While I can hardly claim to have known her, it feels like an inaccuracy to say that I didn’t. What I mean is, for about six months, we saw each other twice a day, five times a week. I knew what she had for breakfast: a strawberry yoghurt and a banana, never any variation. I knew what books she liked to read: historical fiction, mainly. I knew that she drank decaf coffee, that she suffered with hayfever during the summer and that she had a cat named Mina, who broke its leg last December. I knew her middle name was Camille and I called her that, until I changed my mind and named her Emily.
There were plenty of intimate details that I knew, but there were also too many that I didn’t. Where she was going, for example, what she did in her spare time, where she lived. How old she was, where she’d grown up, where she wanted to go in the world. We met everyday, our hands had brushed, our bags had bumped, our shoulders had collided, but it never went any further than that.
The day everything changed started out like any other. Emily Camille and I arrived at the station – me first, then her about two minutes later. We found our spot on the platform and waited together for the seven twenty-five train towards London. Emily was wearing black heeled boots with cable-knit tights and I was wearing cut off trousers. She ate her banana while I checked my phone and when the train arrived, we climbed on together. We took our normal places, me by the bin and Emily by the door. She took a book from her bag and I scrolled through Instagram as we travelled towards London Waterloo.
It was a perfectly regular commute: the usual push and shove, the usual drawling phone calls, the usual person who didn’t know the basic etiquette of taking off their backpack on the train. We hurtled through the familiar stops; we saw the other familiar people. I scrolled. She read. The train slowed down as it got stuck in the usual congestion outside Wimbledon and Emily Camille looked up from her book and glanced out the window. I did too, expecting only to see the dull, dismissible scenery of the morning.
Instead, there was a man stopped in the middle of a path with his phone pressed to his ear and as we crawled by, his eyes turned hollow. His cheeks seemed to droop. His hand fell to his side and his phone slipped to the floor. He sunk to ground as we rolled on down the track. Something immeasurably awful had been said to him. Something unbearably horrendous had just happened. I was jelly limbed. My chest was tight. My tongue felt too heavy in my mouth.
I looked at Emily Camille and she looked at me. This man had just received the worst news of his life and only we had seen it. Emily Camille opened her mouth, but there were no words. It was a catastrophe. It was the end of the world. We were suddenly sorely united. The train trundled on, but we weren’t really with it.
Emily Camille and I both stepped shakily down onto the platform when we arrived at London Waterloo. We paused for a moment as everyone else pushed by in their ordinary, untouched morning moods. It had really happened then. Whatever it was had really happened. There was nothing to say. I forced my legs to move and Emily fell into step behind me as I went through the barriers. We went our separate ways, me down to the Northern Line and Emily Camille off into the unknown.
I expected things to change after that. I spent all day imagining the following morning when Emily Camille and I would strike up a conversation, wondering aloud to one another what the man had heard, how he was, what he was doing. We would become more than strangers – friends perhaps, maybe more. I would learn her real name and she mine.
Funny how life gets in the way of these things. That morning, on the train, I had been able to convince myself that the virus was still far off and distant. By seven that night, it was very much part of our lives.
It was more than a year before I got back into my old routine. I spent my days working from home and learning how to crochet. I sometimes thought about the man when I sat down to yet another lonely dinner. I often wondered what Emily Camille was doing. I wondered if she ever thought of me.
The first time I went back to the station for the seven twenty-five train was an unusually bright April morning. I went to my old place, put my toes over the line and waited. Two minutes, three minutes, four minutes, but there was no sign of Emily Camille. I boarded the train without her and took my place by the bin.
I spotted her eventually though, two weeks later. She’d found a new spot, further down the platform and she was wearing new shoes. She’d had her hair cut up to her chin and she was eating an apple. Since then, she’s never once glanced in my direction. I have no idea what she’s reading anymore, no idea if she still eats a strawberry yoghurt.
See, we were just strangers, Emily Camille and I. Strangers, connected momentarily by rough, loose stitches, drawn together by faint lines. Still, I find myself thinking of her sometimes and when I do, I feel oddly bereft as if I really have lost a friend.