The Legged and the Legless

The train wasn’t very busy that Saturday morning. There were enough people to tire out the ticket man, but not enough to mean Imogen was to either stand or sit next to a stranger. There were, however, enough to put a terrible feeling in her stomach.

  She already felt sick. She had drunk so much the night before that she woke up in the morning to find she’d fallen asleep on top of a boy she didn’t even remember the name of, in a room full of other sleeping teenagers. Most of them were fully clothed, which was both a good sign and a bad sign. Imogen’s anonymous new friend was loosely hanging on to an open vodka bottle, the vodka slowly dripping onto the floor. Imogen picked the bottle up and placed it upright on a table. It was her friend Rosie’s house, and it had been Rosie’s party. Nobody else seemed to be awake, so Imogen splashed her face with water from the kitchen tap and dug her handbag out from under the passed-out torsos scattered casually across the living room floor. It had been a long night, yet all Imogen could remember was dancing to ABBA. She quietly let herself out the back door – Rosie’s dog was asleep and blocking the front door, some shifty looking fella was fast asleep in her dog basket.

  It was 10 AM, and the earliest Imogen had been awake in a long time. The air was fresher than she remembered but she felt stuffy inside and could barely keep her head held up. She got to the train station in time to catch the 10:42 train home. Train times were so exact, but the trains were almost always late. It was a half-hour journey which Imogen was not looking forward to.

  She sat down in a corner at the back of the carriage, where she felt nobody could see her. She looked down at her legs. Her skirt seemed to have shrunk overnight and her bruised thighs were more noticeable now. She counted the bruises – 2 blues ones, 3 yellow and a fresh one, a red clot of blood glowing from under the skin. They were all from walking into things when she was rat-arsed.

  The train was moving, the ticket man was coming, he checked her ticket, all was well. He looked at her legs as he went by. Imogen couldn’t decide whether he was judging her by her pale white, dirty-looking thighs, or whether he was perving over the longest pair he’d seen for years. Both conclusions made Imogen feel disgusting. She hated that type of attention and from now on would bare as little flesh as possible.

  The more she thought about it, the more she felt she was being watched. She looked around. A middle-aged woman wearing rosary beads threw her a dirty look, or at least that’s what it felt like. A possible bible-basher. A young couple, the girl wearing gold hoop earrings and the boy dressed for a building site, kept glancing over at her. They were both smirking, probably at her horrible legs. The only other person who could see her was a teenage girl, about her age, but a lot more innocent looking.

  Imogen’s headache was growing. A glass bottle had shattered against her skull, a train was crashing in her brain. She felt uneasy over this, the train wasn’t getting any slower and she had visions of it flying off the track. The world was whizzing by and she couldn’t stop it. She was getting no younger, she was nearly 18 and old enough to be considered an adult and she would soon be legal to buy alcohol. It seemed stupid that she’d spent so much of the past 3 years drinking ridiculous amounts, being so intoxicated most weekends that she no longer had a good reason to turn 18 – she’d already done enough. She felt she didn’t even have a chance to turn herself around and enjoy the last days of her youth being healthy and behaving in what most would consider a decent manner. She looked back at the innocent girl and only saw a ghostly image of what she could have been. She was being stupid. She didn’t know this girl and didn’t know she was as pure as Imogen expected, but there was a look in her eyes that she found herself longing for.

  She looked down at her palms. They were sweating. In fact, her whole body was beginning to sweat. She feared it would soak through her t-shirt and she would begin to smell. Her face was starting to burn, yet she felt cold and shivery. Her throat began to feel heavy and saliva gathered in her mouth.

  The voices of two young children seemed to echo up the train, the dialogue reminding Imogen of her and her older brother when they were both young. She felt a rush of sadness and jealousy. Why could she have not remained sweet and clean forever?

  She watched the world as it flew past, the trees, the animals, country houses. She tried to grab the scene for a second and keep it still but she couldn’t quite reach. It was never coming back to her, and even if she saw it all again it would be different, older, and so would she, and her life would be wasted on the demon alcohol probably, unless she changed. But she couldn’t leave it behind, she couldn’t leave her friends and those nameless, faceless, legless boys behind, and she didn’t want to anymore. Fuck what she was told, fuck the bible-basher and the people staring at her legs, judging her and giving her nasty looks, and most of all fuck that girl with her boring, straight-laced lifestyle.

  26 minutes had passed, and now Imogen was vomiting in the toilet on the train. It was down her top and somehow on her legs. It stung and burnt in her throat, not to mention it reeked of something rotting away in a tiny little box. She had a few minutes to clean herself up before the train stopped.

  Imogen stepped outside the cubicle. She felt embarrassed as she tried to cover up her puke-stained top by folding her arms. Nobody seemed to look at her, even though she probably smelt dreadful. Her skirt turned out to be longer than she thought and she realised she was much younger than she had convinced herself she was. The train stopped, she got off and made her way home to take a long, cold shower to clean the troubles away from her skin.