What became of us

were not buzzy places filled with high drama and intrigue, they were slow and depressingly predictable. Petty criminals offended again and again and eventually, these days, went to prison. They rarely made inadvertently profound remarks or taught you anything about social deprivation that you didn’t already know. Their plotlines never tied up neatly.
    But something in her must have longed for a world where these things did happen, and in particular where female lawyers were tough, but beautiful and slim, and had intensely attractive, but troubled, lovers to give them back-rubs at the end of a hard day.

    A lad wearing an ill-fitting uniform was pushing a trolley down the aisle towards her. She asked for coffee.
    ‘Anything to eat?’
    A perfectly simple question now, but when she had been fat it would have been said with a smirk, and she would have refused for reasons of dignity, leaving herself hungry and vulnerable to the sweet buttery smell of pain au chocolat in the patisserie of the destination station.
    She took the polystyrene cup of hot, bitter black liquid and watched the boy trundle on awkwardly, his trouser legs somehow managing to be both too big and too short. She looked at her watch, alarmed to see that a whole hour had passed in which she had not thought of Barry or the children. With a flicker of guilt, she checked the screen of her mobile phone for missed messages. Sometimes, when the phone was in her bag, it would ring and she would not hear it. George usually woke at around this time. She imagined him walking in half-asleep to their room, finding her gone, but hoisting himself into the big double bed anyway, to finish off his sleep in the warmth of his father.

    A couple of tables down there was a lone man also sipping coffee. She caught his eye and half smiled as travellers do, acknowledging a shared environment. She wondered for a moment whether he was someone she had encountered at work. Not a barrister, nor a criminal, she thought, but perhaps a plainclothes policeman wearing the sort of middle-of-the-range, off-the-peg suit in beige that they always wore. Perhaps he knew Liam.
    Liam was a psychologist the police sometimes used as an expert witness. She had first encountered him outside the courtroom where the case against a client of hers had just been dismissed by the judge. In a flush of triumph from arguing the case well, she had not been able to resist remarking, as she brushed past him,
    ‘Evidence. You can have all the theories in the world about his relationship with his mother, but evidence is what you need to deny him his freedom.’ And Liam had replied, with complete equanimity, ‘That remark tells me a great deal about you.’
    ‘Oh?’ She had stopped walking, turned to face him, seen the laughing eyes in the otherwise serious face, thought Frank Furillo, and felt the first spur of attraction snagging her gut.
    ‘Not that I could ever prove it, of course.’
    He began to walk away down the corridor towards the exit.
    ‘What do you mean?’ She found herself chasing after him. He stopped abruptly in front of her, so that she stepped into the two feet of personal space strangers keep around them. She took a step back, literally wrong-footed by him.
    ‘Shall we discuss it over a drink?’ he had asked as they stepped outside into a misty autumnal afternoon.
    Flustered, she had already forgotten what it was they were supposed to be discussing.
    ‘Sorry,’ she had said, gathering herself together, ‘I really don’t have the time.’
    ‘Oh, but you should make time for yourself.’
    His tone had been a mixture of teasing and concern. It was as if he had taken one look at her and understood her whole life. Women’s magazines called it juggling, a jokey happy word for the relentless struggle to keep a career, a marriage, a house and three boys going at the same time.
    She hadn’t known whether to smile at him, or look offended. In the end she had walked away purposefully, feeling his eyes on her back and wondering how far she would go in the wrong direction before being sure that when she turned round he would not still be looking at her.
    For the next few days, she had thought of almost nothing except him. After a week, she looked up his office number in the telephone directory.
    ‘Ursula,’ he had repeated, as she announced herself.
    It was as if he had been expecting her call.
    ‘I’m interested in what you do... like to have that drink... hear more about