The Blackpool Highflyer (7 page)

The fire was in good order, so I picked up the
Courier.

'Hundreds of detectives guard the King of Spain’ I read, but
couldn't be bothered to find out why. I leant out and looked
along the track. Clive was in front of the engine talking to a
lass, so things were going on as usual with him.

How was it, I wondered, that Clive had seen the stone so
early? I'd been looking out, my eyes were Ai, and I'd not
been able to make it out. There again it had been lying flat on
the rails. It might not have tripped us up after all; we might
have gone clean over it.

I opened the fire doors and pitched the
Courier
in. It flut­tered like a bird for less than a second, and was gone.

You'd read about railway wreckers from time to time: little
articles in the corners of newspapers. I had an idea about the
death rate on the railways: as a passenger, the chances against
being killed were 1 in 30 million. I'd read that somewhere in
the
Railway Magazine.

Wreckers ... They wanted to make a train jump - for fun. I
banged the fire doors shut. They were kids; or drunks.
Drunken kids.

We were a fair distance from either Salwick or Kirkham, so
anyone putting that stone on the rails would have a chance of
not being seen; there again you'd do well to have a motorcar
if that was your programme. And while you weren't likely to
strike a great crowd hereabouts, you'd be exposed to the view
of the odd individual for a long time. The stone had been put
on one of the fastest stretches of line to be found, so it would
have been known that any train coming to meet it would be
doing so at a lick. Well, they would have known it if they'd
any knowledge of railways.

I stood up to reach for my tea bottle, and saw through the
glass that Reuben was playing the gooseberry, interrupting
Clive and the woman on the track ahead. Clive was nodding,
so I reckoned we'd been given permission to take our train on.

And then there was a woman, her head below the level of
my boots, looking up. Her hat was off. She did not look like a
person on an excursion.

'Will you come along here?' she said. She was crying. She
had a face that should have been happy. Should have been
pretty too - would have been when she was younger. It was a
sharp, small face. She looked like a sort of older fairy.

'Someone hurt?' I asked, and she nodded.

I put down my tea bottle on the sandbox. Then, with a
guilty feeling, I remembered the first-aid or ambulance box
that ought to be in the locker of any engine. I opened the
locker door, and there it was: a wooden box with the word
'accident
' hand-painted on the lid. I caught it up, jumped
down from the engine and went after the woman.

As she walked, the words were coming between sobs: 'I
didn't want her down .
. .
didn't want her stifled and jostled
in that
way
...
it was cooler
up
...
so I left her on the seat.
Well, she was sleeping . ..'

As she spoke, I opened the box. There was a bottle of car­bolic, a roll of bandage (not over-clean), a tub of ointment of
some kind, and a little book:
What to Do in an Emergency
by Dr
N. Kenrick F.R.S.E. etc. Price one shilling. I flipped it open
as I followed the woman along the side of the carriages:
'Treatment for the Apparently Drowned'. 'Drowning is a
very frequent accident,' I read. Not on the bloody railways it
isn't, I thought. But this wasn't a railway book at all. I read on,
feeling vexed: 'Cases of Poisoning ... A List of Poisons.'

We came up to the fourth rattler from the engine, and
someone was saying: 'Oh she's been terribly bashed.'

I pulled myself up to the compartment and there was a
woman lying across the seats on one side, with three others
standing over her, blocking my view of her head and face.
They all had the rosettes on; the rosettes were too big, and
there were too many of them for this small space. The women
shifted, and I got a proper sight of the one lying down: she
was very beautiful, with green eyes and fair hair. I could pic­ture her, not in a mill, but as the good fairy in a pantomime,
and she looked a little like the woman who had come for me.
But as I looked, she moved her head slightly and vomit rolled
from her mouth. The stuff was pink. It spread across the red
cloth of the seat.

'Oh!' said one of the women, 'and her so neat in all her
ways!' She fell to mopping at the vomit with a shawl.

There was a boy on the opposite seat with a dog alongside
him. On his knees was a book:
Pearson's Book of Fun.
I looked
at him for a second. He was staring straight ahead and his
white rosette was bent, as if he'd tried to fight it off. The
woman who'd come for me was in the carriage too, talking in
a low voice to the women around me. She turned to me and
said: 'She was reaching for her box on the luggage rack when
the great jerk came. It was to get a book down for her boy. We
think she's taken a concussion, but she's not too poorly.'

'Let me see,' I said, 'I have an ambulance box.'

At which the woman lying down was sick once more.

She gave me a half-smile as the woman with the shawl began
mopping again. She said something and the woman with the
shawl replied: 'You are
not
holding up the excursion, love.'

'No,' I said, 'there's other things doing that. The engine's
come off the tracks,' I added, speaking directly to the woman
lying down, but she'd closed her eyes by now.

'Just you wait 'til you see that ocean, love,' said the woman
with the shawl. 'Just you wait until you do. Like nothing on
earth, it is. Why, it never
ends
you know.'

She turned to me: 'She's never seen the sea, you know.
She's a widower, and she's always stayed at home with her
boy when we've had excursions in the past. She particularly
wanted this compartment because it had views of the sea.'

Above the seats, there were photochrome pictures of the
Front at Blackpool.

I said, 'I think the boy should climb down ... And the dog.'

'Why?' said another of the women. 'Whatever are you going
to do?'

They all looked at the ambulance box that was in my hand.
The rosette on the bosom of the woman lying down rose and
fell in an uncertain way.

I turned to the lad and said, 'Want to see the engine, mate?
She's a Highflyer, one of Mr Aspinall's . . . quite a beast, you
know.'

The kid just stared back. He had a complicated face, the
sort that can frown without trying. He also had too much
hair, and his coat was too short, and too thick for the weather.

As I looked at the boy, I could hear his mother being sick
for a third time.

'Oh, may God help her,' said the woman with the shawl,
and I knew this was a bad lookout, with God coming into
things.

The woman with the shawl was mopping again. I thought
the boy was about to cry, so I said: 'It's a handsome dog.
What sort is he?'

'A very
good
sort,' said the boy.

I looked at the dog, and all in a moment the sun coming
into the carriage had turned its eyes to glass circles.

'He's an Irish terrier,' I said.

'If you
knew,'
said the boy, 'why did you ask?'

'I wanted to see if
you
knew.'

By turning his face about an inch away from me the boy
made it plain that he thought this a low trick, but he said
nothing.

'Oh, she looks a little brighter now,' the woman with the
shawl was saying.

'My dad had one when I was a young lad,' I said to the boy.
'He was a butcher. All butchers have got dogs.'

'I know two that don't,' said the boy.

'Well
...'I
said.

'I can think of
three
that don't,' said the boy, and he added,
with a look of fury, 'Most butchers
don't
have dogs.'

I turned back towards the woman lying down.

'First thing,' I said. 'Let's give her some air.'

At this, one of the women told the boy to get down, and
with such meaningful force that he obeyed, taking the dog
with him.

'Now’ I said, putting down the ambulance box and the
book, 'let's help the lady sit up a little.'

And I heard a word from the one who'd come to collect me:
'No,' she said. But she said it quietly and I paid her no mind.

I leant forwards and helped the woman into a half-sitting
position. Nobody moved to stop me. Directly I touched her
head, my hand was both wet and dry: blood. There was a
deeper red stain on the red cushion on which she'd been lying
too. There was a sort of bony rumble and the woman with the
shawl had fainted. I turned back to my patient. She opened
her eyes, and the beautiful, surprising green-ness of them
came and went all in a moment. The eyeballs had rolled up
and she was white as paper. No human should ever look like
that.

One of the women shouted: 'May God rest her soul.'

All was confusion after that, with everyone fighting to get
to the woman and to bring her back to life, but it could not be
done.

At the end of this scramble, with the compartment filled
with the sound of screaming, the elderly fairy, the woman
who had come to collect me from the cab and who by rights
ought to have had a happy face, looked at me: 'What is your
name, Mister?'