Hamish MacFarlane is the author of one published novel, "Threeplay" and after a thirteen year hiatus is working on his second. He lives in Scotland but is in the process of emigrating to the United States. He blog about both subjects at www.difficultsecondnovel.com.

Traffic (February 20, 2011. Issue 25.)

You hate it when I’m late.

I call to explain and the droop in your voice tells me I’m under suspicion of causing this delay myself, shouting at him to jump, to slow my journey home.

I picture your face and - don’t panic, you still look good when you’re upset - a line of static develops between us.

I end the call and wait for the inevitable PA announcement. Other passengers aren’t as savvy. What was that? Was it a cow? No chance. It’s “person under a train”, it’s “customer incident”, it’s “multiple blunt force injuries”. It turns out that trains on the Bathgate line make the same thump, rattle and whine as Tube trains when someone jumps in front of them.

Just as in London, I curse the jumper for making me late, increasing the static and hum on our domestic line. People still want to make train jam, even up here in West Lothian. Is there a place left where living doesn’t feel like too much effort?

And unlike London, much better than being stuck in an underground tunnel, I have a view, a seat and a phone signal. So I call you, providing evidence to the rest of the carriage of what a smart-arse I am, naming it as a jumper before the train driver has a chance to catch his breath. I call you, static happens, and I’m more concerned about that than the guy under the train.

The driver stutters on the PA, he coughs and stumbles. This is going to be incompetent, it’s going to take all night, but it takes First ScotRail just seventy-five minutes to get us moving again. To kill the time, I look out the window; rolling fields and British Transport Police scraping along in their Land Rovers. I read my book, where no one is delayed. And I call you again; interrupting, updating, promising.

We don’t talk about jumpers. Suicide is a nuisance, a real drag. I’ve with you about this already, and like most subjects, we’re chatted out, exhausted. I’ve written about suicide. I’ve sliced myself with razor blades just to steer clear of it. I’ve sat in hotel room bathrooms, tempted by hot water and built-in drainage, the poetry of red lines on white porcelain. I’ve stood on balconies, ready to take the plunge. I’ve been fumbling for the off-switch since I was eight years old. So when I get home, we really don’t need to talk about the jumper.

* * *

My train is on time the next evening and there’s enough sunlight left for me to wash our cobalt Renault Megane. I’ve rinsed and soaped, and bucket in hand, I’m ready to rinse again, as tender as if it were my own son, wary of stinging its eyes.

Two shadows enter my field of vision, stretched human and canine shapes from next door. The dog is Poppy - old news, Steve and Alison’s scruffy white pooch - but when I look up, squinting against the sun, I see that the woman is a stranger. And that’s when I notice that Steve’s black SUV, the Mercedes monster, isn’t in their driveway.

The woman checks my name, introduces herself as Steve’s sister, then says, “I’m…I have some bad news.’

She’s strangely familiar in her body language, her expression a mixture of apology and adrenalin, even though we’ve never met. She has something and she’s going to share it with me whether I want it or not.

I put my bucket down, knowing before she speaks that whatever it is, I’m not dressed appropriately; t-shirt and shorts, trainers wet from careless water.

“Steve committed suicide last night.”

She uses those words, even though there was nothing to commit, suicide isn’t illegal, they’re not going to string Steve up for it, they won’t be putting points on his licence. You only get penalised for trying and failing.

Alison’s decided, blurted, that number 4 Loaninghill Crescent needs to know, so now I’m in it, part of her story, but I was already in it, I was all over it, and I tell Steve’s sister, trump her revelation, tell her that I was on that train, helped make the jam, cursed Steve as he soaked into the tracks and dirt.

But I don’t, of course. I tell her what people say and then I run into the house with the promise of a phone number, close to disassociating with the effects of the newsflash, my wet shoes marking the fake wooden floors, and I have to speak, get the words out quick before you whine about my thoughtless footwork or else you’ll feel like a bitch after the fact.

“I need a pen. It was Steve who jumped. I need a…does Alison have our number? – I need a pen.”

We have pens all over the house - this rented shell barely out of its plastic wrapping, full of someone else’s generic furniture - but now there’s no pen to be found. I’ll have to draw blood, scratch numbers into the woodwork, but no, you’ve found one, and now I’m faced with what to write on…a Post-It, a London postcard, a Roman scroll? Nothing’s appropriate, everything just adds insult to injury, and my right eye is twitching, flickering, losing the plot.

You break my paralysis with a clean lined index card, and my handwriting is an ugly scrawl:

Alison – we’re on 852935 – call if you need anything.

I underline “anything” as if there’s no end to the possibilities of what Alison might require, from a job reference to an exotic soft cheese. What will Alison need? Perhaps nothing we can give her, but the first things I can think of, who’s going to mow her lawn? Who’s going to roll her wheelie bins to the pavement? These are Steve’s jobs, exclusive to him, surely Alison will be clueless. And once I’ve passed the index card to Steve’s sister, I stand by our car, unable to break protocol by rinsing the soap, and Poppy, the mutt that is now 100 per cent Alison’s, runs over to sniff at my legs, to say whassup? and that’ll do it, worse than anything, a dead guy’s dog. I give Poppy some attention, I tell her what people tell dogs, as the soap dries and smears on the Megane.

Once the sun finally goes down, we go to bed, I turn the light out, and we cry.

It’s real this time; not the Hollywood hitch and gulp we had after watching the Holocaust flick; or the clumsy shoulder-lean three weeks into our marriage, my father in hospital with a suspected heart attack; or even your crumple on learning your careless sister was pregnant with another brat, five years into our own infertility cliché.

We cry together, because we’re bad neighbours, and because even good neighbours wouldn’t have stopped Steve, beyond cups of sugar and borrowed ladders.

And we need a good cry anyway. This move of ours, from North London to West Lothian, frying pan to fire, hasn’t been any kind of great escape. It’s still us, just a different location and it’s more of the same, more of less, so much less than we need.

We wouldn’t treat dogs the way we’ve been treating each other, and is that the luxury of marriage - someone to be your very worst with? I think we both know, still green in this workaday, one in a million relationship, that we should be on our very best behaviour. And when I feel your hot tears on my chest, your salty kiss, I know we’re lucky fuckers, this flukey love we’ve found ourselves in, and we can cry about that too.

* * *

The next day you get up early, make a yawning casserole. I pick a bottle of wine from the rack (is that appropriate, is it the thought that counts? It’s white, in the end; somehow that seems decent) and I get twitchy over using the casserole dish that my brother’s partner just gave us for a house-warming gift, fresh out of the box, because I can guarantee we’ll never see it again.

Alison seems grateful enough, inviting us in and telling us about Steve, about his survival tricks that stopped working.

“He was doing better,” she says, putting the casserole down on the kitchen counter, (immaculate, sparkling – was she up all night cleaning? Is that what she did?) “But it always comes back, and he stopped taking his Antabuse, and I think…he was just worn out with it. He’d had enough of hurting.”

Alison can try to explain what Steve has done but she’ll never come close. A potted alcoholic history for the neighbours, amazing how easily it pours out of her. And that’s always a satisfaction for you girls, right? Telling people the daft thing your man’s gone and done - having to call you three times from Tesco and still coming home with the wrong kind of flour. And boys love it too, by the way, our carefully nurtured image of domestic incompetence, designed to shrug off any notion of responsibility outside of 9 to 5.

I’ve never really looked at Alison before, not properly, so I don’t know how pretty she was before her partner killed himself. She looks good now, in a pinched, pale way - and it’s more like Steve’s just late home and he didn’t call. But then she spills her fat tears, smiling at the same time, beyond social embarrassment, and do you give her a hug? I sure as hell don’t. My hands clench and un-clench at my sides, I’m ready to throw myself through the polished kitchen window rather than stand here for another moment.

You and I leave, leaving her alone in that house. It’s absurd, barbaric, the way we abandon her. This wouldn’t happen in Africa or any of those other places we keep telling to hurry up and get civilised, where babies don’t cry because they’re never put down. I go to work and there are minutes at a stretch when I forget Steve is dead.

Alison’s parents arrive from New Zealand, glassy-eyed and ashen-faced. Jet-lag is bad enough and they seem astonished, battered, and even though they can’t possibly be up to the job, we retreat, give family the right of way, flinching at the return of Steve’s hulking Mercedes, wondering who could stand to drive it. And two days later we take the weekend break we’d booked, putting another note through Alison’s letterbox, with our mobile numbers this time. As if we can help from Aviemore, as if we’ll dash back when she calls. As if she’d call in the first place.

Six days later, I miss Alison’s visit. You tell me she had her dad with her. All that’s left of the encounter is the washed casserole dish and the Marks and Spencer lily she presented as a thank-you gift. Little does Alison know, or probably care, how forgetful you are with houseplants, that the lily is doomed to die on our watch.

But looking at the flower now, scared to move it from the coffee table, holding hands, we decide we’ll get to know our neighbours better, next time, because it’s important to know them just enough so that when one of them makes jam or clutches their chest or forgets to look both ways, we can help. Help more. More than tuna casserole and Turning Leaf chardonnay.

I engage my head-of-the-household tone, a manner that’s begging for kids to arrive so I can get real value from it. I could win medals for having the best thing to say each time we screw up, and you tease me for it, this theatre-voice, but really, I’m just trying to grow up. And that’s it, lesson learned, we can move on, and I’m grateful for Sky TV and taco salad and monkey-cry sex that makes my toes curl and ears pop.

And later I think of Steve, the first day we moved into Loaninghill Crescent, washing his Mercedes tank, giving me a smile as I struggle with the impossible garage door, and asking, “You leaving or arriving?”

It meant what it meant, I guess, his question, nothing more. The last renters hadn’t made much of an impression. They left a bigger mark on us, with their stockade of used nappies in the back garden bushes and the matter-of-fact calls from debt collectors, than to Steve, who perhaps was already distracted with thoughts of one last holiday, one last drink, before taking his early exit.

Steve had looked that bit older than us, late-thirties, although the lines on his face were perhaps just from money, or the West Lothian tan. He had those tribal highlights in his hair and forearm tattoos, but by himself, perfectly reasonable. When he pulled up in his car after work, the Mercedes M-Class throbbed and sometimes there’d be a brutal blast of music when he opened his door a beat before switching off the CD-player. What a gent, what a class act, knocking on our door before he washed his car, in case we didn’t want our Megane to get sprayed.

“You leaving or arriving?”

“ Yeah, mate, cheers.”

“ Aye, cheers.”

And I cry by myself, later, without you, because the man is dead, this is a man-thing now and I’m sorry, and I know how he felt, and I should’ve talked to him more, and there’s a reason why men are better at killing themselves. Men don’t cry for help, they just make jam. Steve’s worm-food and that little dog is still waiting for him to come home, and it’s not right, we have to soldier on, because the clean-up operation is too hard on everyone else.

I think of Steve, flicking the switch in my head, and part of me is jealous and part of me is furious, wanting to dig him back up so I can kill him myself, because he surely had to be the worst kind of cunt to leave his girl like that.

Summer ends, abruptly, it leaves town altogether. And it is fine. We’re fine. We’re doing okay. And thinking of Alison and her empty house, save for Poppy, save for a regular flow of girlfriends armed with wine and DVDs, I love you more. Up here, away from London, finally we become more like we are, more man and wife, more me and you. And we get some of the peace that Steve didn’t find, and then it’s onto the next jump out of the comfort zone, looking for a new house, to buy this time, kissing the rental market goodbye.

Next door, a skip turns up and workmen arrive, and Alison tells you that she and Steve had ordered the conservatory last winter, already paid for and forgotten about, she’d decided to go ahead with it. And I think this extension, this building work, is worse than the Mercedes that sits in their driveway or the dog that keeps sniffing at us through the wooden fence, and I wonder what Steve was thinking, whether this was supposed to be for Alison to enjoy without him, or if he’d been feeling like life might just be something he could do, and I know I’ll never sit in there.

And because it’s easy to get caught in a roundabout, we still argue, let loose in a way we rarely did in London, and because you can hurt me, I need to walk a lot, and I run into Alison. She takes a lot of walks with Poppy; perhaps she’s planning to toss her into the canal. You’re amazed that she’s kept the Mercedes (remembering the last time we’d seen Steve alive, just 24 hours before the jam, chatting as he polished the insects off the bonnet) although to me the SUV isn’t the suicide weapon – I reckon she’s more likely to be allergic to trains. We nod, and wave, and sometimes we stop, and she’s doing better, she says, back to work, only part-time but it’s something, and I tell her we’ve been looking at houses, still in Broxburn but a cheaper part of town, away from the bankers.

I want to tell her (before we turn into Christmas cards and then nothing) something she doesn’t know, but I don’t tell her that I’m walking because of Steve, because my train killed him, because I felt his thump and bump, because he’s stuck inside my throat like a fish bone, that my iPod isn’t loud enough, the walking path isn’t long enough, that I’d like to cut myself wide open, and scrub my insides with a wire brush. I don’t tell her that Steve was just that little bit more decisive than I’ve ever been. And apart from that, what else can I say?

Alison doesn’t tell me what’s on her mind either; what she thinks about in the dark; whether she’s haunted, or relieved, or barely listening. We give each other smiles, and I touch her arm, as if I’m entitled to that much intimacy, and she goes into number 2 and I go into number 4, bang on time, and you ask me how my walk was, and I tell you, glowing, that it was fine, and I kiss you, and you smile, and you tell me my lips are cold.