Stranger on a Train (10 page)

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?'

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.