by Jenny Diski
The moment of connection between our engine and the goods train turned out to be more than the slight bump we were warned of over the tannoy. We lurched hard as we made contact with the train in front. People were thrown back, in some cases off their chairs. Raymond, in a drunken haze all morning, slid almost gracefully to the floor and seemed comfortable enough where he landed. But Bet, being tiny and tense, was thrown hard against the wall. She yelled in pain, and when we had got straight again, she held her shoulder and winced.
‘I think I’ve dislocated my goddammed shoulder. Jesus, what else is going to happen? How bad can a journey get? It’s not enough why I had to take this trip at all, but we ran over three people and now we’re shunting trains. I can’t take any more of this.’
After a moment’s silence, there was a message on the tannoy again.
‘Is there a doctor on the train? Would anyone with any medical training please see the conductor.’
‘Jesus. Jesus Christ,’ Bet moaned.
Eventually we got going again, at a snail’s pace, and pushed the train in front for about an hour before a somewhat gentler lurch indicated that we had disconnected from it and could get back on course. By this time, the drinks were flowing and a party was in full swing. We were quite fearless about the conductor now. Just let him try to chuck us off this sorry apology for a train journey. There was a mood of reckless abandon, of lost souls trapped on a drifting ship, of simply waiting for the next disaster to occur. I went down to the bar to get Bet and me a couple of cans of Manhattans (yes, really, cans). Chris was sitting at one of the tables with his wife and kids having Cokes. Without thinking about it much, I fished in my bag and went up to their table, saying hello to his wife and the little ones. Then I squatted down beside Chris. I hadn’t rehearsed anything.
‘Hi. Will you do me a favour?’
Chris looked alarmed, glanced at his wife, but didn’t look at me. ‘What?’
‘For dinner this evening,’ I said, sliding the scrunched up fifty-dollar bill I’d taken out of my bag across the table and under his hand. I’ve rarely felt so inept. It wasn’t a big deal. I had intended not to make it a big deal, but I hadn’t the faintest idea how to give someone money. He hadn’t asked for any, I had enough not to make it painful. I just wanted to shift some of my surplus to Chris, who could use it. I didn’t want to offend him. I didn’t see it as a handout, more as a redistribution, and not particularly princely at that. But I had been so awkward. Will you do me a favour? Apologetic, surreptitious and alarming. I had somehow embarrassed all of us. Chris’s wife signalled him to take the money. He looked at me coldly.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘And?’
I didn’t understand. ‘Nothing.’
He continued to look at me as if waiting for something.
‘Sorry…’ I tailed off, and fled back to the smoking coach, minus the Manhattans. It didn’t matter. Conal had arrived and was freely distributing his bourbon. It had got quite rowdy. People were telling tales of their worst train journeys and great historical Amtrak disasters. Even Maddy and her DJ dragged themselves apart from each other to contribute.
‘There was that train wreck a few years back on this route. Back South. You remember reading about it? This paddle-boat had hit the rail bridge but they didn’t report it. The bridge must have been weakened or something, because part of it collapsed when the train crossed. All the coaches went down into the swamp. But it was a pretty low bridge – I guess that’s why the paddleboat went into it. Amazingly, not many people were hurt. They got out of the coaches and were swimming in the water. Some people drowned, I guess, but most were OK. But it was an alligator swamp. The train wreck didn’t kill them, the alligators did. Came from every direction, and you know they can’t chew. They get hold of a bit of you and just twist themselves round and round until the victim’s drowned. Anyway, most of them survived the train wreck but were killed by alligators.’
There was a wide-eyed silence for a moment. Then Bet wailed.
‘Oh Jesus…’
‘Yeah,’ DJ said. ‘And they don’t just eat them there and then. Alligators don’t like fresh meat, I heard. They keep them until they’re well—’
‘Shut up,’ Maddy squealed. And the coach collapsed into gales of ghoulish, whooping laughter. Even Raymond had peeked out of his semi-coma and grinned hugely at being part of the fun.
Chris came into the smoking coach and sat down next to me. ‘I’m sorry about earlier.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m sorry I was suspicious. When you said do me a favour, I thought you were giving me money … to do something. I thought there was something you wanted.’
‘Oh Christ. I’m sorry, that was my fault. It was a stupid thing to say.’
‘No, it was me. I didn’t believe people did that kind of thing without wanting something.’
‘It isn’t anything. It wasn’t much. I had it. When you’ve got a spare fifty, you can give it back to someone who needs it. I just didn’t want it to be anything special.’
Chris nodded. ‘Yeah, I’ve given stuff to people. But no one’s given me anything until now. Thanks.’
It was all out of hand. A very small donation. I had handled it so badly. Why is it so difficult? Only my embarrassment had made it difficult and allowed a misunderstanding. The whole episode made me ashamed. Chris and I shrugged a smile at each other and he went back to his family.
By now the party slipped easily into community singing (Johnny Ray, Sonny and Cher, Tammy Wynette and Patsy Kline were deemed suitable) until, about eight-thirty, over four hours late, we arrived for a twenty-minute stop at El Paso. This was the end of the line for Bet, who had been free with her covered Coke bottle, and was quite jolly in spite of evidently having a bad pain in her shoulder. There were fond farewells from her fellow travellers, who were losing one of the old-timers. She invited me on to the platform to meet her hero. He was there, a middling-height, stocky man with a broad moustache, cowboy boots, jeans and jeans jacket. He ducked his head in acknowledgement of me as Bet started to introduce us, but he was busy. He had a small child in one arm and a large suitcase in the other. A massively pregnant young woman was walking just ahead of him.
‘Hi, hon, be with you in just a moment.’
‘It’s this coach,’ the pregnant woman called back at him, and she and the hero disappeared on to the train. Bet and I stood watching him.
‘Ain’t he wonderful? Always helping people.’
I had a moment of alarm, but Hero returned.
‘Hero, this is my new friend Jenny. Jenny, my hero.’
We shook hands. I said I was happy to meet him, that any hero of Bet’s was a hero of mine. He grinned modestly.
‘Ready, hon?’
‘Sure thing. Jenny’s gonna come and visit with us real soon.’
‘Great.’
We hugged goodbye, and Bet winced as I crushed her sore shoulder. As they headed off for the hero’s four by four I could hear Bet’s rasping voice.
‘How’s Mikey been? Jesus, you won’t believe what kind of a journey I’ve had…’
By the Time I Got to Phoenix
Suburban Phoenix is a perfect place to take refuge from an excess of commerce with the world. I sat in the shade of a banana tree by the swimming pool fringed with towering date palms: a garden oasis, the silence of the late morning heat buzzing, nothing moving under the blazing sun except an occasional butterfly lurching between shrubs, the cat raising its head from time to time to see if anything had changed and dropping back into its torpor. Now and then I slipped into the water to cool off before returning to my chair and a recuperating torpor of my own. I felt as if I had been ill. With that sense of consciously getting yourself back, of relearning the normal you after the body has been haywire, I was hyper-alert to my own processes: aware of every movement I made, of the precise physical requirements for each activity, of microscopic muscular changes as my eyes followed the passing butterfly, as my chest raised and lowered to breathe, as
I reached for my glass of orange juice or stretched out my leg to stroke the cat with my foot. I didn’t even blink without knowing I was doing it. The heat (it was around 108 degrees) had something to do with making every slight effort noticeable, but it was also a mental state of watchfulness that came with the sudden release from the company of others, a stark focusing on who that person had been who had watched, listened, talked, and interacted and been seen by others. The impression of my fellow travellers remained with me, I felt, almost physically, like the pale marks left on the flesh after it has been squeezed.
Every two weeks in rotation, each subdivision of suburban Phoenix is flooded. The water authority dammed the Salt River into a series of lakes in the mountains east of Phoenix and then created two canals to deliver the water to residents so that their gardens might thrive in the desert. Every fortnight, at a given time, each householder turns on the taps connected to buried pipes linked to the canal, and the water authority’s man, the zanjero (Spanish for ditch-rider and pronounced sahn-hair’-oh, the website explains helpfully), opens the company valve so that hundreds of gallons of precious water seeps up over the ground. The flood inundates each property, and the water sits on the surface three or more inches deep for hours until it is absorbed into the soil to keep the front lawns the most garish green imaginable, to make the palms so tall and so heavy with dates that they have to be collected professionally, to make the banana trees fruit, and the oranges and lemons hang heavy from their branches in this reclaimed patch of Arizona desert land. Arizona: named I suppose by the Spanish for the aridity of the area. (Maria, my hostess, is originally from Ecuador. Sometimes she goes to New York, or back home to Ecuador purely to find some rain. She longs for clouds, dull days and downpours.) The water from the dammed Salt River sinks into the naturally bone-dry cultivated gardens so that suburban America can live in a high degree of aesthetic and physical comfort in an environment inimical to all life except the cactus. The date palms, called Sphinx, are known only in Phoenix and possibly Saudi Arabia. Word is, the Phoenix trees were first obtained in Saudi Arabia in 1917. Another story tells of a single Sphinx date tree being ‘discovered’ in a backyard near Phoenix in 1919, and its twelve offshoots providing the stock for all the rest, no other examples of the species being found anywhere in the world. Whatever the truth of the origin of the Sphinx date palm, it is strange to find oneself sitting in this modern high-tech water-hole. Except for the furnace-like heat, which human ingenuity has yet to find a way to control economically, I might have been lounging in a glassed-in bubble, a cultivated Eden in a surrounding wilderness. My kindly hosts had left me to myself for the afternoon. At least some of the time I wept.
In 1962 I left the Lady Chichester Hospital in Hove for London, rescued by an act of charity, taken in by someone I had never met who had heard of my trouble from her son, from whose school I had been expelled. She offered a place to live, more education, a kind of normal life. After the ups and downs of being with my parents and spending several months being kept apart from them in this psychiatric hospital by doctors who had no more idea of what was going to happen next in my life than I did, the arbitrary rescue came and it seemed I was all set for everything turning out well, quite against the odds. It was, I was, going to be OK after all. A lucky escape from chaos and distress. Some dark doomed alley it was generally agreed I would have been forced to go down by previous circumstances beyond my control had miraculously been avoided. I’d been offered the chance to subvert the poor prognosis assumed by everyone, including me, for someone of fifteen already expelled from school, alienated from her parents and in the loony bin. So there I was, in London, saved – and I was consumed with guilt. Survivor guilt, they would call it now. I had lived, at the Lady Chichester, with others whose chaos and distress at least matched mine. Now, for no reason that I could fathom, accidentally, arbitrarily, I had been rescued. I had left my fearful, desperate friends behind. But who was going to rescue them? My fellow inmates – friends – had waved me off generously, quite pleased, I suppose, to discover that rescue from out of the blue was at least possible. I left them in hospital with either a little more hope, or, suspecting that good luck from out of the blue was a limited commodity, a little less. I was of the latter sort, and felt I carried away with me a large chunk of the good luck generally available to the inmates of the Lady Chichester Hospital. Bolts from the blue, I and they knew quite well, could be bad as well as good news. The blue, we like to believe, is a place apart from life, a separate realm where the discontinuities exist, queuing, or more likely jostling, for their moment to drop on an unsuspecting world. The bolts from the blue manifest themselves in unscheduled knocks on the front door, the phone ringing late at night, a follow-up visit to a doctor’s surgery, a lost footing on the stairs, someone else’s heart attack or the snapped brake cable in a car passing you on the street, the notification that you are not the only one who knows the pin number of your credit card, a sudden gust of wind uprooting that tree, the erupting of a nearby volcano that has been inert for decades before you arrived for your holiday, the parting of the earth along a quiescent fault line that runs along your route to work, the absence of a scheduled knock on the front door or ringing of the phone. Or a letter saying, you don’t know me, but I’ve heard about you from my son, come and live with me and I’ll sort things out. Out of the blue. Who could have expected…? How could you guess…? Why would you imagine…? How could you know…? And whether the bolt is good or bad there are two equally valid, equally felt responses: why me?, and yes, of course, what else could have happened? So we wait, when we are stuck, anticipating, with hope and fear, the bolt that will come out of the blue. And sometimes, like a bolt from the blue, it doesn’t come.
Saved from whatever unimaginable but obviously dreadful fate would have been mine, in a comfortable house in London, waiting to find a school that would risk accepting me to let me take O levels, I became remarkably unhappy at having been chosen to survive. And then guilty too about my ingratitude to my rescuer for being so miserable about it. I spiralled down into a depression just as things had started to look up. In retrospect, it’s not at all surprising – what is more frightening than having been saved (for what?) and by someone who has taken you on trust, sight unseen, quality untested? What is more terrifying than having to make something of an opportunity that the people you left behind have not been given? But at the time I was baffled by my new, unjustifiable distress. And now, in the spectacular heat and singing silence of my Phoenix oasis, I was shot through with similar feelings of remorse at the relief I felt on having left my travelling companions behind, at getting solitary and self-absorbed again.
The train had pulled in – four and a half hours late – to Tucson station at two-thirty in the morning. Once there had been a direct link by train to Phoenix, where my friends John and Maria lived, but that had been let go to ruin in the name of profit. Now there was a two-hour bus journey to get to where I wanted to be, or the kindness of my friends who had followed the train’s whimsical journey on the internet and knew that the ten o’clock arrival time was going to be more like two or three in the morning, but were still not put off coming to pick me up. Compared to the people on the train they were old friends, but actually I had never met Maria, and knew John only from a previous trip I had taken to Antarctica.
I had said goodbye to my fellow smokers around midnight. Raymond was asleep. I asked Chuck to say goodbye to him for me.
‘Aren’t you going to give him your phone number in England?’ he asked.
‘No.’ It hadn’t occurred to me.
‘I think you should. You told him you’d go see him if he stopped drinking. What if he does?’
I scribbled my phone number on a piece of paper, in the certain knowledge that it wouldn’t survive Raymond’s journey home. But then, there was also that soft spot in the back of my head.
Chuck nodded that I was doing the right thing. Maybe he was employed by psychologists at Amtrak headquarters
as a peripatetic super-ego of the rails. Morality lurks everywhere in America. Not surprising, really, that I couldn’t tell if Chuck was saint or sinner, Samaritan or hypocrite: I feel much the same about morality when I come across it. I should have liked Chuck more. I should at least have admired him. But what I mostly did was not trust him. My problem, I suspect, rather than his.
The go-go girls who may have been boys got off at Tucson, though even with my last long look I couldn’t decide about their Adam’s apples. The only other people who got off the train were John and a middle-aged woman who was met by a man who enfolded them both in his arms, delighted to be reunited. There was not the slightest hint of Mexican or Indian about either of them, so I supposed they were John’s adoptive parents. They were a bourgeois smiling couple, who turned their amiability towards me as I waved goodbye to John and he gesticulated at me and told them who I was. They looked pleased that John had made friends on the train. So was I. The man put an arm around John’s shoulder and they walked off towards the car park.
My friend John, who was in his late sixties, waited while my suitcase arrived from the baggage train and then drove us for two hours through the desert blackness of Phoenix. At five in the morning, before we said goodnight, he lit up the swimming pool and the date palms in the back garden to show me that they were there for the next day’s recuperation. He thought my three-day trip from Jacksonville to Tucson by train the kind of heroic journey that had taken valiant Englishwomen to the heart of African darkness in the nineteenth century. On the Antarctica trip, he had already revealed a profound and romantic attachment to English eccentricity, and he shared the more general American attitude that the US rail system was as good as defunct, useless for getting from A to B, dangerous, dirty and full of dreadful people, because who else would travel in such a way when there were cars and planes? Only those travelling by the once renowned Greyhound buses were more suspect. The lateness of the train and my tales of death and drunkenness as we drove through the desert in the dark only confirmed the foolhardiness or quaintness of my choice of transport to Phoenix. Being English I could not be a fool, so I must be one of those faintly mad, innocent and intrepid Englishwomen who pick up their skirts, caring nothing about revealing ankles, bloomers, God-knows-what to God-knows-who, and voluntarily stamp around in the murky undergrowth of the nastier parts of the world. At any rate, he was sure that I must be exhausted and shaken to my very core at the conclusion of such an experience and that I would certainly want to spend the following day quietly in his backyard oasis. Even though intrepidity is something no one can accuse me of, and since, not knowing the general opinion of the rail system, taking a train to get from one place to another had not struck me as heroic so much as sensible, I was nonetheless inclined to agree with him about my core, which, being made of far flimsier material than he supposed, was indeed exhausted and shaken.
