Chapter 46
838 Words
46
John Lucas swallowed hard as he felt his legs wobble beneath him. He looked down at the steel rails, wooden sleepers and chipped stone beneath him.
So this was it. This was where it all ended. This was to be his final resting place. Or, more accurately, some of him would rest more or less below where he now stood and other parts of him would be spread along the track and the front of the train — if he timed the jump right.
He knew what was going to happen and he knew it wouldn’t be pretty. But right now he didn’t care. Yeah, the train driver would need counselling and might never work again, but as far as John was concerned he could go f**k himself. He didn’t care about anything any more. He didn’t even care about his own life, never mind that of some bloke driving a train.
It would hurt. He knew that. But it would only be for a split second, if that. His skull would almost instantly crack or blow open, leaving him completely braindead within a second at the very most. It would be instantaneous relief from this life.
That word made him laugh. Life. It hadn’t been a life. He’d been dragged up on a shitty estate and had fallen into a world of crime — something he’d later found out he wasn’t particularly good at. He’d spent his time inside looking back rather than forwards, always thinking about the stupid mistakes he’d made, the things he’d done and wished he hadn’t. He could’ve started writing a list on the day he was banged up and still be writing it now.
He was a man who alway seemed to make the wrong decision. He didn’t know why; it was just something that happened. And each of those decisions had, in turn, led to him standing on the edge of the bridge at Middlebrook station, staring at a train he’d never seen before, but which he knew was about to end his life.
There was no point in trying any other way. All he’d ever had in life was his mum — the one person who’d really cared for him.
He’d never known close family, other than her. When his mum had become pregnant not long after leaving school, her family had disowned her. His father was a married man, a friend of the family. He never knew his name. He didn’t want to. John had assumed for many years that he’d grown up on a council estate because that was his place in life.
He thought, like so many of his friends’ families, that this was his background. It was only years later that his mum had told him she’d actually been from quite a well-off family, but on being disowned when falling pregnant she’d been forced into council housing just to put a roof over her and her son’s heads.
She was as astonished as anyone to find out that her Aunt Iris had left her a decent inheritance. Not a fortune, but enough to enable her to buy her own house and set her and John up with the life she’d wanted him to have. John had his own theories on that one. In his mind, his father had been Iris’s husband, his great-uncle Frank.
His mum had mentioned something in passing about Frank being a not particularly pleasant man. The inference was that he was physically abusive towards Iris. John wondered whether Frank had r***d his mother — Frank’s niece — and that John himself had been the product of that crime. That would, in his mind, explain why Iris had left her estate to his mum. Perhaps it was her way of apologising, of ensuring that John — her step-son, to all intents and purposes — had a half-decent upbringing.
They’d moved out of the council estate and into their own house when John was thirteen. By then, the damage had already been done.
He wondered how much of it was down to that upbringing and what was in the genes. To exist purely because one of the vilest of crimes had occurred had to affect you in some way.
In any case, it was all irrelevant. That sad, shitty little life would all be over in a few seconds. He’d be able to join his mum, wherever she was, and ask her to tell him everything. He wondered if at the moment of his death he’d suddenly know it all anyway, ascend to some all-knowing plane where everything becomes clear. That was the thing about death — no-one really knew what happened. There was no way of coming back and telling everyone what it was like. No-one would ever know until it happened to them.
Whatever it was like, it would be infinitely preferable to living this shitty life.
He looked down over the edge again, the tips of his toes protruding over the precipice as he started to hear the train rushing down the tracks.
He swallowed again, then heard a voice behind and below him. He turned round to look and saw a woman on the far platform, looking shocked and panicked.
He turned his head back towards the train and scrunched his eyes shut tight.
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