I called her Effy because all her friends called her Effy. Her real name was Fiona, which I liked. Liked better, probably. ‘Effy’ was cute, but when you’re going down on a girl whose a good few years younger than you in the first place, the last thing you want in the back of your mind is how her name makes her sound like she spends all day at school daydreaming about dollhouses. Thoughts like that tend to leave a pretty unpleasant aftertaste.

The first night I met Effy she was drunk as the proverbial skunk, which never effected my decision to sleep with her that night on her parent’s sofa downstairs so they didn’t hear us and start chasing after me wielding various kitchen utensils. That’s probably not how many of the classic romance stories start off, but those stories never seem to end well anyway. I’ve never felt guilty about it, don’t see why I should. I’ve always maintained that it’s only ‘taking advantage’ if the girl is paralytic and you’re sober and stoic, cold and calculating, pretty much a creepy scumbag. If you’re almost or equally as drunk, then there’s really nothing to worry about, morally. I’m not sure if that’s a widely held belief, but it probably should be. By this unwritten rule, I was in the clear, because that particular night, I was clobbered. I’m not sure of the occasion, or if there even was one, but some nights are just like that.

I was in a club in the middle of the city, pretty much like any other. It was dark and it was decadent. Nothing like the last days of Rome or anything like that, a modern, restrained, repressed decadence bubbling beneath the surface. The music wasn’t what I would call good, but the atmosphere sure was. The place was packed; with people who lived for the weekend trying to put things aside, trying to let go and just trying to forget themselves. Real life could wait until Monday morning. I was out with a couple of my friends, but at that point I had no idea where they had rambled off to, so I had gone to the bar to get another terrible cheap drink and to see if I could see anyone I knew or anyone I would like to know.

I usually think that “meeting at the bar” is something that only happens in films and on TV. A handsome man, calm, collected and composed, sober as day despite apparently being on a night out, sees an attractive female sitting at the bar alone, and approaches her. She’s sat alone in a social environment, despite being beautiful and friendly and exactly the kind of person who should be surrounded by friends, and she turns to see him smiling at her. She looks polite but ultimately disinterested. This is until he spins her a flawless line. She waits until the canned laughter has died down, returns his smile and banters back with a perfectly witty and well-timed response. They end up leaving together as the theme tune plays and the studio audience applauds. Fade out.

I’d like to be able to say that Effy and mine’s first meeting was just like that, preposterous but perfect, a sitcom come to life. The truth is, I can’t remember it in the slightest. For all I know, I unleashed on her history’s greatest chat-up line, and my hazy recollection is robbing the world of men of a priceless gift, an unstoppable weapon of mass seduction. Or maybe she came onto me first. I don’t suppose it matters.

The day I saw the Devil was two months later. I was sitting on the train home from Effy’s, heading north. I was caught up in a no holds barred wrestling match with myself over how often I caught myself thinking about her, as opposed to how often I wanted to be thinking about her. We had been fairly ‘casual’ up to this point. No strings, no commitments, no promises. Just two young kids running around having fun. Having a laugh. Skylarking. One problem with this, was that I was young, but I was no longer that young. I had more than one friend who had ‘settled down’ and was already working on getting everything he was expected to get, everything you ‘should’ have: a wife, kids, a job, a car, a dog, an extended family, mortgages, commitments, responsibilities, meat pies on Mondays, felatio on Fridays, routines, ruts, crippling monotony. If I didn’t have those things, I was expected to at least want to have them. Whether I did or not, I was probably getting too old to be making out with a teenage girl, no matter how inordinately attractive.

The second problem was just that: Jesus Christ, she was fucking hot. Physically, sure, she ticked all the boxes. Nice hair, eyes, smile, body, everything. She wasn’t perfect, but the best girls never are. It was because of, not in spite of, her flaws that she was stunning. But she had that thing, that spark, that indefinable “something about her” that put her on another level entirely and made you think you could run a marathon or fight a lion if she wanted you to. I would spend time with her, doing the usual: drinks, dinner, cinema, sex. I’d be thinking I had her number, I could predict her, I knew what she was going to say or do. And then she’d just turn around and take me completely by surprise in the best possible way. Or she would say or do the exact expected thing, act like all girls act, but that “something” about her would somehow make it seem more exciting, more vibrant and beautiful than normal. Great boobs too.

You could be lying there with her next to you, physically and mentally spent, looking through the familiar filing cabinet marked Excuses To Leave for one that didn’t seem stupid and obvious. And then she would roll over and look at you, and she would do or say something adorable and you go half-insane for a minute and the next thing you know you’re sat on the train replaying every conversation you have ever had over and over in your head.

I was trying my hardest to fight it, I really was. I enjoyed the life I had now, all about fun and being footloose, fancy free and all that. I enjoyed being young, free, single, a bit of a cliché. I liked being casual, cavalier, piratical. It was easy and it was fun. It suited me, and it usually suited the ladies too. But then I would think about how I was sat there on the train, ploughing through a dreary Northern landscape like Lowry on morphine, heading without much enthusiasm back to my regular life that essentially seemed less interesting because Effy wasn’t in it. And that’s when it hits you like a big boot to the face: I was actually falling in love with her. How grimly predictable.

I hate trains, as a rule. They are bad enough under normal circumstances, let alone when your carefully cultivated “womanising” self-image was being chipped away more and more every time you remembered the look on an 18-year-old’s face as she ripped her dress off.
It’s fairly typical that if I’m sat on a train minding my own business, I’ll end up sat by somebody who eats like a velociraptor with a megaphone fitted inside its mouth; or sat trapped in a four-seat booth with two or three of the biggest morons to ever walk upright; or sat behind a parent whose idea of dealing with their crying baby is to compete; or crouched in the floor by the toilets because the guy sat in the seat you had booked wouldn’t think twice about dishing up a knuckle supper if you dared to ask if he’d mind moving. As it happened, on this one occasion, I had none of these issues to deal with, leaving me with only boredom to overcome. It wasn’t just regular boredom, either. It was kind of an enforced boredom, because I knew that if I let my mind roam I would end up off the edge of the map. I tried to think of things to occupy me. An entire family of wholesome Enid Blyton-esque kids were sat across from me, so I would have felt mildly embarrassed returning from the refreshment carriage with an assortment of alcohol. I tried reading the newspaper, but I wasn’t really in the mood for witch-hunts or hatemongering, cheeky puns or the crossword. I couldn’t really listen to music without drawing questionable parallels between the lyrics of whatever love songs my MP3 player’s shuffle function would inevitably offer and my own Effy-based situation. I was pretty much the picture of pathetic. I hate trains.

So I had settled on sitting there, slumped in my seat out of malaise rather than comfort, starring out of the window. My mind was fairly occupied, so my eyes barely registered the sights outside the window: rain, wind, fog, murk, interchangeable trees and shrubbery, the occasional lonely house, a general filter of grey over everything that passed. It was all rather depressing and a cold wet slap in the mouth of anyone who had ever romanticised the “glorious countryside”.

Looking through the glass of a train’s window is the equivalent of sitting watching the static pattern you see when your television isn’t tuned in. Nothingness. But if you look for long enough, you may see things move, twist and distort, see patterns and shapes forming in the void, may make out faces and voices, attach meaning, become interested, follow a narrative, rate the whole thing 5 stars. But there’s nothing there, not really. It’s just static, nothing more. Which is why I was so certain when I saw the Devil in the middle of the nothingness. You tend to remember a thing like that.

I was lost in the static, keeping one eye on my surroundings to make sure I didn’t accidentally miss my stop, when I saw him. I didn’t do a double take like in the movies. I didn’t need one, my mind just snapped back into focus and fixed on the solitary man stood on the nearby hill. The rain was cascading down by this point, but strangely the man outside appeared to be bone dry. He was still immaculately turned out, his bespoke onyx suit unaffected by the weather’s onslaught. His leather boots remained polished and spotless, mocking the mud and it’s attempts to assert itself. His hair was shoulder-length, styled and looked untouched, seemingly repelling the rain, diverting its path to either side of the man. At first I thought I was looking at a mirage, a hologram, something not really there, or at least a mannequin or effigy of a man. And then I saw the eyes of the stranger, and I was left in no doubt.

I must have seen the man for no more than a matter of seconds but to me they felt like decades. Trees grew and fell in the time I looked at the figure outside the train, generations past, babies in their pushchairs became old men in their wheelchairs. Everything seemed to slow right down like a Hollywood action movie. I’m willing to bet that if I had tried to turn away, it would have done me no good anyway. I would have seen the impassive gaze of the man and his awful charisma in the face of any one of my fellow passengers. If I had attempted to block him out by closing my eyes, I am certain I would have seen nothing but his unbreakable stare cutting through the blackness, and the barely noticeable upturn of his lips that indicated a cruel, knowing smile. I could focus on nothing inside the train, could only hear people’s muffled speech as if it came from miles away.

So I manned up and returned his stare. It will sound ridiculous, this whole thing, I know it will. But I had the undeniable sense that the stranger was looking at me specifically. Across the distance and through the glass, I could still feel a connection between the stranger and myself. I can’t explain it, but I just felt it, in my heart and in my stomach. For whatever reason, I had been chosen, and now I remained frozen for what seemed like forever in a hellish staring contest with the man on the hill.

As the train finally thundered past and out of the stranger’s line of sight, I could have sworn under oath that the figure looked straight at me one last time, his eyes piercing me deeper than they already were. He was looking straight at me, past all my defences, straight to the core of me. Past clothes, flesh, bones, sinew. Past thoughts, memories, desires, fears. Past my mind and past my heart. Past everything, until he saw before him a clear snapshot of my naked soul.

The train had now passed the stranger, and once again all I could see was the familiar grey nothingness. Time itself seemed to speed up from 0-88 M.P.H in a few cocaine-fuelled seconds. The sights and sounds of the carriage flooded back into my perception as I tore my eyes away from the window with difficulty. I felt nauseous. I was sweating, swapping between too hot and too cold. My head whirled like a particularly enthusiastic dervish. I couldn’t see straight, tears gatecrashed my eyes. I tasted copper in my mouth and my heart beat staccato. My belly was break dancing, slithering up and down, feeling reptilian and vile. I was losing control of my breaths, of my mind, and maybe my body, sitting facing the very real possibility of shitting myself. I choked back some sick and felt the acid sting the back of my throat. My brain felt like it was burning from the inside out.

I lent my head back against the seat and tried to keep up appearances, tried not to draw any unnecessary attention. I tried to gather myself, reset my balance, and steady my mind. I blocked out the sounds of the train, no longer caring if I missed my stop, no longer caring about much of anything. If the train had run and run until it charged all the way through the country, shredding the tracks as it did and leaving fire and panic behind it, until hurtling through and past John O’Groats and coming to a stop at the bottom of the sea, I don’t think I would have paid much attention. Because it was then, as I sat there, mouth dry, chest tambourine tight, that I knew that the man who had caused me so much distress with nothing more than a look was the Devil himself.

It sounds crazy and it probably is. I probably am. I’m fully aware that as far as jumping to conclusions goes, this was something else. But I just knew. There is nothing I have ever been surer about in my life. The instant the stranger had looked inside me and seen all that there was to see, I had been certain. It had been a violation, but in a bizarre way, it had not been one-sided. It was a gift I had never wanted, but at that instant, I had been given an insight of my own. I had briefly seen into the soul, or what passed for it, of the mysterious man. It was something I wasn’t prepared for and could not comprehend, beyond a blinding, searing light and a sense of something unquestionably evil, albeit evil wrapped in charm and enigma. In that second of disassociation from the rest of the world, I had been linked with the man outside the train and I had understood. Horns or not, tail or not, comical goatee or not, this man was the Devil.

I thought about it some more as I sat there, trying to slow my heart rate to something acceptable. I tried to convince myself that I was mistaken, that the Devil was a concept, a scary story told to people when they were young to make them behave themselves. I tried to convince myself that I was going mad, as this seemed a better option, and perhaps I was. I tried to convince myself I had an overactive imagination, that I was inventing things out of pure boredom, that I’d had mushrooms and just forgot about it, anything. Looking around the train, nobody else seemed particularly bothered. But then again, the Devil hadn’t been studying their soul, taking it all in, reading it from cover to cover, for some reason. For what reason? He hasn’t actually seemed to mean me any specific harm, for what it’s worth. Though I had been shaken beyond belief, and though thinking about him caused me nothing but dread, surely the very embodiment of evil would have better things to do than causing a bit of panic to a nobody like me? You’d assume there would be more hellfire and brimstone, more rivers of blood, more corruption of the innocents, all that eternal damnation stuff.

I tried again to think straight and tell myself that I was a grown man, an educated man. I stopped believing in spooky stories a long time ago. The Christian concept of the Devil picking you out and staring all the way into your soul was laughable, horror novel shit. I tried to laugh at myself, to rebuke myself for being such an idiot. So what if I had had a stare down with some guy and he’d seemed otherworldly? So what if I had been enveloped by a sense of fear at the time? Evil is everywhere, the man on the hill was not automatically the Devil; he could have been a murderer, a bigot, or your friendly neighbourhood child molester. I imagine if I saw Hitler standing outside a train staring at me I would get ‘bad vibes’ from him too. No big deal.

Except, I knew that I was making excuses. Acting the ostrich, borrowing my head so I didn’t have to accept what I had seen and more importantly, felt. Devil or not, the stare of that man had basically traumatized me. I couldn’t think straight, couldn’t imagine when I would be able to again. I couldn’t get what had happened out of my mind, couldn’t just shrug it off and forget about it. I needed to sleep. I needed a drink or six. I needed something.

I knew what I needed. I pulled my phone out of my pocket, and scrolled through it until I found Effy’s number. I knew what I needed. I was going to tell her that I was 90% sure that I loved her. It was out of the blue, was going to come as a bit of a surprise and to be honest, it was fairly poorly planned, but one of the things she always said that she loved was spontaneity. Well, I was going to call her on it. After what had just happened, I didn’t even care if I looked like a clown, I couldn’t handle it any longer. I wasn’t going to waste any more time playing it cool. I needed her.

I needed someone to talk to, although I doubted I was going to tell her that I had come face to face with the Devil, seen as few women have ‘tall, dark and mental’ at the top of their checklists. I needed to remind myself of goodness, and that there was still some beauty left in the world. I needed her to bring her enthusiasm for life into mine. Most of all, at the risk of sounding like the cheesiest dork that ever lived, I needed somebody else to see me the way he had. I needed Effy to look as deep as the Devil, maybe deeper, to look straight at my soul and like what she saw. I needed her to save me.

For the first time since I boarded the train, I felt happy with my thumb hovering over the ‘call’ button. Before I pressed it, I noticed that I had received a new text message an hour or two ago. It was from Effy, I took this as a good omen, that my half-baked idea of ringing her and declaring my love and quest for salvation (I thought to myself that I should probably tone down this aspect) over the phone was the right thing to do. And then, then I read her message. I smiled to myself, and I read it again. It was playful, flirty, nothing too serious. I read it another time, and I stopped smiling. It was happy, light-hearted, innocent, unburdened. I couldn’t do it to her. I wasn’t going to bring her into this mess. I would not be her albatross. I had been chosen. I had been spoiled. Who did I think I was, to drag her down with me, to ask her for help with this thing? It wasn’t like asking to borrow a fiver or if she’d buy me a drink. It was too much. After what I had seen on that train, I don’t think she could have saved me, even if I had asked her to, but I could save her.

I slowly put my phone back into my pocket and when I heard my stop announced, I grabbed my bag and my jacket and headed for the door. As I waited, I convinced myself that I would have to delete Effy’s phone number before long. Resisting temptation had never been one of my strongest attributes, and if I wanted to keep her away from this shit, I had to put what I wanted to one side. She would be confused, and it would hurt her, like it would me. There was literally nothing I would want to do less than hurt her, but better this than feeding her this poison. She deserved better than that, better than me. Probably always did. I caught my reflection in the glass as the train slowed. There was emptiness in my eyes and I looked like the ghost of someone I’d never met.

As we came to a stop, I stepped through the door into the damp air. The cold was bitter and it hit me with cruel intentions, but I didn’t really notice or even care. I walked through the station in a trance, now and again keeping a cautious eye out for the image of a handsome man in a suit with a horribly captivating stare. As I wandered out of the station and headed home, I was thinking of the birthmark just below Effy’s left breast.
I fucking hate trains.