The book on the train

Fiction, about adults over 18. A woman who arrived at all of this in 2012, by the least respectable route available, and who has stopped apologising for it.

Fiction. Every character in this story is a consenting adult over 18.

A story by the editor.

In the summer of 2012 there were four copies of it in one carriage of the 7:41 from Woking, and I know that because I counted them, over the top of my own.

That is the detail I always give people, because it explains the whole thing better than any confession would. It was not a secret. It was not under the mattress. It was on the train, in daylight, being read by a woman in a lanyard and a woman with a cello case and a man in his fifties who had turned the cover slightly inward and was fooling nobody.

My mother read it. My mother rang me to tell me it was filth, at length, twice, with page references.

Here is what I want to say about that book, and I want to say it in the right order, because the order is the point.

I did not fancy him. I have never fancied him. The helicopter and the suits and the brooding did nothing for me at all, and I have met enough men since who modelled themselves on that to be able to say it with feeling.

What got me was a paragraph nobody talks about. He tells her what is going to happen. Not in the sense of threatening her. In the sense of describing it, in advance, in order, and then expecting her to say whether she agrees.

I read that on a train and something went through me like cold water, and it was not about him at all. It was that somebody had written down, in a book, in Tesco, the idea that a woman might be asked what she wanted and be required to answer properly.

I was thirty-one and I had never once been asked.

Book group did it in the October. Eight of us in Sarah's conservatory, and the conversation was entirely about whether it was well written, which it is not, and whether it was demeaning, which is a longer argument than anybody wanted after a bottle of prosecco.

What nobody said, all evening, was anything about themselves.

That room comes back to me. Eight women, and the statistics being what they are, and not one of us able to say out loud that a particular part of it had done something. We talked about the prose. We were extremely funny about the prose.

I went home and lay awake and understood, with the specific clarity you only get after midnight, that I had been carrying this for about ten years and had needed a badly written novel to hand me the vocabulary, and that even now, holding the vocabulary, I could not say it to seven women I had known for a decade.

Then nothing, for three years, which is the part of these stories that always gets cut.

Nothing is not quite true. There was reading. There was the sort of reading you do at half past eleven with the brightness turned down, and the closing of tabs, and the low-level administrative dread of a shared laptop.

But nothing happened, because I had a picture in my head of what this required and the picture was a man like the one in the book, and men like the one in the book are either fictional or a problem.

In 2015 I found one of the problems.

He was called Marcus and he was perfectly nice for about six weeks. He had a document. He wanted it signed, and he was very keen on the signing, and I remember sitting in a Pizza Express in Guildford reading four pages of clauses about my availability and thinking that this was it, this was the real thing, and feeling faintly sick and putting the sick feeling away where I put things.

What he did not have was a single question about me. Not one. He had a great deal about what I would not be permitted to do and nothing at all about what I was frightened of, which I now know is the entire test and which I did not know then.

When I said I did not want to sign it he went quiet in a way that lasted four days and then explained that I clearly was not ready, and that he had been very patient, and that most women would have been grateful.

I got out. I want to be clear that I got out largely by luck and by being busy at work, rather than by any wisdom, because I have friends who did not.

He had read the same book I had. He had read it as a manual. That is the danger of it, and it is why I will not recommend it to anyone even now.

The man I have been with since 2019 is a quantity surveyor from Bolton with an unremarkable face and no helicopter whatsoever.

The first time we talked about any of this properly we were in his van outside a builders' merchant, and I did it badly, in a rush, looking out of the passenger window at a stack of paving slabs. He did not say anything for long enough that I started assembling an apology.

Then he asked me what I actually wanted to happen. Not what I liked. What I wanted to happen, on a specific evening, in what order.

And when I could not answer, because I could not, he found a pen in the glove compartment and wrote on the back of a Screwfix receipt while I talked, and stopped me twice to check he had it right, and then read it back to me.

I cried in a van outside a builders' merchant. Not because it was romantic. It was not remotely romantic. It was because a paragraph I had read on a train in 2012 had turned out to be available in real life, and in real life it looked like a man with a biro and no idea he was doing anything remarkable.

So. The book.

It is badly written. Its hero would be a nightmare to live with and several of his behaviours are, if you take the romance lighting off them, the pattern of somebody you would want a friend to leave. The idea running underneath it, that he only wants this because he is damaged and will be cured of it by a good woman, is the exact idea that kept me quiet for ten years, and I resent it enormously.

I also would not be here without it.

Both of those are true and I have stopped trying to resolve them into one opinion for the benefit of people who want me to have a tidy position. It was a bad map. Bad maps have got a lot of people out of the house.

My copy is in a box in the loft with the paperbacks I have not thrown away. I do not reread it. I am not sentimental about it.

But when someone tells me, with a particular face on, that it set the whole thing back by twenty years, I think about a carriage on the 7:41 with four copies in it, and eight women in a conservatory who could not say a word, and I think: it got us onto the train, at least. The rest of the map we had to work out ourselves.