Closed Circuit


She's crossed the yellow line,  her hands clenched by her sides.  Her suede shoes are spotted with raindrops, her short dress clings wrinkled to her thighs.  On the black-and-white security video you can't see the colour of her hair, but I can tell you it's banana-blonde, bruised darker by the rain.

The tape strobes forward, so one minute she's peering down the platform and the next she's staring back over her shoulder and you can see her eyes, wide and ringed with black, and her mouth, sagging loose like she's crying, but you can't see the tears because the picture breaks up into useless grey squares when you zoom in that far.   

The policeman pauses the video so I can blow my nose.  My handkerchief smells of her detergent, fake lemon, artificial and soapy, like her pillows. My wife's sheets smell like lavender.  I wipe my eyes and we carry on.

Next thing she's gone, only her footprints left, pale and dry on the wet concrete, and a train whipping past.  There's a pause, and then the video jerks a man into frame, suspends his briefcase in mid-air as he runs towards her empty space, grasping at nothing, and the briefcase smashes to the ground as he drops to his knees.  You can't see the footprints anymore; he's sprawled in the way.  The tape pushes a crowd to his side, presses an old woman's hands to her eyes, yanks her mouth wide open.  Strangers jostle to see.

Everything jolts along in silence like a slide-show, without the old lady's screams or the howling of the breaks or the security guards shouting or the rattling of the rain on the train roof.  All I can hear is the whirr of the tape machine and the pounding of blood in my ears.

The policeman passes me the note, and I say, yes, this is her writing, that is my name.  My hands tremble as I sign the statement.  He offers to phone my wife, emphasizes the word wife, calls me sir, and I want to grasp his pimply neck with my shaking hands and squeeze.  But I can't concentrate on his face; the room blinks out and flashes up her face, wide eyes, wet mouth, slick hair against the skull, black-and-white, tense, fixed.   

My wife reads about it later in the newspaper.  How awful, she says, her hand to her mouth, that poor young woman, and I don't reply.  I can barely hear her.  The train howls through my skull, huge and endless, and everything around me vanishes, piece by piece, popping out like spent bulbs, and I'm left standing on my own in the middle of a vast concrete plain, my eyes open, and all I can see are her footprints, blurred and ruined by the never-ending rain.


* Valerie O'Riordan has had fiction published at Pequin and Dogmatika. She lives in Birmingham, England, and blogs at www.not-exactly-true.blogspot.com