Thieving Fear

TWENTY

As Ellen plodded into the station concourse a voice as large as the building finished an announcement, and she heard a tuneless humming behind her, which rose as if she'd aggravated its impatience. Nevertheless it was being emitted by an invalid tricycle, not its rider, who called 'Can you mind out, love? I can't see round you.'

She might have fled without looking at him, to a different exit and home – she'd already had children turning to stare at her once they'd sat ahead of her on the bus across Southport – but she mustn't care about anything more than Rory. As she moved aside the tricycle droned past her, laden with a pensioner whose pink scalp peeked through his grey hair and who bulged on both sides of the seat, not least his tweedy buttocks. At once he halted, blocking her progress. 'I still can't make it out,' he complained. 'When's the next train to Manchester?'

'In just a few minutes, and I'd like to be on it if you don't mind.'

'Can't stop you if there's room.'

She felt as though he were putting into words the image that had haunted her for days and equally sleepless nights, and so her retort was more of a plea. 'What do you mean?'

'The same as I say, love. It's an old-fashioned habit of mine.'

As the tricycle cruised forwards its humming grew more laboured. Perhaps Ellen should have saved her breath as she did her best to overtake, but a remnant of her old profession made her say 'You ought to have that serviced. It's under too much strain.'

His large already purplish face shook as he poked it up at her. 'What's it to you?'

'I'm only advising you. I used to care for people like you.'

'Given up now, have you?' he said and slitted his overflowing eyes as if to keep a thought in. 'Hold on a tick. Weren't you in the paper?'

She only had to run for the train, if her legs were up to running. She was stumbling away when he said 'It was you plain enough. No wonder you didn't want to show your face.'

The tricycle hummed alongside her, sounding unbearably smug, and she turned on him in the hope that some of the scattered commuters might come to her defence. 'Why shouldn't I?'

'Good God, woman, don't grimace at me. You're ugly enough.'

It must be a standard insult of his, Ellen tried to believe – perhaps one he'd levelled at any wife or wives he had – but it didn't tell her anything she didn't already know. Nobody was going to intervene on her behalf, since they could see the truth of his remark, if they could bear to look. Indeed, she had a sense that one of the spectators was delighting in her experience. Their glee seemed to pace her as she trudged ahead of the old man, her eyes so swollen that they felt like insomnia rendered solid, her lips too engorged to utter another word.

The first carriage on the train had a space for wheelchairs and the like at its near end. Ellen dumped her wheeled case in the luggage alcove of the only other carriage and plumped herself onto the closest pair of unoccupied seats. She was wearing her most voluminous clothes, but she couldn't tell whether they were clinging to her because they were no longer large enough or with her inelegant sweat. As the train filled up, more than one person thought better of sitting next to her. She was beginning to dread that someone might have to – that she would be trapped with their reaction or their attempts to conceal it all the way to Manchester – when the train jerked forwards.

She felt the vibration travel upwards from her feet, a quivering that passed through every inch of flesh. As she moved uneasily the seat seemed to yield too much, unless she did. She lifted a ponderous arm to open the meagre slat of the window, which brought her upper regions a humid breeze, although it also intensified the earthy stench that had become her companion, no doubt a symptom of her state. She was so enclosed in bloated flesh that she couldn't judge how hot she was. Whenever a shadow moulded itself to her she could have taken it for moisture welling up from her body. She tried gazing out of the window, but the headlong countryside occasionally halted by stations was eager to parade the sight of her face bulging like a fungus under bridges or being dragged like a fallen moon – an object as rotund and blotchy and porous – over fields and townscapes. Sometimes the spectacle compelled her to touch her face, but she was unable to determine how swollen if not rotten it might be – no less than her groping fingers. If she rested her hands in her lap she couldn't avoid noticing how much they resembled stranded sea creatures, bloated and pallid and ready to grow more discoloured. In the end she had to settle for staring at the back of the next seat, although it made her feel caged, like an exhibit but one so unsightly that spectators couldn't bear to look. She would be with her family soon, and surely they could stand whatever she'd become or at least show her a modicum of sympathy. The prospect went some way towards sustaining her as far as Manchester, and the thought of Rory did. In one sense he must be in worse shape than her.

The train wobbled to a halt at Manchester, and then she did. She kept her seat while the carriage emptied, not least because nearly everyone who passed her stared at her, unless they glanced at her and quickly looked away. She remained seated even once she was alone in the carriage; she didn't want another confrontation with the tricycling pensioner. Or was she alone? Perhaps if she peered into the dark under the seats she would find she wasn't quite. She would do nothing of the sort; she might be missing the next train to Huddersfield. She stumped along the aisle to grab her luggage and lower herself from the train.

The tricyclist was blocking the way off the platform while he lectured the ticket collector about facilities for invalids. Neither man immediately acknowledged Ellen. 'Excuse me,' she said to the collector, 'could you ask –'

'Just because I'm in a chair doesn't mean I can't talk.'

'I'm aware of that. So could –'

'See, there's people like her that don't think us cripples ought to be heard. We're just in their way, that's what they think.'

Ellen was growing hotter with frustration, which made her feel heavier still. 'Well, if you don't mind my saying so –'

'I do mind. We're not meant to have feelings, you see,' the old man informed the collector. 'At least there's some that still care about us. She got fired from her job for mistreating the likes of me.'

She might have tried to refute this if the collector hadn't said 'Do you two know each other?'

'I know all I want to know about her, thanks very much.'

'You don't know anything about me.' Despite feeling like a child in an outsize body, Ellen couldn't resist adding 'And I'd rather not know anything about you.'

'See, she admits it. That's how much she cares about cripples, and they were supposed to be her job.'

Ellen had a sense of helplessly performing a script for someone else's amusement or worse. 'I always cared for my patients, however disabled they were.'

'You can see how much, can't you? She won't even face me. Maybe she thinks I'm nothing to look at, but –'

'I don't care how you look,' Ellen said and stared at him. 'It isn't how people are on the outside, it's inside that counts.'

'And you're as bad one way as you are the other. Don't go putting on your nasty face again. I told you, there's no need to make yourself worse.' As Ellen's cumbersome lips shifted he said 'Just dry up, you ugly woman.'

She thought the collector was coming to her defence until he said 'Can you both go through now, please? There's another train in.'

She must have deserved everything, then, since he apparently thought so. As the tricycle moved off with a satisfied hum she brandished her ticket at the collector, though her distended fingers came close to dropping it on the ledge of the booth and letting it lie. She dragged her case and herself across the concourse to the departures monitor and saw that the next train to Huddersfield left in ten minutes. Having shown her ticket to another official, who looked unimpressed by it or her, she blundered into the nearest carriage on the train.

Despite its size, the train was nowhere near full by the time it left the station. Ellen couldn't blame the handful of commuters for wanting to avoid her, especially once she saw her blurred face slithering sluglike across the inside of a bridge. It was as dim as some bedroom item rendered monstrous by a nightmare that refused to dissipate. She closed her bloated eyes and clasped her hands tight in her lap against the temptation to finger her face. They felt like clammy lumps of tripe resting on more of the same, and in general refusing to see only aggravated her sense of herself as just a hulk of loathsome meat. Now and then sunlight flooded over her, unless it was some exudation of her own, which reminded her of the old man's advice. She wished she could indeed dry up and wither too. Writers might be meant to use their own experiences, but she was afraid she'd passed the limit. Her imagination felt crushed by her body, reduced to a sense of the misshapen mass of flesh.

At last the train wavered to a stop in Huddersfield. Once she heard she was alone, unless someone was silently watching her, she opened her eyes and heaved her deformed bulk towards the platform. Perhaps the ticket collector had seen her coming, because he took her ticket without looking at her. She trudged out to a taxi rank, where she felt her midriff swell like an inflated tyre as she bent to the window of the first vehicle. She was sure the driver barely managed not to shrink away, but she wasn't going to subject him to her presence in the car. As soon as she'd obtained directions to Empire Street she stepped back.

The beginning of the route was steeply uphill. The dark sky looked laden with moisture, if no more so than Ellen felt. A bridge over the ring road seemed to coat her with noise and grimy fumes before the route led between a factory and a wall overhung by trees. When she plodded into the shade of the foliage it seemed to leave her moister. Most of the few people she encountered were on the opposite side of the road, and all were by the time she came abreast of them. Were they glancing hastily away from her or from somebody behind her? Surely she was bad enough. If there appeared to be a scrawny shadow on the pavement when she turned her burden of a head, it must be an elongated stain. The clumps of outstretched spindly objects at the ends of two thin twisted branches of the main discolouration couldn't drag her back or down or chase her off.

Beyond the factory a side street led past a copse to Hugh's house. An unpainted gate slouched in the entrance to his garden, more like a scrap of wilderness. However shabby the building was, it looked like a haven to her. Whatever had befallen her, surely Hugh and Charlotte would understand. She was suddenly so desperate to see her family that she grew afraid of being prevented somehow as she and her thunderous luggage made for the house. She had almost reached the gate when she saw Hugh.

He was on the stairs, framed by the window and the doorway of the front room, and seemed paralysed with shock. There was no question that she was the cause of his distress. In a moment Charlotte peered across the room at her and cried out, unless she was too appalled to make a sound. Ellen couldn't run, but she and her case lumbered away as fast as they could. The front door must have opened, because this time she heard Charlotte, whose question only spurred her onwards. 'Oh, Ellen, what have you done to yourself?'