The 7:52 to Pearse

Chapter 1: I. The Man Who Read the Ending First

The first time Nuala Brennan noticed him, he was reading the last page of a book. It was a wet Monday in September, the kind of morning when Dublin Bay looks like a sheet of hammered pewter and the whole of Howth Head disappears into cloud. The 7:52 DART slid into Sutton with a long, tired sigh, and the doors opened, and a tall man in a navy raincoat stepped aboard, shaking water from his hair. He took the seat diagonally across from hers, set down a battered canvas satchel, pulled a paperback from his pocket, and, without so much as glancing at the first page, flipped straight to the end. Nuala, who taught second class at a primary school near Westland Row and had strong views on narrative, felt something close to physical pain. He read the last page slowly. He frowned. Then, with the air of a man completing a necessary inspection, he turned back to the beginning and started again. Monster, thought Nuala. Somewhere an author is weeping. She went back to her own book, a library copy of something Scandinavian with a corpse on the cover, and did not look up again until Pearse Street, where she gathered her green umbrella and her bag of laminated phonics cards and stepped onto the platform. He got off at the same stop. He turned right. She turned left. Neither of them looked back. It was a Monday. It meant nothing. But on Tuesday, the 7:52 pulled into Sutton, and the doors opened, and he got on and took the same seat, and flipped to the last page of a different book. On Wednesday, the same. By Friday, Nuala had stopped pretending she wasn't watching for him.