Читать книгу Radio Silence - Alice Oseman, Alice Oseman - Страница 15

I met Carys Last on the train to school when we were fifteen.

It was 7.14am and I was sitting in her seat.

She glanced down at me like a librarian looking down at someone over a tall desk. Her hair was platinum blonde and she had a full fringe so thick and long that you couldn’t quite see her eyes. The sun silhouetted her like she was a heavenly apparition.

“Oh,” she said. “All right, my little train-compadre? You’re sitting in my seat.”

That might sound like she was trying to be mean, but she genuinely wasn’t.

It was weird. Like, we’d both seen each other loads of times. We both sat at the village station every morning, plus Aled, and were the last people to leave the train every evening. We’d done this since I started secondary school. But we’d never spoken. That’s what people are like, I suppose.

Her voice was different to how I’d imagined. She had one of those posh London Made in Chelsea accents, but it was more charming than irritating, and she spoke slowly and softly as if she were slightly high. It’s also worth noting that I was significantly smaller than her at this point. She looked like a majestic elf and I looked like a gremlin.

And I suddenly realised it was true. I was sitting in her seat. I had no idea why. I normally sat in an entirely different carriage.

“Oh, God, sorry, I’ll move …”

“What? Oh, no, I didn’t mean move, wow, sorry. I must have sounded really rude.” She sat down in the seat opposite me.

Carys Last didn’t seem to smile, or feel the need to smile uncomfortably like I was doing. I was extremely impressed by this.

Aled wasn’t with her. This didn’t strike me as odd at the time. After this incident, I noticed that they sat in different carriages. That didn’t strike me as odd either. I didn’t know him, so I didn’t care.

“Don’t you normally sit in the back carriage?” she asked me in the tone of a middle-aged businessman.

“Erm, yeah.”

She raised her eyebrows at me.

“You live in the village, don’t you?” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Opposite me?”

“I think so.”

Carys nodded. She kept an unnaturally straight face, which was weird because everyone I knew always tried so hard to smile at you all the time. Her composure made her look significantly older than she was and admirably classy.

She rested her hands on the table and I noticed that they had tiny burn scars all over them.

“I like your jumper,” she said.

I was wearing a jumper that had a computer with a sad face on it underneath my school blazer.

I looked down because I’d forgotten what I was wearing. It was early January and it was freezing, which was why I was wearing an extra jumper over my school jumper. This particular jumper was one of the many items of clothing that I bought but never wore around my friends because I thought they’d laugh at me. My personal fashion choices remained at home.

“D-do you?” I stammered, wondering if I’d misheard.

Carys chuckled. “Yes?”

“Thanks,” I said, shaking my head slightly. I looked down at my hands, and then out the window. The train moved suddenly and we set off out of the village station.

“So why’d you sit in this carriage today?” she said.

I looked at her again, properly this time. Until this point she’d only ever been a girl with dyed blonde hair who sat at the other end of the village train station every morning. But now we were talking and here she was – she was wearing makeup even though she was still in lower school so it was against the Code of Conduct, she was large and soft and somehow powerful, how did she manage to be this nice but not smile at all? She looked like she could probably murder someone if she had to; she looked like she always knew exactly what she was doing. Somehow I knew this wouldn’t be the only time we would ever talk. God, I didn’t have a clue what was going to happen.

“I don’t know,” I said.