by Jenny Diski
It wasn’t that I minded my mother thinking I was bad, it was that I hated the idea of S being good. I guess I wanted to consume her goodness, chew it up and spit it out. I discovered not just that I didn’t want to be good, but that I did not want S (or others) to be good either. If I envied S her place in my mother’s fantasies of a good daughter, I did not want to replace her with myself. I found that not being good was a characteristic I had to pursue, because the idea of my own goodness sent me into a delirium of rage.
Conforming to a non-smoking world belonged in the same emotional arena. It was not simply a matter of physical addiction – nicotine-replacement products work quite well in that respect – which prevented me from giving up (even on a pragmatically temporary basis) when confronted with the difficulties of smoking in the face of North American puritanism, it was the puritanism itself. I didn’t want to do as I was told, I didn’t want to be more comfortable by conforming, giving in, as I saw it, to the pressures of an anti-smoking policy that was reinforced by moral imperatives. Very childish. Yes, exactly. I also didn’t want to become an ex-smoker, not if it meant that I became someone who tsked and sighed whenever I caught a whiff of smoke in the air. The tension in my solar plexus began to agitate as soon as I thought of it. It was almost organic, my desire not to be a virtuous, self-righteous non-smoker. I was deeply, fundamentally of the other party. And this, it turned out, was all to the good, because the other party was a three-day affair I wouldn’t want to have missed.
* * *
The smoking carriage was an oasis of tawdriness. It was a slum at the centre of the train that was in every other part designed to please the paying customer. Even in coach the seats reclined and were upholstered, there were carpets, windows that had been cleaned at least at the start of the journey, air-conditioning that worked. The observation car and restaurant offered an approximation of old-fashioned comfort and hospitality, swivel armchairs, side tables, a bar, panoramic windows through which to see America slide past. The sleeping compartments added to these conveniences the details of flowers in vases and starchy antimacassars. The intention throughout the train was to attract the public back to an old form of travel by offering them a degree of physical pampering even if they weren’t going to get where they were going on time. The smoking coach, however, was the sin bin, the punishment cell, a capsule of degradation where those who were incorrigible would suffer the consequences of their obduracy. And it was wonderful.
It was entirely correction-facility grey: the lino floor, the dull-putty coloured walls and the moulded polystyrene chairs that ran along the length of the short carriage, eight chairs on either side, bolted at their base to a shiny steel girder fixed to the floor. Between every two or three chairs was a small plastic table, also attached to the girder, on each of which was an individual-tart-sized disposable tinfoil ashtray. As grey as sin. As grey as smoke. These are the surroundings you deserve. An environment you can’t spoil with your befouling habit. Something that won’t be wasted by your obvious inability to appreciate decent conditions. It had only two smallish windows at each end on either side, the larger middle sections which in all other coaches were windows seeming to have been deliberately blanked out. At the far end, opposite the only door (the smoking coach was a dead end), a black bin-bag holder was fixed to the wall. Above it, a sign said, ‘Do Not Bring Beverages Into The Smoking Coach’. Beside the door a handwritten notice instructed, ‘Do not stay more than fifteen minutes at a time. Only cigarettes are permitted to be smoked.’ The ashtrays were always overflowing, the tables dusted with ash, the bin bag between three-quarters full and overflowing, the floor scarred and scratched. The air was fogged grey with smoke, sometimes thick enough to choke someone coming in from outside. There was a small air-conditioning grille at the top of the far wall, but mysteriously it never seemed to work. The smoking coach was closed for one hour in each twenty-four, in order it was said for it to be cleaned, but there never was a time during the day or night when it was cleaner than any other, and the conductor responsible for the coach was seen only when he came through the door to enforce the rule about not bringing drinks in. Then he would peer through the grimy glass in the door before pulling it back with a look of disgust on his face as what remained of the air assaulted him. ‘Jeez,’ he would moan, and then bark at the offenders who had failed to hide their clear plastic glasses or bottles in time. He’d jerk his thumb towards the notice on the wall.
‘See the sign? Get it outta here.’
Later he’d return and find things just as before.
‘You want me to lock the coach? I want them drinks gone.’
‘C’mon,’ someone would call to him, inviting him to live and let live. ‘Give us a break.’
He remained sullen. ‘I didn’t ask for this job. You keep the rules then I don’t have to come into this hole and suck up a lungful of your cancer.’
Bet had her own way with the non-drinking rule. Wherever she went she carried in her bag a small, 300ml Coke bottle half-full of gin concealed by an insulating silver sleeve designed to keep cold drinks cold. Some became quite adept at keeping their drinks on the girder under their seat and bending down away from the door to take swift surreptitious sips. Others simply risked temporary expulsion and the wrath of the conductor with blatant cans of beer or liquor in clear plastic tumblers from the bar, right out in the open for any passing representative of authority to see. It probably depended, like so much else, on what kind of childhood the individual had been dealt. Concealment, sneakiness, risk-taking, defiance are learned characteristics instilled early in life. It was, in some way, thoughtful of the Amtrak authorities to retain an embargo that the tolerated, neutralised, exiled smokers could each in their own manner transgress. It left just a little edge in a smoothly rounded world.
The misfits and miscreants of the train, obviously in the real world a complete range of society, were equalised in their smoking-coach selves into a homogenous group with a fundamental set of values. Whatever our place out there, we were as Shakers or Albigensians in our train life: a despised community existing on sufferance in a world that no longer permitted itself the luxury of burning heretics. Between ourselves, and to outsiders, we stood for something, allied in our determination to persist in our desire in spite of all the effort of the moral majority and the do-gooders who would have saved us from ourselves and for their own satisfaction. It gave us a feeling of fellowship, a purpose even, that supplemented the mere journey that all of us, smokers or not, were taking. There was no sense here, as in many groups, of newcomers having to prove themselves or be superseded by newer newcomers before gaining acceptance. The simple act of entering the coach, laughing appreciatively at the smog and lighting up entitled you to full membership. The notion of the train being the longest main street in America was reduced in the smoking coach to a far more essential concept of an America where all kinds and conditions of humanity could coexist in spite of all their differences of status, race, religion, political creed, because of a recognised underlying common cause. This (pace the Native Americans) was what America had been for in the first place.
Bet and I headed for the smoking car directly after breakfast. To get there we passed Troy’s seat. He waved and we said hello but didn’t stop. Troy wasn’t a smoker. Already we were in different camps. Gail was there when we arrived, wearing what she had been wearing the previous night, her bulky thighs splayed over the edge of the narrow plastic seat near the door.
‘Hi,’ Bet said brightly.
Gail groaned, and lifted her limp arm to take a drag, as if the half-smoked cigarette she held between her fingers weighed a ton or two. ‘Is it breakfast time yet?’
She hadn’t slept. The kids were asleep in their seats, and she’d been kept awake with their tossing and turning and the wondrous unconscious determination of children to take all the space they need. She spent the night in and out of the smoking coach. ‘Where we at?’ she rasped, as we sat down across from her and began to light our
cigarettes.
Through the night I’d noted the stations on the way, as I was woken from my rocking sleep by the unfamiliar slowing and stopping of my bedroom. I’d open my eyes and see that we were in Lake City, Madison, Tallahassee, Chipley, Crestview, Pensacola: names on boards at half-lit middle-of-the-night stations where one or two people waited sleepily for the Sunset Limited to arrive, blowing its unearthly whistle at an unearthly hour. The travellers got on or off and the engine started up again, the wheels squeaked as they began to roll, and I lay back in my bunk beside the black-again window to watch the stars slip away at a gathering speed.
We were, of course, two hours behind schedule. We should have arrived at our first stop in Alabama – Atmore – at 7.05 a.m., but we had just left it at sometime past nine.
‘We’re an hour out of Mobile,’ I told Gail. ‘Though we should be in Mississippi by now. But we haven’t lost any more time during the night.’
Gail shrugged. It was a long way still to LA and a comfortable bed. She heaved herself off the chair, stubbed out her cigarette and with a ‘See ya’ went off to wake the kids and get some breakfast.
It was a quiet time in the smoking coach. A woman in a knitted gold dress sat in the far corner, tap-tapping the end of her cigarette. A very young girl in floppy jeans and midriff-baring top sat huddled over in the opposite corner, drawing hard on her Marlboro. A couple of chairs down from her a very tall, thin young black man with a baseball cap on backwards read from a book resting on his crossed, outstretched legs. Gold Dress and Baseball Cap had looked up briefly and said hi as Bet and I came in. Marlboro Girl had remained hunched, head down, face hidden behind a fall of wispy blonde hair, in her corner. A few minutes after we arrived and were smoking contentedly, watching the bayous pass, a corpulent red-faced man wearing long shorts and a sporty open shirt slid the door open with his elbow so as not to disturb the contents of the plastic tumbler in his hand.
‘For Christ’s sake shut up,’ he was muttering grimly. ‘Sit down, stick a cigarette in your stupid face and shut up.’
He was talking to a woman behind him dressed formally in tailored pants and a neat blouse, a scarf wound around her throat and gold jewellery abounding on her wrists and fingers.
‘Don’t talk to me like that,’ she said, but her face and tone had no hint of outrage in them. She spoke as dully as if he had told her the time and she hadn’t wanted to know, as if he were always telling her the time and she always didn’t want to know. Her ‘don’t talk to me like that’ was automatic and weary, said with neither a thought nor an emotion behind it. That was noteworthy, but her voice was even more extraordinary. It sounded like a pneumatic drill on paving stone, a low rasping vibration that was only recognisable as a voice because it spoke words, so mannish it couldn’t have come from a man.
‘I’ll talk to you how I want,’ the man replied, though with as little interest in the conversation as she. ‘Good morning, ladies,’ he said in an altogether more jovial voice with a slight Irish lilt to his lazy American accent, lifting his tumbler to us in greeting.
‘Hi,’ growled the well-dressed woman like a fairground barker.
They sat down opposite us, him with his podgy naked calves ending in deck shoes planted wide apart, her with good court shoes, legs neatly crossed, lighting up with a gold Dunhill lighter.
‘Light one for me,’ he told her.
‘Put your booze down for one second and light your own,’ she monotoned at him.
‘This delightful woman is my wife Virginia,’ he leaned across to me. ‘I am Conal. Glad to make your acquaintance.’
‘Hello,’ I said weakly, stunned at the performance.
‘Oh, hailo,’ he pantomimed in a posh English accent. ‘Virginia, my dear, you must be on your best behaviour. We have a well-bred British lady among us. None of your filthy sailor’s language if you please.’
‘For God’s sake, behave decently,’ Virginia snarled. ‘Please excuse my husband, he’s a pig.’ She got up and came to sit next to me. She was tall and quite stately, but beginning to stoop as if her height and stateliness were becoming burdensome to sustain. There was something unhealthily grey about her carefully made-up face. They were on their way home to Los Angeles, she told Bet and me, sucking hard on her cigarette and lighting another from it before it was halfway smoked. They had been on holiday in Florida and always took the train because she was frightened of flying. Anyway, it gave Conal more time to drink. The Florida trip was so that she could recuperate.
‘I’m sorry about my voice,’ she growled. ‘I’ve just had an operation for cancer of the oesophagus.’ She pointed at her scarf. ‘I’m not supposed to talk at all. They took out what they could. They said I’ll be all right. They think so.’ She fell silent.
‘Telling them all about your cancer, dear heart?’ Conal called. ‘That’s it, don’t keep it to yourself. I’m sure the nice English lady could care less.’
Virginia threw him a contemptuous look and turned back to me. She put one of her heavily beringed hands on mine in a gesture of intimacy and moved her head closer to my face. ‘I don’t want to die,’ she whispered in her sandpapered voice, intense, yet hardly talking to me at all, shocked almost at the sound of her words, but at the same time almost pleading as if entrusting the thought to a stranger might function as some kind of prayer.
‘Then you could try putting out your cigarette, not drinking like a fish in secret, and shutting up,’ hissed Conal, pouring the remains of his whisky down his throat.
An expression of his love, perhaps. Two drunks locked together in life, panicking about the end. Their theatre of hatred sent me retreating into sentimental mode. It was enough for Bet, who whispered ‘Jesus’ under her breath and rose. ‘I’ve got to leave,’ she said. ‘Knock on my door next time you go for a smoke.’
The tall young man with the backwards baseball cap finished his cigarette a moment after Bet had left and loped to the door, nodding a generalised, ‘See ya later.’ He was holding Heidegger’s Being and Time.
‘Hey, baggage,’ called Conal, getting out of his chair and grabbing hold of Virginia’s arm. ‘You’re going to frighten the refined English lady away. She’s too good for the likes of us dirt Irish.’
She shook off his hand, but, growling goodbye to me, followed him out as if he were still holding her.
‘Bye, Conal,’ I said, waving a feeble hand at him as he disappeared through the door.
A moment after everyone had left, Marlboro Girl looked up and smiled shyly at me.
‘Hello,’ I said.
‘God, wasn’t he awful?’
I shook my head in wonderment at the degree of his awfulness. She got up and came to sit next to me. She looked so young, I asked if she was travelling alone. An expression of pure childlike terror crossed her face.
‘I’m eighteen,’ she reassured me. ‘Maddy. I’m going home to LA. I had an accident.’
She was remarkably beautiful in a modern, huge-eyed, extremely wide mouth, gauchely tall and thin-as-a-reed sort of way, like an anorexic fawn. She was Julia Roberts as near as dammit. Her clothes were very expensive schmutters, pale ultra-baggy trousers just hanging on to her barely there hips, showing a waistband of boyish underpants and an expanse of exposed torso below a tight, skimpy T-shirt. She was as consciously and unconsciously waiflike as it was possible to be, but seemed quite at ease with her modish beauty.
‘What happened?’
‘I was in Florida for a fashion shoot,’ she said, looking pleased to start talking. ‘I’m a model.’ Of course she was. ‘They think something’s wrong with my brain.’
Eight days before, someone had opened a door too fast without looking and slammed it into her head. It bled a lot, and she passed out for a second or two. They took her to hospital and she was given a scan. She had a blood clot.
‘A dark patch or something, the doctor said. They sent me back to my hotel to wait a few days to see if it would disappear. It can be nothing, apparently, something that j
ust goes away. But it hasn’t. When they did another scan this morning, they told me it hadn’t improved. It’s got bigger. They said I had to go home for surgery. I’ve spent eight days in my room sitting still, frightened that I’m going to drop dead. That’s pretty crazy-making. It’s better being on the train, with people around, and going home.’
‘Your parents…?’
‘I spoke to them on the phone every day. They’re waiting for me. The doctors didn’t tell me anything. Just that the clot had got bigger and I had to have surgery. They need a course in psychology, those doctors. I’ve been so frightened. They haven’t really told me anything. I don’t know what’s going on, what could happen…’
‘Why the train? It’s a long journey on your own by train.’
‘They said I couldn’t fly. The pressure changes might make the clot, you know … And there wasn’t a sleeping compartment available. It’s slower but safer by train. They told me I mustn’t do anything to raise my blood pressure.’
‘Should you be smoking?’
‘I’ve got to do something. And this has really messed up my trip. I’ve been modelling for six years. This was a really big job. Vogue.’
She shook her head slowly and then fell silent, perhaps at how small the loss of the big opportunity seemed now she spoke of it, compared to the blood clot that had got bigger in her brain.
‘If you want to sleep, you’re welcome to use my compartment.’
