Girl Like You

By Amy Honeywell

You don’t notice when he sits down next to you. Forehead against the window, you let your eyes blur, the fields streaming past. You hold a book in your lap, thumb marking your page, the tray table down with coffee in a paper cup placed in the circular indent. Each time the train judders, you reach for the cup, concerned it might overbalance and drench the rucksack at your feet. You’d spent the weekend visiting your girlfriend, Tam, walking between seaside villages on the Norfolk Coast Path and then breaking up while waiting for the bus home. Last night, you slept back-to-back in Tam’s small double, hyper aware of the parts of you that touched, tears slipping sideways onto the pillow.

It hadn’t been a surprise, you’d both struggled since you moved to London two months before. As you walked along the rise of the flood defences which dissected low-lying fields, it felt like something had already ended. You spoke only of the land, of the rusting boats fallen to one side in the veins of the saltmarsh, of the sea that you knew lay beyond the long brush of brown yellow grass rising over the dunes in the distance. Birds drove long beaks into the mud, pulling worm after worm as you stood watching, letting your knuckle brush the back of Tam’s hand hopefully.

This morning had been fragile, both unsure of your new boundaries. You bundled your clothes to your chest and got dressed in the bathroom, borrowing Tam’s deodorant and then worrying that you shouldn’t have. You sipped tea in the living room while she spoke in a hushed voice to her housemate, Freddie, who gave you a tight hug as you left that brought your heart to your throat.

A voice over the tannoy startles you, announcing that the café bar is open and that you can upgrade to first class for £12. You pull your neck straight and open your book. Your coffee is lukewarm so you drink it in three gulps. You try to read, but the words won’t stay still and you can’t stop checking your phone to see if Tam has messaged. You stare, letting the words crawl across the page, wishing you’d filled your water bottle before you left. Your throat and tongue are dry, your spit sour.

‘A book lover?’ he says.

You don’t realise he’s talking to you until he taps a finger on the page and you turn to him.

‘Pardon?’

‘Are you a book lover?’ he says again. He’s older than you, with muscular arms and knees spread wide.

‘I guess,’ you say with a smile.

‘Nice to meet you,’ he’s holding his hand out for you to shake and you reach for it politely. His hand is dry and warm and he squeezes your fingers in a way that feels practiced and confident.

‘Nice to meet you, too,’ you echo. You sit in silence, holding the book in your lap. You are aware of the distance between your leg and the man’s knee. You move in your seat so your own knees push into the side of the train under the window. You want to text Tam, but you don’t know if that’s something you are supposed to do. Instead, you scroll through the photos from yesterday, slices of water turned fiery white in the sun, the flat stretch of the wash, curling seashells cracked open and pecked dry by gulls. There’s a photo of Tam, stood on a bridge, the white cylindrical body of a windmill in the background. She has one hand raised to her face, blocking the midday sun, her backpack straps digging into her bare shoulders, her hoody tied around her waist. You feel the catch of tears and blink quickly.

‘That your friend?’ he asks, looking over at your phone.

You pause. ‘Yes,’ you say, locking the screen. The train slows to a stop and more people get on, filling the remaining seats and standing in the aisles. Checking your watch, you see there’s still over an hour until you reach London. As the train drags away from the station, you look up and down the aisle. The man’s body barricades you into your seat.

‘You looking for someone?’ he asks.

‘Just seeing how busy it is,’ you say with a forced brightness. You look out of the window again, but struggle to lose yourself in the fields that give way to houses before becoming fields again. You hear him pull his tray table down with a clunk, followed by the plastic crunch of a water bottle.

‘You’re not very talkative,’ he says with a laugh that makes you jump.

‘I’m tired,’ you reply. Your peripheral vision holds both the blur of the window and the man’s profile as he leans towards you.

‘You got a boyfriend?’ he asks. The question catches you off guard, so you say: ‘yes, yes.’

The man smirks, ‘he who’s keeping you up at night, then?’ You can feel the thrum of your pulse in your neck, the clench and unclench of your jaw.

‘Not married, though,’ he adds. It’s a statement, not a question. Later, you will return to this moment, your body contorting uncomfortably to ensure you don’t touch, the way he looks down at your clenched fist and leans in a little closer. The smell of his breath. The train, stuffed full of people oblivious to your racing heart, your panicked smile, your darting eyes. You will think of this imaginary boyfriend and how it’s he who stands between this man and you. Later, you will cry hot, angry tears when you find a seashell at the bottom of your bag and remember the cement of fear in your chest, the sickening feeling of becoming untethered from yourself. You will turn it in your hand, a sand coloured spiral, and push the end of your finger against the crevice created by a hungry bird, feeling the gap where the soft insides had been.

‘He’s lucky,’ the man says, ‘to have a girl like you.’

You don’t reply.

An announcement states that the train is approaching the next station and you stand. The man frowns but you smile and laugh and wait for him to move so you can grab your rucksack and empty coffee cup and squeeze out into the aisle, your book tucked under one arm. You push past a couple drinking cans of gin and tonic before getting caught in the throng of people waiting to get out onto the platform. You think you can feel his eyes on you, but when you look over your shoulder he’s staring down at his phone, one leg stretched out into the aisle. You keep walking until you reach the back of the train. Only then do you let go of the breath you’ve been holding.

At Liverpool Street, you see him from a distance, bag slung over one shoulder, water bottle in hand. He seems smaller, looking from his phone screen to the departure board before glancing around at the tide of people crowding in from arriving trains. You walk away from him, resisting the urge to look back.

Amy Honeywell is a writer living in Norwich, where she completed the University of East Anglia’s Creative Writing Prose MA. Her short stories and essays have been published in magazines and journals including Porridge and Disappointment Magazine, as well as shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and longlisted for the Bedford Competition. She has run community creative writing workshops in partnership with Queerfest Norwich and Norwich Trans Pride.

Amy’s work focuses on landscape, domestic spaces, the family, and queerness. She is especially interested in furniture as political objects, and how the home can exist as a fractal of wider society. Her current work concentrates on the Norfolk coast, exploring the impact of coastal erosion on patriarchal family structures.

Amy is writing her first novel.

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