by James Hawes
The wide, high train had come all the way from Budapest and was now threading along the banks of a mighty river through mountain gorges. It had a splendid old buffet car and signs in five languages everywhere you looked. This was travel as it should be, and I had somehow managed to find a real old-fashioned compartment all to myself, thus avoiding the many young tourists whose world-English chatter offended me (oh, really, was Prague cool? How profound!) and whose general attractiveness, or rather sheer, cleanly hopefulness (but isn’t that the same thing, really?), made me uncomfortably aware that I was a troubled man of forty-five who had not slept, washed or had sex for too long.
But it all gave me no joy. Even the fact that I had a cold bottle of beer in my hand, another two by my side and my trusty pillow plumped-up ready for sleep at last could not make me feel any better. Led astray again. Thought I had found someone who could guide me. Like with Panke, all over again. Hubby fucking Huck. Christ, when would I learn? Men can’t deliver because there’s nothing there to give. It’s all just show, just status games and playground strutting …
Hungry, lonely and grey with exhaustion, I drained my beer and buried my face as deeply as I could in my pillow’s downy embrace. Thank God I had brought it, this little piece of M&S so far from home. As the train jogged timelessly along, my exhaustion took over and a warm, snug fantasy began to envelope me.
Imagine, if only it had been a wartime bomb under my lawn last night, not a gun!
When better, discuss?
The spade blade nudges the decades-old alloy once again. Once too often, once too hard
The family were safely away. The vast mortgage we had just taken out, just to move to bloody London, all because of my so-called career, would have been instantly paid off. My pension would have been topped up as if I had died on the last day of my full-length work life. The tragedy would have left them pretty well sorted out. What more can any man do?
True, deprived of my earning capacity, the family would probably have had to move back from London. But in all honesty that would probably do William and Jack no harm. Frankly the school they had got into was not terribly good and the secondary schools were … Balls. Not terribly good? Who was I kidding? The primary school was shit. The secondary schools were all war zones. With me safely dead, and with the insurance payout, they could flee. They could go to Exeter. My children would see Sarah’s parents every day and my parents every other weekend. Jack and William’s secondary school would be at least passable. A fair bit of white trash, no doubt, in an Exeter state school, but a couple of rat-like louts per form, whose dads are hardly ever there and may in any case also be their uncles, is not the same thing as half the class being aspiring gang members who wouldn’t know what a dad was. Sarah could work part-time and have Mariana looked after by her parents, her own old storytelling relatives, not by strangers paid to pretend they cared. Yes, my children would be socially and financially provided for. What father can do better than that, these days? The best time to die is when your death will most help your children. Discuss. Indeed, from a certain point of view my bit part, or rather my blink-and-you-miss-me-oh-you-just-did crowd scene, in Life on Earth would have been performed as perfectly by sticking my fork into a rusting old Nazi bomb last night as it would be by forcing everyone to endure life in SE11 just so I could work my balls off teaching crap about an extinct shit-hole run by the Red Army for another twenty years.
Beneath the cold earth, the aged Nazi plates give and shift. Enough, at last, for contact.
I hugged tight the warm thought of instantaneous oblivion. It was even snugger than my pillow.
Boom.
What would it feel like? Wouldn’t it be so fast that feel was probably not even the right word? How fast do human nerves react? The gap between burning your finger on a pan and pulling the finger away is almost measurable. If a ton of high explosive goes off between your balls, would the mind, blithely thinking that it was merely digging a safe little garden, not cease completely to exist before the pain ever hit home? Examples, legion, from military history, of men hit by death decisively and by surprise and found with unmarked bodies and calm features. No agonies of despair. No long wait in a bright room for a nasty chat with an overworked young oncologist. No slow decay in a savings-draining rest home that smells of old piss. Surely it would be rather like that time a couple of months ago when, lost in gold-tinted daydreams of the London job, I had walked at a fast aerobic stride right into a Sheffield lamp post. Thump. The shock outrunning all pain for a good second. Which would be enough, in this case, to get me to for ever. Instantaneously ended.
Snuggle snuggle.
60: In The Paper, At Last
The train trundled on and I closed my eyes.
And imagine. If I really had set off a wartime bomb, I might, after all, have got my obituary in The Paper.
The tabloids would certainly have seen the funny side of a lecturer in modern German history and politics (who had been on national TV) being killed by an old German bomb. They would scarcely have been able to resist the headline, not on page one, naturally, but perhaps only a few pages in from the front: Achtung! For you ze lecture is over!
And then, surely, someone on The Paper, high up in an airy, gold-windowed office in Docklands, might idly have taken notice of me at last? Yes, the mighty search engines of The Paper would have been fired up. They would swiftly have shown that I was a lifelong subscriber to themselves, that I had a flawlessly left-liberal publications record (several of my articles were quite easily available, on request, in the stacks of some of the better university libraries) and that I had been just about to give a soundly anti-imperialist paper at the major national peer-group conference in Oxford, and a plenary one at that. The editors of The Paper (I could scarcely imagine their soft-suited power and rumpled elegance) might well have judged that I would have done great things in my field had I not had this ironic encounter with a piece of Britain’s wartime heritage (I had already contributed to Newsnight, after all). They might have decided that the unexpected loss of such a man indeed merited The Paper’s notice, if only for a hundred words or so in that little round-up of minor obituaries.
Minor, perhaps, relatively speaking: but in The Paper!
Sarah would cry, of course.
Sarah.
God, I wanted to talk to her. I grabbed for my phone and dialled.
—John? I’ve been trying to call for ages.
—Oh, sorry darling, I’ve been, um, in the British Library. You have to turn your phone off in there, you see. So, did they give your parents a better room, darling?
—No, we’ve moved hotels.
—Oh good.
—The new one’s fine. And it’s not that much more expensive, so don’t worry.
—I’m not. That doesn’t matter.
—Well it sounded as if it mattered yesterday.
—No, it doesn’t. And it didn’t. Sarah, look, I just wanted to say that I really …
At this moment the tannoy once again began to announce in Czech that the buffet car was out of food until Dresden. I knew that it would now repeat the message in German, Hungarian and English. I had no alternative but to hastily kill my phone. Having just told Sarah that I’d been working until very recently in the British Library, it might be a little hard explaining that I was now on a train heading from Prague to Dresden. And I didn’t want to have to explain anything at all. I simply wanted to tell her, well …
When I was sure that the message had finished, I called again, my hand this time cupped close around the microphone.
—John?
—Hi again, just lost you on the train, sorry, darling. Look, I just …
—That sounded like some foreign language.
—What? Foreign? No, darling. Well, no more foreign than usual on London bloody Transport, eh, ha ha! Sorry, darling, was that a bit too like one of Hubby Huck’s jokes?
—What? A bit too like who?
—Oh, nothing.
—John,
are you all right?
—Me? God yes. Just a bit tired. From hammering away under the stairs all day, you know, trying to get the VIP finished. For us all. Tuck-tuck, tuck-tuck, ha ha.
—Tuck-tuck?
—The keyboard.
—Under the stairs? But you’ve been in the British Library?
—What? Oh, yes, just the last few hours. Well, you know, something came up, I needed to, check a rather obscure point. Even more obscure than most of my points, I mean, ha.
—You don’t sound very well, John.
—Oh, it’s just, you know, working a bit hard, all on my own here, probably not quite depressurised yet.
—Well, it’s what you wanted.
—Oh, yes. It is. And everything’s going to be fine. Everything. I promise.
—Perhaps you should go for a walk.
—Yes. That would be good. God, if we only had forests and mountains like this, eh?
—Like what?
—Hmm? Oh, I was just, I was reading a, a holiday brochure. That I found lying about on the train.
—John, we’ve already decided that we can’t take Mariana on a big walking holiday. Even if we could afford one.
—Perhaps we’ll be able to soon, eh? After I give the VIP!
—Yes, well, let’s wait and see, shall we? John, I’m serious, I don’t want to come back and find you’ve wasted hours on the web again looking for amazing bargain holidays we’re never actually going to go on, because even if they’re amazing bargains they’re still never quite cheap enough for us. Not this week, John. In fact, never again, please.
—Absolutely, darling. Sorry about that. It’s just, right, well …
—You were about to say something, just then.
—Was I? When?
—When we were cut off. It sounded important.
—Hmm? Oh, must have been, just, I’m, I’m glad your new hotel’s better.
—Right.
—And, well …
—Yes, John?
I heard a noise and looked round. A youngish couple had stopped at the sliding door to my compartment and were now blatantly surveying its vacant acres.
I had managed so far to deter interlopers by using well-remembered tactics from my interrailing days: I had taken off my mud-caked shoes, plonked my visibly damp-socked feet on the seat opposite and made a little display of my beers. Whenever anyone had seemed tempted by the empty seats I had spread my arms, yawned without covering my mouth, scratched my unshaven neck and generally tried to radiate as farmyard-like an aura as possible. I quickly went through this routine again, but saw immediately that I was in trouble. Scrub-cheeked young Germans and hard-working, respectable Czechs might think twice at the sight of me, mid-American teenagers might grimace and pass hastily on, but these two were stocky types with distinctly Accession State clothes and luggage. They had clearly seen far worse things in their hard lives beyond the Danube than a somewhat rumpled, middle-aged Englishman drinking from a bottle of beer with his shoes off. Any minute now they were going to slide the door open and challenge me to deny that there was room for them, in whatever language they spoke. My cover might be blown. Time to hang up.
—Hello, darling? Can you hear me?
—Yes, perfectly. What’s wrong, John? John?
—Darling, I-can’t-hear-you.
I killed the phone again just as the door slid open.
My unwanted new travelling companions, a pregnant young woman and her partner, did not, in fact, even bother to ask for form’s sake whether they could come in. They bustled in without wasting their hard-earned smiles on me, sure of their equal rights to my compartment. With the efficiency inherited from generations of transnational rail travel, these New Europeans began to stow their baggage and to lay out a home-made picnic that looked as if it could keep a large family content until Vladivostok. A sudden ravenous jealousy now added to my pique: jealousy of their copious snacks, for I could not in fact recall the last time I had eaten a thing and was painfully aware that I had now missed the buffet car, but also jealousy of them being a young couple journeying together somewhere, laying out a big picnic which had clearly been prepared by them or by some other family member.
I drained my beer and laid my bristly cheek back into my pillow, contenting myself with a rather fine daydream in which I had the Armalite with me, on the luggage rack above my head, and could, if I so wished, at any time produce it, handle it with George-like aplomb and smilingly demand a tasty, paprika-laced treat as the price of my contribution as an Englishman to EU structural subsidies …
I sank further into my pillow.
As the train jogged timelessly along, my exhaustion took over and …
What?
My eyes were snapped incredulously awake by an unmistakable smell that had crept into my throat.
Cigarette smoke.
Impossible.
The Slavic bastards were smoking in the bloody compartment!
61: Gunsmoke
I flipped around in my seat to glare full-on at them. I spread my arms wide and frowned, but this universal or at least pan-Caucasian gesture of disbelief met only with bafflement. They looked back at me, then at each other, as if to ask each other whether either of them had any idea what was making this madman so indignant. Then a left-field guess dawned slowly on the man’s face and he looked at his cigarette before scanning the compartment just to confirm what he already knew: that it could not be the cigarettes that were making me so outraged, since this was clearly not marked as a non-smoking compartment and the default setting of the world was, as everyone knew, smoking.
I sank back in disbelief, like some hero trapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare. It was impossible that these people could be within their rights as they did this to me, yet clearly they were. Never had the gap between justice and the law, between what should be and what is legally allowed, been so blindingly plain.
I tried to breathe only through my nostrils, but as the blue clouds of smoke slowly filled the entire place it became clear to me that I had no alternative but to yield to injustice and move. I was not sitting with bloody smokers. So I was going to have to give up my beloved, sleep-necessary window seat. No more could I use the cushions opposite on which to stretch my legs luxuriously out. I was going to have to pick up my pillow and walk away, with no certainty that I would find so comfy a place on the whole long train. Quite probably I would now have to muscle in on half a dozen happy young people and sit there feeling old, uncool and unclean. But there was no alternative.
Except that there was.
—Bon dia, scushe, exishte la poxibilitate de prendare una xigaret? I asked, smiling, for I had by now established that my companions were Romanians and thus spoke the handiest language on earth, the only one which you can actually make up as you go along and be more or less understood provided you stick to everyday needs.
—Si, exishte, they replied, with satisfying amazement. They did not quite smile but were clearly relieved that there was now a logical explanation for my scowling behaviour: I was not mad, I was simply a foreigner dying for a smoke, the way you do. The begged cigarette appeared, along with a light. I smiled, nodded thanks, mimed delight and relief, sucked deeply, opened my second beer and sat happily back.
As I did so, the collar of my old tweed jacket shoved itself higher, and I caught, amidst the horsey fibres, a smell I had never found on my clothes before. A strange and slightly sickly mix of talcum powder, WD-40 and bonfire night. And something else. Yes, that was it. Burning metal. My first day at my secondary school.
I would, had I been born a year before, have been safely bussed twelve miles to the grammar school, to take my place amongst the at least partially bookish and studious. But it had all gone comprehensive by the time my turn came along, so I walked to what had been the local secondary modern. This place had for some decades equipped for life stout Devon youths who had sex by thirteen, drove tractors and played darts in pubs by fourteen and delightedly left education soon thereafte
r. And so it fell out that our very first lesson of our very first day was to take up a piece of steel so that we might each forge and rivet our very own coat hook, to serve us for all our schooldays, using a bloody great red-hot coke-fired miniature blast furnace, anvils and hammers and all. I stared in dis-belief as my turn approached, and was simply too scared to pull my red-hot lump of metal out with the yard-long tongs, despite the teacher‘s shouts and the laughter of my new classmates. By the time I had been ordered, stung and ear-clipped into grasping it with the metal jaws, the steel had gone beyond white-hot, had caught fire and was burning, crackling like a giant, hellish sparkler, sending out foot-long lightning bolts that bounded across the floor and made my fellow pupils dance joyously for cover. The teacher was forced to rescue me and the classroom. He snapped that I was a bloody useless nancy boy, and shoved me aside so hard that I fell on to the bare cement, thus setting the seal on my playground fate that morning and for years to come.
That smell it was. Burning metal.
I sniffed tweed again, inhaled tobacco again, sucked beer again, sat back and smiled: gunsmoke!
62: A Little Speed Hump for Real-Estate Speculators
By the time we reached Dresden the tall, wide buffet car had provided me with three further beers and a packet of American cigarettes (provided by a Hungarian waiter in a small act of private enterprise). What with the drink and the fact that it was years since I had been on a German railway, I forgot how high the trains are and stepped from the door into unexpected nothingness, falling with a small yelp of shock on to the platform.
I lay there for a moment, flat on my back, almost laughing with delight at this proof that I was indeed back in good old Europe, and that I could still roll instinctively from a fall without hurting myself like some old git.
From this surprisingly comfortable position, I surveyed the grandeur of the renovated Hauptbahnhof. State spending? We have no idea what it really means, in Britain. Or at any rate, since we pay the bastards enough in taxes, they must be spending it in some mysteriously invisible way. On wars and preparations for wars, perhaps? Well, you could see what they did with the stuff here. The place so dripped with public money that the nineteenth-century building seemed like a proud showcase for some extraordinary new form of high-tech transport. And this was supposed to be a deprived region!
