by Jenny Diski
But then I wonder at my wondering. Not that it isn’t marvellous and extraordinary that a cat chooses to keep company with me, but it occurs to me that I might be just as amazed by the company of other human beings who choose to make contact with me across the chasm of separate individual consciousness. Rationally, I know both cats and people have a built-in need for making contact, but that doesn’t make the fact of connection less extraordinary. Yet when I try to transfer that state of awareness to contact with my own kind, I fail. I can’t apply my sense of miraculous contact to people. It’s a flaw, perhaps like being colour-blind, or my own spatial deficiency that prevents me from transferring the information on two-dimensional maps into actual geography. What I experience most with other people is my estrangement from them, the distance of a mutually unique separation that words or touch never quite bridge. Unlike cats, people interfere with my apprehension of reality, they muddy how I can know myself, confuse my understanding of how I am, which is centred around the notion that solitude is a state of perfection, and the simplicity of being alone a desired goal. Of course, I have not been entirely on my own. I have had, and have still, people in my life. People I love and whose company I enjoy. But people complexify things; they place their glass of beer on the table and break up my view of the horizon by including themselves in the landscape. A cat might walk across the table with impunity; a lover putting his beer glass in front of me at a beachside taverna announces his place in my existence and ruptures my uninterrupted vision of perfect nothing.
My problem, if that is how it should be termed, and it probably should, is that I am never lonely on my own, but I often feel estranged when in company. Alone, I might experience all kinds of discomfort, but hardly ever the kind of discomfort that I feel would be improved by company. The discomfort arrives when I’m with other people, and then the urge to find a remedy is strong. The best and most effective remedy I know for such discomfort is to get alone again. The problem is that being alone isn’t a problem. The idea that someone I am with feels he or she knows me throws me into a fretful anxiety about what and who they think they know, and my sense of what I know of myself is threatened. To have one’s knowledge of oneself questioned by connection to another is a perfectly proper human adventure but I have no internal drive to have such adventures. So for me familiarity is difficult, while strangeness is comparatively easy.
One day on the freighter, the reticent Roz commented on the ease with which I got on with the crew. ‘You seem to be able to talk to everyone. And they want to talk to you. You have a way with people.’
I didn’t say: only in the company of strangers who are guaranteed to disappear back into their own lives. There was no call for such an intimate admission.
When You’re Strange
The Sunset Limited was late. The ten-o-six arrival time and the ten thirty-seven departure time passed, the night deepened, and no one was surprised. It was half past midnight before the gleaming aluminium double-decker, more than anything like a giant version of one of those trendy retro toasters, pulled in to Jacksonville station. It had started out at 6.50 p.m. from Orlando, Florida, so it had lost over two hours during the four-and-a-half-hour journey. This was so unremarkable that no one bothered to explain why.
The first thing you learn about rail travel in America is that the trains are late. Regulars vie with one another to win the competition for who has suffered the longest delay. People who travel by train do not have urgent deadlines. Once you purchase your ticket and set foot in a train station, you have given yourself up to Amtrak time, which has a delightfully eccentric relation to US time. The printed schedule that waits at your seat or sleeping compartment becomes a wormhole between the parallel worlds of America and Amtrak. With the schedule, a watch and a calculator you can trace the theoretical journey you will take, estimate where you would be when, and then, as Amtrak reality takes hold, compute and recompute the slippage as the train catches up and loses ground against the official timetabling. You can’t ever be certain when you will arrive at your destination, but you can work out at each stop what your final arrival time would be if nothing further delayed your train. This bears no relation to reality, but it becomes a kind of hobby, a therapy, even, an exercise in holding on to the idea of a world beyond Amtrak. Of course, you have also to take account of the time zones and include in your estimations of arrival the fact that Eastern Time changes to Central Time between Tallahassee and Chipley, Florida, which becomes Mountain Time somewhere en route from Alpine to El Paso, Texas. Two stops later, between Lordsburg, New Mexico, and Benson, Mountain Standard Time, a zone particular to Arizona, comes into force before Pacific Time takes over as you leave Yuma and arrive at Indio, California. Take the officially scheduled time of arrival, remember that an hour has been added for each of these zones (apart from Mountain Standard Time which is a mystery all of its own), note the time of your arrival at the next station, calculate the difference between the time on your watch and the time the schedule claims you will arrive, and you are in a position to make a guess when you will get to your final destination.
This guess is, naturally, meaningless, because who knows what delays will occur in the meantime, but nonetheless the train traveller pores over the timetable and arithmetises away rather as a British traveller in foreign parts might tune in to the World Service to check that the realm she has left behind continues to exist, however improbable it might seem. Inside the time capsule of an Amtrak train, there is a choice of losing yourself entirely to a system outside your control, or trying to keep track of what was once, and will be again, what you call reality. The accomplished long-distance train traveller understands the futility of holding on to a time outside their temporary universe. In transit it doesn’t matter. We are all going somewhere, eventually, but in the meantime, we are going nowhere, our lives confined to a narrow corridor, a long road that has no turning, which rocks and thrums along its predestined route, or sometimes just stops dead in the middle of any place. There is no way out, no taking command of the situation, so all that is left to people in transit with time on their hands is to be where they are for as long as it takes. To be a train passenger in America is to be in an altered state, the fifty-first and the only mobile state in the Union.
Whatever the quirks in the schedule, it would take me from last thing on Saturday night until at the earliest sometime late Monday night, or early Tuesday morning, to reach Tucson, and I would pass through seven states to get there: Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. It was the Atlantic Ocean all over again, but with landscape. Almost the entire width of America was about to scroll past my window for two days and two nights like a real-time travelogue, and I would sit still in my space capsule and watch its passing.
* * *
Our friendly foursome parted company when we were directed by the conductors to our designated places. Troy, Gail and the kids disappeared along the platform to their seats in the regular coaches, while Bet and I were pointed in the other direction to the sleeper section, where we climbed aboard the train with the help of a portable yellow stool familiar from all train boardings in movies (which Judy Garland used to leap aboard the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe of The Harvey Girls, which Joseph Cotton climbed on in Shadow of a Doubt to visit his small-town sister and her family while the police were searching for the merry multiple widower), placed on the platform by each conductor to enable us to reach the elevated bottom step. The immense shiny tin can that was the outside of the train was thrilling, but as soon as you were on board, it vanished and you became exclusively an inhabitant of the interior, like a traveller inside the shape-shifting, time-travelling Tardis. Bet and I waved a temporary goodbye as she was sent up the spiral stairs to her compartment and I looked for mine on the lower deck. We planned to meet up again in the morning.
‘Come and get me when you go to breakfast,’ she called, telling me her compartment number. I said I would. ‘Not too early,’ she added from the top o
f the stairs.
After more than twelve hours in company, I was alone again in a space of my own with a door that closed and a curtain over it to keep curious eyes from invading my privacy. The compartment was the width of a single bed with a few inches to spare. The bed was already made up and ran beneath the length of the window. The bunk above the window was down so that I had somewhere to put my hand luggage while I found my washbag and something to sleep in. A 6-inch-wide cupboard between the bed and the sliding door had a rail and two hangers for the clothes I was wearing. It was as tight a squeeze as could be managed, and as I lay myself down to test the bed, I couldn’t have been happier. I am very content in enclosed spaces, providing they enclose only me. I like cocoons. I also enjoy the fact that they require an order of their own. By the side of the bed, a ledge demanded I keep my washbag and travelling clock on it. My overnight bag had to go in the bottom of the narrow cupboard, with my shoes. My word processor slipped under the bed that would, in the morning when rearranged by the steward, become two facing seats with a fold-down table between. Light switches and the air-conditioning controls were above what would become the seat backs. The window had curtains that could be drawn and fixed against the distraction of stars and the roaming moon in the inky night or prying eyes at station stops in the early hours. Along the corridor there were several lavatories with basins for washing and tooth brushing, as well as two shower rooms for those truly committed to in-train hygiene. It was all perfectly self-evident and self-evidently perfect, that half past midnight in my sleeping compartment on a train in Florida, USA.
The steward knocked and introduced herself as Ashley. Fresh coffee and orange juice would be available from six the next morning at the top of the stairs. Did I want a morning paper? Breakfast was served in the dining car from six-thirty to nine-thirty. Was I comfortable, did I need anything? She was on duty all night, just let her know.
‘Where can I smoke?’
There are various arrangements for smokers, depending on the route. On some routes smoking is entirely prohibited, on others there are designated ‘smoking hours’ in the bar, on most there is a small self-contained smoking compartment next to the bar. The Sunset Limited had the latter. To reach it, I had to go up the stairs to the upper deck, along the adjacent sleeping coach, through two seating coaches and then downstairs in the middle of the third, where the bar was to the left and the door to smoking coach to the right.
‘And there’s nowhere else I can smoke?’
‘No, ma’am.’
‘Not in my room with the air-conditioning turned up full?’
‘No, ma’am.’
‘Not even by the outer door in the middle of the night when no one is around?’
‘No, ma’am.’
‘With the window open?’
Ashley was sympathetic but firm. I didn’t fancy my chances if I crossed her.
‘OK, I know when I’m licked.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ smiled Ashley, acknowledging her absolute authority over sleeping coach M with grace. ‘You have a real good night, now.’
And, reader, I had passed my fiftieth birthday. I was too old to smoke in the lavatory, or directly under the air-conditioner, or in the boiler house. It was not so much the perceived lack of dignity of the surreptitious act, as the sense of the ridiculous should I be found out. The humiliation of being caught is what has kept me relatively docile and law-abiding all these years, because although the desire to transgress rules simply because they exist no longer amounts to a compulsion, I still experience an innate and unresolved dislike of authority in any form. The gall rises automatically. I am always sorely tempted to transgress rules. I do have a problem with virtue. I have never liked virtue much in others or in myself. The idea that I might be being good, doing what I am told, what I am supposed to do, fulfilling expectations, living up to my promise, still has an actual physical effect on me that I have had as far back as I can remember. Rage is the word that covers it. Rage begins behind the sternum (a little above where depression lives), a small tightly wound coil which comes suddenly to life, unfurling, snakelike, extending itself upwards through the chest until it has you by the throat and then springing, striking like a cobra at the head, at the place between the eyes and spreading like a bloodstain over the entire brain, red and hot and blindingly furious. Blinding rage. This is not a rough approximation, a physicalisation of a mental experience, but as precise a description of the reality of rage as it develops as I can muster. Do not imagine the uncoiling spring or the snake’s head strike as metaphor for a feeling. True, there is no organic internal spring or snake, but take their physical effects for the reality I experience. Always have experienced. And never more than in the area of goodness and badness.
My first vivid recollection of this kind of rage was recently confirmed when someone, recognising a description of myself and her in childhood in my book, Skating to Antarctica, called me and arranged a meeting. She had been my friend when we were both very small. We met at a café for the first time since we were ten. I at least was not convinced that it was a very good idea, but thinking about our friendship I recalled something terrible that I had done, and I wanted to apologise. A bit late, forty-five years on, but it was an opportunity to acknowledge one’s misdeeds to another that we don’t usually get.
‘You were sitting in the bedroom of my flat when we were five or six,’ I reminded S. ‘I was ill, with measles I think – I remember there was a red bulb in the light socket because I wasn’t allowed to be in brightness. I asked you to pass me something and when you refused, I flew at you, and bit you on the cheek. I can still picture the tooth marks I made. My mother came in and went berserk. She smacked me and made me apologise.’
My mother specialised in going berserk, but this time she had good cause.
‘Yes,’ my former friend said. ‘I remember. I wasn’t going to mention it.’
I said it was unforgivable and that I was very sorry. I’m not sure how valid such an apology is. The more-than-fifty-year-old woman is certainly ashamed that she behaved in such a way, but I don’t think the six-year-old who offered a sullen tight-lipped apology after being smacked and punished was in the slightest bit sorry, and as I recollect the strength of her anger, I doubt she would be even now. What I remember most vividly about my attack on my best friend was the sense that I actually flew out of my bed and across the room to sink my teeth in her flesh. I have a recollection of bridging the gap between us yet remaining horizontal, without my feet touching the ground. I launched myself from my bed across the admittedly not very large room, fuelled by an anger that was more powerful than the force of gravity. I remember, with astonishment at the thrust of its forward propulsion, the rush of blinding rage and self-will. The two middle-aged women, one apologetic and one forgiving, were, of course, in no position to do either on behalf of the enraged and wounded children they once were, except perhaps in the sense that we are all in loco parentis to our childhood selves. Aside from that, it turned out, as I feared, that we had little in common any longer from our past. In fact, it emerged that we had always been somewhat at odds, even in our childhood.
S had read the account of my childhood in Skating to Antarctica with amazement at the tale it told.
‘I thought you had everything. You had everything – and then you had nothing,’ she kept saying, as if in wonder.
S’s father had left her mother who, having S and her brother, had to go to work while the children stayed with their grandmother. S had envied me both my temporarily present father and my chronically underemployed mother. What I experienced as a family viciously at war in a very small flat, was for S complete, present and attentive. She had longed to be me.
S had fine straight hair, which I’d always envied, mine being long and frizzy and prone to knotting.
‘I remember watching your mum doing your hair every morning,’ S recalled. ‘Dipping the comb in water and combing it over and over until every tangle was out, then brushing it tightly
back away from your face and tying it with satin ribbons she’d just ironed.’
I remember the daily hairbrushing sessions, too, but differently. The comb yanking at the tangles, pulling the hair out at the roots, my mother shouting, me crying, to say nothing of the bloody humiliation of having satin ribbons in my hair. I ached for a loose curtain of hair falling over my face as S had. She envied me my obsessive mother, I envied her her neglect. She knew nothing of the violence and fear in my life with my terrifyingly erratic mother and the fights between my parents; I knew nothing of the sense of deprivation, the lack of a father, the daily absence of her mother, in hers. Meeting up after all these years what we discovered was that as best friends we had been locked in jealousy and enmity, each pursuing our own misinterpretation of liberty and love. The everything S saw me as having was for me parents who hated each other and sometimes hated me. The everything I lost had not been the perfect family security that S perceived. But now, as an adult, it crossed my mind that perhaps S might have made a better job of being my parents’ child than I had. I felt she thought something like that too as we perched on our stools in the café. My fury at S must have built up from all those moments I now remembered when my mother would shout, sometimes with S standing by, ‘Why can’t you be like S? She’s a nice, loving child. She doesn’t complain when I brush her hair. Why couldn’t I have a daughter like her? What have I done to God that he should have punished me with you?’
