“Bon matin. Good morning. Checking in?”
But I didn’t expect to be taken this literally. “No, I’m, ahm . . . I’m meeting . . . a friend.”
He examines my sweat, my unlikely holdall, and I would almost welcome his suspicion, because it would be less humiliating than what he does give me—the fatherly smile reserved for the unthreatening and sad.
“Okay. The bar is through there on your left, let me get the door.”
This means I can’t wait in the foyer, must go to the bar, a dim and leathery, expensive space where I hide behind a lime and soda water to catch my breath. But it’s all right that I’m here, because it was somebody else’s suggestion and I don’t want to have a drink, so I won’t have one. I also believe that dropping in at a watering hole or two like this can immunise your heart against temptation. Plus, there is a slight, innocent comfort in knowing that booze is still available, that it’s carrying on a full and active life without me.
“If I come talk with you, would you mind?”
The answer to this question always being, “Yes, I would mind very deeply and, in addition, I have a communicable disease.”
But then he reminds me of me—something dreadful peering back at me from underneath the surface of his eyes, some huge deficiency that scares him.
“Would you mind? I could just go . . .” He is dull-voiced and meaty and neat in a wealthy/casual/North American way.
“No, I don’t mind. Sit down—I would buy you a drink, but I don’t have any money.” This last because my sympathy can only extend so far.
“That’s okay. I have a lot . . . of money.” He makes the announcement as if it’s the worst news in the world. “I can pay.” And this has an edge which tells me that someone has recently broken his heart and so rendered his every possession temporarily de trop.
Which is fine by me. “I’ll let you know when I need another soda water.” Of course, I never met anyone like this when I drank—anyone willing to pay. “What’s her name?”
“Oh, Jesus.” He drops at this, landing in the armchair opposite as if I have hit him with a tray. Accompanying his sigh comes the tang of at least two miserable, early-morning whiskies and I heartily wish I’d been able to guess he would be this raw and leave before he made life complicated. It’s not as if everyone doesn’t get abandoned, isn’t mugged by the ghastly products of their own affection—if we all made a fuss, the world would be chaotic, no one would ever get anything done. “Oh, God.”
“I wouldn’t bring Him into this, He won’t like it.”
The man squints across at me. I might as well be speaking Japanese. “Dorothy.” His bottom lip shudders. “That’s her name.”
“Okay. That’s her name.” I avoid repeating it—he is too muscular to be controllably distraught. “Would you like to say what she did?—or you can call her names and I’ll agree.”
“I don’t want to do that.” Of course he doesn’t, not yet. Tomorrow he will, but not today. “She didn’t do anything wrong.”
If we’d both been drinking whisky—although it is barely past ten in the morning—then I would give him a comforting hug. “That’s very unlikely, I’m sure.” I would rub his arm and hold his hand and we would be fucking within half an hour. “Unless you’re a bad person.” Afterwards, we would agree it had been exactly what we needed. “. . . murderer, violent, dog molester, criminal type, in which case—”
“I am.”
“What?” I only made the joke, because I thought it was a joke. “You’re a bad person?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t look that way.”
“I steal.”
“You steal.” I try not to sound too relieved. “Well, that could be worse, though, couldn’t it?”
“No!” His round, pink fist thumps down on the table top between us and the bar’s well-polished silence thickens, observes. He coughs, swallows and again his bottom lip threatens to fail him. “I mean . . . I’m sorry. I mean, I explained to her what I do, because she knew about it. But she didn’t understand and we were . . . we were going to—”
“I know.” I barge in fairly roughly to prevent him from imagining the glowing children and monogrammed golf balls and minor urinary infections they were on the brink of sharing for eternity. “I know . . . you thought you’d be good together.” This seems to jab him underneath the ribs and so I go on, just to draw him from further despair. “But some things . . .” Then I halt before I end up saying just aren’t meant to be.
He grabs for my hand in a non-erotic, drowning way. “It’s my job.”
I meet his intense, little eyes and resist asking, “What’s your fucking job—it’s your job to steal? Great job. Regular income, I bet. No tax. Why don’t you order a wife from the Philippines, or somewhere, get fixed up and leave me be.”
“I’m in insurance. I adjust loss.”
Which removes my remaining compassion in a breath. Because, as he now explains at great, self-pitying length, the loss he adjusts is not his customers’. He is in place to defend his company. He denies claims. This saves an immensely wealthy institution from paying out any of the money its policyholders have paid in. When he denies a claim, people lose their farms, their cars, their houses, they go without physiotherapy, they watch ailing relatives suffer constant pain, they die of untreated cancers, industrial illness, progressive disease. He is a fucker.
“What’s your name?”
“Um . . . Matt. My name’s Matt Duchamps.”
Matt Duchamps is a fucker.
Although I did once receive compensation for a carpet that was damaged by fire when there was no fire and, indeed, no carpet. Then again, I would never have got the minute, almost irrelevant, insurance cheque if I’d had to deal with somebody like him. “Matt—I’m Hannah, by the way—look, Matt . . .”
He mumbles on, ignoring me and pretending he shares his former fiancée’s loathing for his business. He says he was about to retire in any case, that he was ready to move on for moral reasons.
“Matt.”
He stops, shows me the toddler-lost-in-woods face that would have made Dorothy utterly sure she was doing the right thing.
“Matt, you weren’t meant for each other.”
His lip is back on the verge of collapse.
“With her, it was the money—she liked you because you had money. She bailed out as soon as she knew you were changing jobs. She was a bitch.”
Matt begins sobbing so inconsolably that a concierge comes over to be sure that all is well. So I pat Matt’s hand and appear solicitous. The concierge nods, thinks well of me, and glides off, satisfied.
“Matt? Matt, it will be awful and very lonely, but you’ll have to move on. You can’t get fixated this way—people leave. People leave you. But there will be others.” Matt whimpers. “Others who don’t leave. Ones who love you for yourself.” A racking chain of sighs suggests that he finds this as implausible as I do. “You’ll be fine.”
“Hannah, let me . . .” He crimps in a remarkable pressure around my fingers and I can’t help but picture Dorothy, lying back every night while he prodded and mauled across her like a partially tranquillised bear.
“You don’t have to do anything.” I point this out with complete sincerity. “Really. It was my pleasure.”
“No, no . . . you were here. You listened. No one else seemed like they would. And so I have to give you something.”
Well, if you’re insisting—money’s always good.
“Really, it was nothing.”
Money, I could accept—on behalf of all insurance claimants, everywhere. You wouldn’t miss it, would you, Matt? Good old Matt.
He struggles the breadth of his free wrist down into his inside pocket and brings out an uninspiring fold of thin card. “Here.”
I stare at it with probably open contempt.
“I was going to surprise her. We’d catch . . . see . . .” He snatches back his gift, opens it out and spreads the contents. “See, we were going . .
.” He swallows wetly. “It was a surprise. For her. We were catching the train this afternoon and going to Toronto. Then we’d take the trans-Canadian to Vancouver—the whole way. I booked a sleeper car. They, they, they encourage couples. There’s an observation deck.”
And I kiss Matt.
“Oh, ah . . . you’re welcome. We, I, we had accommodation in Vancouver—”
“That’s okay.”
“The Pacific Palisades. Because it sounded so good. Pacific Palisades . . . You been to Vancouver?”
“No. Well, yes. But I don’t remember. Not really. I was on my way to somewhere else.”
“You want the vouchers? For the hotel?” He’s trying to squeeze more gratitude out of me, but I have none, because I’m in a hurry now.
“No. No, I don’t.” And I leave before he can attempt to befriend me, exchange addresses, extract a promise of postcards to be sent en route. I also rush away before he can change his mind, or vanish: before the tickets turn into water, dust. Because this is more luck than I get in a decade.
God, thank you.
I mean it.
I can go to Clear Spring.
I will go to Clear Spring.
I will start going today.
And I’ll get better.
And I’ll be good.
Now that you’ve been good.
Now that you’ve done this.
You didn’t have to do this.
Now that you’ve helped me.
I will be good.
It was underground—Montreal station. Another twenty minutes and I had it nailed, was queuing for a train to Toronto: where the station is, likewise, buried. Then an afternoon that wandered down towards the lakeside and the bracing sun and endearing seabirds and an indication of my smooth and simple life to come, followed by a night spent sharing a Spartan hostel barracks with three hearty backpacking girls, fresh from New Zealand. This I refused to take as an indication of anything.
And it didn’t matter. It was only a tiny blank in the progression of the plan which has delivered me sweetly across a silver and rose morning and into the beautiful, grubby limbo of railway-station passageways and waiting rooms and coffee and escalators and the hard spine of the platform and then up the wonderful metal steps of a train that will take me almost all the way to Clear Spring.
I sit in my little cabin, enjoying its nautical touches: mysterious hooks and shelves and flanges for me to get used to, metal fittings and bulkheads in the usual railway-carriage colours: yellowed-over blues and dusty greens. I will be at home here, neatly boxed behind my slightly insubstantial door.
Which shivers, when we’ve hardly left the station, with a violently cheery rapping. I open it to unveil a self-consciously dapper attendant. “Now then, good morning . . .” He glances round and then seems wrong-footed, if not dismayed. “Duchamps? Or Burnaby?”
“Ah, yes.” I didn’t know whether these tickets were transferable, so I’ve decided, for the duration and as a minor holiday, to be Burnaby. “That’s me, Burnaby. Dorothy.” I set about generating an air of dignified disappointment.
“No Duchamps?” He waits, balanced between perky servility and a tactful exit.
“Didn’t work out. All the more room for me.” I grin a feisty grin.
“Well, yes. I suppose so, eh?”
“Yes.” With a faint note of wistful acceptance. “All the more room for me.”
“O-kay . . . My name is Charles, anything you need, you just ask. I’ll be the attendant for this car?” Charles has clearly delivered one too many announcements and his inflections have been terminally affected. “There are breakfast muffins and whatnot along to the front, coffee and juices, in the lower area of the ob-ser-vation car. Cooked breakfast set back in the dining car. It’s all there if you want it.”
I feel that Burnaby wouldn’t want it, not while she’s being bereft, “Thanks, but no.” And I turn my head to the sun-dusted window as if I am contemplating other breakfasts, ones full of masculine promise.
“Right you are then. Good morning.” And the door snaps politely shut. Through the partition I hear two little-old-lady voices bickering next door and the small thumps of luggage, repositioned.
And this will be the only problem on the trip—inside my little cell I can be tranquil: I have my own view, my own toilet, my own sink—but outside, there are other people—there’s a whole train stuffed with other people. I sit in one of the two chairs provided for Burnaby and Duchamps while their window shows suburbs and malls sliding back into lumber yards and tractor franchises, birch trees, the naked frame of a timber house dark on the brow of a hill, civilisation unravelling, and I think that I mainly dislike other people—the vast majority of them having been no use to me. In fact, being canned in with a trainload of other people for most of three days does not appeal in any way. Even howling drunk, I wouldn’t like it.
It’s exactly the sort of present you could expect from a loss adjuster. Matt Duchamps—an absolute fucker.
Naturally, they lure you from seclusion with the thought of food— “Good afternoon. The last sitting for lunch is now being served in the dining car. Please make your way to the dining car. Last sitting. Than-kyou.” Meals are included in the ticket and I didn’t bring even snacks with me.
So out I go—I have to keep my strength up, be in good form for the clinic and for Robert.
I am preceded along the train by a heavily muscled attendant—rolling solidly ahead as I stagger and sway. His broad skull disappears directly into his shoulders and back, the dense block of his uniform filling the corridor with extraordinary precision. He might almost have been grown to fit it. Finally, he lunges to one side, disappearing with a wink into what I assume is his berth and I am left alone to press on into the dining car. Lakes and streams and leaves are giddily picturesque around me as I’m bounced from one elbow to the other until both ache. I sustain myself with a hope that the last sitting will be sparsely attended and quiet, as the name might reasonably suggest.
But I am not remotely shocked to discover my hopes are misplaced as I stumble into a stridently pink car, already packed with diners who peer up at me as if I may be an additional hors d’oeuvre. A grinning waiter shows me—with laborious, faintly mocking, deference—into the only remaining available seat, thus filling the table reserved for misfits and solitaries. I join a silent, male pensioner who eats nothing but dry bread, a middle-aged woman with shaking hands and a scrawny, ill-shaven railway enthusiast. “You’re all equal here, eh? On the railway? Doesn’t matter who you are once you’re here. We’re all equal, eh? You can talk to anyone on a train. Anyone at all.”
And apparently anyone at all is supposed to listen without thoroughly losing their appetite, or killing him. Within moments, and completely against my will, I learn that he is called Marty Kershaw, that he used to work for Canadian Pacific, and that he cannot succumb to a fatal heart attack remotely soon enough.
I soothe and restrain myself by studying the foliage that whips past, but I can tell my fellow inmates are eyeing me instead of their windows. I can see them in reflection, sneaking looks: the mother surrounded by moon-eyed teenagers who slices her food into mouse bites and chews with inordinate care and who is as big as an adult manatee; the man with the Quaker-style beard and monstrous eyebrows who keeps on rubbing at his thighs; his lady companion who blithely wears a chunky wooden necklace, from which there dangles an articulated doll. To be frank, there isn’t one among them a sensible child wouldn’t run away from at first sight. Each of them alone would give train travel a bad name.
But I’ll only have to be here for a couple of hours a day and it’s not as if I haven’t spent my life among the walking wounded and the odd. There’s no credible reason for me to prod at my bison sausages and country vegetables and know that I can’t eat them, because my throat is wincing shut in spite of me, because I am, in some way, under threat.
Small talk and engine noise are eddying peaceably about, stories of relatives and travels are bein
g exchanged. Cutlery tinks and scrapes, the train growls on, the waiters wait, there is nothing definably out of place. Which makes the sense of danger worse—because if I alone have noticed it, thought it, then it will notice and think of me, it will seek me out.
I begin to wonder if this is the next phase in my sobriety—the onset of aimless fear. Or perhaps I am simply acknowledging the whole lifetime of terrors I’ve ignored: the broad accumulations of waiting death: nuclear, chemical, wholesale-industrial, for-fun-and-for-profit death: the rotting atmosphere, the disappearing trees, the plaintively burned orangutans, the avoidable starvation and discontent, the random injustice, deliberate cruelty, the very new and very old diseases, the frank and coy annihilations that nip and nudge and leer at us, seep through and cripple our resistance, take us away.
Reality—there’s nothing but horror in that.
Except this is something else. A personal problem. I can feel it stroking the back of my hair.
This is for me.
A plan I didn’t make that’s just for me.
Which is when it winks at me: gives me a peek, a tiny unveiling of the dark thing organised inside the car. Whenever I glance towards anyone, they turn away, they shield their eyes, break off their conversations— every person—every time—as if they had rehearsed this, were quietly linked. And they seem to know the waiters too well.
Which is insane. A little paranoia is healthy, but this is insane. I have to eat up my fruit salad and get out of here. Skip the coffee, go to sleep. Skip the coffee, turn the unconvincing lock on my cabin door and go to sleep. Skip the coffee, check the cabin, because you can’t secure it while you’re out, turn the unconvincing lock and go to sleep. Skip the coffee, check the cabin for someone who might be hidden there, somebody harmful, turn the unconvincing lock, undress, get into bed, then stare at the window, go to sleep.
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