'I'll be fine, I'll settle once you go -'
'This is Southern England in autumn, Harold, not Greenland in January,' said Summerfield. 'Go on, piss off the lot of you, and come back with a decent explanation for all of this.'
The four of them made their way to the end of the carriage, leaving behind Jane Masters and Peregrine Summerfield, who layered themselves in sweaters and nestled beneath an orange car blanket that made them look like a pair of urbanised Buddhist monks.
It was lighter outside. The moon gave the surrounding wooded hills a pallid phosphorescence. A loamy, wooded scent of fungus and decayed leaves hung in the air. The track appeared as a luminous man-made trail in the chaotic natural landscape. They saw that the carriage must have rolled by itself for at least half a mile before coming to a stop at the bottom of the incline. The grass around them was heavily waterlogged, so they stayed in the centre of the track. Kallie kept his torch trained a few feet ahead.
'How far do you think it is?' he asked, pointing to the distant black oblong beside the track.
'I don't know. Half a mile, not much more.'
'We could have a sing-song,' said Masters. 'Claire, what kind of music do you like?'
'Trance techno and hard house,' Claire replied. 'You don't "sing" it.'
'Anyone else know any songs?'
'Please,' she begged, 'the first person to start singing gets a rock thrown at them. Ben, tell another story, just a short one.'
'Okay,' said Ben. 'The woman it happened to is a friend of my mother's, and she's not nuts or anything. At least,' he added darkly, 'she wasn't until this happened.' And he told the tale of the lottery demon.
'Sounds to me like her boyfriend left her and she couldn't handle it,' said Masters.
Claire gave a scornful hoot. 'Typical middle-aged male viewpoint.'
'So what are we saying here, that for every positive action there is a reaction?' asked Kallie, 'like you can't win without making someone else suffer? Thanks for the morality play.'
'No,' said Ben defensively, 'just that luck works in both directions. Look at tonight. If we hadn't booked the dining car and then stayed late over our meals, if we hadn't joined your table, we wouldn't be in this fucking mess now.'
Something hooted in the rustling hillside at their backs. The black bulk loomed a few hundred yards ahead. Masters was freezing. His left shoe was taking in water. He hated leaving Jane, but knew she was not strong enough to walk through unknown terrain in the dark. 'Don't worry, there will be a logical explanation for this,' he assured the others. 'There always is.'
They reached a concrete ramp and began to climb. 'It's a station,' said Ben, shining his torch ahead. 'Milford. Ever heard of it?'
They climbed on to the platform and approached the low brick box that functioned as the main building. Masters tried the door of the waiting room, but it was locked.
'Do you think it still operates?' asked Claire. 'It's unmodernised. They've got wooden slat benches instead of those curved red steel ones with the little holes. And look at the lights. They've got tin shades.'
'It can't still be used,' said Ben, shining his torch through the window of the ticket hall. 'Take a look at this.' The others crowded around in the halo of light. The ticket machines inside had been vandalised. The timetables were heavy with mildew and drooped down like rolls of badly-hung wallpaper. Several of the floorboards were rotten and had fallen through.
'Can you see a phone?' asked Claire.
'You're joking. If there is one, it's going to be out of service. Try your mobile again.'
A silence. Only the sound of their breath and the wind in the trees while Claire tried to get a service signal. She tipped the device to the light. 'Still nothing.'
'We should at least try to work out where we are. Did anyone see if we passed Exeter?'
'I don't know, Ben,' Kallie suddenly shouted, surprising everyone. 'This was your idea, remember? I'm from the city, I don't visit places with trees unless they're the indoor kind in big pots, like the ones you get in malls. If you told me to expect rabid fruit-bats and rats the size of Shetland ponies I'd believe you because I don't know about outdoor stuff, this is not me, all right?'
'You might have told us before you decided to tag along,' said Claire. 'I'm freezing. What are we going to do?'
'I guess we either walk back to the carriage or pass the night here,' Masters replied.
'I'm not walking all the way back. Anyway, there's no more heat or light in the carriage than there is here. Oh shit, listen to that.' From above came the sound of rain on slates.
'That does it, we all spend the rest of the night in the waiting room,' said Ben firmly. 'It makes the most sense.'
'Oh, you get to decide what's good for everyone, do you?' Claire snapped. 'Of course, you're American.'
'Just what is that supposed to mean?'
'Just that you always boss people about.'
'Only if we know what's best for them.'
'You're trying to make up for being beaten in Vietnam and the Gulf by telling everyone else what to do.'
'At least we're capable of making life-decisions, which is more than you guys. I suggest you try it sometime.'
'Great advice coming from a country where people eat with their fingers and send money to TV evangelists.'
'Now you're being offensive.'
'Come on, you two, give it a rest.' Kallie pushed between them and led the way back to the waiting room. They had to break the lock to get the door open, but found a dry fireplace with dusty bundles of wood stacked beside it.
'I read that bird-watchers use places like these as hides,' said Masters, digging out his lighter. Outside, the rain began pounding the roof. It took a few minutes for the wood to catch, but soon they had a moderate amount of light and heat. Paint hung in strips from the ceiling, but the floor appeared to have been recently swept.
'I'm going to use the john,' said Ben, rising from the corner where he had been seated glaring balefully at Claire. 'If you hear a crash it's me kicking the lock off, okay? Give me your flashlight.' He pulled the waiting room door open. 'Hey, listen to that rain.'
'This is like the station in Brief Encounter.' Claire hunched down inside her overcoat. Kallie had already fallen asleep. 'I've seen it dozens of times on TV and I always want the ending to be different.'
'I'm surprised you like it at all,' said Masters. 'Surely your generation prefers more recent stuff. You'd rewrite the ending, then?'
'Only in my head. Don't you ever do that, change the endings of things?'
'All the time, Claire.'
Kallie fell asleep in front of the fire. The rain was still pounding the platform roof. 'Ben's been a long time. Do you think we should go and look for him?'
'No, it's okay, I'll go,' said Masters, forcing his aching limbs into action. He checked his watch but condensation clouded the face. As he picked his way along the dark platform, he tried to imagine what had been responsible for stranding them here. The carriage had been coupled at both ends. There had been a guard in the carriage with them. None of them had been paying much attention – they'd been too busy grandstanding each other with crazy stories. Perhaps they'd missed some kind of emergency announcement. But didn't the staff always come around and check the carriages if there was a problem? In this day and age surely people were protected from accidents of fate? Wet leaves plastered the backs of his legs as he walked. He reached the door of the ladies' toilet, but found that it was still locked. There was no sign that Ben had ever reached this far.
He turned slowly around and studied the dim forms about him. No sound but for wind and rain. But there was a faint glimmer of light, no more than a pencil beam, from somewhere near the far end of the platform. As he reached it, he realised that it had to be from Ben's torch, and it was coming from the underpass to the other platform. Wary of slipping on the wet steps, he descended.
***
'They've probably found a telephone by now and called someone,' said Summerfield vague
ly. 'There's really nothing to worry about.' He and Jane sat side by side in the pitchblack carriage, protected from moonlight by the hill behind them, as the art historian emptied the last of the wine into his glass. At least she had stopped crying now.
'I want to know why this is happening,' she said finally.
'That's like trying to explain the moon, or the course of people's lives.'
'It's all so random, and it shouldn't be. We've been telling each other stories all night, but they're not like life because they have plots. Nothing is left to chance. All this – there's no plot here, just a stupid accident, someone not doing their job properly.' She wiped her nose with a tissue. 'I don't want to be worried all my life. I'm tired of always thinking of others. When the children were ill, when my mother died, when Harold had his breakdown I was always the strong one. I had the answers and the energy to go on. It seems like there was never a moment in my life when I wasn't prepared to face disappointment. I feel like a fictional cliché, the academic's neurotic wife, and only I know that I'm not in someone else's story, that I'm real. Well, I don't want to be like that any more. I want someone else to take care of the worrying for a while. I want to go away somewhere warm and quiet. Where could I go, Peregrine?'
'I know a story about a special place,' he whispered.
'Is it real, though?'
'No, of course not. I don't know anything about real places.'
'But you must do. You're so much more practical than Harold.'
'Darling, I'm not real, any more than you are. In your heart you must know that.' And she knew he was right, for she remembered nothing before boarding the train.
***
Masters reached the bottom of the dripping tunnel and peered ahead. He could see nothing but the glare of the flashlight. 'Ben?' he called, and the reverberation of his voice was lost in the falling rain.
The torch lay in a shallow puddle. He picked it up and allowed the beam to cross the walls. There was no sign that anyone had been here. He continued through the underpass to the other side, but a rusted iron trellis barred the way to the opposite platform, so he made his way back.
When he reached the waiting room once more, he found it deserted. The fire burned low in the grate. Kallie's jacket was still lying across one of the benches, but the three students had disappeared as completely as if they had never existed. Masters was a rational man. He tried to remember their faces, but found he could no longer conjure their features in his mind. Shocked, he dropped down into the nearest seat and tried to understand what was happening.
They had been on a train, and the carriage had become separated, and they had walked to the station… Jane and Peregrine were still waiting for him, that much he remembered. He had just decided to walk back to them when he heard a distant pinging of the lines. Impossible, of course, but it sounded as though a train was coming. He ran out on to the platform and peered into the murky night as the sound grew louder.
Now he saw the bright, empty carriages swaying around the bend ahead, heard the squeal of brakes as the locomotive pulled into the station and came to a sudden stop before him. The green-painted carriage threw yellow rectangles of light on the platform. It bore the initials GWR on its doors. The compartments were separate and lined with colourful prints of British holiday resorts. The seats had anti-Macassars on their backs. The train was a flawless reproduction of one from his childhood, but why? And how? And surely it occupied the same line as their poor stalled carriage?
He had barely managed to climb inside and shut the door before it lurched off once more, running to its timetable as surely as Alice's white rabbit, and as Masters fell back into the seat he thought; this is a memory, an idealised moment from the past, correct in the details down to the curious acrid smell of such carriages and the itchy bristles of the seat, but not something that's really happening now – merely a culmination of fragments seen and experienced, not fact but fiction, someone else's fiction.
He pushed down the window and leaned from it, searching the track ahead. Where the stalled carriage should have been was nothing at all, no carriage, no track, no hills or sea, no night or day, just nothing.
And he thought; I've fallen asleep like one of my students, that's all it is. There's nothing to be afraid of. It's simply that I've lost the ability to tell reality and fantasy apart. Right now it seems I'm fictional but I know I'm real, for I have real memories. He thought hard and tried to recall something, a moment so exact and specific to his life that it would prove he was real, so that the fiction would break up around him like an unfinished short story. He tried to think of Jane and Peregrine, whom he knew had been having an affair for nearly two years, but could not conjure a single past memory from either of them. He thought about this evening, and the way it conformed to the most absurd conventions of a typical Hallowe'en short story; the stormy night, the train ride, the mystery destination, the tale-telling guests. Stay calm, he told himself, and remember, remember, he repeated as the train hurtled toward a stomach-dropping oblivion, remember something real and true, remember the last time you were truly happy.
And then a real moment came to him.
A dead, hot day in mid-July The air is countrified, dandelion spores rising gently on warm thermals, the lazy drone of a beetle alighting on dust-dulled hedge leaves. A suburban summertime, where the South London solstice settles in a sleepy yellow blanket over still front gardens.
Westerdale Road has its characters; the bad-tempered widow who appears in her doorway at the sound of a football being kicked against a wall, the deaf old couple whose pond freezes over every winter, so that they have to thaw their goldfish from a block of ice in a tin bath beside the fire. Some of the houses have Anderson shelters in their gardens, converted to tool-sheds in time of peace. Others still keep chickens, a distinctive sound and smell that excites the neighbourhood cats. Further along the street is a 'simple' man who sits on his front step smiling inanely in the bright sunlight.
Masters forced himself to remember, to stop himself from ceasing to exist. These weren't his memories, he realised with a shock, they belonged to someone else entirely. What were they doing in his head?
Many street names conjure pastoral imagery; 'Combedale Road', 'Mycenae Road', 'Westcombe Hill'. At noon the silent sunlight scorches the streets. Housewives stay deep within the little terraced houses, polishing sideboards, making jellies, listening to wirelesses in cool shadowed rooms. Their men are at work, mopping their brows in council offices, patrolling machine-room floors, filling out paperwork in dusty bank chambers. Their children are all at school, reciting their tables, catching beanbags, and in the break following lunch there is a special treat; the teacher unlocks a paddock behind the playground of Invicta Infants, and here is a haven from the hot concrete, a small square meadow of close-cropped emerald grass hemmed in with chicken-wire. Here we are allowed to lie on our stomachs reading comics, passing them between each other. It is peaceful, warm and quiet (the teachers do not tolerate the vulgarity of noise) and although we are in a suburban street, it feels like the heart of the countryside. And here is the heart of all remembered happiness.
Confused, Masters began crying as the carriages dissolved around him and tumbled away through the night sky, the foundations of his life evaporating as he fought to recall anything at all that made him human.
What was it about this area, what did it possess to make it so special, so irreplaceable and precious? A few roads, a pond behind a wall where sticklebacks were trapped in jars and dragonflies skimmed the oily water, a railway line with a narrow pedestrian tunnel beneath it, a station of nicotine-coloured wood and rows of green tin lamps along the platform. Some odd shops; a perpetually deserted furniture showroom, damp and dark, its proprietor standing ever-hopefully at the door, a model railway centre, a tobacconist selling sweets from large jars, a rack of Ellisdons jokes on a stand, none of them living up to their packet descriptions, a chemist with apothecary bottles filled with coloured water and a scale machine, gre
en and chrome with a wicker weighing basket, a bakery window filled with pink and white sugar mice, iced rounds, meringues and Battenburg cake. An advertisement painted on a wall, for varnish remover of some kind, depicting a housewife happily pouring boiling water from a kettle on to a shiny dining room table. Cinema posters under wire. A hardware shop with tin baths hanging either side of the door.
This confluence of roads and railway lines is bordered by an iron bridge and an embankment filled with white trumpet-flowered vines, and populated by families with forgotten children's names; Laurence, Percy, Pauline, Albert, Wendy, Sidney. No ambitions and aspirations here, just the stillness of summer, the faint drone of insects, bees landing on flowerbeds in the police station garden, tortoises and chickens sheltering from the heat beneath bushes, cats asleep in shop windows with yellow acetate sunscreens, and life being lived, a dull, sensible kind of life, unfolding like a flower, the day loosening as slowly as a clock spring – an implacable state which children thought would never change, but which is now lost so totally, so far beyond reach that it might have occurred before Isis ruled the Nile.
The lecturer had no memories of his own because he did not truly exist. Just like any flesh and blood human being, the creation that was Harold Masters reached his time unexpectedly and without resolution, and so dissolved into a tumble of threadbare tissues. With no plot momentum to drive him and no memories of his own, just borrowings from the mind of his creator, he turned over and over into nothing and was gone. And in that moment, he was the most real.
The storyteller in the mind's eye of Harold Masters sits at his chipped writing desk staring up at shelves of books, his eye alighting on an old 78 rpm record, and it dawns on him that he took Masters' name from the label, which features a dog and a gramophone. He wonders how many other characters' names came from spines of books and recollections of friends. A video of Brief Encounter, a copy of Dracula, a photograph of New York, a lottery ticket, a drawing of a phoenix, a brandy bottle, a hotel brochure, a dog's collar, an Arsenal scarf, childhood notes. He looks for the patterns that shape his own life and finds only tarmac, concrete and steel, the dead carapace of something lost to all but his mind's eye.
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