Five passengers. Five minutes until the next train … five minutes until someone dies.
FIVE by Ilona Bannister is a tense, intriguing drama that opens on a train platform, where five strangers unknowingly face a chilling countdown: one of them will die in five minutes. Read on for an exclusive excerpt.
—
07:01.
Someone will die here this morning, at this suburban train station. It will happen in the next five minutes when the 7:06 to London Victoria arrives.
Four others have died here previously. In 1861, an alcoholic mourning his dead wife and child in a stupor of grief. In 1923, a World War I veteran, suffering from shell shock, bombs explod-ing in his head until his last breath. In 1972, a teenage girl, unmarried and pregnant, forced to leave home by her parents. In 1994, a seeing-eye dog who gave its life to save its owner when he stumbled perilously close to the tracks at just the wrong moment.
At least two of these deaths were accidental, one was intentional, and one seemed intentional but wasn’t, but they will not be described here in detail because we have only a few minutes before the train arrives. And there is a great deal yet to discuss. And a fifth death to witness that may or may not be deliberate. It will be hard to tell when it happens.
Turn your attention now to the stairs descending to the platform. A small child struggles out of his mother’s grasp. He shrieks. He bolts towards the tracks.
He looks over his shoulder and sees his stricken mother, running. He laughs and trots to the edge of the platform. He turns around to face her, his back to the platform edge and the tracks beneath it. He does not realise that he has crossed the yellow caution line. Even if he does realise it, he is too young to understand the yellow line’s warning that another step back will be too far. He steps.
He loses his footing and the platform disappears underneath him. He looks at his mother. As he begins to fall, he meets her eyes and in them he sees something he does not yet have the words to name. It is not anger or fear.
It is hesitation. It would be easier if I lost him, is the thought she thinks for a sliver of a moment, a granule of time, thirty-nine hundredths of a second, to be precise.
Pause here for a moment.
Please do not judge this mother for having this thought. Thoughts like these come to all mothers. They are involuntary. Sometimes they appear precisely because they are the oppo-site of what the mother truly thinks. The mother’s anxious, exhausted brain plays a sinister game with her. It makes her think that she will say and do things that she would never, ever say or do.
For example, a mother does not really want to throw her baby out of the third-storey window to perish on the pavement below, although she may think this every time the window catches her eye when she passes it, holding her crying infant to her chest and swaying in her reflection in the glass. A mother does not want to push her baby buggy in front of a bus, although the thought flickers across her mind every time she stands at the bus stop, her toddler whining and struggling against the straps of the seat.
A mother’s brain, knowing how much she loves her child, tortures her with that love, inverts her love, turns it inside out with horrible, haunting thoughts of terrible things that she would never do and that will never happen to her child. So please, do not think badly of this mother for having this thought in this moment.
It is her thoughts that come after it that should concern you. They’ll say it’s a shame if he falls, she thinks, the next step she takes imperceptibly slower than the last.
They’ll say it was an accident, she thinks, reaching out, but not quite reaching him.
‘Oi!’ a man shouts on the platform, at 7:01 and seventeen seconds. He is a businessman. A man’s man, a macho man, a family man, a self-made man, whatta man, whatta man, whatta man, whatta might—
‘Oi!’ the man shouts as he runs up to the mother and grabs her by the elbow, helping her regain her balance as she in turn grabs her son by the shoulders of his coat. The man pulls the mother with her child from the platform edge. ‘Careful now,’ he says.
The boy, Gideon, does not say anything. His mother, Emma, thinks, Fuck, and says, ‘What are you doing here?’ quietly. She does not look him in the eye. Breathless, she puts a protective arm around her son’s shoulders, adjusts her bag with her other hand, bends to hoist him onto her hip, and struggles because of their bulky coats and because he is six years old and too big for her to carry. The skin on the knuckles of her ungloved hand is cracked and bleeding. From the cold grey air of this morning. From the mother’s work that she does.
Emma says, softly, seriously, ‘Why are you here?’ as Gideon pulls the hat off her head and throws it on the ground and screams. He kicks away from her. She puts him down but grasps his arm tightly, forcefully. ‘Gideon,’ she says sharply through clenched teeth.
‘Here you go,’ the man says, picking up the hat. ‘One of those mornings, eh?’ he says, and he shrugs with a friendly smile.
Emma says nothing. He is speaking to her like they’re friends, like colleagues on good terms, and not each other’s downfall. How much simpler, better, her life would have been if she had never met, never known this man.
‘Did you follow me?’ she asks.
‘Should I have a little chat with ’im?’ the businessman says to her in a lower voice, ignoring her question. ‘Tell the boy to give ’is mum a break—’
Emma grabs the hat, briefly looking the man in the eye, and says, ‘No. I’m trying to do what you want. I need time.’
The businessman steps back. ‘Look, forget about yesterday. Just hear me out,’ he says. ‘And you,’ he crouches down to be on Gideon’s eye level, ‘you be good for your mum.’ Standing he says to Emma, ‘He’s just like my others, full of beans.’
Except that Gideon is nothing like his ‘others’, the other six children of the businessman. The two youngest of whom are boys, a little older than Gideon, the result of his third marriage to a much younger woman who will be dropping them off at school about twenty-five minutes after the death in their brand-new G-Wagon. They are well adjusted and rosy cheeked, and the young wife will tell them that she loves them when she leaves them and then drives away to start her day with Pilates, then the PTA fundraiser meeting, then walking the dog and shopping online before she picks them up from after-school football or drama or how-to-grow-up-to-be-just-like-your-asshole-rich-dad training. Emma would like to tell his wife to fuck off and die. She would like to tell all the wives like the businessman’s wife to fuck off and die.
She would like to get away from the businessman now, she would like for him not to look at her and her son and make assumptions.
‘I’m working on your brother,’ she says to the businessman. ‘But I can’t talk about it now.’
Emma then turns abruptly with Gideon and moves to a bench further down the platform. She doesn’t care if the businessman thinks she’s a bitch. Their exchange lasts twenty-seven seconds.
Bitch, the businessman thinks for sixteen hundredths of a second as she leaves. He watches Emma and her son walk down the platform. He considers his next move. Emma is skittish and he had hoped she’d behave herself in a public place. He scared her yesterday. He shouldn’t have done that. He just wants her to smooth it over with his brother. Then put their pooled money into the start-up he’s funding today – a project with lifesaving potential on a world-changing scale – and forget all of this when they’re rolling in it. That’s all. Money fixes everything. Which is why the businessman is confused by Emma’s reaction because usually women listen to him. Usually women love him. Well, perhaps not all women.
For example, the slender, elderly white woman with the short white hair who is watching him and Emma right now would definitely not love him if she met him. The businessman, admittedly, does not do well with her demographic, as he is only interested in women who are fuckable, so he has not noticed her this morning. And this is just as well because the old woman, Mrs Worth, does not want to be noticed. And she certainly doesn’t want to be fucked. Not this morning. She is standing in her long black coat, collar up against the wind, at the far end of the platform where the sign warns, PASSENGERS MUST NOT PASS THIS POINT OR CROSS THE LINE.
During the twenty-seven seconds of the businessman and Emma’s conversation, Mrs Worth was lighting a surreptitious cigarette. She knows no one is watching her because it is early in the morning and no one cares about the activities of old women, and she also doesn’t give a goddamn if they do. She is nervous. It is an important day.
Mrs Worth takes her second drag and enjoys judging Emma, who is now on a bench furiously taking things out of her bag, looking for something.
Emma’s every emotion is betrayed by her skin. Red blotches of rage and embarrassment creep up her neck as Mrs Worth watches her shove things into her bag, empty her coat pockets, and swear when she can’t find her phone. Mrs Worth notices the small bandage on Emma’s eyebrow. Emma once had a golden complexion, sparkling eyes and enviable blonde tresses. But she has been so drained by Gideon’s difficult birth and subsequent difficult life that her eyes have lost their colour and her hair has faded from gold to gossamer. Her skin is as pale as the butter of post office walls. Only when she feels shame or self-consciousness does her pallor change, the red patches pulsing under her translucence like neon hotel signs on postcards of Las Vegas.
Good Lord, Mrs Worth thinks, watching her, referring to Emma but also by extension to all women born after 1975 who have careers and children but constantly complain about how difficult the ‘balance’ is, and take pride in not being able to cook as though being negligent about a child’s diet is a feminist statement while they pay other women to be their cleaners and nannies and assistants and still, with all that support, can’t manage the behaviour of their children on a public outing when women like her did it all alone, all the time, with no one’s help. Useless, she thinks. She looks at Gideon, swinging his legs, shouting something incoherent, and thinks, Probably hyperactive or transgender or allergic to nuts like all of them these days.
Emma feels Mrs Worth’s eyes on her, she looks up. There is a flicker of eye contact that lasts thirty-one-hundredths of a second. Old crone, Emma thinks, familiar with the disapproving glares of mean old women. Incompetent bint, Mrs Worth thinks and sniffs with satisfaction, now that she knows that Emma knows she disapproves of her. If more people disapproved of things – social media, self-checkout machines at the supermarket, vegetarians, fat children, those disgraceful leggings that all the women round here wear – the world would be a better place for Mrs Worth. She is perceptive, though. Gideon is indeed allergic to nuts.
Mrs Worth turns her attention away from Emma and watches a small bird alight on the platform. She looks for the train down the track as she puffs on her cigarette. She checks her watch, not long now until the train gets here and takes her to London to see her grandsons. The last time she saw them the little one was four and the big one was six. The little one is nine now and the big one is eleven, and she reckons they have only a vague memory of her, if they have one at all. And God knows what her daughter-in-law put into their heads about her over all these years. But they are her son’s sons, and the invitation to her daughter-in-law’s funeral feels like a step in the right direction. For all of them. Especially her daughter-in-law.
And then, Mrs Worth finds herself lying on the concrete floor of the platform. She tries to get her bearings, but she is too light-headed. She does not know how she came to be there. But the others do.
At 7:02 and thirteen seconds they heard Emma shout, ‘Gideon!’ They saw Emma and Gideon struggle over her phone, Gideon clutching his mother’s wrist and pushing her arm, the phone flying from Emma’s grasp with surprising velocity as she wrestled her bag and her child. They saw the phone shoot past Mrs Worth’s head, surprising her and throwing her off balance. As the phone slid off the platform edge and onto the tracks, Mrs Worth fell, due to the hit of nicotine, the cold, the fact she’d had no breakfast, her nerves, and her advanced age – Mrs Worth will be seventy-eight this year – which combined to trigger a cardiac event. She feels a sudden shooting pain from her chest to her jaw to her arm.
From her position Mrs Worth doesn’t know the others are looking over the platform edge to see where the phone fell; she can’t see Emma running to the edge, Gideon running to the stairs. She doesn’t register Emma yelling, ‘Goddamn it!’
She only notices the pin-striped burgundy knee of the stranger kneeling beside her. The brown skin of the hand put out towards her, a memory from a long time ago of a hand put out to help her, and then she looks at his face.
‘Um,’ the stranger says, ‘are you all right?’
Despite her disorientation, she manages to give a Mrs Worthian answer: ‘Of course I am, don’t be ridiculous,’ she says, although she thinks she is having a heart attack and she finds it most inconvenient.
‘OK,’ he says, unsure. ‘Are you here with someone?’
‘Do I know you?’ she asks in a tone that makes him feel as though his question was too personal.
‘Uh, no, sorry, look, do you think you can get up? Maybe you shouldn’t get up, actually. Did you hit your head?’ he says, looking down at her, then up at the digital information display. It says the time is 7:02. Four minutes, he thinks.
‘I need to get there. I just need to get there,’ Mrs Worth says, finding the words hard to say because a fist is tightening around her heart and it won’t let go.
‘Um, yes, OK, but first we need to make sure you’re all right. Can I call someone for you? Do you have a mobile?’
The Good Samaritan is Sonny, a young man of twenty-seven. He grew up in this affluent London suburb, attended a private school nearby, and has been living here since coming home from university to save money and work out his next steps in life. Except that his homecoming was almost six years ago, and he should have made more progress by now. But a few things got in the way. They always do.
Sonny makes excellent first impressions. He is attractive and instantly likeable. He is tall with a slim, athletic, runner’s build, and handsome, with a unique sense of style. He relies on his looks, his dress, his racially ambiguous features, as a kind of sleight of hand, a misdirection. There is so much to look at when one meets Sonny – his face, his clothes, his eyes, his way of being – that people often don’t actually see him. And he knows it, and this is how he prefers it.
He is wearing an outfit this morning that is very Sonny. A burgundy pin-striped suit with slim-fit flared trousers. To guard against the cold, he’s not wearing a coat but an oversized, chunky-knit claret and orange bohemian scarf that is completely inappropriate with a suit, except when Sonny wears it.
The hem of his trousers hits well above his ankles, draw-ing attention to his white patent wingtips, which he wears without socks, despite the cold day. He is wearing a black shirt with a thin black satin tie. His nails are carefully manicured, painted white. The manicure is feminine but on Sonny’s hands also unexpectedly masculine, as is the suit, which he found in the women’s section of his favourite vintage clothing shop. His head is shaved but for the crop of copper-brown curls with bleached streaks, which he sometimes ties back to look serious but today put up in a topknot that falls forward just so, allowing one or two of his spiral curls to escape and fall charmingly just in front of his left eye, which is brown, draw-ing attention to his right eye, which is green.
His green-eyed mother said the green eye was from her Colombian father and the brown eye from her Jamaican mother, and though they had both passed, they loved him so much they came back to see the world with their grandson. Sonny’s pale and freckled, copper-haired, blue-eyed Scottish father, whom his wife’s parents had never trusted, said his son’s different eyes were the result of his mother drinking when she was pregnant, and people laughed when he said this, because they knew that a woman like her would do no such thing.
If you were his friend you would say to your other friend, ‘Only Sonny,’ and both of you would shake your heads and smile and know you meant that only he could pull off this outfit. You are, and always will be, a little bit in love with him, but you tell your friends that you would never date him because he’s soooo amazing but he has capital I Issues. Although, if you were honest with yourself, you know the reason you are not dating him is that he has never shown the least bit of without socks, despite the cold day. He is wearing a black shirt with a thin black satin tie. His nails are carefully manicured, painted white. The manicure is feminine but on Sonny’s hands also unexpectedly masculine, as is the suit, which he found in the women’s section of his favourite vintage clothing shop. His head is shaved but for the crop of copper-brown curls with bleached streaks, which he sometimes ties back to look serious but today put up in a topknot that falls forward just so, allowing one or two of his spiral curls to escape and fall charmingly just in front of his left eye, which is brown, draw-ing attention to his right eye, which is green.
His green-eyed mother said the green eye was from her Colombian father and the brown eye from her Jamaican mother, and though they had both passed, they loved him so much they came back to see the world with their grandson. Sonny’s pale and freckled, copper-haired, blue-eyed Scottish father, whom his wife’s parents had never trusted, said his son’s different eyes were the result of his mother drinking when she was pregnant, and people laughed when he said this, because they knew that a woman like her would do no such thing.
If you were his friend you would say to your other friend, ‘Only Sonny,’ and both of you would shake your heads and smile and know you meant that only he could pull off this outfit. You are, and always will be, a little bit in love with him, but you tell your friends that you would never date him because he’s soooo amazing but he has capital I Issues. Although, if you were honest with yourself, you know the reason you are not dating him is that he has never shown the least bit of interest in you. Not in that way. Oh – you think longingly, in secret – but if he did, you could definitely be the one to save him. Definitely.
Except you couldn’t, because one of his issues is that he is £32,000 in debt due to an online gambling addiction, and even his closest friends don’t know. His girlfriend – who isn’t as good looking as he is, which you and the other girls find annoying because you’re all better looking than her – knows about the gambling. But she doesn’t know that he’s at this station today.
He has lost all of the money from his trust and sold the vintage Rolex left by his Colombian grandfather, which he mourns every day as it was the most meaningful object he owned. And the £32,000 debt would have been £27,000, except that instead of paying it off, as he had told himself he would, he lost half the money he got for the watch on his favourite poker site.
If he could just get a better job and start earning more, he could pay off the debt, put this behind him, or work two jobs, bring down the debt, pay the debt, or he could play a game right now, because you never know, he might win, he could win enough for it all to go away, or it could all end now, this morning, and he could do what he planned to do and just go to the edge of the platform, just there, and at the right moment, at the right time, imagine it, the relief, he could just jump in front of the—
‘Oi, you can’t do that!’ the voice of the businessman suddenly cuts through Sonny’s conversation with Mrs Worth and the constant monologue of the debt, the debt, the debt flowing under his every thought and action.
Emma yells, ‘Just watch me!’ as she jumps down onto the tracks, so overtaken by adrenaline and anger and frustration that she just barely registers her son mimicking her somewhere, ‘Just watch me, watch me!’
‘Oi!’ the businessman shouts again, as he jumps down onto the tracks after Emma.
Perhaps now is the time to introduce him properly. His name is Liam. He is tall and broad, conventionally handsome, the alpha male in every room he enters. He wears exactly too much expensive cologne. He has a Mediterranean complexion, always tan in defiance of the sunless English winter. His smile, charmingly imperfect with that slight gap between his two front teeth, is a small gift he bestows upon women. When they deserve it.
He is in his mid-fifties, but age has only made him more attractive, adding salt, pepper and distinction to his close-cut beard, which matches the dark stubble of his close-cut shaved head. Even Liam cannot make hair grow where nature has determined it no longer will, but he has turned his hair loss to his advantage. He is ruggedly handsome, his male pattern baldness a credit to his virility, as though his hair simply could not survive his potent masculinity and so surrendered, defeated, leaving his scalp as a shining emblem of his vigour.
Liam gets up at five every morning to run and work out in the very expensive gym in the finished basement of his enormous suburban house, and it shows. No potbelly of middle age for him. He has the abs of a much younger man. And the bank account of a very rich one.
Liam usually drives to his office in London. He’s only at the station today because he was hoping to catch Emma. He hates taking the train with all of its sad, ordinary people. Having been ordinary himself once, he prefers not to be reminded of those days. Although when doing business, he does like to bring a touch of the common man into the room. It’s a useful tool that makes men born into affluence uncomfortable and deferential. Especially in today’s climate. It is why he still thickens his accent when he speaks to men of greater education and higher birth. He knows it stings when his dropped hs and double negatives remind them of his lesser beginnings but his bespoke Italian shoes remind them of his greater wealth.
If he survives and gets to his meeting, Liam will make an investment in an opportunity presented to him by two young people from the generation that people Liam’s age have little respect for because they’re sensitive, self-centred and politi-cally self-righteous. But these two are onto something, he can feel it. And if he is right, as he usually is, it will have global implications. And if he can get Emma to get his brother on board, all his problems would be solved.
So it really would be a shame if Liam died before making today’s investment. Perhaps even a greater shame than if Gideon, the child, died. Gideon, after all, has nothing to invest. Neither does Emma, who is in debt, having invested all she has in Gideon. Liam knows this. That’s why he follows her onto the tracks.
Now, pause here.
Take note of their positions.
The child, the mother, the businessman, the old woman and the gambler.
Consider these five in relation to one another.
Consider them in relation to themselves.
Leave them here and meet the others, the witnesses to this morning’s events. But please don’t hang about. We don’t have much time.
In the middle of the platform stand two middle-class, middle-aged, middle-management commuters who are slightly hungover from last night’s midweek, mid-priced, mid-range red wine.
The first, whom we’ll refer to as Bad Back for reasons that will soon reveal themselves, is tired from training for the charity 10k he was pressured into signing up for and for which he has collected no donations, planning to just give £500 himself at the end and be done with it.
The second, To Do List, is trying to finish her online shop-ping order on her phone before the train gets here, but she forgot her reading glasses and cannot see the screen clearly and consequently orders Royal Gala apples instead of Pink Ladies.
When her food delivery arrive tomorrow, To Do List will argue with the delivery person and say, ‘I didn’t order these.’ He will show her his handheld device, where it will demonstrate clearly that she ordered Royal Galas, but she will insist that this is impossible, even in the face of hard evidence. To Do List often misdirects her difficult emotions, and the supermarket delivery person will bear the brunt of her reaction to witnessing a death at the train station the day before, not knowing that the Royal Galas represent her new certitude about the futility of her own existence.
But that is tomorrow. On a day like today, a physical description of Bad Back and To Do List would ordinarily follow here. Clever observations about their modes of dress and thinning hair. The matronly bosom of To Do List, for example. Or the paunch of Bad Back and the small tufts of hair in his ears, which suggest a dying marriage because his wife has not noticed as she no longer sees him when she looks at him and/or she does not have the energy to raise the topic of ear hair in a way that will not drive the final nail into the coffin of their union. There are many other mundane but poignant details we could explore in the lives of these ordinary commuters, but we have time constraints. Let’s just say that you’ve seen them before, on some other train platform in some other suburb, weighed down by bags and coats and unmet goals and unrealised dreams.
You might be looking at one of them right now as you wait for your train. Or maybe you’re avoiding looking at the unseemly ear hair or mature bust you have noticed in the one sitting next to you by keeping your head down in this book, reading it for book club during your commute, asking yourself why you always put off reading the book until the day before book club.
In any case, Emma and Liam shout at each other, but Bad Back and To Do List can’t quite hear what they’re saying. They look up from their phones for a moment to roll their eyes privately and sigh heavily. They try to ascertain what roles, if any, they will have in this situation.
Bad Back knows it is never a good idea to get involved when abnormal behaviour is on display in public and returns to looking at his phone.
But To Do List feels uneasy. She’s not sure if she added regular or fat-free Greek yogurt to her basket. She’ll have to check the order when she gets to the office. Then she turns her attention to the scene.
This isn’t good, she thinks, looking at Gideon bouncing by the stairs, and Emma and Liam on the tracks, and Mrs Worth still on the ground. Someone will have to do something, she thinks. She pulls out her phone. She leaves herself a voice memo, ‘Order Archie’s shin guards.’
There is another witness here as well, a young man descend-ing the steps, walking onto the platform. He is a home health aide who has finally finished the night shift at one of the old, large, unrenovated homes in this area that have high but crumbling ceilings and beautiful rooms with peeling brocade wallpaper, where important men once smoked cigars in dinner jackets and velvet slippers but that now house their forgotten elderly owners who both fear and long for the quiet of death.
This young man, whom we will know as Medical Student, is newly arrived in this country. He left his home country in Eastern Africa to study medicine in a country in Eastern Europe, but his training was interrupted there by a homicidal psychotic dictator’s egomaniacal war. He entered the UK on a student visa, intending to start again from scratch. But to pay his university fees and to live, he must work more than the allotted twenty hours permitted, which leaves little time for his studies. So he takes the night shifts to catch up on his reading while occasionally checking to make sure the old rich people are still breathing. Medical Student is tired but will soon spring into action. Unfortunately, he will be just a little too late. Or maybe, depending on how things go, he’ll be right on time.
Right now, as he walks down the last few steps to the plat-form, he is taking in the scene and looking around for anyone with whom he could make eye contact and share a laugh of disbelief at Emma and the incomprehensible behaviour of pale British women when he spots Mrs Worth on the ground. He runs to her side.
Those are the witnesses.
Now, observe that Gideon is crying, or is it laughing? It is hard to know. He rocks on his feet, wraps his arms around himself, makes an aeroplane noise and runs in a circle. ‘Watch me!’ he echoes his mother and then sits down on the platform edge, his legs dangling over the side, arms crossed. Emma calls to him, ‘Stay right there!’
Liam yells at Emma, ‘Are you mad?’
Bad Back looks up at them and thinks, Best not to get involved. He looks at the digital information display. It says 7:02. He hopes Emma and Liam will wrap this up soon. He has to get to the office. He texts his assistant, just in case he’s late. Nutters on the tracks. Hopefully no delays but will let you know.
‘C’mon, love, be sensible—’ Liam says, walking slowly towards Emma, the phone lying on the tracks between them. Liam’s arms are tensed, his knees bent, he approaches her slowly, as though she’s a wild animal or a hostage taker or about to jump off a ledge.
But Emma is a mother standing on train tracks. And she has had enough.
They both lunge for the phone, but Liam overpowers her, grabs it, and holds it in the air above her head, out of her reach, as he takes a step backward towards the platform.
‘Careful, the third rail!’ he warns her.
‘What are you doing?’ she shrieks, pulling at his jacket, jumping up to grab his arm.
He easily holds her back with his other arm and says, ‘I just want to talk.’
To Do List, watching them, feels a surge in her gut, as much as one can feel a surge when wearing very tight tummy control undergarments, and knows that tragedy is upon them. She says into her voice memo app, ‘Call window cleaner,’ as she hurries up the stairs to find a staff member.
‘I’m trying to do what you want, just fuck off!’ Emma says, angrily, pushing at Liam.
Liam says, urgently, ‘Think about the boy,’ gesturing towards Gideon, as he takes careful steps back to the platform.
To this, Emma gives a response, but everyone present hears her words differently, imbues them with meaning based on their own beliefs about who she is and how women – mothers – should behave. We cannot explore each interpretation in depth, as the clock is ticking and the train has just arrived at the station before this one and opened its doors and will soon be doing the same here. And there is much that still needs to be accomplished before the death.
In summary, Sonny hears her say, ‘Don’t be a hero, don’t try to play me.’
Mrs Worth hears, ‘I can’t change him, don’t try to save me.’ Bad Back hears, ‘Don’t go changin’ to try and please me,’ and is momentarily distracted by a brief memory of dancing with his wife on holiday last year to Billy Joel’s ‘Just the Way You Are’, of which this is the first line.
It is at this point, at 7:02 and forty-three seconds, that Gideon shrieks, ‘Mama!’ his arms outstretched, his eyes fixed on the back of Liam’s head and his mother’s phone in the air.
‘That’s Mama’s!’ Gideon yells, as he leaps from the platform onto Liam’s back, eleven seconds before 7:03.
People who experience tragic events often say that they happened in a flash, out of the blue, in the blink of an eye. The average adult blinks fifteen to twenty times a minute. In twenty blinks of an eye, think of all that can happen, and a minute becomes a very long time.
‘That’s Mama’s!’ Gideon charges and grapples for the phone, wrapping his legs around the stunned Liam’s waist, digging his child’s fingers into Liam’s collar, scratching the flesh of his neck, reaching up to his arm with surprising strength.
The one thing no one hears next is Emma saying, ‘He never calls me Mama.’
‘Well, it’s Daddy’s now!’ Liam taunts Gideon, waving the phone in the air, the child flailing on his back.
‘You bastard!’ Emma yells.
‘Bastardo!’ Gideon exclaims in an Italian accent for a reason known only to him.
‘Takes one to know one!’ Liam retorts as Gideon bites into his neck.
‘Harder!’ Emma encourages her son, and Liam finally drops the phone.
One station away, at 7:03 and nine seconds, the passengers board, the train closes its doors. And the driver releases the brake.