by Jenny Diski
Here’s the thing about sentimentality and fatally flawed wishful thinking: it’s virulently contagious. And that capacity we have for making unhappiness happen is powerful enough to take the apparent form of its own opposite. For just a moment it’s as if I’ve never lived, never had any experience of anything. The fantasy solution of living together with my memoryless friend from St Pancras Hospital was not even the first. The first was a daydream of living alone with my father – it would all be all right if only my mother wasn’t around, if only my stepmother could be got rid of. It came disastrously true when he left my stepmother and got a flat for just him and me when I was thirteen. Hopeless. Domestic battles, his romances and/or financial plans (often one and the same thing, it turned out) ruined by my presence, my jealousy, my disappointment, his insensitivity, his disappointment. He was back with my stepmother in just weeks, and I was a defeated prisoner living sullenly in the attic until I got my social worker to send me back to boarding school. I know what happens when dreams come true. Then the memoryless man. And then there was Ralph: me twenty, him mid-fifties and far gone in alcoholism, also at St Pancras after John had gone back to his life. Hours and hours in a side room persuading him not to go out and get a drink. So much talking. Then he’d disappear and come back days later shaking and frail, full of determination not to let me down. In love with me, his young angel of sobriety. Eventually, they threw him out. Too many lapses. His liver was shot. His case was medical. A few weeks later I got a suicide note, apologetic, lyrical with love and loss. What might have been. But the actual suicide was several months later when he was found dead in bed with a case of empty whisky bottles beneath. That was Ralph. He used to come with me to Biba’s and watch me buy feather boas and minidresses. His father had been a Georgian poet. And there was H from the French Pub – wistful but very married with kids. And Michael, wildly, enchantingly drunk while he was young, always forgiven, so unreliable that if he said he would meet you at the cinema, you could be sure it was OK to stay in and wash your hair. Then older, still charming, but with the shakes, all the opportunities that his talent and charm had brought long gone in his conscious preference for alcohol. Then Michael was dead and we had a rousing funeral with hundreds of old friends and fellow drinkers, singing the Internationale and ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’, and celebrating the story that in his final moments he had raised a ghostly glass and said, ‘Fuck the begrudgers.’ A veritable Don Giovanni of the Gin. Somehow a string of hopeless drunks and wishful thinkers who conceived of me as a route back to life or included me in passing on their journey in the other direction. And I was moved by their intentions, their hopelessness, their existential necessity, their self-destructiveness. Each time, I forgot for a moment what I already knew. Maybe this could work, I’d think, as I never thought about sober, reliable lovers. Though the fact that none of them could ever work must have been the real attraction. Eventually, I stopped doing that, because, perhaps, I no longer needed other people’s desperate daydreams to animate my life. Or finally, experience had told.
But there I was on the train in America, and for just a second, as if I’d been born yesterday, Raymond’s unrealisable fantasies sounded plausible. Or the rhythm of the metal wheels on the track made them sound so. Or my immersion in the sentimental narrative of an American train journey had given cliché credibility. And why not? Redemption stories and romance are woven into the fabric of the human mind, just like the other apparently tougher tales of solitude and loss, disappointment and hardship never recompensed. The fiction of dirty realism is no less sentimental and clichéd than the romantic fantasy of dreams come true. In America every story has happily-ever-after either as an ending or a howling opposition. The template story is known, how it should be, and all the stories told on the journey are exemplars of closeness or distance from the true tale. Is that solely American? Probably not, but the dream of meeting the stranger who is the completing half, the compensating force, takes a decidedly dystopian, misanthropic turn in the hands of the Englishman who made Strangers on a Train. Hitchcock’s stranger is the devil, a nightmare, a punishment for not keeping oneself safely contained while in transit between realities. In England we don’t talk to strangers, we sit solitary and silent on our journeys. In the movie, Bruno Anthony is Guy Haines’s retribution for allowing his island self to be breached. Hitchcock, the archetypal Englishman, knows through and through that you must never talk to strangers. He issued a gleeful warning to America about the terrible repercussions of openness and optimism. But still they talk to strangers on the train and hope that they will transform their lives into all the good things a life should be. And still the strangers listen, lulled into imaginative compliance by their temporary rootlessness and the dreamy syncopation of the rails.
‘So, what do you think?’ Raymond asked me, determined to be taken seriously. He didn’t even know my name.
‘Get sober, and we can think about it,’ I said, knowing I was asking too much, at least, hoping so.
‘I’ll stop drinking and get everything straight in North Beach. Then I’ll call you, and you can come out for a visit. How’s that?’
‘OK. When you’ve been sober for two or three months, I’ll come and see you.’
What the fuck am I talking about? What if, unlike all the other drunks I’ve known, he actually goes and stays on the wagon? Well, then, I’ll visit him in LA. Why not? In any case, as soon as I leave the train, he’ll forget he ever met me, or I’ll slip into all the other misty opportunities that were not taken. Still, I’m sorry I said it. But Raymond is asleep or unconscious.
When I looked up, Chuck was watching me.
‘Appealing, kind of, isn’t it?’ he said, looking steadily at me as if he were underlining the thoughts and unease that had been going through my mind. I was beginning to get the feeling that Chuck might turn out to be the authorial voice of our journey. I nodded, guilty and embarrassed that I had been so obvious, at any rate, that I had been so observed.
‘You get sucked into daydreams.’
‘Yeah. Best not though, it won’t help him.’
* * *
Three meals a day came as part of the fare if you had a sleeping compartment. People in seats had to pay to eat in the restaurant car, bought snacks at the bar, or came equipped with food for the journey. Bet and I usually ate together in the restaurant car, on the lower floor just before the smoking coach. We had breakfast, lunch and dinner, seated by the dining steward opposite paired strangers or married couples. You don’t get to choose where you sit in the confines of a train dining car. It was a realm of its own, where the maître d’ was both host and not so very benevolent dictator. Waiters zipped up and down the narrow corridor between the tables, more or less immune to the swaying of the car. Speed, efficiency and an indefinable mix of banter and contempt was what you got with the restaurant car staff. Throughput was the thing. You booked a time to eat and waited until your party’s name was called, then you’d better get there quick if you didn’t want to feel the honed edge of the dining steward’s tongue. The food – ‘regional specialities freshly prepared by on-board chefs’ – was awful: beef or chicken in a variety of glutinous sauces (Cajun around New Orleans, spicy chilli in New Mexico, but all generally brownish), microwave reheated to within an inch of its miserable life; salad as an automatic starter – shards of flagging iceberg lettuce and a choice of distressing dressings in plastic pouches. Breakfast was the best, at least bringing to mind the wonders of sausage and hash browns at a diner, though currently as we were in the South it was necessary to avoid at all costs the ‘grits’ option. Some claimed that quality had nothing to do with avoiding the grits (something dangerously like wallpaper paste mixed with, well, grit) served on the train, that one should avoid them at all times and anywhere. But the quantities were vast and those of us who had sleeping accommodation had paid for it, so we chomped through our portions. In any case, the mealtime calls served the same function as they do in hospital, breaking up, pacing out t
he day. It was part of our institutionalised behaviour.
Dinner over, in the dark of Sunday night, we slipped through the South, past invisible bayous and alligators, and into Texas. I put out my final cigarette around midnight somewhere between Lafayette and Lake Charles and said goodnight to my fellow smokers, only the younger of whom were still up. Chuck had persuaded Raymond to return to his seat in front of him and the boys. Bet had gone to bed straight after dinner. She had been subdued all day, ever since the accident, about which people spoke only in undertones to newcomers to indicate what kind of a journey it had been so far. Maddy and her DJ friend had popped in and out of the smoking coach all day, but apart from a generalised greeting, were locked onto each other, talking close and urgently. Conal wandered in now and then with his bourbon for a quick cigarette and a sneer while Virginia slept in their extra first-class double sleeping compartment. George with his baseball cap on backwards had finished with Heidegger and was now on to Viktor Frankl, but it was face down on his lap as he listened to (and I eavesdropped on) another young black guy, Chris, no more than twenty-five, I guessed, who sat next to him. He was telling George that he was travelling with his wife and two young kids from New York to California to see his family who had never met his children. ‘I got unpaid leave from work. My folks haven’t seen my kids, and who knows when I’ll be able to visit them again?’ He couldn’t stay talking long, because he had to get back to his wife. He’d tried to persuade her to come and sit in the smoking coach, but she couldn’t take the fumes.
‘I told her there were some real interesting people in here. But she hates the smell of smoke, and anyway, she’s shy.’
Chris had a worried look about him. When he’d booked the train, he told George, he hadn’t realised how expensive food was on board. He’d run out of money and there were two more days and a night to go before they arrived. Last night he’d got the dining-room steward to let him do some washing-up in return for a meal for himself, his wife and the kids. This evening he was helping the sleeping-car stewards clean up. But he was anxious about the following night. Still, he figured he could persuade someone on board to let him work for food.
‘Maybe, if I get lucky, they’ll let me drive the train,’ he laughed.
George listened sympathetically. Two young women came in who I’d never seen before, and I would have remembered. They weren’t more than teenagers, very young black women, and they were dressed to kill, standing out as madly, idiotically glamorous among the other, comfortably dressed travellers. They wore skin-tight jeans, high heels, midriff-revealing tops with extra holes cut out to expose as much flesh as possible, glossy make-up and gold jewellery wherever there was space. They spoke to each other intensely, as if they had urgent information to convey, though clearly it was a strategy for appearing not to notice that they were being noticed, which was their main objective. They chattered and chirruped their way into the smoking coach without acknowledging anyone else but found seats for themselves next to a young white man who had come in not long before and sat on the other side of George. He went on high alert as they arrived, sitting to attention as the girls settled themselves, wriggling and giggling, down. He tried to stay cool for a second and a half before he gave up all appearances of resistance and nervously offered them each a cigarette. Soon they were all deep in conversation and getting on like a house on fire. George looked across at me and nudged Chris. He raised his hand to his throat, stroking it once or twice. Their cigarettes finished, the girls teetered noisily to the door, followed sheepishly by the young man.
‘Hey man, later. We’re heading for the bar,’ he said to George, a mixture of pride and wonderment on his face. George gave him a warning look, but the trio were gone. He shook his head in amused pity.
‘Did you see?’ he said to me, and then turned to Chris.
‘See what?’ I said. Chris looked baffled.
George put his hand up to his throat again. ‘He’s going to get a shock. Did you catch their Adam’s apples?’
I had been too entertained by their self-excited mannerisms and gaudy seduction technique, and Chris was absorbed in his own problems.
‘They were really good, but there’s nothing you can do about the Adam’s apple. They were guys. Take a look next time they come in.’
And, of course, it would have explained everything. I waited for a while, but they didn’t return to the smoking coach.
It was my last full night on the train. I spent a long time lying awake in my bunk, not wanting to miss the stars passing and the rhythm of train rocking me. Bet, Raymond, Chris, Conal, Virginia, Maddy, the TVs and John rolled around in my mind, a handful of human stories, only a tiny sample of the available lives that the train happened to be transporting along with me. As I lay there, all the separate stories, all those minds and hearts took on volume and mass, occupying the empty space in my compartment, squeezing out the very air before spreading to the corridor outside and the entire train. I breathed in the stories, known and unknown, and felt their weight bearing down on me. When I checked on the inky sky outside there was all the empty space of the universe, black and endless, stars and vacancy, on and on in silence for ever, while on the speeding train the crush of human consciousness, of existence, all of it, crammed in, congealed into a sticky writhing narrative, telling itself repeatedly, and saying everything and nothing. I tried to make it feel normal – the longest main street in the USA – but it remained overwhelming, catastrophic. Finally I slept to avoid the panic that was rising.
* * *
After breakfast, the smoking coach was almost full with all our regulars deep in urgent conversation and a few newcomers. Bet was already there, she had skipped eating.
‘Jesus, Jenny, you’ll never guess…’
I was barely through the door. She was scandalised.
‘That John. He’s just been in—’
‘Yeah,’ said Conal. ‘Your sweet little innocent kid.’
‘He was tricking us…’
‘You women…’ Conal snorted in disgust.
‘He was, you know, touching himself … down there, you know … all the time … while we let him put his head on our—’
‘Masturbating?’ I said. ‘Yes, I know. Well, sort of masturbating.’
‘You knew?’ the blonde girl said, astonished.
‘You knew, you mean, you knew what he was up to?’ Bet said.
‘He wasn’t up to anything. He was just getting his pleasure confused, or not confused.’
‘He was being sexually abusive,’ Chuck said, with a look of grave anger on his face.
‘Yeah,’ Gail bellowed. ‘Getting off on it.’
‘Well, yes. Didn’t you know?’
Everyone was horrified, though there was a degree of amazement rather than wrath in the women’s outrage. The men were solemn and vengeful. Their worst fears had been confirmed. Poor retarded John had been getting sexual pleasure right there in front of our eyes, and getting away with it. Had he been laughing at them all along?
‘He’s a pervert. We ought to tell the conductor to get the police at the next stop.’
‘What kind of parents are they, letting him wander round on his own?’
‘He could be dangerous. What if he molests kids on the train? We’ve got to report him.’
‘He should be restrained.’
‘He ought to be thrown off the train.’
‘But he’s not dangerous,’ I said. ‘He’s just not sophisticated enough to keep things separate. He makes associations that we don’t allow ourselves to make.’
‘He’s got no control. There are little kids, Gail’s kids, on the train. How do you know he’s going to stop at touching himself?’
Of course, I didn’t. Bet was intrigued by my lack of alarm, she was half convinced I was right, but it occurred to me now that I might be wrong. Maybe he could spiral out of control. What about kids? What made me so sure John was a harmless innocent? Yet I was sure, and I was more disturbed by the growing anger in
the smoking coach which threatened to turn nasty. A mob was in the making.
‘Why don’t we ask the conductor to check with his parents or whoever he’s with, and see what they say? He’s very well cared for, they don’t seem to neglect him. They must think he’s safe if they let him wander about on his own.’
‘Or they don’t know, and don’t want to know.’
Maybe they were right. Who knew what people were capable of? Who knew how much people chose not to know? Anyway, John had been expelled from the smoking coach. Chuck had sent him out and told him not to come back, that he was too young to be there (his blond charges notwithstanding) and that he had to stay with his folks. John had taken fright, according to Bet, who wasn’t sure whether this was a good thing or not. No one mentioned him to the conductor as he scowled in on us during his regular inspection. He walked through the coach and examined the contents of the garbage bin on the end wall, wrinkling his nose in disgust at the butt ends but not letting that stop him checking for empty beer cans. I looked around at the irate passengers, but no one seemed inclined to say anything to the conductor about John.
Later that morning the train came to a halt in the middle of nowhere, between San Antonio and Del Rio. Nothing happened for half an hour and then a message came over the tannoy that we were held up on the single track by a goods train that had broken down in front of us. It had been decided that we would shunt the train ahead to the nearest branch line. It would be quicker, we were told, than waiting for it to be repaired. This way only another hour or so would be added to the three we had already lost. Groans of disbelief went up in the smoking coach, and doubtless throughout the train. Mostly we were laughing and wondering what else this journey would have to offer.
