Hush Hush by Gabrielle Mullarkey

eased off.
    As she found the platform for
Victoria, a Tube train was pulling in.
    Angela prepared to hop on,
relieved to see that both platform and arriving train were relatively
empty. Her lungs swelled briefly with elation, just as giddy as her
recent panic. She was going to make it! A whole Tube journey by
herself, without hysterics or throwing up!
    Then she glanced down the
platform and saw Pauline standing at the far end. Something in
Pauline’s stance sent icicles up Angela’s spine.
    Pauline’s toes hugged the
edge of the platform. Her arms were rising slowly, her calves
bunching purposefully through the clingy cotton of a long ethnic
skirt. She was aping the graceful trajectory of a pearl-diver, poised
to take flight with an angelic leap of blind faith. And she was
waiting ‒ waiting
for the onrushing train to come her way.
    ‘Pauline, no!’ Angela
had thought her cry would emerge as a bat-squeak. Instead, she heard
her desperate roar bounce off the echoing roar of the Tube train.
    Pauline looked up in
astonishment. Just for a second, she teetered dangerously, arms
flapping. Oh my God, thought Angela. She is going to fall in front of
the train. And all because I yelled at her.
    Pauline stepped back from the
edge. She waited calmly as the Tube doors slid open, then boarded.
    Further down the platform, Angela
boarded, heart hammering. She had made a spur-of-the-moment incursion
into Pauline’s life, prompted by instinct. But what of the
consequences? Pauline, who’d probably been daydreaming, would
think she was mad, hate her, make work a misery.
    At Victoria, Angela hung back in
the exodus from the station, keeping Pauline within her sights.
Pauline strode ahead, not a chestnut hair out of place beneath her
velvet Alice band.
    Angela scampered towards the
sanctuary of Marchbank Publishing. Eyes down, she almost tripped over
Pauline, who’d stopped to look at a display of pipes and
pipe-racks in a shop window.
    ‘H-hello,’ nodded
Angela, continuing to walk.
    Pauline left her vantage point
and fell into step beside her. Her silence drove Angela to gabble. ‘ Sorry about that ‒ shouting at you on the platform.’
    ‘You thought I was going to
chuck myself under the train,’ said Pauline as a cool statement
of fact.
    ‘Course not!’
    ‘I sometimes think about
playing chicken on Tube platforms,’ confessed Pauline dreamily. ‘ I enjoy facing my
fear and inciting other people’s. I like to stand too close to
the edge, and look up to see terror on the Tube driver’s face.
Isn’t that wicked?’
    ‘Dunno.’ Angela felt
Pauline’s habitual stare and shrank deeper within herself.
    ‘Was that your boyfriend,
the bloke who came in with the flowers?’ asked Pauline.
    ‘No. Yes. Sort of. We only
met the other day.’
    ‘He’s a looker.’
    Angela said nothing. Agreeing
would sound big-headed and demurring like false modesty.
    ‘They’re all shits,’
said Pauline suddenly. ‘ I
can’t stand women who’d rather tolerate a shit than be on
their own.’
    Was that a challenge or an
accusation? ‘ Yeah,
well,’ said Angela nervously. ‘ I’m
wary myself. There’s a lot in that old saying, never trust a
man with testicles.’
    Pauline laughed. A great snorting
laugh of vented agitation. Beneath its sharp edge lay the faint
belltone of unhappiness. Some man had treated Pauline like a shit.
Recently. Angela toyed with the idea of confiding the Tufnell Park
incident.
    But then the revolving doors of
work loomed before them, and Pauline disappeared inside. She didn’t
hold the lift for Angela.
    Back at her desk, Val was
waiting. ‘ Angela!
You kept quiet about him. Red-haired, Irish, bringer of flowers and
springer of surprise lunch dates. He’s gorgeous.’
    ‘Is he?’ Angela
curdled with embarrassment as Marla looked up as well. ‘ I
haven’t known him long. You don’t think he’s a bit ‒ rugged?’
    ‘If you can’t see
he’s gorgeous, you need bifocals,’ sniffed Val.
    Pauline said