When You’re Strange

The Sunset Limited was late. The ten-o-six arrival time and the ten thirty-seven departure time passed, the night deepened, and no one was surprised. It was half past midnight before the gleaming aluminium double-decker, more than anything like a giant version of one of those trendy retro toasters, pulled in to Jacksonville station. It had started out at 6.50 p.m. from Orlando, Florida, so it had lost over two hours during the four-and-a-half-hour journey. This was so unremarkable that no one bothered to explain why.

The first thing you learn about rail travel in America is that the trains are late. Regulars vie with one another to win the competition for who has suffered the longest delay. People who travel by train do not have urgent deadlines. Once you purchase your ticket and set foot in a train station, you have given yourself up to Amtrak time, which has a delightfully eccentric relation to US time. The printed schedule that waits at your seat or sleeping compartment becomes a wormhole between the parallel worlds of America and Amtrak. With the schedule, a watch and a calculator you can trace the theoretical journey you will take, estimate where you would be when, and then, as Amtrak reality takes hold, compute and recompute the slippage as the train catches up and loses ground against the official timetabling. You can’t ever be certain when you will arrive at your destination, but you can work out at each stop what your final arrival time would be if nothing further delayed your train. This bears no relation to reality, but it becomes a kind of hobby, a therapy, even, an exercise in holding on to the idea of a world beyond Amtrak. Of course, you have also to take account of the time zones and include in your estimations of arrival the fact that Eastern Time changes to Central Time between Tallahassee and Chipley, Florida, which becomes Mountain Time somewhere en route from Alpine to El Paso, Texas. Two stops later, between Lordsburg, New Mexico, and Benson, Mountain Standard Time, a zone particular to Arizona, comes into force before Pacific Time takes over as you leave Yuma and arrive at Indio, California. Take the officially scheduled time of arrival, remember that an hour has been added for each of these zones (apart from Mountain Standard Time which is a mystery all of its own), note the time of your arrival at the next station, calculate the difference between the time on your watch and the time the schedule claims you will arrive, and you are in a position to make a guess when you will get to your final destination.

This guess is, naturally, meaningless, because who knows what delays will occur in the meantime, but nonetheless the train traveller pores over the timetable and arithmetises away rather as a British traveller in foreign parts might tune in to the World Service to check that the realm she has left behind continues to exist, however improbable it might seem. Inside the time capsule of an Amtrak train, there is a choice of losing yourself entirely to a system outside your control, or trying to keep track of what was once, and will be again, what you call reality. The accomplished long-distance train traveller understands the futility of holding on to a time outside their temporary universe. In transit it doesn’t matter. We are all going somewhere, eventually, but in the meantime, we are going nowhere, our lives confined to a narrow corridor, a long road that has no turning, which rocks and thrums along its predestined route, or sometimes just stops dead in the middle of any place. There is no way out, no taking command of the situation, so all that is left to people in transit with time on their hands is to be where they are for as long as it takes. To be a train passenger in America is to be in an altered state, the fifty-first and the only mobile state in the Union.

Whatever the quirks in the schedule, it would take me from last thing on Saturday night until at the earliest sometime late Monday night, or early Tuesday morning, to reach Tucson, and I would pass through seven states to get there: Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. It was the Atlantic Ocean all over again, but with landscape. Almost the entire width of America was about to scroll past my window for two days and two nights like a real-time travelogue, and I would sit still in my space capsule and watch its passing.

*   *   *

Our friendly foursome parted company when we were directed by the conductors to our designated places. Troy, Gail and the kids disappeared along the platform to their seats in the regular coaches, while Bet and I were pointed in the other direction to the sleeper section, where we climbed aboard the train with the help of a portable yellow stool familiar from all train boardings in movies (which Judy Garland used to leap aboard the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe of The Harvey Girls, which Joseph Cotton climbed on in Shadow of a Doubt to visit his small-town sister and her family while the police were searching for the merry multiple widower), placed on the platform by each conductor to enable us to reach the elevated bottom step. The immense shiny tin can that was the outside of the train was thrilling, but as soon as you were on board, it vanished and you became exclusively an inhabitant of the interior, like a traveller inside the shape-shifting, time-travelling Tardis. Bet and I waved a temporary goodbye as she was sent up the spiral stairs to her compartment and I looked for mine on the lower deck. We planned to meet up again in the morning.

‘Come and get me when you go to breakfast,’ she called, telling me her compartment number. I said I would. ‘Not too early,’ she added from the top of the stairs.

After more than twelve hours in company, I was alone again in a space of my own with a door that closed and a curtain over it to keep curious eyes from invading my privacy. The compartment was the width of a single bed with a few inches to spare. The bed was already made up and ran beneath the length of the window. The bunk above the window was down so that I had somewhere to put my hand luggage while I found my washbag and something to sleep in. A 6-inch-wide cupboard between the bed and the sliding door had a rail and two hangers for the clothes I was wearing. It was as tight a squeeze as could be managed, and as I lay myself down to test the bed, I couldn’t have been happier. I am very content in enclosed spaces, providing they enclose only me. I like cocoons. I also enjoy the fact that they require an order of their own. By the side of the bed, a ledge demanded I keep my washbag and travelling clock on it. My overnight bag had to go in the bottom of the narrow cupboard, with my shoes. My word processor slipped under the bed that would, in the morning when rearranged by the steward, become two facing seats with a fold-down table between. Light switches and the air-conditioning controls were above what would become the seat backs. The window had curtains that could be drawn and fixed against the distraction of stars and the roaming moon in the inky night or prying eyes at station stops in the early hours. Along the corridor there were several lavatories with basins for washing and tooth brushing, as well as two shower rooms for those truly committed to in-train hygiene. It was all perfectly self-evident and self-evidently perfect, that half past midnight in my sleeping compartment on a train in Florida, USA.

The steward knocked and introduced herself as Ashley. Fresh coffee and orange juice would be available from six the next morning at the top of the stairs. Did I want a morning paper? Breakfast was served in the dining car from six-thirty to nine-thirty. Was I comfortable, did I need anything? She was on duty all night, just let her know.

‘Where can I smoke?’

There are various arrangements for smokers, depending on the route. On some routes smoking is entirely prohibited, on others there are designated ‘smoking hours’ in the bar, on most there is a small self-contained smoking compartment next to the bar. The Sunset Limited had the latter. To reach it, I had to go up the stairs to the upper deck, along the adjacent sleeping coach, through two seating coaches and then downstairs in the middle of the third, where the bar was to the left and the door to smoking coach to the right.

‘And there’s nowhere else I can smoke?’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘Not in my room with the air-conditioning turned up full?’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘Not even by the outer door in the middle of the night when no one is around?’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘With the window open?’

Ashley was sympathetic but firm. I didn’t fancy my chances if I crossed her.

‘OK, I know when I’m licked.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ smiled Ashley, acknowledging her absolute authority over sleeping coach M with grace. ‘You have a real good night, now.’

And, reader, I had passed my fiftieth birthday. I was too old to smoke in the lavatory, or directly under the air-conditioner, or in the boiler house. It was not so much the perceived lack of dignity of the surreptitious act, as the sense of the ridiculous should I be found out. The humiliation of being caught is what has kept me relatively docile and law-abiding all these years, because although the desire to transgress rules simply because they exist no longer amounts to a compulsion, I still experience an innate and unresolved dislike of authority in any form. The gall rises automatically. I am always sorely tempted to transgress rules. I do have a problem with virtue. I have never liked virtue much in others or in myself. The idea that I might be being good, doing what I am told, what I am supposed to do, fulfilling expectations, living up to my promise, still has an actual physical effect on me that I have had as far back as I can remember. Rage is the word that covers it. Rage begins behind the sternum (a little above where depression lives), a small tightly wound coil which comes suddenly to life, unfurling, snakelike, extending itself upwards through the chest until it has you by the throat and then springing, striking like a cobra at the head, at the place between the eyes and spreading like a bloodstain over the entire brain, red and hot and blindingly furious. Blinding rage. This is not a rough approximation, a physicalisation of a mental experience, but as precise a description of the reality of rage as it develops as I can muster. Do not imagine the uncoiling spring or the snake’s head strike as metaphor for a feeling. True, there is no organic internal spring or snake, but take their physical effects for the reality I experience. Always have experienced. And never more than in the area of goodness and badness.

My first vivid recollection of this kind of rage was recently confirmed when someone, recognising a description of myself and her in childhood in my book, Skating to Antarctica, called me and arranged a meeting. She had been my friend when we were both very small. We met at a café for the first time since we were ten. I at least was not convinced that it was a very good idea, but thinking about our friendship I recalled something terrible that I had done, and I wanted to apologise. A bit late, forty-five years on, but it was an opportunity to acknowledge one’s misdeeds to another that we don’t usually get.

‘You were sitting in the bedroom of my flat when we were five or six,’ I reminded S. ‘I was ill, with measles I think – I remember there was a red bulb in the light socket because I wasn’t allowed to be in brightness. I asked you to pass me something and when you refused, I flew at you, and bit you on the cheek. I can still picture the tooth marks I made. My mother came in and went berserk. She smacked me and made me apologise.’

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.

‘For Christ’s sake shut up,’ he was muttering grimly. ‘Sit down, stick a cigarette in your stupid face and shut up.’

He was talking to a woman behind him dressed formally in tailored pants and a neat blouse, a scarf wound around her throat and gold jewellery abounding on her wrists and fingers.

‘Don’t talk to me like that,’ she said, but her face and tone had no hint of outrage in them. She spoke as dully as if he had told her the time and she hadn’t wanted to know, as if he were always telling her the time and she always didn’t want to know. Her ‘don’t talk to me like that’ was automatic and weary, said with neither a thought nor an emotion behind it. That was noteworthy, but her voice was even more extraordinary. It sounded like a pneumatic drill on paving stone, a low rasping vibration that was only recognisable as a voice because it spoke words, so mannish it couldn’t have come from a man.

‘I’ll talk to you how I want,’ the man replied, though with as little interest in the conversation as she. ‘Good morning, ladies,’ he said in an altogether more jovial voice with a slight Irish lilt to his lazy American accent, lifting his tumbler to us in greeting.

‘Hi,’ growled the well-dressed woman like a fairground barker.

They sat down opposite us, him with his podgy naked calves ending in deck shoes planted wide apart, her with good court shoes, legs neatly crossed, lighting up with a gold Dunhill lighter.

‘Light one for me,’ he told her.

‘Put your booze down for one second and light your own,’ she monotoned at him.

‘This delightful woman is my wife Virginia,’ he leaned across to me. ‘I am Conal. Glad to make your acquaintance.’

‘Hello,’ I said weakly, stunned at the performance.

‘Oh, hailo,’ he pantomimed in a posh English accent. ‘Virginia, my dear, you must be on your best behaviour. We have a well-bred British lady among us. None of your filthy sailor’s language if you please.’

‘For God’s sake, behave decently,’ Virginia snarled. ‘Please excuse my husband, he’s a pig.’ She got up and came to sit next to me. She was tall and quite stately, but beginning to stoop as if her height and stateliness were becoming burdensome to sustain. There was something unhealthily grey about her carefully made-up face. They were on their way home to Los Angeles, she told Bet and me, sucking hard on her cigarette and lighting another from it before it was halfway smoked. They had been on holiday in Florida and always took the train because she was frightened of flying. Anyway, it gave Conal more time to drink. The Florida trip was so that she could recuperate.

‘I’m sorry about my voice,’ she growled. ‘I’ve just had an operation for cancer of the oesophagus.’ She pointed at her scarf. ‘I’m not supposed to talk at all. They took out what they could. They said I’ll be all right. They think so.’ She fell silent.

‘Telling them all about your cancer, dear heart?’ Conal called. ‘That’s it, don’t keep it to yourself. I’m sure the nice English lady could care less.’

Virginia threw him a contemptuous look and turned back to me. She put one of her heavily beringed hands on mine in a gesture of intimacy and moved her head closer to my face. ‘I don’t want to die,’ she whispered in her sandpapered voice, intense, yet hardly talking to me at all, shocked almost at the sound of her words, but at the same time almost pleading as if entrusting the thought to a stranger might function as some kind of prayer.

‘Then you could try putting out your cigarette, not drinking like a fish in secret, and shutting up,’ hissed Conal, pouring the remains of his whisky down his throat.

An expression of his love, perhaps. Two drunks locked together in life, panicking about the end. Their theatre of hatred sent me retreating into sentimental mode. It was enough for Bet, who whispered ‘Jesus’ under her breath and rose. ‘I’ve got to leave,’ she said. ‘Knock on my door next time you go for a smoke.’

The tall young man with the backwards baseball cap finished his cigarette a moment after Bet had left and loped to the door, nodding a generalised, ‘See ya later.’ He was holding Heidegger’s Being and Time.

‘Hey, baggage,’ called Conal, getting out of his chair and grabbing hold of Virginia’s arm. ‘You’re going to frighten the refined English lady away. She’s too good for the likes of us dirt Irish.’

She shook off his hand, but, growling goodbye to me, followed him out as if he were still holding her.

‘Bye, Conal,’ I said, waving a feeble hand at him as he disappeared through the door.

A moment after everyone had left, Marlboro Girl looked up and smiled shyly at me.

‘Hello,’ I said.

‘God, wasn’t he awful?’

I shook my head in wonderment at the degree of his awfulness. She got up and came to sit next to me. She looked so young, I asked if she was travelling alone. An expression of pure childlike terror crossed her face.

‘I’m eighteen,’ she reassured me. ‘Maddy. I’m going home to LA. I had an accident.’

She was remarkably beautiful in a modern, huge-eyed, extremely wide mouth, gauchely tall and thin-as-a-reed sort of way, like an anorexic fawn. She was Julia Roberts as near as dammit. Her clothes were very expensive schmutters, pale ultra-baggy trousers just hanging on to her barely there hips, showing a waistband of boyish underpants and an expanse of exposed torso below a tight, skimpy T-shirt. She was as consciously and unconsciously waiflike as it was possible to be, but seemed quite at ease with her modish beauty.

‘What happened?’

‘I was in Florida for a fashion shoot,’ she said, looking pleased to start talking. ‘I’m a model.’ Of course she was. ‘They think something’s wrong with my brain.’

Eight days before, someone had opened a door too fast without looking and slammed it into her head. It bled a lot, and she passed out for a second or two. They took her to hospital and she was given a scan. She had a blood clot.

‘A dark patch or something, the doctor said. They sent me back to my hotel to wait a few days to see if it would disappear. It can be nothing, apparently, something that just goes away. But it hasn’t. When they did another scan this morning, they told me it hadn’t improved. It’s got bigger. They said I had to go home for surgery. I’ve spent eight days in my room sitting still, frightened that I’m going to drop dead. That’s pretty crazy-making. It’s better being on the train, with people around, and going home.’

‘Your parents…?’

‘I spoke to them on the phone every day. They’re waiting for me. The doctors didn’t tell me anything. Just that the clot had got bigger and I had to have surgery. They need a course in psychology, those doctors. I’ve been so frightened. They haven’t really told me anything. I don’t know what’s going on, what could happen…’

‘Why the train? It’s a long journey on your own by train.’

‘They said I couldn’t fly. The pressure changes might make the clot, you know … And there wasn’t a sleeping compartment available. It’s slower but safer by train. They told me I mustn’t do anything to raise my blood pressure.’

‘Should you be smoking?’

‘I’ve got to do something. And this has really messed up my trip. I’ve been modelling for six years. This was a really big job. Vogue.’

She shook her head slowly and then fell silent, perhaps at how small the loss of the big opportunity seemed now she spoke of it, compared to the blood clot that had got bigger in her brain.

‘If you want to sleep, you’re welcome to use my compartment.’

She said no, she felt better being with people.

The door opened suddenly and a young man in his early twenties came in. He was black and hip, with even baggier trousers than Maddy’s that concertinaed around his ankles, his head covered with a black beret. He saw Maddy and flung himself down in the seat beside her, offering her a cigarette which she took and he lit with a snap of his see-through Zippo before lighting and dragging hard on one of his own. Maddy perked up a little more at the cool new company.

‘Man,’ he wailed. ‘I can’t believe I gotta be on this train for two nights. But a lot can happen on a train.’

Maddy and I showed a polite interest.

‘I’m a DJ. My man called from LA. He said come on out here, there’s gigs and bitches and sunshine all the time. I think, fuck, I’ll go. I can DJ in LA, NY, any place, you dig? Hey, you a fucking model or something? Wanna beer?’

Maddy looked quite perked up. Suddenly, just a couple of hours after I’d got up, I was limp with exhaustion. I decided I needed a nap.

‘I’m going back to my compartment,’ I said to Maddy and told her where it was if she needed to lie down later.

‘Sure,’ she said, distractedly.

*   *   *

I slept until we pulled in to Pascagoula, Mississippi at around 11 a.m. There was a tap on my door and Bet called out that she was going to the smoking coach. I said I would join her in a minute. DJ and Maddy were still there, smoking, sipping beers and deep in conversation. Gold Dress was back in the same place. Conal was sitting with a tumbler of bourbon and a cigarette, but no Virginia. As well as Bet, there were two or three men I hadn’t seen before, a smiling Mexican, another tall, lanky black man with his baseball cap the right way round, and a middle-aged guy in a cowboy hat with a face that seemed carved out of stone, smoking solitary and quiet.

‘Come over here, English Lady, and be friendly,’ crooned Conal, his voice turning a corner into a sneer. I shrugged and sat next to him. He put an arm round me. I removed it.

‘My people are from Kerry. You know Ireland?’

‘Not really.’

‘You don’t say much, do you? A proper icy English lady with your grey hair and crossed legs. They teach you that at finishing school, did they? Do you ever uncross your legs?’

‘Let it go, Conal.’

‘I just want to know…’

‘You never will.’

We were sitting at the far end of the coach by a window. Bet in the corner, then me and Conal. There was a slight lurch, barely noticeable, but enough to make Conal have to hold on to his tumbler to stop the bourbon from spilling. A second later, Bet, looking out of the window, made a low whistle.

‘Well, I hope we didn’t do that.’

I glanced out in time to see the wreck of an upturned car on the side of the track.

‘Mmm,’ I said, thinking like Bet how, though we hadn’t done it, some train obviously had at one time. Then I saw that the cloud which for a second I thought was disturbed dust, rising from the wrecked car because of the turbulence of the passing train, was actually smoke. At the same time, the train was decelerating sharply.

‘Oh my god, we did do it,’ I gasped.

‘Hell,’ complained Conal, whose bourbon slopped over the side of his glass. ‘They’ve no respect for good drink.’

Bet put her hand over her mouth, and whispered, ‘We hit that car.’

‘Shit,’ said the stone-carved man, getting up to peer out of our window. ‘Stupid bastards. They tried to beat the train. Happens all the time in these godforsaken places.’

The others gathered round the window, but we were too far past the wreck to see it. They headed out of the coach to the corridor and opened the door. Conal, Bet and I stayed where we were, Bet and I, at least, too stunned to move. The commentary came from the people by the door, and we saw our guard walking back along the track with another conductor, talking into a handset.

‘Kids, probably,’ one of the observers said. ‘Playing chicken with a train. That only ends one way. The train’s always gonna win.’

‘Hit a truck last week out of Chicago. Same thing. Truck driver and his passenger were killed outright.’

Other people added their reminiscences of rail kills they’d experienced. Everyone seemed to have one, and the tones of voice were matter-of-fact. It was all part of train travel in America, apparently. But at least one life had been extinguished just seconds before by our train without us feeling anything more than a mild jolt. It turned out to be three lives.

‘Hell,’ someone said. ‘This is going to make us even later. They have to test the wheel balances before we can move again. Every damn wheel. It can take hours. Jesus, we’re going to be stuck in this hole half the day, and we’re already over two hours late.’

Some voices mumbled agreement, the killing already forgotten in the inconvenience.

Our conductor came back.

‘Sorry, folks. We hit a car. We going to be a while sorting this out. Two kids were killed outright. One in the back’s alive. Pretty badly hurt. We’re waiting for the ambulance and we can’t leave until they find the local coroner to pronounce death. We’re checking the train for damage while we’re waiting.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s a real mess. You all stay where you are. The one in the back is screaming something awful. But there’s nothing anyone can do until they’re cut out of the wreck.’

So we waited in the dusty heat on the outskirts of some nameless town between Pascagoula and Biloxi, Mississippi, for a coroner to be found, for the wheels to be tapped, for our journey to recommence. We were instructed over the loudspeaker system not to leave the train and asked if there was a doctor or paramedic on board for one of the chefs who had fallen hard when the train came to a halt and possibly broken his arm. How much you felt the jolt of the car or of the emergency stop depended on where you were on the train. We were towards the rear, so felt very little, because the first two carriages absorbed the force (and, of course, the car and its passengers), but near to the engine, people knew immediately that something had been hit. For us in the smoking carriage, it had been little more than a few spilled drops of bourbon and a flash of smoking metal, as the car was struck at nearly full speed and somersaulted to the side of the track. It was hard to take in. The upturned automobile I had seen might have been there for weeks or months even – it was probably an ancient vehicle already – so settled had it looked in its final resting place. It was now already quite a way behind the train, so we couldn’t hear any sounds coming from it. The train had been speeding along on the flat, past one after another one-horse town with unprotected train tracks at their outer boundaries. To our right was the sweaty marshy landscape of the South and a bit of a dirt road that led perhaps to the next place; to our left, small groups of clapboard houses and unkempt rubbish-strewn backyards could be glimpsed between the trees. This was poor country. The train whistle had blown two or three times as it approached each residential area to warn of its coming. There were no level crossings, no traffic lights in these backwoods places. The single dirt road out of town ran across the tracks, an oncoming train blew its whistle, that was all. Although you could see it coming for a long way through the flat landscape, it is notoriously hard for someone watching it come to judge the speed and distance of a moving train, but who in a place like this would be in such a hurry that they would try to beat it? Someone suicidally, pointlessly impatient, someone whose judgement was hopelessly impaired by drink or drugs, or someone terminally bored. One thing everyone knew was that in a race between a car and a train, the train always won. At least everyone on the train knew that. Maybe the three people in the car didn’t know. Or they were young enough to believe that nothing like death could ever happen to them, that taking risks always had the desired outcome. Perhaps they wanted to make the train and its passengers pay attention at whatever cost. But the one person left alive in the car was screaming. The worst thing in the world had happened and for no good reason.

The coroner came quickly. He was in the bar nearby, at the back end of town. The two people in the front were pronounced dead, the third cut out and driven off in the ambulance (‘Nah, she’s had it,’ the conductor confided), and the wheel balances were checked in record time, so that despite the worst fears of my fellow travellers, we started to pull away from the sight of the accident just three quarters of an hour after we first struck the car. People expressed relief that the delay wasn’t as great as they had feared.

‘What about the driver?’ I asked my conductor, Ashley, when I got back to my compartment.

She was very distressed, she had gone out to the car. ‘It’s so terrible when that happens. If you’re crew, you feel, I don’t know, sort of responsible. I know we couldn’t do anything, but … I heard that poor girl screaming.’ She shook her head hopelessly. The driver was back driving the train. There wasn’t anyone who could take over until we got to New Orleans four hours or more away. Amtrak didn’t carry relief drivers.

‘You mean he just got back in and started up?’

‘He had to. He’s real upset. It kills drivers when that happens, but he has to carry on until we get to New Orleans. He’ll be OK. But you notice we’re going pretty slow.’

We were. There was no more hurtling through the bayous that day. Not that he had been going too fast, not that, even at our present speed, if we hit a car, anyone in it would survive. But you could feel his distress and caution in the movement of the train. And you could hear it. For the rest of the day, the whistle blew, not just once or twice as we approached a road crossing or a station, but from a mile or more away, long sad wails that resonated back through the stifling air to my compartment – the train is coming, the train is coming, for god’s sake don’t get in its way – the most mournful sound you could imagine, much more than was necessary, as if the driver were keening. Hear that lonesome whistle blow. And it blew and blew for as long as the driver drove the train. It called out like a banshee; while I lay in my bunk, watching the sky, it howled the miles away.

We got to New Orleans in the late afternoon where we stopped for an hour as scheduled to change crew and take on water. Bet and I walked through the chaotic station and stood outside smoking. We didn’t talk about what had happened, but Bet was morose.

‘Have you slept?’ I asked her.

‘No, I was just lying down. Couldn’t sleep.’

I nodded. When she finished her cigarette she asked a porter where the nearest liquor store was and headed off in the direction he indicated.

‘Supplies,’ she said. ‘Want anything?’

‘Shall I come?’

‘No, I’ll just walk. See you back on the train. Kids, Jesus.’ She left, head down, marching towards a new bottle of gin.