Too Much to Ask

To travel any but the shortest distance by train is bizarre to most people in the States. Why take three days to cross the country when you can do it in three hours by plane? A glossy US fashion magazine thought it so quaint that they commissioned me to write an article describing the journey I was about to make. When I returned to the UK, I emailed the copy and then got a call from the features editor. It was fine, but could I cut some of the stuff about the train and my fellow travellers and put in more landscape and scenery? I did, of course, see a lot of landscape. I watched America go by inch by inch, just as I had obsessively examined the passing ocean on the freighter, staring for hours at a time out of the observation cars or the window of my sleeping compartments. My suitcase was weighted down with the books I had brought to read, but I didn’t complete a single chapter while on the move because I couldn’t keep my eyes on a page of print when every kind of the most extreme and extraordinary, changing and changeless landscape was rolling past my eyes. I often wished the train were slower so that I could examine the bayous, the rivers, the grasslands, the mountains and deserts in more detail. But it became clear to me that the passage of landscape before my eyes was in itself a particular way of viewing the country. At any rate, a particular way of being in the country. Everyone knows the pleasure, even on the shortest train journeys, of staring out at the world that goes by beyond the viewer’s control, to the accompaniment of the rhythm of the wheels on the rails and the swaying of the carriage. Hypnotic, the landscape forever approaching and passing, skimming along, the eye snatching a detail, noticing a cloud, a bizarre building, a blasted tree, a startled creature, but not being able to hold on to it as the view rolls by. Our thought processes work more slowly than the speed of a train or the eye. There’s as much relief as frustration in that. Thoughts can exist independently of what the eye is taking in, they can be allowed to take care of themselves. Alternatively, you can read a book or open your laptop and ignore the whole thing while you get from A to B. I, at any rate, couldn’t tear myself away from the passing parade of America, and I let my thoughts do what they would. Passive watching is an intense and private activity. It leaves a residue. The eyes look and take in the fleeting images, absorb them into the processor inside the head which transforms them into a memory: the recollection of a split second gone by which will become a memory of something seen yesterday, a week ago, a decade past, somewhere back in the mists of time. The flashing pictures remain, but they settle in beside other related images. And most of the related images are in Technicolor and wide-screen. Was that image, that memory, from the train journey or a movie you once saw? American landscape is known, like famous speeches in Shakespeare’s plays or phrases in the King James Bible are known. They are already read, so that when you come across them in their proper context, they jar and falsify the moment. In the auditorium, Macbeth’s nihilism and despair are weakened as you overtake the actor in his assessment of life as full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. On the page In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth slips by in a far too familiar rhythm, so you forget to wonder: what beginning? Created from what? Why? And as you actually pass through the boundless grasslands of Montana, or deserts of Arizona and New Mexico, a thousand Westerns complete with their wide-open background scores rush to clog the mind. The Big Country, The Searchers, Stagecoach, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, Wagon Train, Red River and, of course, Blazing Saddles. John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Ward Bond, James Stewart, Montgomery Clift stride or lope into view and people the empty vista outside the window, filling it with human endeavour. There’s a stored image for every inch of the landscape passing by. Gunslingers on galloping horses kick up the dust getting out of town fast ahead of the posse, cowboys bed down by the campfire, guns at the ready beneath the saddle under their head, ranchers locked in sullen, greedy conflict with immigrant farmers plan violent evictions, wagon trains full of pilgrims in search of a new life and the odd run-out-of-town whore circle as the Indians charge down from the hills to attack the intruders, the lonely hero walks away westward from the danger of being included in the civil society he has helped to bring about. Each image comes complete with its own landscape. Every landscape comes with its own set of meaningful images, seen already in darkened cinemas and on TV. We know the landscape of America, even if we have never been there. We’ve inhabited it, even if we’ve never set foot outside London, Delhi or Helsinki. We’ve been a part of it, even if we’ve never been further west than the movie house at the local mall in a New England suburb, or if we spend our days shopping till we drop on Fifth Avenue.

But what do I do with all this view? I can attempt to describe what the eye catches, and try to nail down the strobing images in an approximation of words. So. The sky is vast and vacuously blue, the empty deserts at sunset threaten the spirit with their scrubby grey-green dying light, the rivers wind from bare trickles in parched earth to thunderous rushing torrents, the canyons dismay and dizzy you as you stare down into them and try to make out the bottom, the mountains loom in anthropomorphic shapes of things seen best in dreams, the grasslands and wheatfields wave like an endless syrupy ocean tickled into motion by the breeze. You know, you’ve seen it in the movies. What is remarkable, what is strange about passing through America, peering at it through the screen of the train window, is that everything is familiar. It is much more as if America is passing through you, what you are, what you’ve known. Sitting there looking out at the landscape is like having a dye injected so that the tendrils of memory in the brain light up and trace the private history of your mind. As I sit and watch the weird rock formations, sagebrush, cactus and Joshua trees of the desert land go by, the cinema in Tottenham Court Road where I saw my first shoot-outs jumps vividly into my present. The smell and plush of the carpet underfoot comes flooding back to me, the tense anticipation as the lights begin to fade, the solid dark presence of my father sitting beside me, the blue smoke from his cigarette curling up into the bright beam on its way to the screen which will light up with dreams and places and complexities of human joy and trouble that my striving six-year-old brain can barely imagine, let alone make sense of. That’s what the landscape of America is like.

On sunny days in mid-fifties London, I went to Russell Square and played cowboys and Indians on a landscaped hill with a tarmacked path cut through it like a perfect canyon. When it rained, I went with my friend – S, I expect – to the Egyptian Gallery of the British Museum and we played my favourite game. Surrounded by monumental stone fragments – an icy-smooth foot bigger than a bathtub, a marbled sinewy arm extending to a closed fist as broad as the front of a bus – S and I would sit on a bench intended for weary or thoughtful culture seekers and pretend in loud voices and almost certainly execrable accents to be American children on holiday – no, vacation. With our voluminous knowledge based on the films and TV we had seen, we discussed the incredibly luxurious and automated homes we had left behind, what we thought of little England (cute, very cute), the contents of our wardrobes (bobby socks, real denim jeans) and the shimmering stars who dropped in regularly for tea. We could think of nothing more glamorous to be, nowhere more extraordinary and magical to persuade people we were from, while genuine American tourists – more crisp and matronly than glamorous – passed by smiling at our unconvincing twang and improbable fantasies. That is what the landscape of America is like: being a child in Fifties London.

But there is another way of looking at the journey. The fact is, I am not in any of the places the train passes through, I am on the train. That is my place, that is the real landscape. The extraordinary thing is not the difficulty of knowing what I am experiencing as I look through the window, but that my real landscape is filled with strangers who are thrown together by the accident of travel and who, because of being human, or American, or not English, or not me, are busily making themselves known to each other before they go their separate ways. Just because we all happen to be going in the same direction, an us has been formed. And I discover that however much I wish to justify my private daydreaming and pleasurable alienation with thoughts of the difficulty of having the experience of what has been already experienced, this random collection of strangers has become a group to which I belong, here and now and unavoidably. And I discover I don’t want to avoid participating in this group. Not that I could if I want to smoke or eat or drink or see the landscape through the big picture windows in the viewing car. But I am enjoying being a stranger among strangers on a train making contact with other strangers. Of course, that movie has been made, too. The American dream or nightmare journey is as known as the dream landscape. But the people on the train are undeniably of my present as well as echoing my past. The bonding is fast. We do begin to look suspiciously at newcomers entering the smoking coach after the previous stop, feeling all the more like an us as these new strangers arrive. But soon they are regulars, assimilated, and they look askance at the next strangers to our group who enter our space. We are evidently a group to the outside world. People who do not smoke look curiously through the glass of the door as they pass by. Enviously even. One woman braves the fug, opens the door, coughs, blinks and says to us all, ‘I wish I smoked. You all look as if you’re having so much fun.’ We know we are a temporary agglomeration, a group whose elements are always leaving, arriving, re-forming, but I have the oddest, and rarest, sense of belonging in this smoking coach and more generally on the train. A kind of clarity of what kind of creature I might be that usually eludes me. I see myself reflected in the company of these people who know nothing about me, and who will never think about me again once they have got back to their real lives. I sense I am seen. It may be true (it feels true to me) that only by being alone can I experience myself fully, but being a stranger on a train – at least for a little while – gives me a view of myself here and now, and of others, now and then, which, sitting solitary and staring, I rarely achieve.

But that too feels somehow familiar. Life on a train, in a circumscribed space with a group of others all with our lives on hold, has a correspondence to my past. The last time I experienced the enclosed life was in Ward 6 at the Maudsley Hospital in 1968. The way of the train is also the way of the boarding school, the convent, the prison and the psychiatric hospital. I was at a boarding school for a while, but my time on Ward 6 (nine months), the North Wing of St Pancras a year or so earlier (four months), the Lady Chichester Hospital in Hove when I was fourteen (five months), are my most marked experiences of life in a dedicated community, and what life on board the MV Christiane or the Sunset Limited immediately refers me back to are those intense and rare periods of camaraderie. A sense of belonging has always evaded me. For as long as I can remember I have felt myself to be not quite in the right spot, not exactly where I should be, in the wrong place, uneasy where I am, but uncertain where it is I ought to be. Even as a small child, I would prowl around looking for a spot that was mine. Usually, it was at the far end of somewhere, in a corner, behind something. A small, enclosed place with as many walls as possible to prevent surprises, and really no room for anyone else. People were more difficult. I hung around other people’s families, or interrogated strangers to see if I felt all right with them. Occasionally I did, but the invitation to go home with and belong to them was never forthcoming. Finally, I concluded that the answer on my own was as near to being where I belong as I can muster. On a good day, it is still precisely the right location. I suppose I might trace the unease of place back to childhood and early adolescence when, for a period, I was sent to a variety of refuges, a children’s home and to various families who took me in for periods to keep me out of the way of my mother. They were all kind and generous people, offering me asylum, but although it felt like ingratitude, the feeling of not belonging was perfectly reasonable. I was a stranger, even if I was glad enough not to be with my trying parents. And I have never quite shaken off the feeling that wherever it is I ought to be (as a child it should have been home, but I knew it wasn’t, and therefore it was somewhere, but nowhere I knew), it isn’t here. For a child the oddness of other homes or of other families’ ways of doing things constitutes wrongness. The smells, the cooking, the patterns of daily life differ from home, and home, whether it’s happy or not, is what you know, your only given place in the world. Later you may relinquish the pull towards the familiar, but the generalised desire for belonging remains, transferred in many people, I suppose, to a solid sense of themselves, so that they are not too threatened by other people and places. For me, other people and places induce what engineers call noise, and interfere with my ability to feel that I am myself, that, indeed, I have any self. But at home, in my own flat with my own mother and father, I still searched for the right spot, so the unease is internal. However, it turns out that there are places of hiatus where I can exist with other people for a while, places I can put myself in that provide me with a way of being me without having to be exclusively on my own.

Phyllis was officially catatonic. I knew nothing about her life before she was admitted to Ward 6. What you saw was what you got with Phyllis. She was thin and somewhere in her late thirties. She was just there when I arrived at Ward 6, without a history that anyone bothered to tell me about. A fixture, with long, lank mousy-brown hair which the nurses sometimes drew into a limp hanging tail to keep it out of her eyes during the day when she sat slumped over, her back humped, her lean, expressionless face staring down at the hands in her lap. She spent all day in the chair beside the door between the television section of the dayroom and the dormitory where ten of us slept in open-fronted cubicles, five-a-side, head to head. Every morning Phyllis was pulled from under her blankets and sat on her bed, hunched like a rag doll, while the nurses manipulated her arms and legs out of a shapeless hospital nightie and into a shapeless cardigan, skirt, thick tights and carpet slippers, all dun-coloured. They washed her face and tied back her hair (though it always loosened and drooped into a semi-concealing swathe over her face) and, pronouncing her ready for the day, began to manoeuvre her towards the dayroom. A firm hand at the centre of her back once she was standing would get her to shuffle one or two reluctant steps forward to make a slow incurious progress from her bed at the far end of the dormitory to the chair beside the door.

‘Morning, Phyllis,’ her neighbours would say if they were feeling sociable as she came to a halt at the end of their bed, waiting for the next push. On a good day Phyllis might grunt without lifting her gaze from the lino floor. It was never clear whether it was a grunt of greeting or just a grunt. Those of us who were younger were differently angry and were likely still to be in bed, waiting to be turfed out by the ward sister after several warnings.

‘Get up, get up. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re young, you’re healthy. Nothing but bone-idle lazy, that’s all that’s the matter with you.’

The covers would be torn back, and we would hiss and curse and sit up just long enough to grab them back and bury ourselves underneath them. No different from being teenagers lying abed while our overworked parents despaired of us. Of course, we were on medication, had diagnoses, slashed ourselves, overdosed (as well as overdozed), cried inconsolably, hit out, acted out, over-ate, under-ate, withdrew, were injected, electroconvulsed, tranquillised, but essentially the three or four members of our dormitory in our early twenties were waging the same war against the grown-up world as any other right-thinking adolescent in 1968. Almost certainly, each of us had missed or muffed the opportunity to do so at a more appropriate time in regular circumstances. The game was played vigorously and to rules.

‘All right, all right,’ Sister Marshall would lilt at us, loud and West Indian, with a dismissive wave of the arms. ‘Do what you want. You will anyway.’ Her cry calls down the years. Every mother giving up, or wishing she could. ‘Do what you want. You will anyway.’ And Sister Winniki, an eastern European dynamo, frantically active, a haunting presence still, would tell us there was nothing wrong with us. We weren’t ill like really sick people. ‘Look at poor Phyllis. Every morning she gets up and dressed. She doesn’t lie in bed all day. Why can’t you be more like poor Phyllis? Up, up, up.’

Nobody really tried to make everyday sense of anything on Ward 6. Our everydays were different. The idea that it would be better to be like Phyllis was never challenged because its absurdity was evident, even to Sister Winniki. It was like a play we acted out, a necessary, even enjoyable pantomime that had its own rules and satisfactions, as well probably for the nursing staff as us. Their job was to make us get up and confront the day, the real world; our job was to huddle and hide from it in various combinations of fear, resentment and disgust. Phyllis just kept still. But sometimes, when one of us had a particularly noisy, riotous run-in with the staff, if you looked carefully, sidelong so she couldn’t see you were looking, you might catch the catatonic, immobilised Phyllis enjoying life. For an instant, a smile would flit over her face, a wicked irrepressible grin that came and went in a second. This happened particularly when we claimed Phyllis as our commander-in-chief.

‘Phyllis says I shouldn’t go to occupational therapy. She says it’s a waste of fucking time … Phyllis wants to watch this programme and she insists on it being this loud; she likes satire. Well, of course that’s what she wants to listen to, she’s a big fan of Hendrix, who do you think put the record on in the first place … Phyllis doesn’t think my skirt is too short … Phyllis thinks knickers are a waste of the earth’s resources … Phyllis says I shouldn’t take my medication, I should smoke, refuse to go to ECT, spit out my lunch because it tastes like shit, chuck this vase of flowers just past your ear … Oh yeah? Just try and make me, Phyllis’ll have something to say about it. Watch out or I’ll set Phyllis on you … You don’t want to mess with Phyllis, when she gets angry, anything can happen…’

And if you were lucky, as well as exasperating the nursing staff, you might get one of those covert grins from Phyllis, just a flash from behind the fallen curtain of hair. We firmly believed that Phyllis enjoyed playing her subversive part in the war between order and chaos. She was, after all, one of us. And so to my surprise was I.

Us were the people in our dormitory. Some willing and vigorous, some, like Phyllis, co-opted. There was another dormitory, our mirror image at the far end of the dayroom. They were not-us. They listened to John Denver and wore knee-length pleated skirts and believed in God, and that passive obedience would overcome their emotional difficulties; we listened to Hendrix and Jefferson Airplane, took drugs and demonstrated whenever possible against authority in the belief that our rage was righteous and that if we were disturbed it was only to be expected, having been born into a deeply disturbing world. I can only imagine that the staff must deliberately have organised this bipolar arrangement, it seemed so satisfyingly clear-cut. Bad girls to the left, good to the right. Most virtuous of all was Velda, in her twenties, and as smugly good as good can get. She went to church every Sunday, battled for the use of the solitary record player to clean the blasphemous air with Cliff Richard, wore her hair and clothes neat and tidy and expressed her god-sent disapproval of me and my fellow bad girls at every opportunity. In return for all this virtue she had been visited with a strange and terrible affliction. Just the sort of thing that God is known to gift to his chosen ones. She had woken up one morning ready to brush her teeth and rush off to the office only to discover she could no longer walk in the way that most people walked. Velda now lurched wildly through the world, flinging one leg out sideways and then roughly righting herself to move forward by flinging the other out at the opposite extreme angle. It was a strangely circular motion that generally got her to where she wanted to go, but very slowly and often by endangering anyone in her path. If you didn’t see Velda coming in time, you were liable to get violently kicked in the shins or take a nasty poke in the ribs. In spite of months of medical investigation, no physical cause had been found for her ailment, and so, to her respectable distress, she was a patient along with the depraved and depressed in the Maudsley. On the whole, our end of the dormitory was unsympathetic. We decided it was just a way of taking up more space in the world and of threatening the rest of us, who walked in straight lines, with being knocked off our course. We didn’t do sympathy much. Whether we took our tone from Sisters Winniki and Marshall or they from us, I can’t say. Then the American evangelist Billy Graham came to town to save Swinging London from the wrath of God. He held mass meetings at Earl’s Court where true believers, after being harangued on the horrors of hell, could queue up for the touch of Billy’s wonder-working hands to absolve and cure them of whatever ailed them. To hoots of derision from the bad side of Ward 6, Velda went one evening in her Sunday finery, and after the sermon got in the queue. The next morning when she got out of bed she was cured, and with tears of joy and hallelujahs, she walked as straight a path into the dayroom as her God might wish. The devil was silenced, Cliff sang out in triumph and the shrinks discharged her as, if not cured, then symptom-free – though some of us murmured that miraculous interventions were as good a reason as any we could think of for incarceration in a mental institution. But Velda packed her bags with a superior smile on her face, in the sure and certain knowledge that the Lord was on her side. I dare say these days she tells her grandchildren about the miracle cure. I wonder if Phyllis has any grandchildren.

Also not-us was anyone from outside the world of the hospital. Visitors, our relatives and friends and concerned, baffled boyfriends, were not welcome. They intruded our other lives into our retreat. They dropped in on the ward from having got on with it, worked, worried, coped with all the things we couldn’t or wouldn’t cope with. We felt the pressure of the real world arrive with them through the ward door like a cold blow. We were vaguely aware that this life apart couldn’t go on for ever. Indeed, the hospital had a two-year time limit for inpatients. Either we had to go back to the world eventually, or become permanently hospitalised in one of those places they used to frighten us with. ‘If you don’t make more effort, we’ll send you to St Bernard’s…’ The temptation to become a basket case in a vast uncaring mental institution was very great when faced with leaving and dealing with the world in which our friends and relatives lived. Or there were the revolvers. People who left and returned, had done for years, were greeted as old friends when they came into the ward and settled back into its routine and safety with sighs of relief. Somehow, this seemed even more terrible than permanent incarceration, more terrible even than freedom. In any case, our visitors presented us with too much reality, and they did not know our codes. Sometimes it seemed they were speaking another language, in careful, patronising words about things which we had no concern for. Indeed, we had no real concern for them. We cared passionately about each other, the members of our dormitory were our family, the people we knew from outside were strangers, crude and devoid of understanding, too fearful for our psyches to speak as brutally as we spoke to each other or to know how to deal with our panic or depression or what to do when we cut our wrists. When one of us had a crisis, the staff would ask another patient to help out, because we knew the language, what the deal was. For those who didn’t, who were nervous with us or took the wrong tone (too soft and gentle, too harsh and condemnatory), we had nothing but contempt. We sighed with relief when the visitors, ours or others’, left us to get on with our proper existence. And for me, an only child taught by my mother that our troubles had at any cost to be kept from others, this was a most uncommon experience.

*   *   *

On the Sunset Limited, thirty years later, as evening closed in, we set off from New Orleans, Louisiana, towards Texas, and on my next visit to the smoking coach after the hour’s stopover, I discovered that we had acquired some new members. A heated conversation on the relative merits of pixies and leprechauns was in full flood as I entered. A man of about fifty but looking older, the ghost of good-looking on his wrecked features, in open sandals, slacks and a short-sleeved shirt that had seen cleaner days, was sitting with his upper body propped against the end wall, a roll-up drooping dangerously from his fingers, a can of beer aslant in his other hand. His head seemed too heavy to be held quite up; his body was slumped as if at any moment it might lose its muscle tone entirely and slide to the floor like an empty bundle of clothes. Still, there was something about him, a bid for dignity perhaps, that lifted him out of the category of a regular drunken bum, and he was holding the attention of the entire coach as he spoke with slow alcohol-sodden care, waving his beer can airily about in order to emphasise the absolute reliability of what he was saying.

‘Don’t you talk to me about pixies, sir. Everyone knows the pixies don’t exist. They are just for children and the simple-minded. Leprechauns, however, very much exist. There is one here right now. Just there in front of my right foot. Do you see? I have known many of them. I am perfectly familiar with leprechauns. The leprechauns are my friends. And if you think that they dress in green and wear ridiculous caps, then you’re a fool who has never really seen the little people. They are quite normally dressed, but a lot smaller than we are. And they are Irish. As I am. Which is why they choose to accompany me and tell me things I need to know. You may claim to be Irish, but only the true Irishman can see the leprechaun. Can you see him?’

His accent veered towards English, overlaid with a slight American twang. As pure comedy he was W.C. Fields, in the current genre he was that drunken doctor who always sits in the corner seat of the stagecoach. He was explaining the reality of the invisible world with exaggerated patience to Conal, who was sitting next to Virginia several places down the carriage. I sat down in a vacant seat opposite the troubling couple. Conal sipped his whisky and smiled scornfully.

‘Yah – you don’t know what you’re talking about, you drunken old fool. I’m an Irishman through and through. I know my leprechauns, by God I do, and they’re very good friends with the pixies. And there are no pixies or leprechauns on this train because pixies and leprechauns don’t travel by train. They teleport. You’re completely drunk, you are drunk as a horse’s arse and you know sweet fanny adams about the little people. You are a fraud. Where do you claim to be from in Ireland, my man?’

‘I do not respond to abusive attacks from the coarse and ill-educated,’ the other man said very grandly and with an even stronger English accent. ‘I was born in Ireland but educated at Cambridge University although I was unable, because of financial constraints beyond my control, to complete my degree. I have been used to a better quality of debate and a far better class of person. The sort of person and debate, sir, that you could not even imagine. You merely show up your own ignorance and rough origins by such poorly phrased linguistic attacks. You would be regarded as very uncouth in decent society. I shall speak to you no more. And the leprechaun doesn’t think highly of you, either. He’s just said so, in so many words.’

He closed his eyes to show that the conversation was over. There were whoops and calls of ‘Right on, man’, ‘Yeah, you tell him’, ‘Bravo’, and ‘Let’s hear it for the leprechauns’ from others in the carriage, who were convulsed with laughter at the intensity of our new man’s conviction on the subject of pixies and leprechauns, as well as delighted by Conal’s evident annoyance at being dismissed as a social inferior. He was cross, though he had obviously been baiting the drunken leprechaun man for some time. He muttered to Virginia about penniless drunks not knowing their place, and then having received a look of disgust from his wife, he lurched from his seat to nudge his semi-conscious rival with his elbow.

‘Here, my boy, us Irish mustn’t hold grudges. Have a drink.’

He held the bourbon towards the new man who wrenched his eyes slightly open at the disturbance. Seeing the glass, he lifted his head to squint a clearer view and reached for it with the hand that was still holding the smouldering stub of a cigarette.

‘That’s very decent of you. Let bygones be bygones. I’ll drink to that.’

A man who was also new to me, sitting across the aisle, leaned forward and spoke quietly to Conal. ‘Don’t give him any more to drink. He’s had enough. Bourbon’ll finish him off.’

‘None of your business. This is between me and my new friend. Man to man. Have a good drink … what’s your name?’

‘Raymond. Thank you, perhaps I misjudged you.’ He took the beaker and had a long swig, then coughed convulsively for a moment. ‘My word that was good. You know your liquor. Very kind. Very kind indeed.’

He coughed a little more and then sank back into semi-consciousness. The man opposite, middle-aged but smoothly handsome and gleaming like a second-string actor in a US television series, wearing neatly hemmed and pressed denims and white socks with his loafers, reached towards Raymond and took the dead cigarette stub from his fingers. Beside him were two boys in their early teens playing with a computerised fishing game, both with lank, long blond hair and blue eyes, dressed in ripped jeans and T-shirts. They had to be brothers, if not twins, and since they were too young to be legal smokers were presumably there because their father, who they called Chuck, was keeping an eye on them. They were snorting with laughter to each other at the old drunk.

‘It’s not funny, guys,’ Chuck said, and then spoke to Conal. ‘Hey man, don’t give him any more to drink. The conductor only let him on the train if I promised to keep an eye on him. He’s going to turn him off the train if he sees him drinking.’

‘What are you, his father?’ sneered Conal.

The man shrugged. ‘Why get him kicked off the train? Let him sleep it off.’

The discussion was interrupted by the entrance of a boy who, having slid back the door, stood for a moment and looked carefully at everyone in the carriage. He was about fifteen, short and stocky with high, tight shoulders, a mop of thick, jet-black hair and the broad features of a Mexican Indian. But something wasn’t right with him. He breathed in shallow pants as if catching the air was difficult. He was immaculately neat and clean in a checked shirt, ironed jeans and new-looking trainers, his longish hair carefully brushed back off his face, but his eyes, too wide, overtly staring at people, and with something bland and unknowing in them, suggested a young child trying to take in the world, not an adolescent in full possession of it.

‘Hi,’ he said in a deep, slow voice.

People in the smoking coach acknowledged him.

‘Bit young to smoke, aren’t you?’ Conal asked.

The boy took a couple of steps into the carriage, and stopped.

‘Hi,’ he said again. ‘I’m John.’

The voice was too slow, the speech slightly slurred, the general invitation to greet him too open. There was something wrong with John. Born wrong or an accident. He walked up to a young woman in her mid-twenties with blonde hair and stood squarely in front of her.

‘Hi, I’m John.’ He waited.

‘Hi John,’ she said with a smile that showed she understood John had difficulty.

John grinned hugely and stuck out his hand. He shook hands with the girl vigorously.

‘John, I’m John. Hi.’

He went around the coach, stood in front of each of us, introduced himself, waited for each of us to say ‘Hi, John’, and then chuckled happily as he shook our hands. He returned to the first girl.

‘Hi, I’m John.’

‘I know,’ she said with a jokey impatience, but his eyes widened and his nodding face urged her to play her part. ‘OK. Hi, John.’ She held out her hand again to have it shaken.

John took the hand and held on to it.

‘Can I hear you breathe?’

‘What?’

‘Can I listen to you breathe? Can I? Please.’

The girl looked mystified. John moved up close to her so that their knees touched, and bent down to rest the side of his face and one ear against her chest between her left breast and shoulder. She stiffened.

‘Breathe. Please breathe. Like this,’ John pleaded, and panted exaggeratedly to show her what to do. ‘Like that. Do it. Please. Do it.’

The girl threw a look of helpless what-the-hell around the coach and panted a little, while we smiled at the comedy and at her willingness to do something for the unfortunate John. What the hell?

‘Don’t stop. More. Breathe harder,’ said John hunched over.

She panted a little more and then stopped, taking John gently by the shoulders and lifting his face off her chest.

‘That’s enough.’

John stood up and grinned hugely.

‘Thank you. Thank you.’

Then it was my turn. John rested his head against my chest and I did a bit of panting. Virginia and a couple of other women declined to perform, but gently, with smiles. Bet agreed and did a quick pant. Then one of the men, all of whom had been looking on amazed, as much by our letting John put his head on our breast and panting for him as by the oddness of John’s wishes, said, ‘OK, that’s enough, John. I expect your parents are wondering where you are.’ The children’s hour was up.

John grinned his understanding that his period with the grown-ups was over. All children know they are on borrowed time when adults indulge them. ‘OK. Bye,’ he called amiably and waved to everyone at the door.

‘Bye, John,’ we called.

We laughed a little nervously when he left and speculated about what was the matter with him. The men were uncertain.

‘Do you think it’s all right, him going around like that? Doing that stuff? Where are his parents?’

‘Having a well-earned break, probably,’ I said. ‘He’s harmless. It must feel good and safe having his ear against someone’s heart and hearing their breath.’ One of my cats does much the same thing.

‘Yeah,’ said Conal. ‘I bet. Can I have a go, Miss British?’

‘Shut your mouth,’ Virginia rasped. ‘You’re the wrong kind of retard.’

A small spark of hatred lit up between them and then died.

The women in the coach, even those who had refused to join in John’s game, conceded the weirdness of John’s public behaviour but recognised his infantile condition and his unconcealed needs. The men were disturbed and suspicious. Poor John, stopped in his emotional and intellectual tracks by something, was getting away with behaviour that they were forbidden. He was somehow cheating, and like older brothers no longer permitted the breast, they were battling with and failing to conceal their jealousy. Maybe, even, he was perfectly all right, but putting it on to get what he wanted: a cunning perve. Men knew about these things. And if he was a genuine retard, then who knew what he would do if he lost control. Desire without control was a terrifying prospect. Men knew about these things.

‘Well,’ Raymond’s defender, Chuck, said. ‘He ought to be supervised. You never know with these people.’

There were masculine murmurs of agreement, even from the younger men. The women glanced at each other knowingly, I thought, and let it go. I assumed that what the women knew was not just about male anxiety, but also what I had noticed when John had his head on my chest and I looked down into the well between us: that he accompanied the pleasurable smile at the sound and vibration of another’s breath and heartbeat with rapid light movements of his hand on his penis under his jeans. It was more like vague flapping at himself than considered stroking. If it was masturbation, it was half-hearted, not designed to achieve an orgasm, almost an absent-minded accompaniment to his delight. He hadn’t touched any part of anyone’s body apart from with his cheek and ear. I presumed the other women had seen this, as I had, and concluded that it would be better if the men didn’t know.

*   *   *

Raymond slept through most of this, but the next time I looked at him, he was staring hard at me.

‘You’re an English lady,’ he told me. ‘Speak to me in your lovely English accent. Come over here and talk to me.’

I sat next to him and told him where I came from in London.

‘Yes, yes, I know Hampstead. The Heath. Ah, you remind me of my past. I had a happy childhood. Now…’

There was a rambling story of a privileged childhood in Ireland and England, of ex-wives, of money made and lost through carelessness and alimony, of a daughter who would have nothing to do with him, who had refused to take his call when he had phoned. He couldn’t remember what he had been doing in New Orleans. He lived in Los Angeles. Chuck, sitting opposite with the two boys, had found him (he himself had no recollection of anything until he was on the train) unconscious on the floor of the station concourse. People had stepped around him fastidiously, taking him for a drunken sleeping bum. In fact, although he was paralytic with drink, he had actually been knocked unconscious and mugged by some kids who had taken all his cash but who, in their hurry to get away in the busy station, had left his gold chain bracelet, expensive watch, credit cards and a return ticket for the Sunset Limited to LA. Thus he was penniless but his credit was good so he could buy drinks and cigarettes from the guy in the bar. Chuck had poured some coffee down him, taken him to the train after Raymond had refused to go to hospital or have anything to do with the cops, and battled with the conductor to allow Raymond to make the journey. Eventually, the conductor agreed on condition that Chuck remained responsible for him and with the proviso that if he caught Raymond drinking he would be thrown off the train at the next station. Chuck, who was listening to Raymond’s slurred and halting story, raised his eyebrows in a what-are-you-going-to-do gesture when I looked at him.

‘It’s the booze, you see,’ Raymond sighed, explaining everything. ‘But when you’ve lost everything because of the booze, you only have the booze left to comfort you.’

We were in a different genre now. Raymond was one of those remorseful, hopeless, sentimental drunks that Hollywood did so well. James Mason in A Star is Born, Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend. A bit of a gent who had had something to lose and who had lost it, all except the ghost of a bit of class, real or imagined. I have a soft spot for remorseful, hopeless, sentimental drunks. Raymond had trailed off and was asleep. I took the can of beer from his hand and put it on the table.

‘I can’t make him eat anything,’ Chuck said. ‘I got the bartender to refuse to sell him any more drink, but people keep buying him beer.’

The two boys had left the carriage to get sandwiches.

‘It’s good of you to look out for him. And you’ve got your sons.’

He shook his head and laughed a bit. ‘They’re not mine. They latched on to me at the station. Going to LA, back to their mother. They were in trouble with the police, just petty theft, kids’ stuff. I got the police to put them in my care until we get to LA. They’re good kids. Just a bit messed up.’

Chuck was an all-purpose Samaritan. Maybe he travelled the rails doing good wherever it was needed. Perhaps the boys were the ones who had rolled Raymond, and Chuck had scooped the whole damn lot of them into his care. Or maybe Chuck was a railroad Fagin who still had his eyes on Raymond’s bracelet and watch. Or the Pied Piper. Anything was possible. Everything was a raw component in a story that had not been finalised. We were on a train, out of the way of our lives, any of us could tell any story we liked. We were, for the time being, just the story we told.

‘Do you live in LA?’

‘No. Just making a visit.’ He had no more to say about himself. The two boys came back carrying cans. ‘Hey, guys, I said no beer. You’re underage.’

They moaned a little but handed the cans over. It seemed they wanted to be in someone’s charge.

Raymond snorted awake. He turned to look at me, and sighed. More like Alice’s White Knight than James Mason. He sloped towards me, partly leaning against my shoulder for support, partly speaking confidentially close to my ear. He stroked my upper arm gently with his fingertips.

‘You’ve got such silky skin. And the way you speak. If only I had met you a few years ago. I could have offered you … You could have loved me and I’d never have got into this mess…’

‘Oh, I don’t think so, Raymond. I’m not very good at relationships.’

I wasn’t keen on the notion that it was only an accident of timing that had kept us apart; not for either of us. I didn’t think it would help him much to have something else to mourn, and I didn’t like his appropriation of my alternative past. That story was mine to play with. I resented the twinge of guilt I had to suppress at not having turned up in time to prevent Raymond sliding into alcoholism. Still, I spoke gently, because what else do hopeless drunks have but their recollection of pasts that never happened? He wasn’t listening. He’d shifted to a present which suddenly had become to him as tractable as his own history.

‘Come and live with me in North Beach. I’ve got enough money to take care of you. You wouldn’t want for anything, I swear. I’d stop drinking if I had you, I know I would. I wouldn’t need to drink, I’d have everything I wanted. I’d cherish you. We’d be so good together. There’s culture in LA. We’d go to the theatre and read books, and walk by the sea. What do you say? I mean it. We could be happy.’

I didn’t answer. I didn’t think it was my place. He wasn’t really talking to me. He was merely musing on how life was supposed to have turned out. It was all very simple, how could it have gone so complicatedly wrong? He gazed into the how-it-might-have-been.

‘All I want … all I want is to wake up in the morning next to you still asleep with your leg flung over my thigh. Is that too much to ask?’ he murmured, and then turned to me directly. ‘To feel the weight of your sweet silken leg stretched out across my thigh when I wake in the morning. Is that too much to ask?’

Well, yes, it was. I was quite sorry that it was, because as wishes go it didn’t seem unreasonable, but it was, in fact, too much to ask, or at any rate more than was going to happen. My leg had other places to be. My own plans and daydreams didn’t reside in Long Beach with a recovering alcoholic. But for a fleeting second it didn’t seem too much to ask as I caught the image of our two bodies, entangled from the exertions of love, drifted into sleep … The morning sun glows through the bedroom curtains and Raymond wakes, filled with a new life and a love that cleared away the mess to reveal quiet joy and contentment. I wake, we smile, sip coffee. Beneath his sloughed off self-destructive shell I’ve discovered layers of knowledge and being that astonish me with their understanding and grace. His drunken intuition was right. We are matched: companions and lovers, settled into a gentle, long-term alliance, two halves come together, at last easy. We kiss good morning and there are no more battles to be fought. Is it really too much to ask? Couldn’t an act of will, a leap of faith, make it possible? Why not an accident of timing not missed and regretted, but presented and taken right now in the present? Why shouldn’t people make good things happen? Just ordinary good things, love, contentment. Is that too much to ask? Why not take a random encounter and a sentimental fantasy and make them into a fact? Say yes to Raymond. Follow the fleeting whim. Take a risk, turn life upside-down and head for North Beach. What’s to stop this story from being the one where she gets on a train, takes an unnecessary journey, meets a drunk and turns it deliberately into a happily-ever-after? Make it happen. Why shouldn’t happiness (whatever that is) be made to happen; we make unhappiness happen all the time? It’s true I’m not unhappy in my real life, that it is very close to precisely how I want it to be. And it’s true that the rescue fantasies of drunks are invariably built on sand. I also know that the chances of my being content with anyone who wears a gold bracelet are very slim. But to what extent is what someone else needs more important than what I want? What if I could be just plain useful to Raymond’s life? What do I ever do for other people? Isn’t my life good because I please myself? Why should I have it so easy? Why not make the effort to be with someone who is light years from my heart and mind? Who the hell do I think I am?

Here’s the thing about sentimentality and fatally flawed wishful thinking: it’s virulently contagious. And that capacity we have for making unhappiness happen is powerful enough to take the apparent form of its own opposite. For just a moment it’s as if I’ve never lived, never had any experience of anything. The fantasy solution of living together with my memoryless friend from St Pancras Hospital was not even the first. The first was a daydream of living alone with my father – it would all be all right if only my mother wasn’t around, if only my stepmother could be got rid of. It came disastrously true when he left my stepmother and got a flat for just him and me when I was thirteen. Hopeless. Domestic battles, his romances and/or financial plans (often one and the same thing, it turned out) ruined by my presence, my jealousy, my disappointment, his insensitivity, his disappointment. He was back with my stepmother in just weeks, and I was a defeated prisoner living sullenly in the attic until I got my social worker to send me back to boarding school. I know what happens when dreams come true. Then the memoryless man. And then there was Ralph: me twenty, him mid-fifties and far gone in alcoholism, also at St Pancras after John had gone back to his life. Hours and hours in a side room persuading him not to go out and get a drink. So much talking. Then he’d disappear and come back days later shaking and frail, full of determination not to let me down. In love with me, his young angel of sobriety. Eventually, they threw him out. Too many lapses. His liver was shot. His case was medical. A few weeks later I got a suicide note, apologetic, lyrical with love and loss. What might have been. But the actual suicide was several months later when he was found dead in bed with a case of empty whisky bottles beneath. That was Ralph. He used to come with me to Biba’s and watch me buy feather boas and minidresses. His father had been a Georgian poet. And there was H from the French Pub – wistful but very married with kids. And Michael, wildly, enchantingly drunk while he was young, always forgiven, so unreliable that if he said he would meet you at the cinema, you could be sure it was OK to stay in and wash your hair. Then older, still charming, but with the shakes, all the opportunities that his talent and charm had brought long gone in his conscious preference for alcohol. Then Michael was dead and we had a rousing funeral with hundreds of old friends and fellow drinkers, singing the Internationale and ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’, and celebrating the story that in his final moments he had raised a ghostly glass and said, ‘Fuck the begrudgers.’ A veritable Don Giovanni of the Gin. Somehow a string of hopeless drunks and wishful thinkers who conceived of me as a route back to life or included me in passing on their journey in the other direction. And I was moved by their intentions, their hopelessness, their existential necessity, their self-destructiveness. Each time, I forgot for a moment what I already knew. Maybe this could work, I’d think, as I never thought about sober, reliable lovers. Though the fact that none of them could ever work must have been the real attraction. Eventually, I stopped doing that, because, perhaps, I no longer needed other people’s desperate daydreams to animate my life. Or finally, experience had told.

But there I was on the train in America, and for just a second, as if I’d been born yesterday, Raymond’s unrealisable fantasies sounded plausible. Or the rhythm of the metal wheels on the track made them sound so. Or my immersion in the sentimental narrative of an American train journey had given cliché credibility. And why not? Redemption stories and romance are woven into the fabric of the human mind, just like the other apparently tougher tales of solitude and loss, disappointment and hardship never recompensed. The fiction of dirty realism is no less sentimental and clichéd than the romantic fantasy of dreams come true. In America every story has happily-ever-after either as an ending or a howling opposition. The template story is known, how it should be, and all the stories told on the journey are exemplars of closeness or distance from the true tale. Is that solely American? Probably not, but the dream of meeting the stranger who is the completing half, the compensating force, takes a decidedly dystopian, misanthropic turn in the hands of the Englishman who made Strangers on a Train. Hitchcock’s stranger is the devil, a nightmare, a punishment for not keeping oneself safely contained while in transit between realities. In England we don’t talk to strangers, we sit solitary and silent on our journeys. In the movie, Bruno Anthony is Guy Haines’s retribution for allowing his island self to be breached. Hitchcock, the archetypal Englishman, knows through and through that you must never talk to strangers. He issued a gleeful warning to America about the terrible repercussions of openness and optimism. But still they talk to strangers on the train and hope that they will transform their lives into all the good things a life should be. And still the strangers listen, lulled into imaginative compliance by their temporary rootlessness and the dreamy syncopation of the rails.

‘So, what do you think?’ Raymond asked me, determined to be taken seriously. He didn’t even know my name.

‘Get sober, and we can think about it,’ I said, knowing I was asking too much, at least, hoping so.

‘I’ll stop drinking and get everything straight in North Beach. Then I’ll call you, and you can come out for a visit. How’s that?’

‘OK. When you’ve been sober for two or three months, I’ll come and see you.’

What the fuck am I talking about? What if, unlike all the other drunks I’ve known, he actually goes and stays on the wagon? Well, then, I’ll visit him in LA. Why not? In any case, as soon as I leave the train, he’ll forget he ever met me, or I’ll slip into all the other misty opportunities that were not taken. Still, I’m sorry I said it. But Raymond is asleep or unconscious.

When I looked up, Chuck was watching me.

‘Appealing, kind of, isn’t it?’ he said, looking steadily at me as if he were underlining the thoughts and unease that had been going through my mind. I was beginning to get the feeling that Chuck might turn out to be the authorial voice of our journey. I nodded, guilty and embarrassed that I had been so obvious, at any rate, that I had been so observed.

‘You get sucked into daydreams.’

‘Yeah. Best not though, it won’t help him.’

*   *   *

Three meals a day came as part of the fare if you had a sleeping compartment. People in seats had to pay to eat in the restaurant car, bought snacks at the bar, or came equipped with food for the journey. Bet and I usually ate together in the restaurant car, on the lower floor just before the smoking coach. We had breakfast, lunch and dinner, seated by the dining steward opposite paired strangers or married couples. You don’t get to choose where you sit in the confines of a train dining car. It was a realm of its own, where the maître d’ was both host and not so very benevolent dictator. Waiters zipped up and down the narrow corridor between the tables, more or less immune to the swaying of the car. Speed, efficiency and an indefinable mix of banter and contempt was what you got with the restaurant car staff. Throughput was the thing. You booked a time to eat and waited until your party’s name was called, then you’d better get there quick if you didn’t want to feel the honed edge of the dining steward’s tongue. The food – ‘regional specialities freshly prepared by on-board chefs’ – was awful: beef or chicken in a variety of glutinous sauces (Cajun around New Orleans, spicy chilli in New Mexico, but all generally brownish), microwave reheated to within an inch of its miserable life; salad as an automatic starter – shards of flagging iceberg lettuce and a choice of distressing dressings in plastic pouches. Breakfast was the best, at least bringing to mind the wonders of sausage and hash browns at a diner, though currently as we were in the South it was necessary to avoid at all costs the ‘grits’ option. Some claimed that quality had nothing to do with avoiding the grits (something dangerously like wallpaper paste mixed with, well, grit) served on the train, that one should avoid them at all times and anywhere. But the quantities were vast and those of us who had sleeping accommodation had paid for it, so we chomped through our portions. In any case, the mealtime calls served the same function as they do in hospital, breaking up, pacing out the day. It was part of our institutionalised behaviour.

Dinner over, in the dark of Sunday night, we slipped through the South, past invisible bayous and alligators, and into Texas. I put out my final cigarette around midnight somewhere between Lafayette and Lake Charles and said goodnight to my fellow smokers, only the younger of whom were still up. Chuck had persuaded Raymond to return to his seat in front of him and the boys. Bet had gone to bed straight after dinner. She had been subdued all day, ever since the accident, about which people spoke only in undertones to newcomers to indicate what kind of a journey it had been so far. Maddy and her DJ friend had popped in and out of the smoking coach all day, but apart from a generalised greeting, were locked onto each other, talking close and urgently. Conal wandered in now and then with his bourbon for a quick cigarette and a sneer while Virginia slept in their extra first-class double sleeping compartment. George with his baseball cap on backwards had finished with Heidegger and was now on to Viktor Frankl, but it was face down on his lap as he listened to (and I eavesdropped on) another young black guy, Chris, no more than twenty-five, I guessed, who sat next to him. He was telling George that he was travelling with his wife and two young kids from New York to California to see his family who had never met his children. ‘I got unpaid leave from work. My folks haven’t seen my kids, and who knows when I’ll be able to visit them again?’ He couldn’t stay talking long, because he had to get back to his wife. He’d tried to persuade her to come and sit in the smoking coach, but she couldn’t take the fumes.

‘I told her there were some real interesting people in here. But she hates the smell of smoke, and anyway, she’s shy.’

Chris had a worried look about him. When he’d booked the train, he told George, he hadn’t realised how expensive food was on board. He’d run out of money and there were two more days and a night to go before they arrived. Last night he’d got the dining-room steward to let him do some washing-up in return for a meal for himself, his wife and the kids. This evening he was helping the sleeping-car stewards clean up. But he was anxious about the following night. Still, he figured he could persuade someone on board to let him work for food.

‘Maybe, if I get lucky, they’ll let me drive the train,’ he laughed.

George listened sympathetically. Two young women came in who I’d never seen before, and I would have remembered. They weren’t more than teenagers, very young black women, and they were dressed to kill, standing out as madly, idiotically glamorous among the other, comfortably dressed travellers. They wore skin-tight jeans, high heels, midriff-revealing tops with extra holes cut out to expose as much flesh as possible, glossy make-up and gold jewellery wherever there was space. They spoke to each other intensely, as if they had urgent information to convey, though clearly it was a strategy for appearing not to notice that they were being noticed, which was their main objective. They chattered and chirruped their way into the smoking coach without acknowledging anyone else but found seats for themselves next to a young white man who had come in not long before and sat on the other side of George. He went on high alert as they arrived, sitting to attention as the girls settled themselves, wriggling and giggling, down. He tried to stay cool for a second and a half before he gave up all appearances of resistance and nervously offered them each a cigarette. Soon they were all deep in conversation and getting on like a house on fire. George looked across at me and nudged Chris. He raised his hand to his throat, stroking it once or twice. Their cigarettes finished, the girls teetered noisily to the door, followed sheepishly by the young man.

‘Hey man, later. We’re heading for the bar,’ he said to George, a mixture of pride and wonderment on his face. George gave him a warning look, but the trio were gone. He shook his head in amused pity.

‘Did you see?’ he said to me, and then turned to Chris.

‘See what?’ I said. Chris looked baffled.

George put his hand up to his throat again. ‘He’s going to get a shock. Did you catch their Adam’s apples?’

I had been too entertained by their self-excited mannerisms and gaudy seduction technique, and Chris was absorbed in his own problems.

‘They were really good, but there’s nothing you can do about the Adam’s apple. They were guys. Take a look next time they come in.’

And, of course, it would have explained everything. I waited for a while, but they didn’t return to the smoking coach.

It was my last full night on the train. I spent a long time lying awake in my bunk, not wanting to miss the stars passing and the rhythm of train rocking me. Bet, Raymond, Chris, Conal, Virginia, Maddy, the TVs and John rolled around in my mind, a handful of human stories, only a tiny sample of the available lives that the train happened to be transporting along with me. As I lay there, all the separate stories, all those minds and hearts took on volume and mass, occupying the empty space in my compartment, squeezing out the very air before spreading to the corridor outside and the entire train. I breathed in the stories, known and unknown, and felt their weight bearing down on me. When I checked on the inky sky outside there was all the empty space of the universe, black and endless, stars and vacancy, on and on in silence for ever, while on the speeding train the crush of human consciousness, of existence, all of it, crammed in, congealed into a sticky writhing narrative, telling itself repeatedly, and saying everything and nothing. I tried to make it feel normal – the longest main street in the USA – but it remained overwhelming, catastrophic. Finally I slept to avoid the panic that was rising.

*   *   *

After breakfast, the smoking coach was almost full with all our regulars deep in urgent conversation and a few newcomers. Bet was already there, she had skipped eating.

‘Jesus, Jenny, you’ll never guess…’

I was barely through the door. She was scandalised.

‘That John. He’s just been in—’

‘Yeah,’ said Conal. ‘Your sweet little innocent kid.’

‘He was tricking us…’

‘You women…’ Conal snorted in disgust.

‘He was, you know, touching himself … down there, you know … all the time … while we let him put his head on our—’

‘Masturbating?’ I said. ‘Yes, I know. Well, sort of masturbating.’

‘You knew?’ the blonde girl said, astonished.

‘You knew, you mean, you knew what he was up to?’ Bet said.

‘He wasn’t up to anything. He was just getting his pleasure confused, or not confused.’

‘He was being sexually abusive,’ Chuck said, with a look of grave anger on his face.

‘Yeah,’ Gail bellowed. ‘Getting off on it.’

‘Well, yes. Didn’t you know?’

Everyone was horrified, though there was a degree of amazement rather than wrath in the women’s outrage. The men were solemn and vengeful. Their worst fears had been confirmed. Poor retarded John had been getting sexual pleasure right there in front of our eyes, and getting away with it. Had he been laughing at them all along?

‘He’s a pervert. We ought to tell the conductor to get the police at the next stop.’

‘What kind of parents are they, letting him wander round on his own?’

‘He could be dangerous. What if he molests kids on the train? We’ve got to report him.’

‘He should be restrained.’

‘He ought to be thrown off the train.’

‘But he’s not dangerous,’ I said. ‘He’s just not sophisticated enough to keep things separate. He makes associations that we don’t allow ourselves to make.’

‘He’s got no control. There are little kids, Gail’s kids, on the train. How do you know he’s going to stop at touching himself?’

Of course, I didn’t. Bet was intrigued by my lack of alarm, she was half convinced I was right, but it occurred to me now that I might be wrong. Maybe he could spiral out of control. What about kids? What made me so sure John was a harmless innocent? Yet I was sure, and I was more disturbed by the growing anger in the smoking coach which threatened to turn nasty. A mob was in the making.

‘Why don’t we ask the conductor to check with his parents or whoever he’s with, and see what they say? He’s very well cared for, they don’t seem to neglect him. They must think he’s safe if they let him wander about on his own.’

‘Or they don’t know, and don’t want to know.’

Maybe they were right. Who knew what people were capable of? Who knew how much people chose not to know? Anyway, John had been expelled from the smoking coach. Chuck had sent him out and told him not to come back, that he was too young to be there (his blond charges notwithstanding) and that he had to stay with his folks. John had taken fright, according to Bet, who wasn’t sure whether this was a good thing or not. No one mentioned him to the conductor as he scowled in on us during his regular inspection. He walked through the coach and examined the contents of the garbage bin on the end wall, wrinkling his nose in disgust at the butt ends but not letting that stop him checking for empty beer cans. I looked around at the irate passengers, but no one seemed inclined to say anything to the conductor about John.

Later that morning the train came to a halt in the middle of nowhere, between San Antonio and Del Rio. Nothing happened for half an hour and then a message came over the tannoy that we were held up on the single track by a goods train that had broken down in front of us. It had been decided that we would shunt the train ahead to the nearest branch line. It would be quicker, we were told, than waiting for it to be repaired. This way only another hour or so would be added to the three we had already lost. Groans of disbelief went up in the smoking coach, and doubtless throughout the train. Mostly we were laughing and wondering what else this journey would have to offer.

The moment of connection between our engine and the goods train turned out to be more than the slight bump we were warned of over the tannoy. We lurched hard as we made contact with the train in front. People were thrown back, in some cases off their chairs. Raymond, in a drunken haze all morning, slid almost gracefully to the floor and seemed comfortable enough where he landed. But Bet, being tiny and tense, was thrown hard against the wall. She yelled in pain, and when we had got straight again, she held her shoulder and winced.

‘I think I’ve dislocated my goddammed shoulder. Jesus, what else is going to happen? How bad can a journey get? It’s not enough why I had to take this trip at all, but we ran over three people and now we’re shunting trains. I can’t take any more of this.’

After a moment’s silence, there was a message on the tannoy again.

‘Is there a doctor on the train? Would anyone with any medical training please see the conductor.’

‘Jesus. Jesus Christ,’ Bet moaned.

Eventually we got going again, at a snail’s pace, and pushed the train in front for about an hour before a somewhat gentler lurch indicated that we had disconnected from it and could get back on course. By this time, the drinks were flowing and a party was in full swing. We were quite fearless about the conductor now. Just let him try to chuck us off this sorry apology for a train journey. There was a mood of reckless abandon, of lost souls trapped on a drifting ship, of simply waiting for the next disaster to occur. I went down to the bar to get Bet and me a couple of cans of Manhattans (yes, really, cans). Chris was sitting at one of the tables with his wife and kids having Cokes. Without thinking about it much, I fished in my bag and went up to their table, saying hello to his wife and the little ones. Then I squatted down beside Chris. I hadn’t rehearsed anything.

‘Hi. Will you do me a favour?’

Chris looked alarmed, glanced at his wife, but didn’t look at me. ‘What?’

‘For dinner this evening,’ I said, sliding the scrunched up fifty-dollar bill I’d taken out of my bag across the table and under his hand. I’ve rarely felt so inept. It wasn’t a big deal. I had intended not to make it a big deal, but I hadn’t the faintest idea how to give someone money. He hadn’t asked for any, I had enough not to make it painful. I just wanted to shift some of my surplus to Chris, who could use it. I didn’t want to offend him. I didn’t see it as a handout, more as a redistribution, and not particularly princely at that. But I had been so awkward. Will you do me a favour? Apologetic, surreptitious and alarming. I had somehow embarrassed all of us. Chris’s wife signalled him to take the money. He looked at me coldly.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘And?’

I didn’t understand. ‘Nothing.’

He continued to look at me as if waiting for something.

‘Sorry…’ I tailed off, and fled back to the smoking coach, minus the Manhattans. It didn’t matter. Conal had arrived and was freely distributing his bourbon. It had got quite rowdy. People were telling tales of their worst train journeys and great historical Amtrak disasters. Even Maddy and her DJ dragged themselves apart from each other to contribute.

‘There was that train wreck a few years back on this route. Back South. You remember reading about it? This paddle-boat had hit the rail bridge but they didn’t report it. The bridge must have been weakened or something, because part of it collapsed when the train crossed. All the coaches went down into the swamp. But it was a pretty low bridge – I guess that’s why the paddleboat went into it. Amazingly, not many people were hurt. They got out of the coaches and were swimming in the water. Some people drowned, I guess, but most were OK. But it was an alligator swamp. The train wreck didn’t kill them, the alligators did. Came from every direction, and you know they can’t chew. They get hold of a bit of you and just twist themselves round and round until the victim’s drowned. Anyway, most of them survived the train wreck but were killed by alligators.’

There was a wide-eyed silence for a moment. Then Bet wailed.

‘Oh Jesus…’

‘Yeah,’ DJ said. ‘And they don’t just eat them there and then. Alligators don’t like fresh meat, I heard. They keep them until they’re well—’

‘Shut up,’ Maddy squealed. And the coach collapsed into gales of ghoulish, whooping laughter. Even Raymond had peeked out of his semi-coma and grinned hugely at being part of the fun.

Chris came into the smoking coach and sat down next to me. ‘I’m sorry about earlier.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m sorry I was suspicious. When you said do me a favour, I thought you were giving me money … to do something. I thought there was something you wanted.’

‘Oh Christ. I’m sorry, that was my fault. It was a stupid thing to say.’

‘No, it was me. I didn’t believe people did that kind of thing without wanting something.’

‘It isn’t anything. It wasn’t much. I had it. When you’ve got a spare fifty, you can give it back to someone who needs it. I just didn’t want it to be anything special.’

Chris nodded. ‘Yeah, I’ve given stuff to people. But no one’s given me anything until now. Thanks.’

It was all out of hand. A very small donation. I had handled it so badly. Why is it so difficult? Only my embarrassment had made it difficult and allowed a misunderstanding. The whole episode made me ashamed. Chris and I shrugged a smile at each other and he went back to his family.

By now the party slipped easily into community singing (Johnny Ray, Sonny and Cher, Tammy Wynette and Patsy Kline were deemed suitable) until, about eight-thirty, over four hours late, we arrived for a twenty-minute stop at El Paso. This was the end of the line for Bet, who had been free with her covered Coke bottle, and was quite jolly in spite of evidently having a bad pain in her shoulder. There were fond farewells from her fellow travellers, who were losing one of the old-timers. She invited me on to the platform to meet her hero. He was there, a middling-height, stocky man with a broad moustache, cowboy boots, jeans and jeans jacket. He ducked his head in acknowledgement of me as Bet started to introduce us, but he was busy. He had a small child in one arm and a large suitcase in the other. A massively pregnant young woman was walking just ahead of him.

‘Hi, hon, be with you in just a moment.’

‘It’s this coach,’ the pregnant woman called back at him, and she and the hero disappeared on to the train. Bet and I stood watching him.

‘Ain’t he wonderful? Always helping people.’

I had a moment of alarm, but Hero returned.

‘Hero, this is my new friend Jenny. Jenny, my hero.’

We shook hands. I said I was happy to meet him, that any hero of Bet’s was a hero of mine. He grinned modestly.

‘Ready, hon?’

‘Sure thing. Jenny’s gonna come and visit with us real soon.’

‘Great.’

We hugged goodbye, and Bet winced as I crushed her sore shoulder. As they headed off for the hero’s four by four I could hear Bet’s rasping voice.

‘How’s Mikey been? Jesus, you won’t believe what kind of a journey I’ve had…’