by Ali Smith
But I tell you. I’m ready. I stand at the counter behind the computers and I’m waiting. If that man comes in here, if that man ever dares to come in here, I will have him removed. Believe me. I have the power to do it now and I won’t think twice about it.
being quick
I was on my way across King’s Cross station concourse dodging the crowds and talking to you on my mobile when Death nearly walked into me.
I’m sorry, I said.
Sorry for what? you said in my ear. He smiled and stepped back and stood to one side as if waiting.
I can’t stop now, I said, I’m on the phone.
Who are you talking to? you said.
Death was unexpected. He was handsome, balding, a middle-aged man in a suit so light-coloured it seemed contrite, and he was vaguely recognizable, vaguely arty, like a BBC executive from the days when TV still promised both decency and aesthetic ambition, the days when its drama was still courageous and you could trust that the mid-evening news was about what was actually happening in the world, not ratings or money or channel protocol. But those days were over and we both knew it, and anyway I was idealizing them, his smile, which was melancholy but civilized, said.
He smiled and my phone went dead. I looked at it; its little screen was dark. A moment ago you had been telling me about your day at work and about how you were home now, waiting for me to come home. I had been talking to you about how I was crossing the concourse, how I would probably catch the fast train and be home around eight and how I would get us an Indian takeaway on my way home. We had been discussing onion bhajis.
I gave my phone a shake. Its screen stayed blank. I put it against my ear but there was only the sound of an off phone, the sound of plastic and nothing. I pressed the on button. Nothing happened. I pushed sideways through the crowd to get to the wall of the station and knocked my phone against it, first gently then hard. It made no difference. I looked up, so I wouldn’t have to look round, look him in the face. High above the shopfronts and the people milling to and from the trains there was a single strand of some plant or other growing out of the Victorian brick at the top of the wall. It was flowering.
I looked at my phone again. Hello? I said, in case you could still hear me, into the tiny hole in the phone’s base.
I started walking. He was walking alongside me, neat and shy. I ignored him all the way round to platforms nine to eleven where I called you from one of the call boxes.
You cut out, you said. Did you want the bhajis or not?
My phone’s not working, I said. Listen. Are you all right?
Perfectly, you said. What’s wrong with your phone?
Are you sure you’re all right? I said.
Yes, you said. Then you said, what? What’s the matter? Is something wrong? Are you okay?
He was standing over by the coffee kiosk now. He wasn’t looking at me any more; he was looking at a woman and child who were in the coffee queue, at two policewomen wearing luminous yellow and chatting at the platform barrier, at a man asking the people at the cash machines if they would give him their change. I watched him shift his gaze from person to person and knew that even though he was looking at these other people it didn’t mean he didn’t know exactly where I was.
I told you about him. You laughed.
It’s not funny, I said. I’m not making it up. I mean it. He’s, like, ten yards away. He’s watching the man making the coffee in the kiosk. He’s watching him sprinkle on the stuff.
Is it cinnamon? you asked.
I don’t know, for God’s sake, I said. Now he’s watching him fitting the lid on the top. He’s watching him do that thing with the napkin that stops the cup being too hot for her to hold.
For who to hold? you said.
The woman, I said, the woman who’s buying the coffee.
How do you know it’s Death? you said. Doesn’t sound much like Death. Sounds like a spy making sure for head office that the kiosk workers are doing everything the way head office requires.
No, no, he’s looking at other people too, I said, it’s not just the kiosk he’s looking at. He’s looking at all sorts of people, he’s –.
Look again, you said. It’s not Death. It’s just a person.
I looked again. Sure enough, the man I had thought was Death was an ordinary man, a man behaving a little oddly, but just a man.
You’re right, I said. It’s just a man in a cream-coloured suit.
How stylish, you said. How springlike. Listen. Call me when you’re twenty minutes away and I’ll order supper and then you can pick it up and you won’t have to wait. Is your bike at the station?
I can’t call you when I’m twenty minutes away, I said.
Why not? you said.
My phone’s not working, I said.
Oh, I forgot, you said. Okay, how about I phone them when I think you’re twenty minutes away? When’s your train leaving?
The tinny digital clock ticking over my head said 19:10:53. Then it said 19:10:54. Then it said 19:10:55.
About four minutes, I said.
Good, you said. Run, or you won’t get a seat. See you soon.
Your voice was reassuring. 19:11:00, the clock said. I put the phone back on its hook and I ran.
The seat I got, almost the last one in the carriage, was opposite a girl who started coughing as soon as there weren’t any other free seats I could move to. She looked pale and the cough rattled deep in her chest as she punched numbers into her mobile. Hi, she said (cough). I’m on the train. No, I’ve got a cold. A cold (cough). Yeah, really bad. Yeah, awful actually. Hello? (cough) Hello?
She looked at her phone as the train went through a tunnel. So did all the other people who had been in the middles of conversations up and down the train, which was packed with people behind me and ahead of me shouting their hellos forlornly, like lost or blind people. The stray hellos reached nobody. They hung unanswered above our heads in the air and cancelled out everybody they weren’t for, then as soon as we were out of the tunnel the phones began again by themselves in a high-pitched spiralling, the signature tunes of TV shows, the simplified Beethoven symphonies.
The woman sitting next to me was sleeping through it, her back attentive and straight, a book closed on her knees and her hands arranged round it. The coughing girl had closed her eyes too. The man opposite me was asleep; he had fallen asleep as soon as the train started to move and was now slumped against the window, his mouth open in a toothless O. I stared over his head at the lightly dusked outskirts of London, at its weeds, its graffiti, its small squares of fast-passing light, the early evening windows of the lives of hundreds of others. I thought how funny it was of me to have imagined that the man who nearly bumped into me was Death. I laughed. The coughing girl opened her eyes and looked at me accusingly. I looked away and smiled to myself, thinking how you and I would joke about it later. I began to think of funny things I could say afterwards, weeks from now, when it had become a running joke. He looked like Death. I thought how the man hadn’t looked anything like Death was supposed to look, hooded in black, faceless, with a scythe, standing at the edge of a pond filled with rubbish like on the public information advert on TV when I was small. Then I began to worry in case it was some kind of omen. I told myself not to be so stupid. I drummed my fingers on my leg. They felt numb, anaesthetized, and I knew for the first time as I sat staring blankly out and the realization of it broke cold on my skull, for all the world as if someone above me had cracked an egg with a knife and let its cool contents slide out of the shell on to the top of my head and down the back of my neck, that I hadn’t ever cared at any point in my life about anything other than myself and that I had no idea how to change this or make it any different.
Then I noticed that the fast train was going very slowly. It slowed to a stop in the dark. This woke several people, many of whom stood up and struggled into coats until they realized they weren’t home at all. They sat down again. To the left of us was an Intercity 125, also full of peopl
e, also stopped. To the right, another stationary train crammed with people. Someone down the carriage told someone down a phone that we were going very slowly, that we’d stopped, that we were probably passing an accident spot.
A voice came over our speakers. There had been a fatality at a station twenty or thirty miles down the line. All round me people began phoning people to tell them. I got my own mobile out to call you, then remembered and put it back in my bag. Will you tape it? a voice behind me was saying. It’s on at nine. Hello? the coughing girl was saying into her phone. Someone died, so we’re late.
Just to repeat to passengers, the voice from the ceiling said, and it was a tired and wary-sounding voice. There is as yet no other information. As yet all the information there is is that a fatal incident of fatality has happened on the line, and that no other information has as yet been received, and that more information is awaited, and when it is received it will be told to passengers as soon as it is received.
The man opposite me opened his eyes, sat up surprised, looked out of the window bleary and blinking, closed his eyes again and went back to sleep. The woman next to me had woken up. She settled herself inside her coat and opened her book. It was called Breaking the Pattern of Depression and had been written by a man with a PhD. I glanced at her face. She didn’t look depressed at all. She looked perfectly happy. There: I had momentarily cared about someone I didn’t know, had never met, would probably never see again after this journey. I looked at the girl, whose eyes were closed again, whose mobile was still in her hand and whose other hand clenched a handkerchief. I tried to feel sorry that she had a cold. Colds were horrible, especially when you had to go to work with one. Her cough was probably keeping her awake late at night. It was horrible to have a cough like that. I looked at the man slumped next to her, big and hopeless as a seal out of water. I had no right to think of him as a seal or as any other kind of simile or metaphor, I thought. I thought kinder thoughts. He must be very tired to be so asleep on a train. Perhaps he had to work very hard. Perhaps when he gets home, I thought, there’s something that keeps him awake all night so that the only sleep he gets is on the train. Maybe his wife and he have had a new baby. I looked at his suit. There were no signs of new baby on it. Maybe his wife, or life partner, or whatever he had, was depressed, and it had become an unbreakable pattern. Maybe he or she had a cough that kept them both awake at night. Maybe he lived on his own; maybe he didn’t have a wife or a partner; maybe this loneliness was what kept him awake all through the dark hours and meant he could only sleep on trains, on his way to and from work, surrounded by strangers.
I began to feel guilty that I hadn’t even idly wondered about the person who had died at the station thirty miles ahead of us. Was it a man or a woman? How had he or she died? Had he or she had a heart attack? Thrown herself or himself in front of a train on a weekday evening on the mundane journey home, or the journey somewhere he or she couldn’t bring herself or himself to make one more time? I had heard somewhere, or read somewhere maybe, that spring was the time of the year when most people found it unbearable, the coming back again of the year’s light. Or had it been an accident? Had he or she been running for a train, trying to get home in time? Had one foot slipped off the side of the platform at exactly the wrong moment and the rest of her or him had followed? Was someone expecting him or her home right now, with food in the oven and a TV on, waiting?
I thought of you. You would be imagining me somewhere I wasn’t. You would be thinking I was closer to home than I was. You would be phoning the Indian restaurant any moment. Maybe you already had. Maybe you were doing it right now. The thought of you blithely ordering food in the belief that I would be there on time, any minute now, to pick it up; the thought of it cooling down inside its tinfoil cartons in a takeaway bag on some sideboard or other in the kitchen of the restaurant; the thought of you sitting in our front room believing I’d be home any second made me feel worse than any number of imaginings about people I didn’t know, even imaginings of them dying.
I got my mobile out but it was still dead. I turned to the woman reading the depression book.
Excuse me, I said.
She looked up.
I wonder if I could borrow your phone, I said.
No, she said.
Oh, I said.
Do you want to know why? she said.
I realized, too late, that she was the kind of person who whispers loudly about rules and regulations at people who eat sweets in libraries.
As a rule of principle, she said, I don’t carry a phone.
Ah, I said.
The link between mobile phones and brain tumours hasn’t yet been disproved, she said.
Right, I said.
So even if I did carry a phone, I’m not sure I’d lend it to you, she said. By even using one at all, I could be doing not just myself but you and countless others on this train and many hundreds of others I’ve never met in my life who live near a transmitter serious harm.
Yes, I said. Thanks.
She went back to her book. Her face was shiny with delight. I glanced at the girl opposite. She had one eye slitted open, which she closed quick, in case I saw she was listening. But I’d seen, and she knew it, and opened the eye again.
I’d lend you mine, she said, but there’s not enough money left on it for any more calls even if I needed to use it myself. Sorry.
Oh well, I said. Never mind. Nice of you to offer. Thanks anyway.
She nodded and closed her eye. I looked over at the four people sitting at the table across from us. They all looked away, up at the ceiling or down to the floor or out into the dark at the other people sleeping, reading, on phones, on the stopped trains on the lines parallel to ours, and then our train, which hadn’t moved for over three quarters of an hour, jolted to life again and the parallel people in the windows of the trains on either side of us shunted backwards as we shunted forwards.
People up and down the carriage cheered and began to phone people. Good, said the woman with the book. The girl opposite looked at me, looked at the woman reading her book, then looked away to the side as she pressed something on her phone, put her phone to her head and said, in a hushed voice, hello?
We gathered speed. We lurched and rolled on tracks that we knew were precarious beneath us. We slowed down again. People up and down the carriage groaned.
No way, the girl said into her phone, and coughed.
It’s like this every bloody time, every bloody time I take a train, a man was saying behind me, probably into a phone but possibly just out loud to himself like a madman. Nobody takes responsibility, he said. Nobody’s responsible. Nobody does anything about it. Nobody’s in charge. Who’s to blame? Nobody.
I saw the scuffed cheapness of the material of the seat I was sitting on. What, I thought, if there was nobody there when I got home? I walked in and you weren’t there. I opened our mortgaged front door and came in and took my coat off and sat down with the takeaway bag of food and you weren’t there. I didn’t take the greasy tops off the cartons, careful not to spill on the floor, while you didn’t bring through the plates and forks: you, lifted into the sky like in stories; gone, the way we expect people to vanish into thin air in faked magic, like something only supposed to happen in other people’s lives, the lives that don’t touch us and our lives. You were gone and the roof blew off our house and left cracked rafters dangling above upturned furniture. The earth below our house broke open and swallowed it whole. I went home and it wasn’t there; just a crater in the ground between the other houses, like those old wartime photographs. So someone I didn’t know was dead. I didn’t care, and why should I? Instead I scared and dared myself into feeling something by imagining what it would be like when what was mine wasn’t mine any more, and beyond that was the knowledge, as blunt and undebatable as the glass in the window next to me, that none of it had ever been mine at all.
I looked at my own reflection in it, and through me, behind me, was the dark of the land. It
was the end, I’d gone as far as I could go. When the train juddered to a stop at a small station and the overhead voice said we’d be stationary here for at least an hour and a half, possibly for longer, depending on information, and the doors opened and the surge of angry passengers from up and down the train demanding money, taxis, explanations, converged on the one small station manager standing blinking with panic outside his office, I stood up and got off too. I pushed through the people on the platform and followed the exit signs. I didn’t know what station or what town I was in until I was outside by the empty taxi rank and saw the name for where I was.
It was a garden city. That was something to do with trees, wasn’t it? It meant a city with a lot of trees and green and it meant something historical, but I couldn’t remember what. Maybe it stated in its town statutes that there were a certain number of trees that had to be planted here, maybe there was a certain acreage that had to be green; I had no idea, or if I’d ever known in the first place I couldn’t remember now.
I looked up the road, then down the road, but I didn’t know which was the right way. So I went back in through the station still full of its angry voices. I bypassed the crowd and walked the length of the train I’d just been on, nodding to people I passed who had stepped off for a smoke. We’re all in it together, we told each other in shrugs, in little jerkings of the head, what can we do? I got to the front of the train. The driver had his feet up against the window and was reading a paper. I walked what was left of the platform till I’d gone as far as it went. This far along the noise of the station was surprisingly muted. I sat down on the edge then shinned down the side of it on to the track.
It was April, I could feel it. It was slight and cold on the backs of my hands and all through my clothes – my coat was still on my seat on the train. The whole of the lighter part of the year, all the light months, stretched away ahead of me. I put my hands in my pockets and walked, trying to hit a sleeper rung with each step. I avoided the toilet paper and sewage and my feet hurt from hitting the uneven rubble in the dips between the sleepers; my legs already hurt from the short distance I’d come. The rims of the rails curved off ahead of me in what was left of the townlight and the further away from the station I walked the purer the dark beyond me got. Now what I could hear was dark, the passing of cars on roads somewhere in the distance, the occasional rustling of the leafing bushes and the litter on the railway banks on either side of the tracks. I could smell it all, I had cold air in my nose and at the back of my mouth and it tasted of diesel or petrol and behind that it tasted of stripling wood, grass and earth.
