Packing is the work of a moment. Laptop and charger, a couple of jumpers, underwear, jeans. Mandy has a hospital appointment this morning. She’s back from her fitting at two. I haven’t got long. Every time a taxi passes outside the window, my heart gives a tiny jolt.
It’s all right. There is time. I wonder if Mandy’s hands are dexterous enough yet to allow her to unlock her front door? They must be. She managed all right the day she walked out on me in the restaurant. Only that was a Tuesday. Maybe the cleaner was in.
I don’t know.
Anyway, I should phone her, if only to warn her, to tell her I’m gone.
A
t its grandest, the north-coast highway is a monster. Its four-lane carriageways are barely enough to feed and relieve the half-dozen ferry and container ports that have spread – a slow and steady flood of glass and steel – to fill the mouths of every valley, making islands of a dozen basalt hills.
To the east, the landscape is economically unimportant and much less dramatic, and the road, having expended its strength on valley-spanning ribcage viaducts and swooping white-tiled tunnels, withers at last to a tiny, chicaned, suburban memory of itself. A main road. A high street. A bus route. At each junction, mini-roundabouts form pronounced bulges.
There is not much else to see. A shingle bank blocks my view of the waves. There are some shops – an uneasy mix of tourist services and struggling convenience stores. Hair Trendz. Raz the Newsagent. Artisanal Fruit Beer & Cheese for that ‘Tasty Gift’.
This is as far as the national rail network will take me. The regular railway loops south from here, its banked-up rail bed forcing the narrow-gauge local service into a weed-choked alley, embankments on the landward side and a sloping sea-wall on the other. Dead turfs and twigs poke up through its concrete honeycomb. A solitary string of barbed wire makes a notional boundary between the two railways, the big and the small.
There is a café at the station, its chunky pine furniture slathered over with a glassy, polyurethane varnish. At the back of the café is a flight of stairs leading to a model railway exhibition. A 00 gauge layout runs round three walls. In the centre, vitrines display larger, stripped-down engines and mechanical toys. Not all of them are very old. Some I recognise from my childhood. I pause to study a model circus, with cages for the lions, and slop buckets hung on little hooks outside the cages, and caravans with washing lines strung between them, and a make-up tent. The flaps are tied back and there is light inside. I hunker down to see in. A female clown is preparing her face in front of a mirrored make-up table. Her frown is illuminated by light thrown from tiny bulbs embedded in the frame of her mirror.
I stand up quickly, self-conscious, the butt of an obscure cosmic joke.
Wooden steps and boxes bring small children up to the height of the railway’s lower reaches, where a variety of goods trains, car transporters, tanker trucks and passenger locomotives weave in and out of sidings and through plaster-of-Paris tunnels, braking and accelerating with an unnatural facility. Clear panels protect the exhibit from curious fingers. Here and there, where the light hits it at an angle, you can see, printed on the glass, the handprint of a child.
The railway crosses a rugged, stepped landscape, rising in one place almost to the bobbly-papered ceiling. (In one out-of-the-way corner, small figures hung on thread simulate the plight of climbers attempting a dangerous, off-width chimney on lichenous rock.)
The trains weave around each other, stop at red signals, go at green. (The abrupt physics of this miniature world is its only unavoidable shortcoming.) The choreography is complex and contingent, signals responding to signals. I wonder if the pattern ever repeats itself. The exhibit may be self-organising, not operating according to some master timetable but to regular readings of its own internal state. Anyway it runs so seamlessly, the eye tires of it in the end. The trains will run and stop and run again as the stars will rise and set, interminably. The rest of the diorama is, by contrast, steeped in incident and drama. True, its occupants – people, road vehicles and animals – are frozen in place. But this actually heightens the drama, bringing to mind scenes glimpsed from a speeding train carriage.
A car has crashed into a safety barrier on a narrow mountain switchback. Witnesses are running up the hill, around the blind bend, to warn on-coming drivers and prevent more collisions.
In the valley below, a lorry driver rests his arm on the sill of his side window as he waits for a flock of sheep to cross a ford. The livery on his truck is written in Cyrillic. He has driven a long way – is he going to fall asleep at the wheel?
At the entrance of a small rural station, a man and a woman are embracing a child. She stands beside a small leather trunk, and wears a daypack, from which merges the head of a teddy bear (or it might be a rabbit). The parents are not so encumbered; they have come to wave the child off. Where is she going? To school? To stay with a grumpy lone relative, high in the papier maché mountains?
Outside, a steam whistle blows. I glance at my watch and hurry down the stairs, out of the cafe and down the concrete ramp to the platforms of the narrow-gauge service. A train is pulling out of the station. The locomotive is serious enough: its jet-black body is as long and sleek as a classic sports car. It is not a toy. Still, it only comes up as high as my chest. The top of the driver’s head is just visible above a polished cowling as he passes by. He is sitting on a padded leather or vinyl bench seat directly behind the boiler. Steam tickles my ankles. Crisp clouds of water vapour obscure the platform for a split second, boiling into the air even as they form. Coaches rumble by. These are taller and wider than the locomotive. It is possible to sit two abreast in them. Some coaches are open, others are fully fitted, with brass-handled doors and sliding windows. A baggage car passes, stuffed with bicycles. In their off-scale compartment, the bicycles look gigantic.
Children wave at me as their coach trundles by. I grin back at them but I keep my hands in my pockets, reluctant to commit myself to the game. The train clears the station and there is Michel, on the platform opposite, looking – in his donkey jacket and cracked DMs – as though he has just stepped out of a protest march. He’s studying another locomotive, on the other side of the far platform. This one is bottle green, with polished pipes and spoked iron wheels, whose rims and details are picked out in red enamel. It is prettier than the engine that just left, and its lines are less muscular. An engineer is polishing its controls with a rag.
Michel straightens up, turns and sees me. He has lost his runner’s poise. He has put on muscle. An all-weather tan has darkened his already dark complexion – he looks like a Romany gypsy in an old print. At the same time, he has acquired a new brightness. A thin beard softens the mournful line of his mouth. His hairline is already receding; and he is smiling. He never used to smile so readily. God help me, he’s happy. He shines with it.
I look for a way to cross over. There is a footbridge, back near the café, but there are no trains at the moment, no squeals of wheel on rail, and the platforms themselves are toy things; they stand barely a foot above the rail beds. Michel waves me over. The engineer behind him frowns but says nothing, just carries on rubbing. I cross the rail bed and step up onto the opposite platform.
‘It’s good to see you.’ He embraces me. ‘Bloody hell.’ He finds us an empty carriage. We sit opposite each other, my kit bag perched on end in the seat next to me.
We sit and we talk; we say the things people usually say, but these pleasantries – ‘Smooth journey?’ ‘How are you?’ – leave less of a mental trace on me than the fact of our proximity. Michel’s presence is like a scent. It presses against me, heavy with memory, as we wait for this pretty green engine to pull us east, towards the shingle banks and the sea.
D
ad had expected Mum to take charge of the look of the hotel, and fill it with the things she made. Curtains, cushions, hand-printed wallpapers, framed pieces. Mum couldn’t sell for toffee, but she had skill, a good eye. Instead she spent her whole time looking after me. I have no memory of her doing anything for the hotel beyond a bit of absenteeism cover here and there. She ran into town for supplies if an order fell through. She handled the bookings when our manager went to pick up his daughter Gabby from school. She served at the bar, but only when Dad wasn’t around. (Meeting her for the first time, you wouldn’t say she was a friendly person.)
So the whole weight of running and furnishing and maintaining the hotel fell to Dad. It was done out in his style, not hers. Not that he really had a style. He had interests. Hobbies.
He collected soldiers. Some were made of glue and sawdust. The others were lead, hollowcast, slush aluminium. There were army men too: generic green plastic, lightweight and homogenous, fitted out for abstract war.
Soldiers skirmished along the edges of shelves, and over the deep, white-gloss windowsills at the back of the house. They sidled along door frames and dadoes and square-cut skirting boards. They balanced precariously on the tops of framed prints. Once a room was freshly made up, Dad would go in and prop a soldier up under the desk lamps, hide another among the stalks of dead flower arrangements. He imagined he was creating witty arrangements – talking points. Really he was playing with them. A mortar with a two-man crew. A despatch rider on a motorcycle. A motorcycle with a sidecar. A scout car with a mounted machine gun.
The hotel couldn’t drum up sufficient clientele on its own, and relied instead on referrals from the local veterans’ hospital. The concussed, the confused, the psychogenically deaf. Dad took special care of soldiers blinded in the field by anti-personnel weapons.
I remember one in particular, because of his hair. It was albino-white and well past regulation length. He was one of a party of four blinded by ‘friendly light’ – a misdirected anti-sensor laser fired from a forward position. He used to compensate for his handicap by hunkering through space, unwilling to acknowledge any collision, any trip, any act of clumsiness. His eyes were hidden behind opaque goggles. Where they left off, crow’s foot wrinkles leant him an anxious air, as though he were wincing against light he could no longer see. He would turn his head back and forth, back and forth, scanning the space before him with his big black glasses. Beneath his service shirt, khaki and colours, his visual vest click-clacked like the shutter of an old-fashioned camera. Equipped with crude, Braille-like vision, he was not altogether blind, but details escaped him. He was in the wrong corridor, but how was he to know this? Every corridor looked alike to him.
I’d been playing with Dad’s soldiers. Two hollow-cast iron infantrymen vanished under the albino’s rubber-soled boots. I could see by his face that he felt them under his foot. He tried very hard not to vary his pace. He moved on, implacable, nothing-the-matter, in the wrong direction. He fetched up eventually in the plating-up area. The kitchen staff patiently and courteously turned him around.
The blind soldiers – I noticed this early on – had two personalities. There was the barefoot personality, and the booted one. Barefoot, they were sensitive, depressed. In their fatigues and boots they were very different – clumsy, and garrulous. Sometimes, when the soldiers put their boots on, they lost their balance. They leant against walls. Sometimes they fell over.
The hotel had a large garden. Mum and Dad never did much with it: a lawn that slewed downhill, dotted here and there with shrubs, each in its island of mulched earth.
Servicemen pecked their way across the lawn like crows. I suppose they imagined they were on one of the gentler stretches of the gorselands: landscapes dimly remembered from basic training. One raised to the sky a face mostly hidden by big black goggles. He stood sniffing the air like an animal in a zoo. Aware of his captivity but unable to fathom it, he scanned the sky for clues.
When I was very young I had been given a set of brightly coloured skittles, painted like soldiers. I rolled a wooden ball and knocked them down. Years later, watching the servicemen from my bedroom window, I found a way to play the game with real soldiers. I remember the feel of Dad’s remote control unit, slippy in my fingers. I remember the soft black nubbin under my thumb. I pressed: outside, servicemen toppled and sprawled over the dewy grass. They lay there, checked themselves, then, as one, they picked themselves up. They said nothing. They turned their heads slowly, vests click-clacking like cameras, orienting themselves against a Braille of shrubs and bracken and flowerbeds. Soon they were moving about the garden again, set on their slow, hesitant courses, their soft green fatigues speckled with lawn clippings. Army men.
‘It’s important we toughen our feet,’ Michel said, stuffing his lurid blue rugby socks into his boots. ‘Footwear doesn’t last forever.’ Michel was using the school’s weekly cross-country run to prepare me for a world without consumer goods. We tied the laces of our rugby boots together and slung them around our necks.
Rhododendrons, stabbing and spiteful, massed along the edge of the millrace. Michel shuffled along the top of the wall, holding on to their branches. I followed him. White water rushed beneath us.
‘We’ll wait here.’
The bushes screened us from the path our games teacher, Mr Hill, would take as he caught up with his runners. Of course anyone inside the mill house would have had a clear view of us hiding there – but there was never anyone in.
I heard Hill running past. I rose and palmed the foliage aside and watched him go. I didn’t like cheating him, but I liked Michel more.
Michel was quiet, lugubrious, self-contained. For me, at any rate, he had extraordinary presence. A glamour. If he understood my feelings for him, he never let on. He showed very little tenderness for me. He wasn’t interested in my weaknesses. He wanted me to be strong. He cared for me as you would care for your side-kick, your familiar, for the man you had chosen to watch your back. He said we had to toughen up.