Torn

The rain comes in waves, driven hard enough by the wind to find its way beneath Ellen’s collar and down the back of her neck. She runs with her head lowered, although running is a generous description of what she manages with a backpack, a holdall and a suitcase. The weight pulls her sideways whenever she lengthens her stride. She keeps correcting for it, hauling herself upright, clenching her jaw against the effort. Somewhere behind her is Tod’s flat, and she wants enough streets between herself and it that going back will cease to feel like an available decision.

Her sneakers have filled with water. She cannot remember when it happened, only that each footfall now produces a small, cold movement around her toes. Her clothes are soaked through, so there is no longer much point avoiding puddles. Headlights spread across the wet road, turning the rain briefly white before passing. A car strikes standing water beside the kerb and sends it against her legs. Ellen gives a sharp, breathless laugh. Of course. She had forgotten to make room for that. Apparently leaving her boyfriend in bed with somebody else has not exempted her from the ordinary little services the world provides.

A man sheltering in a doorway looks up from his phone as she passes. The cigarette between his fingers glows, and smoke leaves his nose in two pale streams. He watches her for a moment, perhaps because of the bags, perhaps because she is running in weather sensible people are waiting out. Ellen hates him for looking and knows, with the small part of herself still capable of fairness, that he has done nothing wrong. She does not want to become something a stranger notices on his way home. A wet woman with too much luggage. Somebody whose circumstances can be guessed at without asking.

The next shopfront is still boarded from the riots. Someone has painted WE ARE OPEN across the plywood, although the smaller notice beneath it gives opening hours that do not include any time Ellen could use. She moves beneath its narrow awning to straighten the holdall strap. Above her, soot darkens the brickwork. She pulls the strap higher and goes back into the rain.

Beyond the park she sees the bus shelter: a plastic roof, a metal bench and a sign whose illuminated display flickers through the rain. A bus is pulling in. Its brakes hiss, the doors open, and the warm rectangle of the entrance appears beneath the shelter lights. For a moment all she can see is the space inside it. Somewhere dry. Somewhere that will carry her away without requiring her to decide how to keep moving.

She judges the distance, then the route along the pavement. Straight ahead to the junction, right, then back along the other side of the park. Too far. By the time she reaches it, the driver will have closed the doors. She looks at the hedge separating her from the grass and makes the decision before considering what carrying three bags through a hedge will involve. There is a thinner place between two dark masses of growth. She turns sideways and pushes into it.

The branches resist with a strength she has not allowed for. Something catches her cardigan near the elbow. Thorns drag across the back of her hand, and the backpack snags behind her shoulder, pulling her to a stop. For one exhausted instant it feels as though the hedge is trying to hold her there. Come back inside. She hears the words in her own mind and hates their familiarity. She twists, forces the suitcase through first and tears herself after it, only to discover that the holdall has caught on something behind her.

“No,” she says, with a useless vehemence that surprises her. She yanks the strap. The bag stays where it is. Across the park the bus doors remain open, but she cannot see whether anybody is still boarding. She pulls harder, leaning her whole weight against the resistance. There is a brief tearing sound. Then the holdall comes free so suddenly that she stumbles forward and nearly falls over the suitcase.

She keeps going. The grass is waterlogged, soft enough to give beneath her feet and send cold spray up her legs. Her lungs hurt. Each breath seems to enter without quite providing what she needs, and the straps work deeper into her shoulders. She watches the bus entrance rather than the ground. Still open. Still there. She begins to believe she will make it, which makes the possibility of missing it considerably worse.

The soft resistance of grass gives way to concrete. Her sneaker slides on the pavement, and she catches herself with an awkward step that jars both knees. Then she is at the door, looking up at the driver while rain runs from her hair onto her face. He looks down at her and waits. She cannot tell whether his expression is disapproval or simply the expression of a man who has spent several hours watching people get onto a bus. Tonight the distinction is beyond her.

She sets down the suitcase and reaches for her phone, dragging it from her back pocket with fingers that have begun to lose their usefulness. Droplets gather over the cracked screen. She wipes it against her cardigan, makes it wetter and taps it against the reader. Her breathing is loud in the entrance. She tries to quiet it while the machine takes its time. Please. She has not checked the balance since before her shift. Please let there be enough.

The reader beeps. A second passes in which she can feel the driver waiting and the passengers looking past him. Then it chimes again and the display turns green. Relief arrives with such force that she has to tighten her grip on the suitcase handle. She moves before anything can change, carrying the bags down the aisle past tired faces, damp coats and a pair of knees drawn back to let her through.

There is an empty seat beside a window. Ellen lowers herself into it and settles the suitcase close to her legs, leaving the holdall at her feet while she works the backpack off her shoulders. The sudden absence of its weight hurts almost as much as carrying it. She places it beside her, leans her forehead against the glass and breathes. The bus is warm. Not wonderfully warm, not enough to undo the cold in her clothes, but warm enough that her body notices and begins to hope.

The doors close. The engine deepens, and the bus pulls away, making the shelter drift backwards outside the window. Rain travels diagonally across the glass. For the first time since leaving the flat, Ellen feels a little of the pressure in her chest ease. She has a seat. She has paid to be here. Nobody can reasonably expect anything from her for the next few minutes.

Then something pink catches her eye.

Fabric protrudes from the side of the holdall. She bends forward, initially thinking she has failed to close it properly, and finds a long split near the lower seam. The hedge. The tearing sound she had not had time to examine. She touches the opening, pushes two fingers through it and feels how easily it spreads. A pink sock hangs halfway out. When she pulls it free, another item shifts towards the gap.

She looks into the aisle. The matching sock lies a short distance behind her seat, wet and flattened against the floor. Her gaze goes to the window, following an impulse she already wishes she had resisted. Through the rain and the lights around the shelter, she can see patches of fabric scattered across the park. A pale shirt near the pavement. Something darker farther back. Beyond it, the small, unmistakable shape of underwear lying on the grass.

Her clothes mark the route she has taken. Not everything, surely not everything, but enough that she cannot make herself continue looking. These are the things she has just carried out of the bedroom while trying to preserve whatever dignity was left to her. Now they are lying outside where anyone can see them, becoming heavier with rain while the bus takes her farther away.

Someone laughs. It is a small sound from somewhere behind her, and perhaps it has nothing to do with the sock, the torn bag or the woman staring through the window. Ellen cannot afford the effort of believing that. “Oh God,” she says, and pushes herself upright. Her knee catches the suitcase. She steadies it with one hand and grips the back of the seat ahead with the other. “Stop,” she tries, but the word comes out too quietly. She swallows and makes herself speak again. “Stop the bus. Please.”

Heads turn. The driver looks at her in the mirror and says something she cannot distinguish beneath the engine and the blood beating in her ears. “Please,” she repeats. “I need to get off.” She is already pulling the backpack onto one shoulder, gathering the holdall against her so that nothing else can fall through the split. The suitcase will not come out from between her feet. She drags it harder, feels it catch, then frees it with a twist that sends pain through her wrist.

The bus slows. Brakes whine, her weight shifts forward, and she braces against the seat until it stops. When the doors open, the smell of wet pavement enters with the cold air. Ellen works her way down the aisle, apologising once when the suitcase knocks somebody’s shoe. She cannot look at the passengers now. All her attention goes into getting herself and the bags through the entrance without dropping anything else.

The doors close behind her almost as soon as she reaches the pavement. She turns towards the park while the bus pulls away, its rear lights blurring into the rain. For a moment she stands with all three bags and no shelter, watching the warm windows recede. Then she carries everything back to the grass.

She puts the suitcase and backpack down where she can keep them in sight and begins collecting clothes. Her fingers are numb enough that she has difficulty separating a shirt from the flattened grass beneath it. She shakes it, which removes almost none of the water, and pushes it into the holdall. A sock. Another shirt. Underwear she snatches up without examining because looking at it makes her feel worse. She keeps searching between the hedge and the pavement, afraid of what she will miss and unable to remember exactly what she packed.

At some point she kneels, and cold mud presses through her jeans. She has found the edge of something caught beneath a branch. Pulling it free requires both hands. When she stands again, her knees are wet in a different, heavier way. The distinction seems absurd. There are apparently several varieties of being soaked, and she is becoming acquainted with all of them.

The tear needs covering. She takes off her coat, hesitates only when the wind reaches the cardigan beneath it, then pushes the coat inside the holdall and works it down against the split. It is not a repair. It is something she hopes will remain between her clothes and the ground. She tests it with her hand, rearranges the wet fabric and gathers the loose things she cannot safely fit back inside. Then she retrieves the other bags and starts towards the shelter.

By the time she reaches it, the rain seems to have entered every part of her that can admit water. Her jeans cling behind her knees. Her hands shake too much to make setting down the suitcase a simple task. Hair sticks to her cheeks, and drops fall steadily from its ends onto the pavement. She sits on the metal bench with a bundle of wet clothes in her lap and the bags crowded around her feet. Wind comes through the open sides, rattling the panel behind her. The shelter keeps the rain from falling directly onto her head. That is the extent of its hospitality.

A screen built into the shelter changes from an advertisement to breaking news. MIDDLE EAST: FRESH CLASHES follows a strip of red across the bottom. Above it, armed men stand at a junction between pale stone buildings while people hurry beneath the awnings of a market. One of the men catches a passer-by by the arm; the picture changes before she sees what follows. The screen has no sound. Ellen watches until an advertisement returns, then her attention drifts away.

For a while she looks at the pavement and tries to breathe without shuddering. Water follows a shallow channel beside the kerb, carrying grit and a small piece of paper towards the drain. She watches the paper catch, turn and free itself. There must be something she can do next. People lose places to live. People run out of money. These are things that happen, and there must be procedures for surviving them. At the hospital, when somebody needs help, there is usually another person to ask. Out here she cannot think who that person would be.

She takes out her phone. The screen does not respond to her first attempt or her second. She wipes her thumb along the least wet part of her cardigan and tries again. When the banking app opens, she already knows what the number will tell her. Knowing does nothing to soften the sight of it.

The fare has taken the last of her money. She looks at the balance, waiting for some overlooked part of the display to alter its meaning, then lets out a wet little laugh. She has paid for a journey that carried her only far enough to make the walk back unpleasant. Even the money is gone before it has had time to become useful.

She lowers the phone into the clothes in her lap, realises what she has done and picks it up again. For a moment she holds it without knowing where else to put it. Then she works it back into her pocket and draws a shaking hand through her hair. Her scalp hurts where the wet strands pull. She needs a plan, and the need feels horribly like another demand somebody has made of her.

Ellen closes her eyes and rests her head against the shelter’s cold frame. Going back to Tod is a thought she refuses before it can acquire details. There is the bar. She has just left it, but it is still a place she knows, with people who know her and doors she might be allowed through. The day shift will be starting soon. She does not need to explain everything at once. She can say she needs to use the toilets. She can get out of the wind.

The thought develops because it has somewhere to go. She can wring out her clothes. Use the hand dryer, taking turns warming her fingers and holding damp fabric beneath the hot air. There might be a towel. There will be light, running water and a mirror she can choose not to look into until she is ready. None of it provides somewhere to live, but she can imagine doing each thing, and that makes the bar more substantial than any of the other possibilities she has considered.

Perhaps she can get another shift. Somebody might be late, somebody might want to leave early, or the manager might allow her to stay if she asks in the right way. She knows the work. She can do it tired. She has spent nearly two years proving that. Tips would mean cash, and cash would mean food. If the customers are drunk enough, generous enough or careless enough with their change, there might eventually be enough for a cheap motel.

She holds that possibility carefully. A room with a door she can close. Somewhere to put the bags on the floor without having to keep watching them. It is too much to depend upon yet, but getting to the bar is not. She can walk there. Thirty minutes, perhaps less through the side streets. She knows the route.

Standing takes longer than she expects. Her legs resist, stiffened by the cold and the brief rest, and she has to lean forward before they will accept her weight. She puts the backpack on, settles the bundle of clothes inside the top of the holdall and gathers the bag against her hip to protect the tear. The suitcase handle is slippery. She adjusts her grip, looks once along the road where the bus disappeared, then turns towards the bar.