knew or angry that he had abandoned her.
Because in those later years, the years when he was her father, the years when she and her brother were there in the house, growing up amidst the chaos of it all. In those years, it was hard to imagine that there had ever been this past. This happiness he’d once shared with her mother. It seemed strange.
That man was some imagined creature of her mother’s imagination, she was sure of it. Some wished for person. Because the father she knew, was never that man, could never have been that man.
But when she saw him then, leaning back in his chair, that calm, loose expression on his face, she thought she had looked into the past and caught a glimpse of him.
And when her mother came out, all impatience and irritation, wanting to know what was taking them so long, she found her daughter standing by the chair, smiling at the limp figure of her father, as if the death was somehow a pleasant thing. Was something to smile about.
And for a few seconds they had both stood still and looked at one another. Because something had changed between them in that instant. Some change that required them now to take each other in. To absorb the new person before them.
At the funeral, she’d overheard her mother talking about it.
“I never thought it could come as a relief to them. To the kids I mean. Not until I saw Lisa smiling like that. Until then I’d always thought his death would come as a terrible thing, you know?”
“Oh I wouldn’t read too much into it, Sarah. It must be a confusing, terrible thing for such a young child to come across their father like that. She probably thought he was playing a game or something. Pretending to be asleep. Something like that. I really wouldn’t worry about it.”
“Yes, maybe. I guess you’re right…”
But her mother’s instinct had been correct. There had been a relief to it. Something about that end that had somehow seemed right.
For years she had thought of telling her mother that. That she needn’t worry about it. About what it may have done to her, finding her father like that.
Because she worried. Right until the end she worried about it. That an experience like that could taint your life forever.
“He was a son of a bitch you know, your father? Doing that to you. To your brother. Obliterating himself like that. Making you find him there like that. He didn’t have to do that, Lisa. He didn’t have to do that….”
That had become the refrain of her final years. Like it was some invocation. Repeated over and over, as a way of trying to undo the past.
And now this. This different death. This man at the station. This story in the paper telling of his wife, his family. Those words of her mother’s, unheard for so long, now back again, clear as a bell.
She thought of the kids. Those three kids, now fatherless. Did they know, she wondered. Know what it was that he had done? Or was he simply not there any more? Is that what they had been told?
When she thought of them, a sickening knot of anger writhed in her stomach.
To stand there that morning and wait for the train to speed by. To jump despite everything.
The wife. The kids.
What could drive a man to do such a thing? It makes her nauseous, that question.
Ah, but all those things in people’s lives you can know nothing about.
The reasons people have for doing anything. Even things like this. Like this death that he had chosen for himself that morning. He did what he did and she can have no way of knowing why that was.
And yet, in the months since it happened, she’d started going back to the station again. Waking up each Monday morning with the thought of it in her head. Filled with a terrible compunction that forces her outside. Forces her to go stand on the platform and wait for the train to rush by.
This vague idea, deep inside of her, a wish even, that if she stood there again she would feel something in the air. That there was some explanation there, in the station, that could explain why a man would choose to step from a platform, into the force of an oncoming train. Something in the air, that was out with his control. That’s what she wishes sometimes.
Each Monday she did this. For over a year now. Until that Monday when she’d come home to find Jerry up and busying himself in the kitchen.
She’d stood in the doorway at first, not sure what to do. The sight of him making her nervous, because she didn’t want to talk to him about it.
“You okay?” was all he said.
“Yeah. Just got up early is all.”
And there’s a silence as he puts his coffee cup down then sighs and looks up at her.
“Every Monday, Lisa. Every Monday since it happened.”
She lets it hang in the air, as if she is hearing that fact for the very first time and it’s something that needs to be absorbed, acknowledged, before she can speak again.
“I know. I just can’t seem to sleep any more. I think about it so often, you know? Wake up thinking about it. And then it’s better just to get up.”
“Maybe you should talk to someone? It could help…”
“I keep going back to the station. Just to stand on the platform.”
He just looked at her. After all, what was he supposed to say to something like that. But she could see it shocked him. See this little furrow of worry settle on his forehead. See that he was waiting for her to say something. To explain things.
“I don’t know why I do it. I stand there sometimes and wonder why I’m there. What it is I’m hoping to resolve by being there. It’s as if….shit, I don’t know. It just helps in some way is all. When I get back, I can stop thinking about it. It helps me to stop thinking about it.”
“Until Monday comes around again…”
“Yeah…”
“Lisa…”
Their conversations would often end this way. With this sigh he had. This way of saying her name and then letting it hang there. Letting things just drift away.
Him wishing she would say more. Just tell him some things sometimes. But always knowing when to stop. When to allow the silence to settle between them.
So when he said it, when he carried on.
“Talk to someone, Lisa. Please. And not just about this…”
It froze her, as if the distance between them had crystallised right there. Right at that moment. Irrevocable.
