07:01Someone will die here this morning, at this suburban train station. It will happen in the next five minutes when the 7:06 to London Victoria arrives.
Four others have died here previously. In 1861, an alcoholic mourning his dead wife and child in a stupor of grief. In 1923, a World War I veteran, suffering from shell shock, bombs exploding in his head until his last breath. In 1972, a teenage girl, unmarried and pregnant, forced to leave home by her parents. In 1994, a seeing-eye dog who gave its life to save its owner when he stumbled perilously close to the tracks at just the wrong moment.
At least two of these deaths were accidental, one was intentional, and one seemed intentional but wasn’t, but they will not be described here in detail because we have only a few minutes before the train arrives. And there is a great deal yet to discuss. And a fifth death to witness that may or may not be deliberate. It will be hard to tell when it happens.
Turn your attention now to the stairs descending to the platform. A small child struggles out of his mother’s grasp. He shrieks. He bolts toward the tracks.
He looks over his shoulder and sees his stricken mother, running. He laughs and trots to the edge of the platform. He turns around to face her, his back to the platform edge and the tracks beneath it. He does not realize that he has crossed the yellow caution line. Even if he does realize it, he is too young to understand the yellow line’s warning that another step back will be too far. He steps.
He loses his footing and the platform disappears underneath him. He looks at his mother. As he begins to fall, he meets her eyes and in them he sees something he does not yet have the words to name. It is not anger or fear.
It is hesitation. It would be easier if I lost him, is the thought she thinks for a sliver of a moment, a granule of time, thirty-nine hundredths of a second, to be precise.
Pause here for a moment.
Please do not judge this mother for having this thought. Thoughts like these come to all mothers. They are involuntary. Sometimes they appear precisely because they are the opposite of what the mother truly thinks. The mother’s anxious, exhausted brain plays a sinister game with her. It makes her think that she will say and do things that she would never, ever, say or do.
For example, a mother does not really want to throw her baby out of the third-story window to perish on the pavement below, although she may think this every time the window catches her eye when she passes it, holding her crying infant to her chest and swaying in her reflection in the glass. A mother does not want to push her baby buggy in front of a bus, although the thought flickers across her mind every time she stands at the bus stop, her toddler whining and struggling against the straps of the seat.
A mother’s brain, knowing how much she loves her child, tortures her with that love, inverts her love, turns it inside out with horrible, haunting thoughts of terrible things that she would never do and that will never happen to her child. So please, do not think badly of this mother for having this thought in this moment.
It is her thoughts that come after it that should concern you. They’ll say it’s a shame if he falls, she thinks, the next step she takes imperceptibly slower than the last.
They’ll say it was an accident, she thinks, reaching out, but not quite reaching him.
“Oi!” a man shouts on the platform, at 7:01 and seventeen seconds. He is a businessman. A man’s man, a macho man, a family man, a self-made man, whatta man, whatta man, whatta man, whatta might—
“Oi!” the man shouts as he runs up to the mother and grabs her by the elbow, helping her regain her balance as she in turn grabs her son by the shoulders of his coat. The man pulls the mother with her child from the platform edge. “Careful now,” he says.
The boy, Gideon, does not say anything. His mother, Emma, thinks, F***, and says, “What are you doing here?” quietly. She does not look him in the eye. Breathless, she puts a protective arm around her son’s shoulders, adjusts her bag with her other hand, bends to hoist him onto her hip, and struggles because of their bulky coats and because he is six years old and too big for her to carry. The skin on the knuckles of her ungloved hand is cracked and bleeding. From the cold gray air of this morning. From the mother’s work that she does.
Emma says, softly, seriously, “Why are you here?” as Gideon pulls the hat off her head and throws it on the ground and screams. He kicks away from her. She puts him down but grasps his arm tightly, forcefully. “Gideon,” she says sharply through clenched teeth.
“Here you go,” the man says, picking up the hat. “One of those mornings, eh?” he says, and he shrugs with a friendly smile.
Emma says nothing. He is speaking to her like they’re friends, like colleagues on good terms, and not each other’s downfall. How much simpler, better, her life would have been if she had never met, never known, this man.
“Did you follow me?” she asks.
“Should I have a little chat with ’im?” the businessman says to her in a lower voice, ignoring her question. “Tell the boy to give ’is mum a break—”
Emma grabs the hat, briefly looking the man in the eye, and says, “No. I’m trying to do what you want. I need time.”
The businessman steps back. “Look, forget about yesterday. Just hear me out,” he says. “And you,” he crouches down to be on Gideon’s eye level, “you be good for your mum.” Standing he says to Emma, “He’s just like my others, full of beans.”
Except that Gideon is nothing like his “others,” the other six children of the businessman. The two youngest of whom are boys, a little older than Gideon, the result of his third marriage to a much younger woman who will be dropping them off at school about twenty-five minutes after the death in their brand-new G-Wagon. They are well adjusted and rosy-cheeked, and the young wife will tell them that she loves them when she leaves them and then drives away to start her day with Pilates, then the PTA fundraiser meeting, then walking the dog and shopping online before she picks them up from after-school football or drama or how-to-grow-up-to-be-just-like-your-asshole-rich-dad training. Emma would like to tell his wife to f*** off and die. She would like to tell all the wives like the businessman’s wife to f*** off and die.
She would like to get away from the businessman now, she would like for him not to look at her and her son and make assumptions.
“I’m working on your brother,” she says to the businessman. “But I can’t talk about it now.”
Emma then turns abruptly with Gideon and moves to a bench further down the platform. She doesn’t care if the businessman thinks she’s a bitch. Their exchange lasts twenty-seven seconds.
Bitch, the businessman thinks for sixteen hundredths of a second as she leaves. He watches Emma and her son walk down the platform. He considers his next move. Emma is skittish and he had hoped she’d behave herself in a public place. He scared her yesterday. He shouldn’t have done that. He just wants her to smooth it over with his brother. Then put their pooled money into the start-up he’s funding today—a project with lifesaving potential on a world-changing scale—and forget all of this when they’re rolling in it. That’s all. Money fixes everything. Which is why the businessman is confused by Emma’s reaction because usually women listen to him. Usually women love him. Well, perhaps not all women.
For example, the slender, elderly white woman with the short white hair who is watching him and Emma right now would definitely not love him if she met him. The businessman, admittedly, does not do well with her demographic, as he is only interested in women who are f***able, so he has not noticed her this morning. And this is just as well because the old woman, Mrs. Worth, does not want to be noticed. And she certainly doesn’t want to be f***ed. Not this morning. She is standing in her long black coat, collar up against the wind, at the far end of the platform where the sign warns, “Passengers must not pass this point or cross the line.”
During the twenty-seven seconds of the businessman and Emma’s conversation, Mrs. Worth was lighting a surreptitious cigarette. She knows no one is watching her because it is early in the morning and no one cares about the activities of old women, and she also doesn’t give a goddamn if they do. She is nervous. It is an important day.
Mrs. Worth takes her second drag and enjoys judging Emma, who is now on a bench furiously taking things out of her bag, looking for something.
Copyright © 2026 by Ilona Bannister. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
