Stranger on a Train (32 page)

I didn't have the courage to reply. The letters have stopped.

*   *   *

When the
Sunset Limited
finally came, I spent a good deal of time in the smoking coach, puffing up a smoke screen and, I must admit, hiding from Jack W. Grey, who told me as we were separated by the conductor towards our different destinations that he had a lot more to say to me. The ugliest man in the world sat opposite me, or perhaps it was just my mood. In a deep southern accent he was talking to an elderly black man who was completely silent and seemed to be paying no attention. I – no longer on duty – was not listening to what was being said, but suddenly the black guy shook his head and said, ‘Ol' Catfish died, huh?' What goes round comes round, round and round.

Next to me a man was explaining about law and order.

‘In Singapore, they whip the fingers off thieves. North Africa it's the complete hand. They know what they're doing. One thing I can't stand is people who hit on kids. Those paedophiles, I'd take a baseball bat and break every bone in his body from the elbows down.' Several men were nodding fervent agreement.

‘Yeah, this chicken-shit community service. Some kid got caught spraying graffiti in our town, and you know what? They made him
and his father
do twenty-five hours' community service. A couple of years in prison for the kid, that would do it.'

Apparently, I had been listening, because I wondered aloud what kind of society they would like to live in.

‘What do I want? I want to mess about on boats and drink plenty, play pool and fight. Hunting in the hunting season and gambling in Vegas during the winter. That's my kind of society.'

There was a good deal of agreement and chuckling with this vision of the good life, which was not entirely unlike Karl Marx's vision of the perfect life.

‘I like the way they run the trains,' the man who approved of North African justice told me. ‘You make trouble, they put you off. Doesn't matter where it is. Just stop the train and throw you out.'

The last time he was on this train they had stopped it and put a drunk out into the desert three miles from El Paso. Not, he assured me, that they don't temper justice with mercy on Amtrak. That same journey there was a paraplegic in a wheelchair who put his hand up a nun's skirt.

‘The conductor didn't throw him out, he just gave him a warning and a good talking to. Next time, he'd be out on his butt, wheelchair and all. Another trip there was this real simple guy. Like a retard, you know? Well, there was this hooker working the train looking for tricks, and the retard just kind of fell in love with her. He didn't get what she was. They put her off the train for soliciting, and the retard, Jesus, he wept and screamed for her. He wanted to get off right there and find her, he pushed the emergency stop and the train screamed to a halt, and he howled and howled to be let off. They couldn't stop him shouting and crying. He went crazy. In the end, they went to the next town and called the cops. They took him in, just to calm him down they said.'

A plump, middle-aged Amish man came and sat down next to me. An elder, I suppose. He prepared his pipe with slow enjoyment, all cheery and ruddy smiles on his wide country-fresh face.

‘Good day to you. Where are you from? Ah, English. I met another Englishman just the other day on the train. He was German. I spoke to him in German but he couldn't understand what I said. He spoke German, but not Old German. We speak Old German. He couldn't understand. Do you speak Old German in your area?'

‘An Englishman?'

‘Yes, a German.'

I concluded that English meant European. Or perhaps he thought England was in Germany, or Germany in England. His information about the world outside his community was very limited. It was the first time he had been away from his home. It was just him and his wife.

‘I promised Mother that we would travel, but there has always been work to do. Mother said, now we must have our holiday. The children are grown and we can take a week off from work to see the world. So we left. We are having a very good time.'

The ugliest man in the world was telling his new friend how he had stomach cancer, and that it was due to Agent Orange used during the Gulf War. He had also been shot in both shoulders and got a shell in his thigh. When he got back to the States, he had to be hospitalised and drugged to deal with his aggression.

‘Listen, I'm not aggressive, or I wouldn't be. All I want is for those sons of bitches to say they're sorry. I just want them to pay attention and apologise to me.'

I'm listening and listening. Although I've had it with other people, I can't stop listening. Sit still and listen to people talking, especially strangers, and what you hear is everything there is to hear. You gather in statements of how things are, the way of it, what it's like. The details vary a bit, but the tone becomes as familiar as the sound of the wheels running over the track. Every word is banal, corny, expected, a story a thousand times told, but every word is true. People may have learned to talk like the movies, but the movies learned everything there is to know from them. Each of them. I love it, and I can't bear it.

Next door to my sleeping compartment a family – mother and father in their thirties, two small kids – stayed shut up in their ‘family room' next door to my sleeping compartment, apparently working through all the possibilities of togetherness. Through the wall the children whined and cried, being bored and restless, the mother encouraged them to play nicely, the father told them off, the mother shouted at the father, the father shouted at the mother. Sometimes it grew quiet when the children, and therefore the adults, were content for a while. Then another explosive argument or fight. The adults yelled, the children wailed. Things quietened down again. The father came and went collecting food and drink from the bar. The mother soothed and told distracting stories and slammed out of the room. I lay on my bunk listening.

Back in the smoking car, a young man in a suit was working at his laptop – the first I'd seen used on the trains. It turned out he was trying to track the route of the train as it went along. He had never travelled by train before. He was amazed.

‘I'm trying to find where we are. I didn't imagine I ever wouldn't know what state I'm in, but the land goes on and on and you lose any sense of where you are at all.'

For hours and hours we had been passing unchanging fields of sugar cane. I had a sense of void. Of being empty of content. This was the discovery I made (again). This was the real experience of experience. Vacancy. I listened and took in. I talked, I reacted. But I was in fact no more than an outline containing dark space. I had no feeling of substance, inside or out. As if I were an empty shell made of thin sugar. Nothing that happened, or had ever happened, accumulated into something solid, into anything I recognised as a – for want of a better word – self. If I thought I would hear clues that I could put together to make a picture of the world, of myself, I was quite wrong. Words and experience just fluttered about, like windblown butterflies. But at the same time, I was astonished by people, by what they have to say, how they live, how the planet exists with so much nonsense and so much endurance. I was touched by what I saw and heard, but when I stopped nodding and talking and smiling and grimacing, there was nothing inside, or nothing other than emptiness. Emptiness was all I could identify as I watched the miles of sugar cane through the window. The old Circle Line trip I used to take was a clearer indication of the blankness of the circle. Blankness outside as well as in the empty centre, and fellow travellers sitting in unassailable silence. If the experience of being no one was what I had been after, I had succeeded in so far as such a logical impossibility is achievable. But being no one sometimes feels like nothing at all.

I spent the night in a hotel in New Orleans, keeping still, not thinking, just waiting for the next train. The
Crescent
would get me back to New York. New York would get me back to London. London would get me back to keeping still and quiet and the fantasy that if I listened to silence and no one, I might hear something interesting. Who knew what? Something about nothing, maybe.

*   *   *

The
Crescent
had a new, cruel twist on the smoking theme. There was no smoking car, but there were smoking
periods,
when addicts were allowed to light up in the bar. I'd forgotten about the other good thing about being at home. I could smoke as much and as often as I wanted. The shift system was explained over the tannoy by the steward who enjoyed giving out the news.

‘Howdy, folks, for those of you without the self-discipline to quit, we have special designated times when you can feed your addiction. These are: 9.30 a.m.; 12.30; 4.30; 7.30 and 10.30. Smoking is absolutely not permitted anywhere on this train except in the lounge bar and only at the stated times. The smoking periods last for twenty minutes. Your cooperation is appreciated. Have a nice journey.'

I boarded the
Crescent
at 7 a.m., so it was two hours before there was any point in making my way clutching my cigarettes to the bar. Actually, it was only an hour and a half before I was sitting in the bar waiting for lighting-up time, because I didn't want to be late and miss one smoking second. I was not alone. A bunch of anxious faces were walking like ghosts towards the small lounge bar, all of us early. We found seats at the tables in the clean conditioned air that was being vacated by non-smoking breakfasters. The bartender came round and placed a foil ashtray at each table. A clock ticked over the bar. Slowly. No one spoke. We just waited. At 9.29, the steward arrived. He checked the clock and he looked at his watch, relishing his moment.

‘Not long now, folks,' he crowed. ‘On your marks … lighters at the ready … go!'

We lit up. Brows smoothing, breaking into smiles and sighing contentedly as we exhaled the first lungful. Twenty minutes is plenty of time to smoke a cigarette, but not to smoke two. You have to rush the first and light up again immediately. But you had to smoke two because there would be no more smoking for two hours and forty minutes. All the pleasure was absorbed by anxiety. The steward watched us contemptuously.

‘Hey,' someone called out to him. ‘What's the schedule for sex on this train?' The steward smiled. He'd heard it all before. ‘Suck it on up, guys. Time's passing.' And time passed. ‘OK, that's it. Put 'em out. Let's get some clean air again.'

It was a strange system. The lounge bar after twenty minutes of concentrated smoking by all the smokers on the train was a thick fog, much worse than if a couple of people had been sitting there all day and lighting up from time to time. When the non-smokers returned, they choked on the air that even the smokers found unpleasant. Everyone was unhappy, except for the steward. And so we trooped back and forth, every two hours forty minutes, by mid-afternoon familiar faces, taking the same seats, raising our eyes at our helpless situation and our craven need. I was just getting through the time as best I could. Going home. My journey had ended before the circle was completed. I'd had it with the tedious, stunning, clichéd, sentimental, heart-rending, banal truths of my fellow travellers and myself.

By 10.30 and the final smoke of the day, we were somewhere or other, South Carolina. For the fifth time that day I sat opposite a woman who smoked deep and hard as she swayed her head in time to something she was hearing through the headphones clamped over her ears. She had the remains of a double whisky in front of her. When the Marquis de Steward called time on our final smoke, both she and I stabbed out our cigarettes but stayed where we were. There was no point in moving, and there was at least the smoke-laden air to breathe.

The woman was in her forties, untidy in a sensual kind of way, good-looking but weary. She sighed profoundly and then looked up at me.

‘Going far?'

‘New York,' I said. ‘Then back to London.'

‘I'm going back to Virginia, to my home. My husband's meeting me at the station.'

She looked at me hard, to see if I understood what she meant. I understood that she was going to tell me.

‘Complicated, ain't it?'

‘Usually.'

She still had her headphones on and moved her head in time to the silent music. ‘You like country and western?'

I nodded. I do, I love the perfectly formed two-minute stories of heartbreak. I admire and respect the unashamed sentiment. The whine of human love and loss. Banal and true enough. The whole journey might have been a country and western album.

She pulled off her headphones and handed them to me.

‘Listen. This is so great. Just listen to the words. Want a drink?'

She called out to the bartender for two whiskies. In my ear a high-pitched male voice complained in a simple but catchy rhythm and even simpler rhymes about heartbreak, about love gone wrong and life never going right again. She told me his name was Aaron Someone. Her face was the template of emotional suffering, her drawn eyes and taut cheeks twitching slightly with the effort of holding the pain in, the corners of her mouth curved into the faintest smile of sad self-knowing. I drank the whisky fast when it arrived.

‘Do you hear what he's saying? Listen to the words. It's so
true.
I've been married for nineteen years. It's my third. It was good for a long time. But for fourteen years now, I haven't been able to break down the walls between us. It's like we live on different planets. I don't know what went wrong. We couldn't
talk.
I said I wanted to get away. Have some time alone. It was cool with him, so I took off. Stayed in New Orleans. You see, I wanted to … find myself.'

‘And did someone find you?'

It slipped out. I wished it hadn't. Her eyes focused sharply on me. She looked awed. ‘How did you know?'