From the author of A Room Called Earth, comes a new novel about the mess that comes before salvation. Read on for an extract from Madeleine Ryan’s new book, The Knowing.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Camille lives in the country.

She’s forgotten her phone.

She’s taking the train to work.

She’s got period pain.

She can’t escape herself … or her toxic boss, Holly. And it’s Valentine’s Day.

The Knowing is a day in the life of a woman who goes to work as usual while dreaming of more.

**********

When Camille realised she’d forgotten her phone, she wanted to cry.

Not immediately. Not when she saw it in her mind’s eye at home on the charger. At that point, she was still deluded enough to think she could salvage the situation. She seriously thought she might have enough time to drive back to the house, and to get it, and to return to the train station, and to maybe get a takeaway coffee, and to settle into a seat in the Quiet Carriage.

The clock in the car is broken and Camille doesn’t wear a watch. She knew the train was leaving at 8.06am, as it does every weekday morning, and that the clock in the car said 7.56am. She just had no idea whether the clock in the car was running five or ten minutes fast. It used to be ten, and then, not that long ago, Camille noticed it was catching up. But she knew that the drive from the train station to the house takes four minutes, because she once listened to a song, she can’t remember which one, and it was exactly four minutes long, and it got her from the house to the station. So she would’ve needed at least eight minutes to get home and back. Then thirty-seconds-to-a-minute to enter the house, and to yell over her shoulder at Manny, and to jump around the dogs, and to unplug and grab her phone, and to run out of the house again, before hopping back into the car and becoming a hazard to everyone and everything. Then she would’ve needed up to three minutes to find a new parking space, and perhaps another two minutes to race to the platform, and it all would’ve been too much, just too fucking much.

Commuters were swarming through the parking lot: in cars, on foot, via bus, with bikes. She could’ve asked someone for the exact time. It’s just that, realistically, if she had actually stopped and done that, like, if she had actually stopped the car, or chosen to get out of the car, or chosen to yell at a complete stranger from the car, and then proceeded to deal with all of the nuances of an interaction with a person she might then be forced to see every other weekday morning on Platform One — after the whole,

‘Hey! Yeah! I want to be nice! Even though I don’t have time! And, ah, yeah, WHAT’S THE TIME? Quickly!

No need to smile! No need to comment on anything! The weather is the same! It’s the weather! Let it go! Let it do its thing! And, yes, it’s Valentine’s Day! Happy happy! Don’t look at me! Don’t think! Just answer!’ incident — she would’ve run out of time altogether. And she couldn’t catch the next train, because it only gets to Southern Cross Station fifteen minutes before she’s supposed to be at work, and there’s still another twenty-minute train ride from Southern Cross to Armadale, and she simply couldn’t be late for that.

Or for Holly.

Camille wrestled with the 9am start Holly ‘deeply preferred’ for more than a year and she couldn’t handle it. The earlier train arrived at Armadale so long before 9am that she’d find herself suspended in this disorienting half an hour of nothingness before the day with Holly even began.

Then Camille started questioning things and reflecting upon things, after having spent more than eighty minutes on the train trying to avoid questioning things and reflecting upon things, and she had to go through this process five times a week, every week, and sometimes even more times a week when some star-studded event, or party, or wedding, or bat mitzvah required more of Holly! And more of Camille! And more of Alyce! And more of Georgia! And more of the flowers!

And all the world’s flowers!

Yet despite Camille’s fears and dramas, she did actually manage to ask Holly if she would be willing to push the starting time of their day forward an hour to 10am.

And Holly said yes.

But even thinking about that whole ordeal puts Camille into fight-or-flight mode again. Asking Holly for anything is a ferocious trauma, and there isn’t enough marijuana or ashwagandha on the planet to get Camille through it. She lives in a state of recovering from, anticipating, or inadvertently managing to activate conflict with Holly, and then bending over backwards to try and diffuse it. Camille doesn’t know why, but this pattern seems to run her life, along with clocks, seasons, invoices, diagnostics, the threat of fine lines, and everyone else’s desires.

And thanks to her now being phone-less, she cannot distract herself from these intolerable aspects of her humanness. She can’t scroll any feeds. She can’t watch any instructional vids. She can’t laugh at any memes. She can’t put any bottles of limited-edition botanical perfume or boxes of hand-rolled incense sticks in a shopping cart and forget about them. She can’t look at any sponsored posts from ‘it’ girls sailing across the Mediterranean in spangly bikinis and being sexy-yet-candid in hotel rooms. She can’t read any reviews of restaurants she’ll never eat at, because her diet is plant-based, yet she’ll obsess over the way they describe those crackling pulled-pork sandwiches, and those oily anchovy-and-garlic pizzas, and those sweet, sticky egg-noodle dishes. She can’t listen to any music. She can’t send Manny any funny gifs about Valentine’s Day because she doesn’t. Have. Her. Phone.

Camille has been wanting to read books on the train to give her eyes a rest, and to give her insecurities a rest, and to give her soul a rest, but she hasn’t gotten around to it, because there are so many things she needs to do on her phone first.

Maybe she’ll buy a book in the city on the way home, and the prospect of that is comforting. Although, she’d like to research different books online before buying one, and she can’t.

So Camille’s holding back tears as she finds a seat on the peak-hour train that never has enough carriages to comfortably space everybody out, and she wants everything to stop, and she wants to turn around, and to go back, and to change course, but the train she’s on is leaving the station, and propelling her deeper into herself; deeper into all of the places she’d rather not go.

Camille doesn’t have any money now, either. There were a couple of travel cards in the glove box of the car, but they’re Manny’s concession cards, and Camille isn’t eligible for a concession. She’s just hoping no ticket inspectors board the train, and she has no idea how she’s going to get through the suspense of it all, or how she’s going to pay for a coffee, or for her lunch, or for anything else that comes up throughout the day. She’s probably going to have to ask Holly for help.

Camille just laughed out loud. Well, she kind of snorted out loud into the void of the shared public space, and no one noticed, because they were all looking at their phones.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Visit Madeleine Ryan’s website

.