Stranger on a Train (6 page)

Only the Lonely

‘Imagine you're de Tocqueville. What do you think of us Americans?'

Imagine you're making a train reservation by phone in England. Imagine being asked such a question. I was back in the stevedore's building calling the 1-800 number for Amtrak reservations to find a train to take me from Savannah to Phoenix. Not impossible, but not quite straightforwardly possible either. I had to get a train for two hours from Savannah to Jacksonville, Florida, where I would pick up the
Sunset Limited
which ran only three days a week from Orlando, Florida to Los Angeles, California, passing through Jacksonville on the way. The Jacksonville connection was leisurely. I would arrive at Jacksonville at midday, and there would be a ten-hour layover before the
Sunset Limited
arrived at 10.06 p.m. It would reach Tucson, Arizona, as close as I could get to Phoenix by train, forty-eight hours later. I had to stay in Savannah for three days after I disembarked, until Saturday morning, and would get to Tucson at ten o'clock the following Monday night. There had once been a train connection between Tucson and Phoenix, but no longer, so Amtrak bussed passengers to Phoenix. I'd arrive there at just past midnight on Tuesday morning, the reservation clerk at the call centre in Chicago explained, and then he explained it all again so that this time I could pay proper attention and write down the labyrinthine arrangements instead of just letting my mind wander through the sound of the mythic places and suggested vastness of time and space of my proposed journey.

‘So you're from England, by the sound of it. Have you got a minute? I guess you're travelling around. I'm curious. Imagine you're de Tocqueville. What do you think of us Americans?'

His name was Mike. He told people about the train schedules and took their credit card reservations. He also wondered what Europeans thought about Americans. He was well placed to find out. But I explained that I hadn't been travelling, and that I'd just come off a freighter and was in Tampa dock.

‘Wow!'

Now he was really excited. He had a penchant for sea travel. In fact, he was currently reading Conrad:
Typhoon.
So had I on the ship. What did I think of Conrad? And Melville? How was the sea journey? And Americans? I must have been to the States before. We talked about the language differences between English and American. The formality I found in American speech that lived so strangely with the vivid slang. A magical combination of ease and discomfort. That, actually, was how I found Americans. We talked about the smallness of England, the oddness for me of being able to take a train that took three full days to get from one side of the country to the other. He said he hadn't realised.

‘Really, less than a day to get from top to bottom? Jeez, that must really make a difference to how we think about the world.'

We talked about the sea again, and he said he'd just read
The Perfect Storm.
I'd seen a documentary based on the book just before I left England, and I'd videoed it. I promised to send it to him when I got home though he would have to get it transferred to the US standard. He gave me his address and we said our goodbyes. My train booking had taken half an hour or more and after three weeks of small talk, I'd conversed with some passion and thought about things that seemed quite important, to a stranger called Mike somewhere in a call centre in Chicago. Welcome to America.

*   *   *

I spent three days in the sweaty, mad heat of Savannah adjusting to living on solid ground. My hotel (‘The Magnolia Place Inn, located in the heart of Savannah's historic district … Built in 1878 … each room is uniquely furnished with English antiques, period prints and porcelains from around the world … As featured in Southern Living') encapsulated the fabled gentility of the South. It was elegant, self-consciously beautiful and old world to a tiresome degree. Mint tea was served in the lounge (‘parlour') at five every afternoon, the beds were four-posters, the owners distantly charming and the bedrooms and public spaces non-smoking.

Much of what I have to describe in this book is predicated on the fact that I smoke. Cigarettes and my desire to smoke them formed the humming rails of my train of thought as I travelled. What I did, who I spoke to, what I had to say, was very often directly related to my wish to smoke. Some travellers have a goal, a mystery they want to unravel, a place they want to reach, a mental task they want to perform, a world they want to describe, but I had none of these. For the most part, cigarettes dictated my actions. Where the difficulty of smoking is so prevalent, is, indeed, a moral force, nicotine addition and the pleasure of lighting up turned out to be as good a way as any other of finding a relation to a place and its people.

I have smoked since I was fourteen. When I wasn't travelling the Circle Line, I sat in front of a mirror in my bedroom illicitly practising my smoking skills, just as I worked at kohling and silvering my eyes and posing naked and enticing to my reflection in preparation for future public performances. Much of the time of the fourteen-year-old is spent in front of the mirror. Life must be rehearsed. At my boarding school, once I had got the social workers to send me back, there was a boiler house by the organic vegetable beds. Two or three people could stand in the space in front of the whooshing boiler, leaning against the brick walls, conversing idly. It was warm in winter and secluded in summer and the perfect venue for smoking breaks between lessons or if the weather precluded a trip to the neighbouring unmown field where sex as well as smoking could occur uninterrupted. I smoked Black Russian, black-papered, gold-tipped, and sometimes Abdullahs, Turkish and oval. A packet cost a week's pocket money but it was important, if one had to perform one's most sophisticated activity in the ignominy of a boiler house, to do so with style. At that time, style seemed to me mostly black and gold or oval and exotic-smelling. I toyed with the idea of a cigarette holder, but it was one more thing to hide in my knickers, and I decided that such extended glamour would have to wait. That year, a coffee bar opened in the town. It was, of course, off-limits. They served espresso and cappuccino in glass cups, which back then seemed to be very dangerous to the adult world and in fact announced the end, finally, of the fifties. There was also a juke box. It played Ray Charles's ‘I Can't Stop Loving You'; Roy Orbison's ‘Crying'; the Everly Brothers' ‘Cathy's Clown'; Dave Brubeck's ‘Take Five'. I sat there with my kohl eyes, my jeans and oversized black sweater, smoking (was there for a brief period a small pipe?) and idly stirring the froth on my cappuccino, wrote poems in a notebook, and waited for a kind word from the first love of my life, Tub (who wasn't, though he had crooked teeth which so moved me they made my heart stop), a junior reporter on the local paper. He called me Nej, reversing me, reasonably enough since I was in turmoil over him. He sort-of-let-me be his girlfriend, though he was careful to remain remote and dismissive. Most of the time I wasn't there for him, just a hovering shadow, who sat in silence while he discussed important matters of life and death with his friends. I existed for the brief moments of encouragement he allowed me occasionally, when he would smile suddenly directly at me, or turn at the door after he had got up without a word to leave and mutter, ‘You coming?', not bothering to wait to see if I was or not. I could spend several hours at night lying in bed remembering and reliving the quality of that moment, of the bare acknowledgement that he wanted me, actually me, it had been only me he had been speaking to. Or at any rate, he didn't
not
want me. Hours would pass as I savoured his tone of voice, the fleeting warmth of inclusion, the inescapable fact (if I thought very hard about it) that he didn't want to leave without me that made up for being ignored entirely for the rest of the time we were together. All the disdain, the apparent absence of my existence while I was in his company, the endless periods of waiting in the coffee bar which often ended (after all) with him not showing up before I had to get back to school, the terrible moments when I couldn't get to the coffee bar at all and he might be there and waiting for me, thinking I had stood him up; all that, the majority of the time, anguish, agony, shrank to fleeting nothing beside the memory of his momentary encouragements. ‘You coming?'
They
were real, the rest was reserve, resistance, a game of reticence that boys played for reasons that were not then obvious. And no moment was more treasured, unwrapped in the dark night of the dormitory to gleam hope at me, than the times when, after taking one for himself, he took a second cigarette from my pack of five and lit it before putting it between my lips. And Roy sang, ‘Only The Lonely'.

So … smoking. Later, when I was twenty, I spent five months in St Pancras Hospital, North Wing, the psychiatric unit. Cigarettes were no longer an accessory, they were an addiction and a constant source of concern, since I had only the ten shillings a week that was doled out by the hospital to patients without income as pocket money. Not nearly enough to keep me in smokes in a world where smoking was a way of passing the time.

The Mystery Man had been admitted by the police after they arrested him, wandering and confused, at King's Cross. He had lost his memory. He didn't know his name, where he had come from, nothing whatever about his life. He was a blank sheet in his forties. I was twenty and became his first friend. We played poker for cigarettes. His inability to remember caused explosions of rage to erupt from time to time, but mostly he was extraordinarily gentle, a man who listened intently to whatever one had to say, whose interest in other people was as much a learning process for him who had had no life that he could recall. We talked a lot, he wondered who he might be, and we imagined a variety of lives for him. It was a game in which he would accept or reject my suggestions according to whether he fancied the idea or not. In reality he was not at all eager to find out who he was, although having no access to his past made him bang his head against the walls sometimes. We considered the possibility, the likelihood, that he had a wife, certainly a family somewhere who knew him, and the idea was intolerable, like a narrowing of vision from a full panorama to a single ray of light that led only where it led. He preferred the more fantastical versions of himself: he was a spy, a master criminal, a private eye, a lost prince from far away. Probably these stories I told him about himself appealed to him because they were likely to be the furthest from the truth. Eventually the police discovered his name, and that he had been missing for a week or so before he had been picked up. He was a builder from somewhere up north. He had a wife and a daughter of nineteen. He had left his house one morning with the rent money and had disappeared. The police and his doctor thought he might have been mugged and the money stolen, or that he had spent the rent money – he played the horses, apparently – and then lost his memory in an attempt to deal with his guilt. John (we'd been calling him John, but it turned out to be his name) told me all this after he came back from seeing the doctor. None of it meant anything to him. The story was as strange as any that we had invented. His wife and daughter were coming to London in a day or two, and he would be meeting them, as far as he was concerned, for the first time. He was terrified, actually sweating at the prospect. I could quite see why.

‘We've been married for twenty years. What if I don't like her?'

I understood the enormity of it. Much more shocking than being a spy or arch criminal. To be an everyday person, a family man with qualities and failings, a husband, a father, to have an intimate history with others, to be an ordinary person with a past was terrible. To have to find out that past, all in a rush, to come to terms with it, not over forty years, but in a matter of days, was frightening beyond belief. What was more, my friend John was going to turn out to be someone, to have a life of his own, and I, for a while the first and most important person in his life, the co-inventor of him, would become just a moment in his passing life, a part of an episode of forgetting that he would probably want to forget. He was scared and so was I. I felt as unconnected with my life, as unhinged from my past, as he was with his. We were outlaws together. Uncluttered and new. His ‘Jenny' was just a few weeks old and without a history. The present in the safety of the hospital was far preferable to both of us than any ongoing truth.

At first he refused to meet his wife and daughter without me being present, but, of course, that had been vetoed by his doctor. ‘What if I don't like them?' he said, haunted by the invisible past, threatened by the future.

How much I wished he wouldn't like them. But at the same time I could see the awfulness of that. Of discovering, say, that he had had a life of unhappiness to which he had to return, and of realising that the intensity of our friendship of a few weeks in a hospital with no past and no future was unsustainable. The doctor told him he was living a pipe dream, that not only did he have a past but so did I, and that real life would scupper us. Living in a brand-new present wasn't an option. I was difficult and needy; he wouldn't be able to cope. He refused to acknowledge this. We would manage. We had a special relation to each other. Old wounds wouldn't apply. The point was that we hadn't hurt each other, and without a past there was no reason why we should. If he didn't like his family, he told me, he wouldn't go back, and he and I would find a flat and live together, though in what relation we didn't specify. And what if he did like his family? That was simple, he would adopt me and I would go and live with them. I found it unbearable that he could even think it possible that he would like them. I knew our time was over. I stayed in my bed in the ward, refusing to see him, leaving him alone, the evening before his wife and daughter were due to arrive. My past, at least, had caught up with me.