by Alison Moore
She remembered being young and missing the last train home, and having to wait around on the platform for hours and hours until the first train of the next morning. She would have been eighteen; she would have been in between school and university. Eighteen seemed so young to her now; at that age, she had been so irresponsible. But at the same age, her mother had been married, with a brand-new baby.
Jessie once asked her mother, ‘Does having babies hurt?’
Her mother laughed and said, ‘Of course it hurts.’ But, she said, she had got through it by imagining that by pushing out the baby, she was pushing out the pain. ‘That’s just the start of it though,’ she said. ‘You’ll find out for yourself one day.’
At Euston, she headed for a concession to see if there was anything she fancied. As Jessie was about to go inside, a woman standing at the entrance reached out and grasped Jessie’s wrist with long, thin fingers. In her other hand, the woman was holding out a takeaway cup of tea, offering it. The woman did not look at all well. Jessie had once accepted a paper cup of cider that had been passed her way by strangers at a party. She had taken a sip and at that same moment thought, There could be anything in this. It was a basic rule – Don’t accept sweets from strangers – but as she swallowed the questionable cider she realised that she had essentially done just that. She had been fine – it really was just cider, probably, although she had drunk no more of it, and had instead abandoned the cup on a windowsill.
‘No, thank you,’ said Jessie, although she smiled at this woman, in whose grip the unwanted cup of tea was vibrating slightly, and on whose back sat a huge and terribly heavy-looking orange rucksack. Jessie turned away and went inside. She bought herself a cup of tea, a tuna sandwich and a magazine, and then headed for her platform and the train which would take her to Carlisle. In Carlisle, she would have a wait of just under an hour before the bus came. She would get herself a warm drink and maybe stretch her legs, and then she would catch the bus; it would take her all the way to Hawick, and in Hawick she would walk to her house and shut her front door.
She found her train, her carriage, her seat; she was pleased to have a window seat, even though much of the journey would be spent in darkness, into which she would be travelling as if into a tunnel; it would be rather like spending endless hours on the underground.
She enjoyed train travel. The previous summer – not this year, whose summer seemed barely to start before ending, but the one before – she had taken a series of trains down through England, into France, and then northeast into Germany. Years earlier, she had taken an interest in the work of a German author of children’s picture books, though her own childhood was long gone: she was in her thirties then, working as a freelance translator, and her first marriage was coming to an end. In one of the picture-book stories, a mother causes her child to fly apart. The pieces are flung into the sky and the sea, into the mountains and the city; they have to be found again, and sewn back together. Entschuldigung, says the mother, at the end: Excuse me or, in this context, I’m sorry. Another story is about a dying man who since childhood has had an angel looking over his shoulder, and nothing ever hurts him. Jessie loved these books, and would have liked a child to share them with now, but she did not have one. The author lived in Hamburg, and when Jessie had come across what seemed to be the author’s postal address, she had sent her a letter, written in German. The address must have been old, though, or somehow wrong, because the letter was returned, with a sticky label (Empfänger nicht zu ermitteln) informing her that the addressee could not be traced. Jessie had found that authors in general could be very hard to get in touch with, hidden as they often were behind the veil of an agent or a publisher.
By the time she took that train trip to Germany, she was in her late forties, and travelling with her second husband, Will. He had been a train driver, a train enthusiast, and she had hoped that the expedition would do him good, but he had spent the hours silently straining to see the track, to see what lay ahead, around the bends; it had perhaps been a mistake.
They visited Hamburg, where Jessie thought again about this author, and wondered whether she still lived in the city; if so, Jessie might have been within a few miles of her. It might as well have been a few thousand miles though, seeing as Jessie still did not know the author’s address. Then one afternoon, walking down by the river with Will, Jessie thought she glimpsed her, or someone very much like her, or very much like the pictures she had seen of her, and she followed her for some time, for some way, hurrying on ahead of Will, trying to catch up. The woman was quite a walker, pressing on when Jessie paused with a stitch in her side, and eventually Jessie lost her, or perhaps it had never been her at all. Looking around, Jessie realised that she had come a long way from Hamburg’s centre, that she was far from the area marked on her tourist map. She began the walk back.
She opened her magazine and flipped through it, glancing at headlines and pictures. She looked at a page of winter coats: trench coats and duffle coats in the shades of a violent sunset; they were streaks of fire-engine red, scarlet, shocking pink, blood red and fish-finger orange. She donated her old magazines to surgery waiting rooms. Some of the magazines you found in waiting rooms were years out of date. She would find herself in a waiting room one day, leafing through this same magazine, looking at these same winter coats, which would no longer be available.
An announcement was made over the tannoy, confirming where they were going, so that no one would end up somewhere they had not meant to be; and then the train was pulling out, although Jessie had not heard the whistle – wasn’t there always a whistle, which let you know that the train was going to move? They had those lollipops as well, that they held up to signal to the driver, to say something like, It’s safe to go now.
Looking up, looking out of the window, she saw that where another train had come in on an adjacent track there was some kind of commotion, something was wrong. People were gathering on the platform, and Jessie saw the orange rectangle of a huge rucksack, abandoned near the edge of the platform, just where all those people were standing, looking down onto the track.
As Jessie’s train pulled out of the station, she leant into the aisle, looking up and down the carriage, but everyone else in there seemed to be busy with their newspapers and phones and children and meal deals. Jessie turned back to the window, but the orange rucksack and the group around it were no longer visible.
She wanted a guard to come into the carriage so that she could ask what had happened, but there would not be one on this train; their tickets had been checked at the barrier. She thought of the ticket inspector on a train that she used to catch regularly, who, as he walked down the aisle, checking tickets, would say to each passenger, ‘Thank you,’ except that he clipped his speech like he clipped the tickets so that what he actually said was, ‘You.’ He would advance down the carriage, coming towards Jessie, saying, ‘You . . . You . . . You . . .’ He would stop beside her, take her ticket and give it back with a hole punched through, and go on down the carriage, saying, ‘You . . . You . . . You . . .’
The magazine was still on her lap, open at those coats that she had been looking at when whatever had happened had happened. She put the magazine aside and did not pick it up again.
There was graffiti spray-painted on the brickwork that ran alongside the train tracks – people left messages, or just their own names, so that someone would see it and know that they had been there. She tried to read them all but already the train was travelling too fast; the graffiti went by before she could fasten her eyes onto it.
They passed the old Ovaltine factory. She ought to try Ovaltine, to see if it might help her to sleep. The former factory had been turned into housing; she was not sure where Ovaltine was manufactured now, or indeed if it still was.
They passed through miles and miles of countryside, as dusk gathered over it. Each time they stopped at a station, the announcement was made, to let everyone
know where the train was going, but by then they were moving again and if anyone was on the wrong train it was too late to get off.
A man sitting across the aisle from Jessie opened some foil-wrapped sandwiches. You did not see that very often these days, grown-ups eating homemade sandwiches. They looked like the sandwiches that her sister used to make for ferry crossings. She used square bread and thick slices of orange cheese, Red Leicester. The foil-wrapped squares looked like an astronaut’s meal. As children, Jessie and Gail had eaten quite peculiar fillings: brown sugar sandwiches when they got home from school, lettuce and ketchup sandwiches on a nudist beach. She remembers looking up from that nudist-beach sandwich and seeing an elderly man in a three-piece suit, a watch chain hanging between the pockets of his waistcoat, polished shoes on his feet. He was standing in the middle of the beach, looking perplexed. He had presumably been walking but had come to a stop and was looking around him at all the nudists, and then up and down the length of the beach. The nudist section extended for perhaps half a mile in either direction. He looked as if he did not know how he had come to be there, as if he had just stepped through a hole in time, and Jessie pictured a parlour somewhere in which a modestly dressed lady was wondering where he had gone. Jessie remembered finding grains of sand in her sandwich.
The passenger with the homemade sandwiches had a plaster on his forefinger, which he was carefully holding away from the bread. Jessie imagined him in his kitchen, slicing a tomato, the knife going into his flesh, the sting of tomato juice in the wound, and him having to see if he had a plaster in the bathroom cabinet. The plaster he was wearing was one of the old-fashioned kind: it was the same colour as his skin, barely noticeable. Gail had kept happier plasters in her first-aid kit, with smiling Mr Men and smiling spacemen and smiling aliens on them. They did help, apparently: smiling worked as a painkiller. She tried it now, turning her head to the window to pull her mouth into a smile. The darkness outside had turned the window into a mirror, and in it she caught the eye of the man with the homemade sandwiches, who smiled back at her. Jessie shifted her gaze and for the rest of the journey she avoided looking his way.
As they travelled north, she heard the accents changing around her, and somewhere in between Kendal and Penrith it started to rain. She had a childhood memory of standing at the edge of rainfall, and running in and out of it. She remembered it like a curtain of rain, the chilly plunge like running through a waterfall, or like crashing through a thin sheet of ice into freezing cold water. Probably it had not been like that at all; probably the edge had been hazy and spitty, the difference in temperature negligible. It was somewhere in the Hope Valley, a lovely part of the world. She could not recall the precise location, though she tried, as if remembering would enable her to go back and run into the rain again, in and out.
1985
When Jessie played childminder to her big sister Gail’s little girl, Eleanor always wanted Jessie to help her build a den. When the den was finished, Eleanor always wanted Jessie to sit inside it with her and read stories. It was dim inside these dens, and if Jessie could not see the words on the page, she missed bits out or made bits up. She expected Eleanor to notice, but she never did.
Eleanor’s favourite story was a picture book about Frogmen: amphibious creatures that lived in the vast, deep sea but sometimes surfaced and came onto the land and might be glimpsed in the distance, or might come so terribly close that you could see their nostrils and smell the salt water on their skin. All these Frogmen lived alone, and they were lonely, but in the end, in the final pages of the picture book, they began to find one another, and to make friends, and to fall in love.
Jessie always felt that there was something rather disturbing about the story. On holiday with Gail and her family, on the beach as the sun went down, Jessie thought about the Frogmen and could not decide whether she would want to see the smooth head of one rising above the water, the webbed feet stepping onto the wet sand. She imagined the slapping sound that the Frogman’s feet would make as it came towards her. She would not know whether to welcome it or turn and run. She watched the water and shivered.
It was the first time Gail and Gary had invited Jessie – who was eighteen that year – to join them on their family holiday; and as it turned out, it was also the last time, the only time. They had been on the ferry, midway between England and France, and had eaten their cheese sandwiches, when Eleanor asked to go up on deck, so Jessie took her. It was blustery, but they found somewhere to sit. Eleanor wanted her aunt to read her the Frogman book which was in her backpack, so they got it out. They were still near the beginning when Eleanor pulled the book towards herself, to better see a picture. Jessie let go, but Eleanor must not have been holding it properly. The book fell through the railings and into the sea.
‘You let go!’ cried Eleanor.
‘I thought you had it,’ said Jessie.
‘You were supposed to be holding it,’ said Eleanor.
They looked down at the choppy water, but already they could not see the book.
‘Perhaps a Frogman will find it,’ said Jessie, but she could tell that even Eleanor, who was only five, knew that was highly unlikely.
Connection
I feel as if I’ve been away for years. I’ve been existing without a watch, without a calendar; I’ve felt timeless, though time has passed regardless.
I found myself waking up feeling homesick and thinking of Jessie, and I decided I would send her a message; I would tell her: I’m on my way home.
When Jessie emerged from Carlisle train station, it was not quite six o’clock but it felt like the middle of the night. On the far corner of Botchergate, there was a cafe bar. Jessie crossed the road and went inside, grateful for the warm lighting and the friendly face behind the bar. She ordered a scone and a pot of tea and took a seat at the window, facing the station and the bus stops, with the bar’s music and chatter behind her. She spread her scone with butter and strawberry jam and poured her tea. She had not realised how hungry she was until she started eating. She wolfed down her scone. There was a little square of flapjack on her saucer; it was a nice touch, a kindness for which she was grateful.
Feeling replenished, she decided to take a walk before catching the bus and having to sit again. She put on her coat, picked up her shoulder bag and her travel bag and headed out into the dark evening. She walked down Botchergate. Seeing a man coming towards her, she was aware of bracing herself for some comment. Once, a man in a city centre had said to her, as he passed her, ‘Bitch.’ She had not known the man; she had not even seen his face. Who would say such a thing, she thought, to a stranger? She had been minding her own business. But still, ‘Bitch,’ he said.
The man on Botchergate passed her without comment, and Jessie went on past the shopfronts. Where the doorways were set back, she half-expected to find someone sleeping, or underage teenagers drinking things with names like Mad Dog and Wicked. But the doorways were empty; the homeless and the children were elsewhere.
Jessie walked down as far as the evangelical church, where she stopped and looked at her watch and realised that she ought in fact to be heading for the bus stop. She turned back and retraced her steps.
In between a pub and the cafe bar, a little girl was toing and froing beneath a street lamp, running into and out of the wash of orange light. With an outstretched hand, the child seemed to be trying to touch the lamplight and then – as if to see if it felt any different – the darkness. Jessie wondered what on earth the child was doing out on her own, at this time of night, in this cold weather. Jessie had drawn close enough to put a hand on the child’s shoulder – her hand had already begun to move, and what would she say, Come with me, I’ll buy you something, warm you up, keep you safe? – when a woman emerged from the darkness and took the child’s hand and the child skipped away with her.
Jessie was nearly at the crossing when the door of the cafe bar opened and a man came out. He stepp
ed into her path, stopping her in her tracks. ‘Excuse me,’ said Jessie, beginning to move around him without really looking at him, looking down, noticing his brogues.
‘Pardon me,’ said the man, and Jessie glanced up at him. He looked like a spiv adrift in time. ‘I know your face,’ he said, pointing a finger at her. ‘I’m just trying to place you.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Jessie. ‘I have to go. I have to catch my bus.’
‘Jessie Noon,’ said the man. She might have denied it, had it not been for the conference name tag that was still hanging from her neck in its shiny, protective sleeve, visible through the unbuttoned opening of her coat and lit by the light from the bar. ‘That sounds like the name of a cowboy.’
‘I’m not a cowboy,’ said Jessie. She looked automatically for this man’s name tag, but of course he was not wearing one. ‘Do I know you?’
‘I’m Robert,’ said the man, extending a hand. Jessie kept one hand on her travel bag and one hand around the bunch of keys in her coat pocket. ‘I’ve seen you,’ he said, ‘in The Bourtree in Hawick. You’re often in there.’
‘It’s my local,’ said Jessie.
‘You’re not from Hawick.’
‘I am,’ she insisted.
‘You don’t have a Scottish accent.’
‘I grew up in Cambridgeshire,’ she said. ‘I moved to Hawick thirteen years ago.’
‘You’ve settled there then.’
‘Yes,’ said Jessie.
‘Whereabouts?’
‘Just off the High Street,’ said Jessie. ‘Near the Horse.’ As soon as she had said this, she thought that she ought not to have done; she did not know this man, who would now know where to find her. She excused herself; ‘I have a bus to catch,’ she said. She moved around him – and he did make her move around him; he made no attempt to get out of her way.
