Stranger on a Train

 

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Map

Circles and Straight Lines

Journey One

Magic Monotony

Only the Lonely

When You're Strange

Too Much to Ask

By the Time I Got to Phoenix

Journey Two

Live Tracks

Expending Nerve Force

Just Like
Misery

What State I'm In

Also by Jenny Diski

Copyright

 

F
OR
I
AN

Acknowledgements

Parts of this text have appeared in
Harper's Bazaar
(US),
The Guardian
and the
London Review of Books.

My thanks to Marjorie and Merle Turner for time off and good company in Oregon, and for straightening me out on the rivers of the Northwest. Thanks, also, to John and Maria Phipps for oasis time. And thanks to my New Mexican hosts. I am grateful to an anonymous, virtual, but, I am assured, human librarian at the Newark Public Library for his or her helpfulness and kindness in finding and sending me the Frank Leslie quote. Frederic Tuten and Karen Marta made New York an even more vivid and invigorating place to begin and end my journey. And many thanks for everything to Ian Patterson, who changed my horizon entirely.

Circles and Straight Lines

Many writers have imagined that history is cyclic, that the present state of the world, exactly as it is now, will sooner or later recur. How shall we state this hypothesis in our view? We shall have to say that the later state is numerically identical with the earlier state; and we cannot say that this state occurs twice, since that would imply a system of dating which the hypothesis makes impossible. The situation would be analogous to that of a man who travels round the world: he does not say that his starting-point and his point of arrival are two different but precisely similar places, he says they are the same place. The hypothesis that history is cyclic can be expressed as follows: form the group of all qualities contemporaneous with a given quality: in certain cases the whole of this group precedes itself.

An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth,
B
ERTRAND
R
USSELL
, 1940

One month after I had started my journey around the circumference of America, I was back again where I began, on the frantic concourse at Penn Station, in Madison Square Garden, New York—

I hate neat endings. I have an antipathy to finishing in general. The last page, the final strains of a chord, the curtain falling on the echo of a closing speech, living happily ever after; all that grates on me. The finality is false, because there you still are, the reader, the observer, the listener, with a gaping chasm in front of you, left out of the resolution of the story that seduced you into thinking yourself inside it. Then it's done and gone, abandoning you to continuation, a con trick played out and you were the mark. An ending always leaves you standing in the whistling vacancy of a storyless landscape. Any ending exposes the impossible paradox – the desire for completion, the fear of termination – which like an open wound is too tender to uncover. But neat endings are the worst; the rounded closure that rings so true and so false, the harmonious conclusion that makes sense of the beginning and of all that happened in-between, and makes a lie of what you know about the conduct of your life, a lie of you.

There are two kinds of neat endings: the satisfying circle that ends where it began, and the straight line that ends in a point. Our life, we are inclined to think, is like the latter; the world is like the former. Artifice – art, if you must – very often inscribes the circle, taking the straight line to its desired conclusion: the point becomes a metonymy for the completed circle. Artifice makes the circle the secret pattern beneath the straight line. Very gratifying, that. It is as if our brains are tuned to that wavelength, we look for completion like we look for the definitive note at the end of a symphony. And, should they wish to challenge it, all that life and artifice can do against the tendency is subvert it: to deny us what we expect, what we are disposed to want, so that what we feel is
lack.
But finally that only reminds us again of what we crave. We don't escape by exposing ourselves to subversion, we only experience our uneasiness at being deprived of what we want. We should be wary of this, aware at least that there's a covert affirmation of the status quo in volunteering ourselves for discomfort.

When I was thirteen, at weekends and during the holidays, I spent a large part of my days underground. I hated my home at that time. Having run away from my distressed and distressing mother and without anywhere else I could be, living with my father was a last resort. He had disappeared without trace over a year before and only recently been found again, living in the house of a woman called Pam. I hadn't chosen to be there, nor had they chosen to have me. Pam, it turned out later, had made a secret deal with my mother after I arrived at her house. She would do what she could to make me feel unwelcome so that I would want to leave and return to my mother. Nothing would have made me do that. The result was an epic sulk on my part. I lived inside a kind of microclimate, a dark cloud of misery and punishment. We all suffered. I spoke to no one, ate meals in silence and retreated to my room at the top of the house. Every morning when I was not at school I walked to the local library and took out three books, novels, whatever took my fancy, based on nothing but titles and covers (I read Nabokov, Somerset Maugham, Edgar Allan Poe, Nevil Shute and Margaret Mitchell with equal enthusiasm and literary innocence), and I took these to the nearest underground station, Notting Hill Gate. Notting Hill, to my great good fortune, was on the Circle Line, a London phenomenon that has been the saving of many a tramp, drunk, overcrowded writer and sulking teenager down the years. It is the only tube line that travels in a continuous complete circle, although looked at on the modern tube map it is shaped more like a bottle lying on its side. All the other lines go north–south or east–west, beginning and ending at opposite ends of the outskirts of the city. The Circle Line, depicted in bright yellow, sits in the centre of the underground web, enclosing within its boundaries the heart of London. It is central London's perimeter and a route that includes most of the major main-line stations. The point about it was that instead of having to get off at a particular station and take another train back, you could sit in the same plush if tatty seat and circle endlessly all day long for just the cost of the minimum fare to the next stop. It was the cheapest day out in London, and the best way to keep dry if it was raining and warm if it was cold. Anyone with time on their hands, who didn't want to be at home, or didn't have a home to be at, could, for just pennies, use the Circle Line as their office (it is said that Naomi Mitchison used it to write novels) or their escape, or even, given the ever-changing cast of characters, their entertainment. If, like me, you were travelling without a destination, or planned eventually to return to your starting point, you could choose, when you first got on, whether to travel clockwise or anti-clockwise; it didn't matter. In those days I could recite the stops in order in both directions, now I have to remind myself by looking on the map. Notting Hill Gate, Bayswater, Paddington (for points west), Edgware Road, Baker Street (where I went to Madame Tussaud's in the old days with my father), Great Portland Street, Euston Square (almost at the block of flats I grew up in until we were evicted after my father moved out), King's Cross St Pancras (to head up north), Farringdon, Barbican (not there in my travelling days), Moorgate, Liverpool Street (for eastern areas), Aldgate, Tower Hill (again, trips with my father in the old days), Monument, Cannon Street, Mansion House, Blackfriars, Temple, Embankment, Westminster (coming out of the City now), St James's Park (feeding the ducks, being stopped by old Queen Mary when I was three and chucked under the chin by her close-laced hand emerging from her car window), Victoria (to the south), Sloane Square (into unknown chic territory for me), South Kensington (the museums on a Sunday with my father), Gloucester Road, High Street Kensington and Notting Hill Gate (home, though I never thought of it as that).

People got on, people got off. Every now and then someone else didn't get off, though you couldn't be sure they were doing the same as you until you had been a full circle, since they might just have gone round in the wrong direction. There would be a couple of flashers a day, who sat opposite you and exposed a pale worm from a slit in their trousers when the carriage was empty enough. A friend, who I met too late for my journeys, used to look at them hard and say very loud, ‘Well, it looks like one, only smaller.' At thirteen, I was too embarrassed to say anything. Not distressed, but embarrassed for these pathetic adults. Also annoyed that I would have to get up and change carriages. Flashing was ubiquitous, and nothing more than a nuisance in those days. I didn't speak to anyone, nor they to me. That was inner-city travel. People wrapped up in their own thoughts, brooding about their lives, or others, about work or love or whatever people think about on the way from here to there and yet in neither place. I smoked if I had any cigarettes – we lived above Pam's newsagent and tobacconist shop, and sometimes I would sneak down in the middle of the night and steal a packet of twenty. I read voraciously. There was no need to look up to check which station we had arrived at, it made no difference to me. So I could keep my head buried (as Pam would say contemptuously) in a book. I got through my three books by the following morning unless I had chosen something I found unreadable. That was very rare. The fact that something could be read made it readable to me in those days. Books were where I lived, not because I was bookish, but because everyone has to have a place to go, and between the covers of books was mine. If I was hungry and I had any money, I could get off at a station and buy chocolate or nuts from a machine, and I bought a drink on the way to the station. The round trip, these days, is reckoned to be about forty-eight minutes. And I would go round and round all day long. I didn't count but if I rode the Circle Line from ten in the morning until five, when it was time for me to go home to eat supper and return to my room to finish my third book, while sitting smoking through the open window, I would have done the circuit nine times. The Circle Line was a salvation until I figured out a way of getting the local council to send me back to the boarding school I had been asked to leave because my mother kept turning up and screaming at everyone.