Stranger on a Train (17 page)

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.

My unintentional confrontation of other people had been surprisingly distressing. I sat in the Phoenix garden having escaped their company, their explanations, their trajectories, and I was both relieved and guilty at having done so. I was also overwhelmed by the weight of stories, by the unrelenting fact of the existence of so many stories, which in my mind now branched and multiplied to include every individual on the planet. Think of all the people in the world and then think that each has a story to tell. Think of them telling it over and over again to each other, to their children, to their parents, to officials, to strangers who pass by, to their livestock, their pets, to themselves if no one else is there to listen. Think of the noise, the weight of stories bearing down on the earth, the burden of incident and consequence, and then think how each of those stories connects to other stories and changes them, and is changed itself so that even the already unimaginable number of stories of each individual multiplies exponentially to an utterly terrifying and panic-making figure that is beyond the unimaginable. So my heart thumped and my head reeled with the life that was seething on the planet. And that, I knew beneath the panic, didn't matter, was just a neurotic twitch of mine, an aspect of my own story, a tendency I have to frighten myself with the world I would keep at a certain distance, like someone with a loose tooth who cannot help but play with it with their tongue. I could breathe my way through that panic. But then something else occurred to me. A new thought, sort of. Part of what alarmed me about the mass of individual stories was that they so conformed to stereotype. It was as if each story illustrated the old cliché that there are no more than ten set pieces about how lives are lived. What discouraged was the similarity of the stories, the repetition of the basic forms. Here's this one, now that one. Only a handful, really, with rather fewer variations than you would expect. You listen to them and think, is there nothing new, why doesn't anything change, what has been learned over the centuries of the same stories being told over and over? It's true that some are magnificently styled as literature or art or music, others staccato statements of one thing following the next, stoical, heroic even, yet others are whines of self-pity, blind lack of insight. There exists a whole range of possible tellings, but just a small range of individual narratives. But as I tried to deal with the panic of quantity qualified by duplication while I sat in my silent oasis, I remembered in Raymond, Maddy, Bet, Chris and all the others the urgency with which each of their stories was told, and, for a change, I understood that whatever repetition I experienced as the distant and weary witness I wished myself to be, every single one of them experienced their own story as extraordinary, unique and worth the telling because it has happened to them and not to someone else. It was their personal existence that made their story remarkable and worth the telling. The same story told by another person was not the same story. It did not matter how many times people had carelessly opened doors and caused an untroubled life to have to confront death, how many times the goodness in life had been squeezed dry by an addiction to alcohol, how often a damaged brain had caused an innocent to be sent away from society, to each person it happened to, it was the first time it had happened to them, their one and only story and each of them told it, to themselves and others, with a sense of wonder that they had such a story, that they had a story at all.