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.

When they left, he came to tell me about them. Nothing had come back to him during the meeting, but he liked both of them, an intelligent daughter of my age and a wife he found attractive and good company. He thought he might have had a good marriage. He couldn’t imagine he had walked out. He must have been mugged. He was saying goodbye to me, although several meetings were planned, and he wouldn’t be going home for a while. There was no more talk about adopting me, and though he spent most of his time with me when his new family weren’t around, I could feel him separating. He talked about what they had told him of his life, as if trying to fit himself into it. It was an ordinary life, but clearly full of affection. He liked the idea of it more and more.

‘But why did you run away from it?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘No, I’m sure I must have been mugged.’

I gave him up to his life. But we went on playing poker and smoking together until his wife came with a suitcase to take him home. John introduced me to her. She seemed very nice.

Smoking is a love that has never gone wrong, never seen sense. I trust cigarettes. Thirty-seven years after I first practised smoking in front of my bedroom mirror, I sat on the hotel veranda overlooking a lush garden in Savannah late into the singing, sweaty night, smoking and waiting for Saturday when I would start travelling again. I woke, washed and left my elegant bedroom to take breakfast on the front porch so that I could smoke while I drank my coffee and watch the joggers, alone, isolated behind earphones, alone but connected by mobiles, with dogs, with babies in buggies, with lovers or encouraging companions, young, old, fat, thin, black, white, running, puffing or effortlessly, round and round the outside of Forsthye Park across the road. Walking slowly, each step taking account of the saturating heat, I crossed the elegantly gardened public squares surrounded by gothic mansions, past live oak trees dripping with Spanish Moss to Shriner’s bookshop to buy Faulkner to read while I lunched in Clary’s Diner – ‘Smoking section, please’ – on gazpacho or a salt beef sandwich. Then I’d walk, to the river, or just through the squares. Never very far and always slowly. Watch people, take in place names and proud plaques on the older houses claiming not their inhabitants but their age as their fame, stop at a café (non-smoking) for mint tea, sit in a square on an unoccupied bench so I could have a cigarette and read or look at the squirrels – the city is overrun with them. One bench declares that it is in the place of the bench that Tom Hanks sat on in Forrest Gump. The actual bench has been taken away back to Hollywood by the studio. Still tourists come to stare and click their cameras at the substitute. It’s a fake bench, but it’s a fake bench in the right place. Back at the hotel I’d have a shower and then take my tea from the lounge out to the front porch again to smoke and watch the late afternoon joggers doing their programmed circuits round the sultry park whose one-mile-long periphery seemed to be its main civic purpose. I returned to the back veranda on the first floor to watch the light die and my cigarette begin to glow as I drew on it in the dark. One, two, three days. All stillness, all alone in a strange city, not lonely for a second. Never alone with a cigarette in my hand.

And if I thought about anything at all, I wondered with a heat-inspired lassitude what I was doing in this far-off southern city, waiting, pausing between a sea voyage and a train journey, neither of which I had any reason to do other than the theoretical wish to be moving through grand empty spaces.

*   *   *

A gangly young man queued behind me to have the conductor collect his ticket and board the train at Savannah station.

‘Are you familiar with Jacksonville?’ he asked me nervously as we sat next to each other in our allocated seats and he noticed from my ticket that I was connecting at Jacksonville to the Sunset Limited. ‘It’s a ten-hour layover. What will you do all that time?’

‘Wait. There must be something to do in Jacksonville.’

He didn’t look convinced. His name was Troy and he was making the two-hour journey to connect with the Sunset Limited at Jacksonville to get him to Sanderson, Texas from where he had a six-hour drive to the small town where he lived and worked as a teacher. He’d spent a long weekend in Savannah having read Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, a story of gay love and death in the mannered South. It was his first weekend away from home on his own. It was a real adventure, a breaking-away, an acknowledgement (though he didn’t say so explicitly) of his own sexuality. He had wandered about the old city, and spent hours sitting in Madison Square looking at the house where the drama of the book took place. He had even knocked on the door, but no one had answered. He had cruised the gay bars and perhaps made contact with other gay men, but somehow it seemed unlikely. I got the feeling it was quite enough just for now that he had come to this sinful city alone. He was in his mid-twenties. Troy would come to Savannah again, he said, now that he knew he could. The town where he lived was where he had grown up. His father had been a teacher in the same infants school where Troy now taught, and still lived locally, widowed and retired. Troy had had to travel a long way to come out, and he was filled with surprise at himself. Even so, ten hours in Jacksonville on his own alarmed him.

‘Well, we’ll find something to do,’ I comforted, half promising to stick with him.

‘It’s supposed to be a dangerous city.’

‘Why?’

He shrugged, uneasy and awkward. ‘Oh, you know…’

Jacksonville station was a utilitarian box, a few seats, a Coke machine and not much else, except a stationmaster who rather proudly told us there was nothing nearby. It was miles away from the city. So what did people with ten hours on their hands do? He shrugged. There was the Jacksonville Landing, a riverside shopping development, and a bus left for it every fifteen minutes. The answer to what to do in Jacksonville for ten hours, while the Sunset Limited chugged its way up to us from Orlando, was a mall.

‘Hold on, I’m gonna hang out with you guys,’ a husky woman’s twang behind us said.

Bet stepped on the remains of her cigarette with the toe of her black cowboy boot and joined us at the bus stop. We had been adopted by a small, delicately thin woman in her early sixties, neatly packaged in tight denim jeans, a white poplin shirt with a black string tie at the collar, and a smart black jacket. Her face was scored with lines, well lived in but with a recollected prettiness emphasised by big blue eyes starkly outlined with kohl and fringed with spiky mascara’d lashes. Her thin lips were lipsticked pink and her cheeks rouged. Her curly, reddish, light-brown dyed hair was caught in a small ponytail at the nape of her neck. She had a swagger, a consciously boyish way about her that jostled with her physically frail appearance.

The three of us sat on the bus with three or four other people heading into town. During the twenty-minute trip the bus stopped several times to pick up passengers, passing through obviously black suburbs on the way into the centre of Jacksonville. By the time we were nearing the mall, it was almost full and we were the only white people on the bus. I noticed this vaguely, but it seemed no odder than being on a bus going through Brixton. Troy and Bet, however, had become silent and I could feel their tension. Our travelling companions were the usual range of passengers: old, middle-aged, young, working people, noisy teenagers, the usual urban busload, with us as tourists. When we arrived at the Landing, Bet let out a deep sigh of relief. Troy nodded and said, ‘Yeah.’ There were beads of sweat on his forehead from more than the heat.

‘Jeez,’ Bet said, releasing her pent-up breath. She was sweaty too.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘That was pretty scary.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t care to be outnumbered like that. In a strange city.’

‘Me too,’ said Troy.

‘But what was so scary? Outnumbered?’ I insisted, as we walked towards the entrance of the mall.

‘We were the only whites on that bus. This is a black city. People like us … white and strangers … it’s not safe.’ Bet spoke in an undertone.

No one, as far as I could tell, had given us a second look on the bus. But it wasn’t what people did that represented the threat, it was the idea of being a stranger, of being in a white minority that made Bet and Troy deeply uneasy. Blackness was dangerous. We didn’t look substantially richer than most of the people on the bus. So the danger from a black majority would have had to come from our whiteness and their hatred. It was a historical fear. And hysterical. Neither of them lived in inner cities. Troy came from small-town Texas, and Bet lived on and kept to the suburban outskirts of Albuquerque. In their America a bus full of black people was a rumour, a story they’d heard about an America in which they did not, and were pleased not to, live. Nightmare in Jacksonville was a bad dream come true. We might have been travelling on a bus full of aliens, or retributive ghouls, those creatures from movies that represent the fear of being overwhelmed by otherness, so strangely dangerous, so dangerously strange was the situation for them. It was probably the fact of the city that frightened my companions as much as the racial ratio. Neither had ever been to New York, neither would have contemplated it. America might look vast on the map, but for many people it’s as small as their local town, beyond which is an uncharted wilderness inhabited by monsters. Once we’d left the street and entered the air-conditioned, security-policed mall, Bet and Troy relaxed. The shops, restaurants and ambience were familiar or versions of the familiar, and peopled by a much higher proportion of whites. Even so, the danger lurked outside.

‘We’ve got to make sure and catch the bus back to the station before dark. If we get separated, we’ll meet at the entrance at 5 p.m. OK?’ Bet told Troy, who, delighted to find himself under the protection of this tough matron, nodded vigorously and checked his watch.

‘I need a beer,’ Bet announced.

There was a piazza outside by the river, with cobbles, a plashing fountain and half a dozen places to eat. We settled on the least crowded and found a smoking table. Troy didn’t smoke, but he was happy to go along with the requirements of his two older women companions. Bet downed a bottle of beer fast and ordered a second. I sipped mine, more intent on nicotine. Troy ordered southern-fried chicken and fries and tucked in.

‘So where you all going?’ Bet asked.

Troy retold his story, wide-eyed in surprise at himself for his achievement. Bet concurred.

‘Good for you.’

I explained that I was from London, had just been on a freighter and fancied taking the slow route across the continent to see my friends in Phoenix.

Troy was amazed. ‘On your own?’ He’d only just made it to Savannah, he couldn’t begin to imagine crossing an ocean to another continent alone in the company of strangers. I wondered for the first time if it was a bit odd, remembering my sophisticated London friends asking, ‘On your own?’ in much the same tone of voice as Troy.

I said that I was writing about the freighter trip for a British newspaper, and that I liked travelling alone. He shook his head in disbelief. Bet approved.

‘I’m a train freak. I travel the trains whenever I can. I write about them for local newspapers.’

We were bonded. Her parents were both children of Irish immigrants, and she had been a wages clerk in a local government office in Albuquerque for twenty-five years. Now she and her husband were retired on a small pension and living in the same house they had bought thirty-odd years ago. Before that he had been in the army, and she an army wife, travelling the world but living always in the America of the base.

‘What was the boat journey like?’ Bet asked.

I told them about how I’d set off with the idea of writing about nothing happening for three weeks while I crossed the Atlantic only to find tragedy caught up with people anywhere.

Bet nodded grimly. She took a long drag on her cigarette.

So was Bet writing about this train trip, I asked?

‘No, this is a different kind of trip. I was in South Carolina for a funeral. I figured I’d take the train back to give myself time to recover.’ Her mouth turned hard as she spoke. ‘I guess one of the reasons I was so upset by that bus ride was because of what happened.’

Bet had a brother who lived in a small town in South Carolina. When he was young, he’d thought about becoming a monk, but Bet said that wouldn’t have worked out. He was too keen on girls. Either in spite of or because of that, he had never married. He was in his late fifties and owned the town hardware store. He lived alone. ‘Drank some,’ Bet said. ‘But he minded his own business and ran the store.’ He sounded like a sad, ageing and lonely man. One night, a week or so before, he’d closed the shop, had a drink in a bar, and was walking home on his own, when he was shot several times in the back by three kids.

‘Black,’ she said in a stage whisper, after a quick glance at the nearby tables. ‘The youngest was thirteen. When the police picked them up they said they had nothing special against him, they just wanted to know what it felt like to kill someone. They didn’t even know him. He wasn’t anyone to them. They wanted to kill someone and it happened to be my brother. They killed a perfect stranger for kicks. My brother. We weren’t that close, but he was my baby brother. I buried him two days ago. Oh, it makes me so mad. What are kids like now? What the hell’s going on in this country?’

The nightmare of America, although still somewhere else, was closer to Bet than I had imagined. Troy looked aghast.

‘My god, you read about these things, but…’ The house from Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which he’d stared at with such fascination, was as close as he had come to the nightmare. Now he was right here, almost at the centre of the drama, he could reach out and touch it, and it wasn’t just a story set in the past. ‘Oh my god…’

He actually paled at the idea of his proximity to tragedy. Bet shrugged and drank down her beer. Her hand shook as she lit another cigarette.

‘I want to forget it. But that bus ride … it got to me again…’

It didn’t seem appropriate to point out that three black killers in a small town in South Carolina had nothing to do with a busload of people going about their business in Jacksonville. It didn’t even seem decent.

‘I’m going to look round the shops,’ Troy said.

‘You want to shop?’ Bet asked me.

‘Not really.’

We sat on while Troy went back into the mall.

‘You think he’s … you know?’

‘Gay? Certainly. Sounds like it’s difficult being gay where he comes from.’

‘Jesus, small towns. I bet his father doesn’t know. This’ll be the first time he’s been open about it even to himself. I don’t have anything against them. So long as they keep it among themselves. Well, good for him for getting out. He’s such a scared little kid. It must have been a real effort.’

Troy came back and reported on the shops. There wasn’t much, but he’d got talking to a guy at the ice-cream stand. Adventure was coming thick and fast. He thought maybe he’d go back and talk some more. He checked his watch nervously.

‘You won’t leave till agreed. Without me?’

‘Absolutely not.’

‘We’ll come and drag you away, kiddo.’

Troy beamed happily and returned to the mall.

‘Ah,’ crooned Bet. ‘I feel just like his mother watching him go on his first date.’

There were hours still to kill. Bet and I walked down to the riverside.

‘What’s the river?’ I asked.

‘The Jacksonville,’ she told me, as we watched the boats ply up and down. It was wide and flat, a busy river with new developments on both banks. The water was a weird rust-red.

‘Let’s go for a boat ride,’ I suggested. There was a small ferry going back and forth, just a little boat with a sun shade and two benches on either side for about a dozen people. The heat, once we had left the air-conditioned restaurant, was exhausting. ‘It’ll be cooler.’

Bet and I stayed on the ferry for a couple of hours, going from one side to the other, paying the two-dollar fare on each turn. Every so often we got off so that Bet could get another beer.

‘You don’t drink?’ she asked me as I got a diet Coke.

‘Not much,’ I apologised.

‘Well, I do. I drink a lot.’

The afternoon on the river was quite blissful, catching the breeze on the water, going backwards and forwards to nowhere. Bet and I congratulated each other on having found a perfect way to spend our layover.

‘What’s the river called?’ I checked with the captain of our ship on one of our crossings.

‘This is the St John’s.’

‘The Jacksonville?’ I turned to Bet.

‘Hell, I don’t know what the damn river’s called. I was just trying to be helpful.’

We giggled a lot, though we talked about nothing much. Bet was catching the Sunset Limited as far as El Paso.

‘My hero’s picking me up and driving me home. There’s no connection to Albuquerque.’

‘Your hero?’

‘That’s my husband, Jim. My hero. Because he is my hero.’

It sounded fine to me.

‘He didn’t go to the funeral with you?’

‘He had to stay home with Mikey.’

‘Mikey?’

‘Our youngest. He can’t be left alone. He’s brain damaged.’

Mikey was in his late twenties and had just qualified as a policeman when he was in a car wreck which left him in a coma for eight weeks and damaged him enough to be completely dependent on Bet and her hero, who were just reaching retirement age.

‘He’s a sweetie. Got the mental age of a kid. Can’t remember anything from one day to the next. Hell, one moment to the next. He’s got to be watched all the time. He’s always trying to do things he can’t do, and then he gets mad because he remembers he can’t do what he used to do. But he’s so loving. And funny. A real joker. He’s a joy. Our other kids are all grown and have families of their own, but we’ve still got our baby.’

Only the words were sentimental. She spoke sharply in the face of a permanent tragedy. She lived with Mikey as he was now. I liked Bet’s toughness, though I wondered how deep it went.

Back at Jacksonville station we still had hours to kill. We sat on a bench in the open on the platform, where Bet and I could smoke, next to a huge young black woman, in her mid-twenties, with a voice so loud you felt it in your solar plexus. It was the only place to sit, and at first I felt Bet’s uneasiness: she was on her guard at the excessiveness of the woman. She was sprawled lazily on the bench, her great thighs comfortably separated, monitoring the comings and goings of her two tiny children, a boy of six and a girl of three or four, who ran in and out of the station. When they had been out of sight for some internally judged time limit, she would call out their names, and although they were behind a glass wall and closed door at the other side of the station, they came running. She never turned to look at them, her antenna was so highly tuned she knew exactly when the kids needed to be recalled before they got on anyone’s nerves. The children returned instantly and amiably to their mother and hung around her knees for a while, being groomed, hair raked, mouth wiped, while she smoked and warned them not to get themselves dirty, before they went off again, both they and their mother reassured.

‘And don’t you go bothering people, you hear?’

They were dressed smartly, quite formally, while she wore a voluminous red tracksuit and trainers ground down by the weight they carried. The two children were obedient but never frightened or cowed by her great voice and monumental presence.

Bet relaxed and she, Troy and I were entertained during our wait with watching the way the family worked together.

‘Hey, they’re great kids,’ Bet said to the woman.

‘They better had be,’ the woman boomed in mock ferocity. ‘Or they’ll catch it.’

But her pride in the compliment and her smile suggested that they didn’t need to catch it often, and whatever they caught wasn’t anything compared to the love they received. Bet seemed quite at ease now with the woman, who though black, young, loud and outsized, and perhaps somewhat strange and potentially dangerous at first sight, exhibited what to Bet was a proper understanding of social control and correct public behaviour when it came to the children. They were never going to grow up to be disaffected, morally blank wanton killers. We introduced ourselves. Her name was Gail, she was on her way from Virginia Beach, where she lived with her husband, to stay with a girl friend in Los Angeles. She was exhausted, having had the same ten-hour layover as us, but with the added responsibility of keeping two small children entertained. She had spent the afternoon with them at the movies, window-shopping and buying food and drink for the train journey which was going to be the full three days. She got back to the station an hour or so before we had arrived hoping she had worn the kids out enough for them to fall asleep. She could have dropped off at the snap of a finger, but the kids had hours of energy left in them. Like Troy, they were travelling coach, which meant sitting all three nights in reclining seats which were comfortable by airline standards, but still seats in a public coach. Bet and I had sleeping compartments. Travelling by train is pretty cheap if you don’t want a bed and a space to yourself for the night. If you do, the price rises steeply, well beyond the means of a working family with better things to spend their money on than the luxury of a bed on a train. My enjoyment of the day in Jacksonville with my new friends depended on the knowledge that when the train came, I’d have a bed and a door to close. But I was delighted by the way the layover had turned out. Bet and Troy were people I would never have come across travelling any other way, nor by spending time in one place in a hotel, not even staying with friends. I was intrigued by Bet’s contradictions and her bearing, and moved by Troy and his lone efforts to be who he was.

A train passed through without stopping, hooting from a distance to warn anyone off the track which was flush with the platform. It slammed past us like a shiny tornado. Troy watched it come and go.

‘When we were kids we used to hang out at the station. They put pennies on the rail when a train was due. Flattened them like pancakes. You ever done that?’

I hadn’t. Trains had never been so accessible in the middle of London, and the tracks were always recessed. It was an all-American tradition.

‘I never managed to do it,’ Troy said. ‘I always got too scared at the last minute.’

Bet and I gave each other a maternal glance at this confirmation of Troy’s timidity.

‘Well, there’s another train due before ours comes,’ I said. ‘Do it now.’

Troy looked alarmed, and shook his head.

‘It’s OK, I was only kidding.’

Troy became silent. The loudspeaker announced the imminent arrival of the next train, which would be slowing but wasn’t stopping, so we should keep clear of the track. Gail told us how she had missed the train this morning because her husband had overslept and she’d made him drive them hell for leather to the next station in time to catch it.

‘Or he sure as hell would have caught something. But we got there, ’cos he was scared as a kitten,’ she bellowed, laughing with every inch of her body so the bench and all of us shimmied in the failing light. It was quite dark by now. Abruptly, Troy got up and took a few steps forward. Then he stopped dead.

‘You OK?’ Bet called. Usually when he went off to the lavatory or to get a drink he would tell us where he was going. But he didn’t answer, just kept standing with his back to us. In the distance we heard the incoming train whistle. It seemed to startle Troy into a decision, and he began to stride towards the track without looking back.

‘My God, what’s he doing?’ I asked, quite alarmed at the intensity in his walk.

The train whistled again, it was much closer now. Troy put a hand in his pocket.

‘You know what? He’s going to flatten a penny…’ Bet gasped.

The three of us watched in silent admiration as he bent down and put something directly on the nearest rail, stepping back just in time before the train arrived. Then, as the train slowed, he turned round to look at us with an expression of perfect satisfaction on his face. Bet, Gail and I cheered, whooped and clapped Troy’s achievement. The other people on the platform and even in the station looked alarmed at the rowdiness. After the train had passed through, Troy collected his penny from the track and held it aloft as he came back to the bench. He held it out for me. It was now an elongated oval with distorted markings, and bright as a proverbial new penny from the buffing up it had received from the train’s wheels. It was as thin as a sliver of ginger. I was as proud as anything of Troy.

‘Wonderful. Well, done.’

‘Isn’t that great?’

‘Yeah, you did it.’

He smiled hugely. ‘Wow, I was really scared. It was just like being a kid again, my heart was in my mouth walking to the track. But this time, I was determined to do it. It’s to celebrate my weekend. Here,’ he said, holding the penny in the palm of his hand out towards me. ‘It’s for you.’

‘Oh, you must keep it as a souvenir.’

‘No, I want you to have it. It’ll remind you of your day in Jacksonville with Bet and me.’

I was getting sucked in. America was rolling over on its back and waving its legs in the air, offering me its soft sentimental underbelly to rub. And of course, as with some stray cat that I was determined to resist, which I had not the slightest intention of taking in, I was overcome by its charms, won over quite, in spite of my objections to its shameless methods. The Jacksonville Penny rests proudly above the corkboard in my study, a monument to what a person can do when they make their moment come, and a reminder that, every now and then and in the right circumstances, I really do like people.

*   *   *

I had better come clean, and admit that the right circumstance, the essential circumstance, is strangeness. Strangerhood seems to be what I need in order to see people clearly and be touched by them. On the whole, I’d rather have been Jane Goodall. Well, not Jane Goodall exactly, but a Jane Goodall version of me who spent my life in a forest befriending and observing a troop of chimpanzees. In lieu of that I became a writer, which is not so very different, except that the forest and the chimps have to be imagined, and the discomforts are far fewer. I was once reprimanded at a dinner party for saying as much, by someone who said that she suspected people like that actually preferred animals to human beings. I said I could confirm her suspicions, which were certainly true in my case. At the very least, given a choice between a human family and a troop of chimps, I’d take the chimps. I quite understood her air of disapproval, I disapprove of me, myself, but it does seem to be an inescapable fact.

I have not, so far, given excessive rein to my delight in animals. I have three cats which were accumulated somewhat reluctantly at my daughter’s entreaties rather than planned as the beginnings of a home menagerie. I try to keep control of my more questionable desires. Now the daughter has left home and the cats apparently are mine, because according to her, it was I who wanted them all along. She may well be right.

Sometimes, when one of the cats is sitting on my lap, I have one of those rare experiences of existing completely in the present moment, of apprehending the reality of now with a blinding clarity and of being part of something extraordinary. I find myself astonished that a creature of another species, utterly different to me, honours me with its presence and trust by sitting on me and allowing me to stroke it. This mundane domestic moment is as enormous, I feel at such moments, as making contact across a universe with another intelligence. This creature with its own and other consciousness and I with mine can sit in silence and enjoy each other’s presence. It becomes remarkable. I smooth the cat’s fur, feeling his muscles beneath the loose skin, and trace the structure of his skeleton, backbone, shoulder blade, and skull with my massaging fingers, while he sits and purrs with the pleasure of physical contact, encouraging my exploring hands by pressing his head and body against them, turning his face this way and that to receive extra attention here or there. This is a perfectly everyday scene but sometimes it takes my breath away that another living thing has allowed me into its life.

But then I wonder at my wondering. Not that it isn’t marvellous and extraordinary that a cat chooses to keep company with me, but it occurs to me that I might be just as amazed by the company of other human beings who choose to make contact with me across the chasm of separate individual consciousness. Rationally, I know both cats and people have a built-in need for making contact, but that doesn’t make the fact of connection less extraordinary. Yet when I try to transfer that state of awareness to contact with my own kind, I fail. I can’t apply my sense of miraculous contact to people. It’s a flaw, perhaps like being colour-blind, or my own spatial deficiency that prevents me from transferring the information on two-dimensional maps into actual geography. What I experience most with other people is my estrangement from them, the distance of a mutually unique separation that words or touch never quite bridge. Unlike cats, people interfere with my apprehension of reality, they muddy how I can know myself, confuse my understanding of how I am, which is centred around the notion that solitude is a state of perfection, and the simplicity of being alone a desired goal. Of course, I have not been entirely on my own. I have had, and have still, people in my life. People I love and whose company I enjoy. But people complexify things; they place their glass of beer on the table and break up my view of the horizon by including themselves in the landscape. A cat might walk across the table with impunity; a lover putting his beer glass in front of me at a beachside taverna announces his place in my existence and ruptures my uninterrupted vision of perfect nothing.

My problem, if that is how it should be termed, and it probably should, is that I am never lonely on my own, but I often feel estranged when in company. Alone, I might experience all kinds of discomfort, but hardly ever the kind of discomfort that I feel would be improved by company. The discomfort arrives when I’m with other people, and then the urge to find a remedy is strong. The best and most effective remedy I know for such discomfort is to get alone again. The problem is that being alone isn’t a problem. The idea that someone I am with feels he or she knows me throws me into a fretful anxiety about what and who they think they know, and my sense of what I know of myself is threatened. To have one’s knowledge of oneself questioned by connection to another is a perfectly proper human adventure but I have no internal drive to have such adventures. So for me familiarity is difficult, while strangeness is comparatively easy.

One day on the freighter, the reticent Roz commented on the ease with which I got on with the crew. ‘You seem to be able to talk to everyone. And they want to talk to you. You have a way with people.’

I didn’t say: only in the company of strangers who are guaranteed to disappear back into their own lives. There was no call for such an intimate admission.