I remember what happened as if I wasn’t really there. I left work at about twenty to six, sleepy from lunchtime drinks with my colleagues, a working celebration of Christmas in alcohol and grease. I’d typed erratically all afternoon and abandoned my meeting notes with a promise that I’d do it in the morning, first thing, clear mind and clear hours. I left and I walked to Chancery Lane. I hurried down to the platform, frowning to myself at the queues, crowded even in the ticket hall, and dashed to the end where I’d be able to disembark correctly at my home stop.
Where the train doors line up with the platform little crowds form and I obediently joined one, a colleague at my right nodding acknowledgement in his equally grim set of head, wanting to get home. I was thinking of some last minute shopping, some errands that I could dash through and get home and do some laundry. My colleague boarded a train but it was too crowded, I hung back. And as it happened again with the next train I was edged over the yellow line, mute protector.
I started to feel dizzy. I thought about hanging on for the train and then I think, I think I started to turn to try to push through the people, get back towards the wall, but I didn’t manage and the next thing I remember is screaming and the sour taste of waking. Waking on the tracks, somehow miracurously falling between the edge and the electrified rail, something no one would let me forget for the rest of the evening. And the man, his hands groping my neck for my suit jacket. Oh my God, oh my God, it didn’t feel like it was happening to me but to a character in the film playing through my mind.
But it was me and suddenly he’d lain me, a fish, on the dock and there were so many faces. A woman covered my legs with a red scarf, I suppose to preserve my dignity where my skirt had ridden up. I repeated my name again and again, I was terrified, trying blindly to reassure myself I was alive. And then someone put me in the recovery position and it hurt so much, I remember feeling the irritating amusement of irony at this, that they’d made me shift onto my side when it hurt, it hurt so much.
And all I could think beyond the burble of the questions was how embarrassed I was, how much I was going to upset my parents and whether I’d be able to go to work tomorrow. I thought about how much my side hurt, focussed on my kidneys, thinking about my history of infections, paranoid I'd destroyed an organ in my fall.
And that is all I remember of what happened, of the accident itself. From them on, everything is much clearer.
Where the train doors line up with the platform little crowds form and I obediently joined one, a colleague at my right nodding acknowledgement in his equally grim set of head, wanting to get home. I was thinking of some last minute shopping, some errands that I could dash through and get home and do some laundry. My colleague boarded a train but it was too crowded, I hung back. And as it happened again with the next train I was edged over the yellow line, mute protector.
I started to feel dizzy. I thought about hanging on for the train and then I think, I think I started to turn to try to push through the people, get back towards the wall, but I didn’t manage and the next thing I remember is screaming and the sour taste of waking. Waking on the tracks, somehow miracurously falling between the edge and the electrified rail, something no one would let me forget for the rest of the evening. And the man, his hands groping my neck for my suit jacket. Oh my God, oh my God, it didn’t feel like it was happening to me but to a character in the film playing through my mind.
But it was me and suddenly he’d lain me, a fish, on the dock and there were so many faces. A woman covered my legs with a red scarf, I suppose to preserve my dignity where my skirt had ridden up. I repeated my name again and again, I was terrified, trying blindly to reassure myself I was alive. And then someone put me in the recovery position and it hurt so much, I remember feeling the irritating amusement of irony at this, that they’d made me shift onto my side when it hurt, it hurt so much.
And all I could think beyond the burble of the questions was how embarrassed I was, how much I was going to upset my parents and whether I’d be able to go to work tomorrow. I thought about how much my side hurt, focussed on my kidneys, thinking about my history of infections, paranoid I'd destroyed an organ in my fall.
And that is all I remember of what happened, of the accident itself. From them on, everything is much clearer.
