The Girl Before You. Nicola Rayner

into at the family law conference. He had aged well. He was so thin at college but he’d grown into his face now; he still carried himself in the same way, though: calmly, lightly, as if he knew his place in the world.

      They had been close during Alice’s early days at university. He would fetch her for lectures and listen to her chat on the way there. In the morning light, St Anthony’s looked like a film set. There was no one else around to worry about or impress and he had a soothing presence.

      One morning, he had asked her to his room for a smoke and Alice, unused to marijuana, had giggled and giggled. They ended up lying on his narrow bed listening to reggae, their slender arms round each other, feeling almost weightless. Alice had never felt so relaxed. She had longed for him to kiss her, but he hadn’t.

      When she’d told Christie about him, her best friend had simply said, ‘Dopehead,’ screwing up her nose. And, not long after, Alice had got together with George. They passed the dopehead once after a black-tie do. Alice had had a couple of glasses of wine and was teetering on her heels. She had shrieked his name as he slunk past. ‘This is George,’ she said, proudly pushing her new boyfriend forwards. The boy never really talked to her after that and at the conference, though he had been friendly, that wariness had remained.

      Alice brushes a hand over her eyes. Later, she will wonder why her gaze returned to the girl with red hair. She looks back in the dark glass to where the girl had been sitting and sees she has moved into the aisle seat. She is reading and her hair is pushed back.

      She looks up from the book and towards Alice. Hers is a memorable face – not one Alice would forget. Her skin looks pale against the black backdrop of the glass. Her eyes are like black holes but, for a fraction of a second, there is a telling tension around them as she squints in recognition and then looks quickly away. Alice stares. She can’t move. For seconds she is frozen. As she stands and turns to look at the girl straight on, she notices the edges of her field of vision are starting to turn black, like looking down a tunnel. She takes a step and starts to speak, but her own voice sounds strange, as if she’s listening to it through water. Her ears feel like they need to pop. She says abruptly: ‘I think I’m going to faint,’ and feels her knees buckle.

      She slumps back in the seat, staring up at the luggage rack. The man sitting opposite her pops into her line of vision. ‘Are you OK? Can I get you some water?’

      Alice sits up slowly and looks over to where the girl had been. There is no one there. She feels washed out, diluted. She asks: ‘Did you see a girl with red hair, just opposite?’

      ‘No, I don’t think so.’ He smiles sheepishly. ‘But I was just looking at my baby.’ He waggles his mobile at her and Alice glances at a photo of a naked infant. ‘You look terribly pale.’

      Alice tries to control her breath. The man is looking at her closely.

      ‘I had a shock,’ she says quickly. ‘She looked so like someone I was at university with. But she …’ Alice lowers her voice so the little girl across the aisle won’t be able to hear. ‘She drowned – the girl – so it couldn’t have been her.’ She realises she sounds a bit mad.

      He smiles kindly. ‘Did you know her well?’

      Alice looks down at her lap. ‘Not particularly,’ she says eventually. She tries to recall the girl’s name. She used to know it. Christie would remember. She adds: ‘I’m not usually like this. I’m a lawyer.’ As if that makes a difference.

      On the tube home, it comes back to her: Ruth Walker. Alice murmurs the words to herself in the noisy carriage. It was a name she’d heard a lot the summer that Ruth drowned. She hadn’t really known her, but stories and superstitions about Ruth’s death had rippled through the student community at that time and somehow things had never been quite the same afterwards. Her name became a way of chiding a friend for staggering home alone drunk or turning down the suggestion of an impromptu night swim. It was as if a shadow had been cast over them – though, of course, her disappearance hadn’t been the only loss that summer.

      Perhaps for this reason, she promises herself she won’t say anything that night. But then a few glasses of wine loosen her resolve. It’s simply too good a story. It’s just a kitchen supper with Christie and Teddy to celebrate George’s first show, which they guffaw their way through after too much Sauvignon Blanc. Alice’s feeling rather giddy and emotional, and it suddenly feels important – imperative – to tell the story out loud, to someone other than George, who had merely held a hand to her forehead and asked how she was getting on with those tablets. She wishes she hadn’t told him about those either.

      So when she finally says it, her voice sounds strange – a touch too high – as she stands up to clear the plates. ‘You remember that girl Ruth?’ She talks over her husband’s shaking head and addresses the table beyond. Christie’s the only one really paying attention, as usual. George is looking rather pale and Teddy is holding an empty champagne bottle up to the light to see if there’s anything left. ‘The one who drowned,’ Alice adds.

      And that seems to get their attention: Teddy puts down the bottle, George murmurs, ‘Not now, darling.’

      Christie frowns. ‘What about her?’

      Alice leans her hip against the dresser, still holding the plates. ‘I had the weirdest experience,’ she says. Pronouncing the word ‘experience’ is a struggle: she is drunker than she thought. ‘I was coming back from Edinburgh today and there’s this girl in the aisle opposite … woman, really – well, our age. In her thirties. And she looks the spit, the absolute spit of Ruth – or how she would look now. Extraordinary. And she died – what? – fifteen years ago.’

      ‘Spooky,’ breathes Christie, ‘a doppelgänger – do you think we all have one? I remember hearing, actually …’

      ‘No,’ says Alice firmly, not about to surrender the conch so easily. ‘It wasn’t just a resemblance; it was more than that. I couldn’t help myself: I got up to say something. Now here’s the thing …’

      ‘Now here’s the thing,’ mimics George, stabbing the air with a fork.

      ‘Shut up, George,’ says Alice. She considers leaving the anecdote unfinished. Tonight, after all, is a celebration.

      But Christie, scraping her pudding plate with a teaspoon, is waiting for the end of the story.

      ‘What happened?’

      Alice pauses. ‘She disappeared,’ she says eventually. ‘I felt very odd – had a sort of turn – and when I looked again she had completely vanished.’

      Before taking a tablet, Alice tries to send herself to sleep by making lists in her head: clients she needs to email, thank-you letters to be written, ingredients for the week’s suppers or, on happier days, things she would like to do – perfect her Italian, learn how to knit. But today she can’t focus on the lists. Her attention keeps getting tugged back to the woman on the train and the look that flickered across her face.

      And just as she is sinking into sleep, half-dreaming, half-awake, Alice’s drifting mind alights on a memory of a party. She was on the periphery, uncertain of herself: a first year at this third-year gathering. She remembers spotting George. She had started to notice him at parties. On the other side of the room, his arm propped him up in the doorway as he surveyed the scene – with the careless arrogance, she had thought then, that only the obscenely good-looking or wealthy could afford. George, with his squat looks, hadn’t been particularly blessed in the former department, though he made up for it in self-belief; but he’d had Dan with him – tall and chiselled. Yes, it may well have been to him, next to George, that her eye was first drawn, before she noticed the approach of the girl with red hair, who charged towards George, holding her face inches away from his, and shouted something with such vehemence that Alice had flinched.

      Was that detail added by her drifting mind, in the process of a memory becoming a dream? Alice wonders, suddenly awake. Had George laughed in her face and had she, the girl, spat some invective at him before storming off? Had it been at this same party that George later appeared