I know what happened to the old woman outside Cessnock subway station. I don’t think anybody else does, but maybe I’m kidding myself; maybe this is the sort of thing everybody knows, and just chooses not to speak about. It has that sort of feeling about it, anyway- something slightly unclean, not something we talk about in public.
When I was little, my mother could see into the future; but only so long as she never looked at it head on. On her bad days, I used to be able to tell that it was happening almost as soon as I opened my eyes in the morning. The future would come creeping under my bedroom door and fill the house up like a fog; she’d be jittery, distracted, her knee jumping at the breakfast table. She talked fast, often in circles. Sometimes she broke cups. I’d take the day off school and sit and write down everything she said. Later, when she’d come back to me, the two of us would sit down and sift through the lot of it, trying to piece together fragments of meaning.
She used to talk about mirrors a lot. She’d talk about reflections, and real life, and how to tell the difference between them: that subtle strangeness, the image flipped, everything on the wrong way round.
But that was a long time ago now, and in another place. I was different then: smaller, more afraid. All of that was behind me, these days. I had my own life, now; every day I got up and I catch the subway to campus, on the other side of the river. It wasn’t much of a subway system, at least not like what we had back home: just a single loop of tunnels, trains going round and round. If you got on at the wrong side, all you had to do is wait; you’ll get there eventually. I found this comforting. Every day I went round and round and round, and then ended up back in the same place again.
Another thing: half of the stations here were so small there that were almost nothing to them, no barriers or safeguards, just a raised concrete platform between two tunnels that opened up onto total blackness. Standing there between them, you could feel a strange wind blowing, especially when the train was getting close. It smelled like soil and cold and damp, like things moving down there, underneath the earth. There was a round, polished mirror fixed to each far wall, I guess to let the drivers see what was happening behind them, but it looked strange, and a little bit lonely; a tiny moon, hanging suspended in the dark.
I saw the old woman almost every morning. She might not even have been that old; she has one of those faces where it’s difficult to tell, skin scraped tight over her cheekbones, pale moon of a forehead, something bleary and unfocused in her eyes. Junkie face, the kids at school used to call it, rolling their eyes back and tapping the side of their heads in the universal gesture for crazy.
There were a lot of drugs about, back home, mostly MDMA and weed and charlie, but occasionally acid and mushrooms as well, but there was still a clear distinction between druggies and people who just used drugs. A lot of this had to do with how you dressed- with money, in other words- but some of it had to do with your face as well, whether you had that drawn, translucent look about you, like you’d already started fading around the edges. Whether your voice had that strangled, nasal edge to it. It had not yet really occured to any of us, then, that it was possible to move from one category to the other. That changed as I got older. People started to slip through the cracks. It happened quickly, or it felt like it, at least; but mostly only one way.
The old woman had more of a touch of that about her, at least to my eyes. Often, when I passed, she was gazing off into the distance, as if she was watching something nobody else could see. She had a dark red birthmark underneath her right eye- a port-wine stain- and there was something hunched and crowlike in her posture, like a rumpled black umbrella. She usually sat at the top of the flight of stairs that led down to the underground. She had a paper cup, and a little cardboard sign written in black marker, block capitals scrawled like hieroglyphics. I AM HUNGRY, it said, and then: JESUS LOVES YOU.
I gave her loose change sometimes, when I had any on me, and she would nod slowly in wordless acknowledgement, already staring through me as if I wasn’t really there.
My mum still phoned me every couple of weeks. Her voice sounded strange. I wanted to blame the connection, but I knew realistically it was probably the medication. They had her medicated up to her eyeballs, and she was not the same, by then, as she once was; but there were still enough similarities that thinking about her made me want to cry. She asked me questions about my flat, my job, university, all with a slightly mechanical edge, and I wondered whether she’d written them down beforehand, whether they were rehearsed. There were long silences where I could hear her breathing heavily on the other end of the line.
“Well, you certainly seem to be thriving.” She’d say, brightly, at the end of every call. There was a sheen of tragedy about it, her voice cracking just a little at the edges. I knew she understood why I was here; I knew that she was happy for me. I knew, also, that she would never forgive me.
After I hung up, I always realised I was twisting her old wedding ring, working it over my finger joint and back again; she’d given it to me just as I was leaving, but it only fit properly on one finger of my right hand. After those phone calls, it always felt strangely heavy; a dead weight.
I was on my way home the day it happened. It was late, and I was distracted; it had been a long day. I’d had some trouble submitting one of my assignments- something wrong with the online portal, it kept on just timing out- and I was still on the phone when I got off the train, trying to get the dodgy underground internet to work well enough for me to double check that everything had finally uploaded properly.
Probably that was why I lingered in the station; usually I didn’t hang around down there, especially not at the very bottom of the platform. I felt something like vertigo whenever I was down there, like my footing was somehow more precarious, even though I knew it made no difference; it was the same width right down to the bottom, the same distance from the dark. The call of the void, I’ve heard people call it, that dizzying downwards pull. But I don’t think there’s any word for it when it only happens underground.
I was standing at the very end of the platform, peering at my phone screen, and at first, I didn’t even see her. I just felt something touch my shoulder.
I looked up then, startled, and I saw her in the round surface of the mirror: the old woman, right there behind me, so close it made me flinch. One birdlike hand was on my shoulder, and for a split second, my eyes met hers in our reflection. Those vacant, far-off eyes, her face like milk; and the red birthmark, spilling down the right side of her face.
The right. It’s the wrong side, I thought, with a cold surge of panic, and twisting free, I spun around to face her; but there was nobody there. Just the empty subway platform, no trains due, and there, lying at my feet like an afterthought, that little scrap of cardboard with it’s sideways spider-scrawl: I AM HUNGRY. JESUS LOVES YOU.
I stood frozen for a moment, trying to make sense of it, my own blood thrumming in my ears. And then I started running.
I slowed down outside the station when I realised that I was trembling, my breath moving through me in fast, jagged bursts. I stopped still for just a moment, and pressed my hand against my chest; you’re okay, you’re okay, I told myself. Just a trick of the light. Just one of Mum’s reflections. It had been a long time, that was all. I’d thought all that was over. I took a couple of deep breaths to steady myself, and then I kept on walking.
I was almost all the way back to the house before I realised that my mother’s ring was on my left hand.