Stranger on a Train (11 page)

‘For Christ's sake shut up,' he was muttering grimly. ‘Sit down, stick a cigarette in your stupid face and shut up.'

He was talking to a woman behind him dressed formally in tailored pants and a neat blouse, a scarf wound around her throat and gold jewellery abounding on her wrists and fingers.

‘Don't talk to me like that,' she said, but her face and tone had no hint of outrage in them. She spoke as dully as if he had told her the time and she hadn't wanted to know, as if he were always telling her the time and she always didn't want to know. Her ‘don't talk to me like that' was automatic and weary, said with neither a thought nor an emotion behind it. That was noteworthy, but her voice was even more extraordinary. It sounded like a pneumatic drill on paving stone, a low rasping vibration that was only recognisable as a voice because it spoke words, so mannish it couldn't have come from a man.

‘I'll talk to you how I want,' the man replied, though with as little interest in the conversation as she. ‘Good morning, ladies,' he said in an altogether more jovial voice with a slight Irish lilt to his lazy American accent, lifting his tumbler to us in greeting.

‘Hi,' growled the well-dressed woman like a fairground barker.

They sat down opposite us, him with his podgy naked calves ending in deck shoes planted wide apart, her with good court shoes, legs neatly crossed, lighting up with a gold Dunhill lighter.

‘Light one for me,' he told her.

‘Put your booze down for one second and light your own,' she monotoned at him.

‘This delightful woman is my wife Virginia,' he leaned across to me. ‘I am Conal. Glad to make your acquaintance.'

‘Hello,' I said weakly, stunned at the performance.

‘Oh,
hailo,
' he pantomimed in a posh English accent. ‘Virginia, my dear, you must be on your best behaviour. We have a well-bred British lady among us. None of your filthy sailor's language if you please.'

‘For God's sake, behave decently,' Virginia snarled. ‘Please excuse my husband, he's a pig.' She got up and came to sit next to me. She was tall and quite stately, but beginning to stoop as if her height and stateliness were becoming burdensome to sustain. There was something unhealthily grey about her carefully made-up face. They were on their way home to Los Angeles, she told Bet and me, sucking hard on her cigarette and lighting another from it before it was halfway smoked. They had been on holiday in Florida and always took the train because she was frightened of flying. Anyway, it gave Conal more time to drink. The Florida trip was so that she could recuperate.

‘I'm sorry about my voice,' she growled. ‘I've just had an operation for cancer of the oesophagus.' She pointed at her scarf. ‘I'm not supposed to talk at all. They took out what they could. They said I'll be all right. They think so.' She fell silent.

‘Telling them all about your cancer, dear heart?' Conal called. ‘That's it, don't keep it to yourself. I'm sure the nice English lady could care less.'

Virginia threw him a contemptuous look and turned back to me. She put one of her heavily beringed hands on mine in a gesture of intimacy and moved her head closer to my face. ‘I don't want to die,' she whispered in her sandpapered voice, intense, yet hardly talking to me at all, shocked almost at the sound of her words, but at the same time almost pleading as if entrusting the thought to a stranger might function as some kind of prayer.

‘Then you could try putting out your cigarette, not drinking like a fish in secret, and
shutting up,
' hissed Conal, pouring the remains of his whisky down his throat.

An expression of his love, perhaps. Two drunks locked together in life, panicking about the end. Their theatre of hatred sent me retreating into sentimental mode. It was enough for Bet, who whispered ‘Jesus' under her breath and rose. ‘I've got to leave,' she said. ‘Knock on my door next time you go for a smoke.'

The tall young man with the backwards baseball cap finished his cigarette a moment after Bet had left and loped to the door, nodding a generalised, ‘See ya later.' He was holding Heidegger's
Being and Time.

‘Hey, baggage,' called Conal, getting out of his chair and grabbing hold of Virginia's arm. ‘You're going to frighten the refined English lady away. She's too good for the likes of us dirt Irish.'

She shook off his hand, but, growling goodbye to me, followed him out as if he were still holding her.

‘Bye, Conal,' I said, waving a feeble hand at him as he disappeared through the door.

A moment after everyone had left, Marlboro Girl looked up and smiled shyly at me.

‘Hello,' I said.

‘God, wasn't he awful?'

I shook my head in wonderment at the degree of his awfulness. She got up and came to sit next to me. She looked so young, I asked if she was travelling alone. An expression of pure childlike terror crossed her face.

‘I'm eighteen,' she reassured me. ‘Maddy. I'm going home to LA. I had an accident.'

She was remarkably beautiful in a modern, huge-eyed, extremely wide mouth, gauchely tall and thin-as-a-reed sort of way, like an anorexic fawn. She was Julia Roberts as near as dammit. Her clothes were very expensive schmutters, pale ultra-baggy trousers just hanging on to her barely there hips, showing a waistband of boyish underpants and an expanse of exposed torso below a tight, skimpy T-shirt. She was as consciously and unconsciously waiflike as it was possible to be, but seemed quite at ease with her modish beauty.

‘What happened?'

‘I was in Florida for a fashion shoot,' she said, looking pleased to start talking. ‘I'm a model.' Of course she was. ‘They think something's wrong with my brain.'

Eight days before, someone had opened a door too fast without looking and slammed it into her head. It bled a lot, and she passed out for a second or two. They took her to hospital and she was given a scan. She had a blood clot.

‘A dark patch or something, the doctor said. They sent me back to my hotel to wait a few days to see if it would disappear. It can be nothing, apparently, something that just goes away. But it hasn't. When they did another scan this morning, they told me it hadn't improved. It's got bigger. They said I had to go home for surgery. I've spent eight days in my room sitting still, frightened that I'm going to drop dead. That's pretty crazy-making. It's better being on the train, with people around, and going home.'

‘Your parents…?'

‘I spoke to them on the phone every day. They're waiting for me. The doctors didn't tell me anything. Just that the clot had got bigger and I had to have surgery. They need a course in psychology, those doctors. I've been so frightened. They haven't really told me anything. I don't know what's going on, what could happen…'

‘Why the train? It's a long journey on your own by train.'

‘They said I couldn't fly. The pressure changes might make the clot, you know … And there wasn't a sleeping compartment available. It's slower but safer by train. They told me I mustn't do anything to raise my blood pressure.'

‘Should you be smoking?'

‘I've got to do something. And this has really messed up my trip. I've been modelling for six years. This was a really big job.
Vogue.
'

She shook her head slowly and then fell silent, perhaps at how small the loss of the big opportunity seemed now she spoke of it, compared to the blood clot that had got bigger in her brain.

‘If you want to sleep, you're welcome to use my compartment.'

She said no, she felt better being with people.

The door opened suddenly and a young man in his early twenties came in. He was black and hip, with even baggier trousers than Maddy's that concertinaed around his ankles, his head covered with a black beret. He saw Maddy and flung himself down in the seat beside her, offering her a cigarette which she took and he lit with a snap of his see-through Zippo before lighting and dragging hard on one of his own. Maddy perked up a little more at the cool new company.

‘Man,' he wailed. ‘I can't believe I gotta be on this train for two nights. But a lot can happen on a train.'

Maddy and I showed a polite interest.

‘I'm a DJ. My man called from LA. He said come on out here, there's gigs and bitches and sunshine all the time. I think, fuck, I'll go. I can DJ in LA, NY, any place, you dig? Hey, you a fucking model or something? Wanna beer?'

Maddy looked quite perked up. Suddenly, just a couple of hours after I'd got up, I was limp with exhaustion. I decided I needed a nap.

‘I'm going back to my compartment,' I said to Maddy and told her where it was if she needed to lie down later.

‘Sure,' she said, distractedly.

*   *   *

I slept until we pulled in to Pascagoula, Mississippi at around 11 a.m. There was a tap on my door and Bet called out that she was going to the smoking coach. I said I would join her in a minute. DJ and Maddy were still there, smoking, sipping beers and deep in conversation. Gold Dress was back in the same place. Conal was sitting with a tumbler of bourbon and a cigarette, but no Virginia. As well as Bet, there were two or three men I hadn't seen before, a smiling Mexican, another tall, lanky black man with his baseball cap the right way round, and a middle-aged guy in a cowboy hat with a face that seemed carved out of stone, smoking solitary and quiet.

‘Come over here, English Lady, and be friendly,' crooned Conal, his voice turning a corner into a sneer. I shrugged and sat next to him. He put an arm round me. I removed it.

‘My people are from Kerry. You know Ireland?'

‘Not really.'

‘You don't say much, do you? A proper icy English lady with your grey hair and crossed legs. They teach you that at finishing school, did they? Do you ever uncross your legs?'

‘Let it go, Conal.'

‘I just want to know…'

‘You never will.'

We were sitting at the far end of the coach by a window. Bet in the corner, then me and Conal. There was a slight lurch, barely noticeable, but enough to make Conal have to hold on to his tumbler to stop the bourbon from spilling. A second later, Bet, looking out of the window, made a low whistle.

‘Well, I hope we didn't do that.'

I glanced out in time to see the wreck of an upturned car on the side of the track.

‘Mmm,' I said, thinking like Bet how, though we hadn't done it, some train obviously had at one time. Then I saw that the cloud which for a second I thought was disturbed dust, rising from the wrecked car because of the turbulence of the passing train, was actually smoke. At the same time, the train was decelerating sharply.

‘Oh my god, we did do it,' I gasped.

‘Hell,' complained Conal, whose bourbon slopped over the side of his glass. ‘They've no respect for good drink.'

Bet put her hand over her mouth, and whispered, ‘We hit that car.'

‘Shit,' said the stone-carved man, getting up to peer out of our window. ‘Stupid bastards. They tried to beat the train. Happens all the time in these godforsaken places.'

The others gathered round the window, but we were too far past the wreck to see it. They headed out of the coach to the corridor and opened the door. Conal, Bet and I stayed where we were, Bet and I, at least, too stunned to move. The commentary came from the people by the door, and we saw our guard walking back along the track with another conductor, talking into a handset.

‘Kids, probably,' one of the observers said. ‘Playing chicken with a train. That only ends one way. The train's always gonna win.'

‘Hit a truck last week out of Chicago. Same thing. Truck driver and his passenger were killed outright.'

Other people added their reminiscences of rail kills they'd experienced. Everyone seemed to have one, and the tones of voice were matter-of-fact. It was all part of train travel in America, apparently. But at least one life had been extinguished just seconds before by our train without us feeling anything more than a mild jolt. It turned out to be three lives.

‘Hell,' someone said. ‘This is going to make us even later. They have to test the wheel balances before we can move again. Every damn wheel. It can take hours. Jesus, we're going to be stuck in this hole half the day, and we're already over two hours late.'

Some voices mumbled agreement, the killing already forgotten in the inconvenience.

Our conductor came back.

‘Sorry, folks. We hit a car. We going to be a while sorting this out. Two kids were killed outright. One in the back's alive. Pretty badly hurt. We're waiting for the ambulance and we can't leave until they find the local coroner to pronounce death. We're checking the train for damage while we're waiting.' He shook his head. ‘It's a real mess. You all stay where you are. The one in the back is screaming something awful. But there's nothing anyone can do until they're cut out of the wreck.'

So we waited in the dusty heat on the outskirts of some nameless town between Pascagoula and Biloxi, Mississippi, for a coroner to be found, for the wheels to be tapped, for our journey to recommence. We were instructed over the loudspeaker system not to leave the train and asked if there was a doctor or paramedic on board for one of the chefs who had fallen hard when the train came to a halt and possibly broken his arm. How much you felt the jolt of the car or of the emergency stop depended on where you were on the train. We were towards the rear, so felt very little, because the first two carriages absorbed the force (and, of course, the car and its passengers), but near to the engine, people knew immediately that something had been hit. For us in the smoking carriage, it had been little more than a few spilled drops of bourbon and a flash of smoking metal, as the car was struck at nearly full speed and somersaulted to the side of the track. It was hard to take in. The upturned automobile I had seen might have been there for weeks or months even – it was probably an ancient vehicle already – so settled had it looked in its final resting place. It was now already quite a way behind the train, so we couldn't hear any sounds coming from it. The train had been speeding along on the flat, past one after another one-horse town with unprotected train tracks at their outer boundaries. To our right was the sweaty marshy landscape of the South and a bit of a dirt road that led perhaps to the next place; to our left, small groups of clapboard houses and unkempt rubbish-strewn backyards could be glimpsed between the trees. This was poor country. The train whistle had blown two or three times as it approached each residential area to warn of its coming. There were no level crossings, no traffic lights in these backwoods places. The single dirt road out of town ran across the tracks, an oncoming train blew its whistle, that was all. Although you could see it coming for a long way through the flat landscape, it is notoriously hard for someone watching it come to judge the speed and distance of a moving train, but who in a place like this would be in such a hurry that they would try to beat it? Someone suicidally, pointlessly impatient, someone whose judgement was hopelessly impaired by drink or drugs, or someone terminally bored. One thing everyone knew was that in a race between a car and a train, the train always won. At least everyone on the train knew that. Maybe the three people in the car didn't know. Or they were young enough to believe that nothing like death could ever happen to them, that taking risks always had the desired outcome. Perhaps they wanted to make the train and its passengers pay attention at whatever cost. But the one person left alive in the car was screaming. The worst thing in the world had happened and for no good reason.