Expending Nerve Force

The Empire Builder left on time at 2.10 p.m., picking up speed through the yards and beyond, through the steel and smoke of the factories, past the suburbs, heading west, its engine pulling energetically out of the industrial north-east, tracing the dreams of the nineteenth-century railroad entrepreneurs of constructing a mechanised way to deliver civil society and all its subsequent unquenchable and profitable needs further and further into the westward wilderness. Did I care? Not then. Not one bit. I hadn’t had more than twenty minutes’ sleep and now I was shown to my deluxe sleeper. I had got the last late-booked possibility of a bed – deluxe: a double-sleeper with its own shower and lavatory at a hefty premium – or it was up and sleepless for the next two nights. I would have paid anything for horizontality. The conductor introduced himself as Chris and before he had a chance to tell me about the complimentary coffee and morning paper, I asked him to make up my bed so I could sleep, which I did until 5.45 p.m. When I woke and examined my deluxe accommodation, I found that not only was my bed twice as wide as the regular sleeper, but I had an armchair and a decent-sized table as well as my own mini, modular bathroom. The single sleeping compartment was essentially a lofty coffin, an enclosure almost exactly the width of the narrow bed with head room but no standing room. Even the slightest degree of claustrophobia would make an overnight trip impossible, quite without Edgar Allan Poe-ish horrors of feeling buried alive. I, however, have no degree of claustrophobia. On the contrary, I particularly like the small, just-so fit of confined spaces, so I was perfectly happy in spite of the contortions and wrigglings required to change clothes while sitting cross-legged on the bed, or the inevitable spillages of essential creams and lotions that I had managed only with difficulty to find while hanging upside down to reach the overnight bag wedged in the slim space under the made-up bed. To me, it all added up to cosiness and was, in any case, infinitely preferable to a night of insomnia in a public coach. This double compartment, though, was spacious enough to swing a cat in – not a large cat: I had a mental image of a small kitten swirling around at the end of my arm – but it was extraordinarily roomy as sleeping compartments went. Pity I had to leave it immediately for a cigarette.

On the way to the smoking coach I stopped at the bar to get a coffee and found myself queuing in front of an Amish woman and her son of perhaps eight or nine years old. They were everywhere on the rail system it seemed, the Amish. Was anyone back on the farm leading the horse-driven ploughs and hand-churning the butter? The boy stepped back as the train jerked and trod firmly on my foot. I responded with a yelp of complaint – he wasn’t a small child. When he turned round and saw me I pointed down to my foot and made a caricature grimace of pain. He was delighted by my mock anguish and his plump, owlish face, topped with the regulation pudding-basin haircut, creased into a great grin, hugely but shyly amused at his achievement. I raised my eyes in cartoon hopelessness, and he started chuckling. His mother turned round and looked at him, smiling benignly down at the boy, and then nodding politely at me. They got their order and sat at one of the tables, and the boy glanced up at me now and then, still amused as he sank his teeth and most of his face into one of the most evil-smelling microwaved hotdogs it was ever my misfortune to have waft my way. Even so, feeling we had been introduced, or at least that I was owed one, I sat down with my coffee on the opposite side of the table.

‘Is that all right for you?’ the woman asked the boy in a hushed, concerned voice that had a foreign but indefinable lilt to it. ‘It is good?’ She was like one of those mothers you only see in old Hollywood films; a little old lady well before her years, utterly beyond womanhood, beyond sexuality, a matron who had done her reproductive duty and had no further need for allure, even of whatever minimal kind the Amish permit. She was unadorned, with a skin almost silvery with cleanliness. Wisps of grey hair strayed from under her starched white bonnet. Her wholemeal dress was light grey, rather than the blue the Amish women on the last train wore, but just as smooth and neat. There was something almost wizened about her – though she couldn’t have been more than forty or so – as she bent down every few moments to the boy and murmured to him to eat tidily, stroking his hair, adoring him, asking if he were enjoying his extraordinarily unAmish-like meal, as it seemed to me. She was devoted and anxious about his well-being and contentment to a fault, completely absorbed in loving and worrying about her son, but she took the time to be well mannered and asked where I had come from.

‘England.’

She didn’t respond to this with any greater (or lesser) interest than if I had said Pittsburgh, but nodded distractedly, more interested in how her boy was doing. ‘How is the weather in England?’

It wasn’t at all clear to me that she knew where in the world England was, but she certainly knew, as all Americans do, that the weather there should be referred to. I assured her it rained a lot and she seemed satisfied to hear it. The world was as she thought and there was an end to it. And where was she going, I asked.

‘Home to Libby,’ she told me, and hugged the boy.

After a moment she seemed to notice that more was required. She spoke shyly and quietly, rather rapidly as if to get communication over and done with as quickly as possible. She said no more than was absolutely necessary to say to a stranger asking questions, but she was not unfriendly. She and her family had been to her son’s wedding to a girl from an Amish community in Massachusetts. He was the fourth of her boys to marry, and she had two married daughters: they all lived with their wives and husbands in Libby. She spoke as if Libby were New York or Paris; as if I couldn’t fail to be familiar with the place. Then she clammed up, looking a little flustered; demure and girlish, and slightly guilty, as if she had already said too much to an outsider. She flushed even pinker than before and dipped her head down to murmur at her son, who nodded his satisfaction in answer to her queries and grinned at me from time to time with hotdog-filled cheeks, like a happy hamster. It was clear that any further curiosity would have been intrusive. For all my fascination, I couldn’t find a way to enter into a real conversation with this woman so locked into her regulated contentment that any question about it from an outsider could only present a challenge. When I got back to my compartment and checked with the schedule, Libby was in Montana, just past Whitefish in Glacier Park, and we were due to arrive there at around 11 p.m. the next night.

I discovered that in spite of my luxurious sleeping accommodation, I was back on an old-fashioned train with a proper punishment smoking coach exactly the same as on the Sunset Limited, even down to the cigarette burns on the floor and the severe warning not to bring food or drink or to stay more than the fifteen minutes designated for smoking a cigarette. A kind of contentment came over me, a warm familiarity, a coming-home to the blue-grey fumes, the grime, the neglected scruffiness and a total absence of the irony and nostalgia of the glass smoking box on the Empire Builder. ‘You want to smoke? Right, here’s a filthy hole to smoke in. So smoke.’ Much better. And here too was humanity and yet more opportunity for me to be a part of it. My eagerness to socialise had reached a critical low. Whatever it was about the human capacity for story that had engaged me on the first accidental journey had evaporated into a wish for stillness and silence as America passed by. I entered the smoking coach only because of my urgent need to smoke. I rather hoped it would be empty. I had no desire to break into a new social round. Apparently my increasing weariness of human company was not unique. In a memoir of train travel in 1878, Helen Hunt Jackson suggested that she had experienced a similar trajectory of social exhaustion:

Be as silent, as unsocial, as surly as you please, you cannot avoid being more or less impressed by the magnetism of every human being in the car. Their faces attract or repel; you like, you dislike, you wonder, you pity, you resent, you loathe. In the course of twenty-four hours you have expended a great amount of nerve force, to no purpose.

Far from being empty, the smoking coach contained the intensely sociable joys of Big Daddy. He was a bulging Southern gentleman in his early sixties, with the rolling accent and moustache of Rhett Butler, an elaborately floral embroidered waistcoat and a cowboy hat with a wide curved brim. His face was dark, deeply bronzed; he might have been black, or sunburned, it was impossible to tell. Perhaps it was just his name (from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, I believe) that made me think he bore an uncanny resemblance to Tennessee Williams. He was loudly admiring a large black woman’s T-shirt that had ‘The Cardinals’ emblazoned across her billowing breasts in cardinal red.

‘That T-shirt is really something. I’d like one of those.’ He turned to acknowledge me as I sat down, offering me his hand and his name. ‘Big Daddy, ma’am. Those are very fine pants you’ve got on there. I do think highly of those pants.’

‘Hey, Big Daddy.’ The T-shirt woman squealed with laughter. ‘You go on like this and you’ll have a full set of clothes.’

Big Daddy was on his way to Whitefish, in Glacier Park, the Alpine skiing and fishing resort in Montana. He took regular holidays by himself, leaving his woman at home, he told me, allowing me to understand that he bestowed his charms wherever they might be wanted and that both he and those who succumbed to those charms generally found the outlay worthwhile. He was an ageing, old-time gigolo, still available to amuse. Once he heard I was a writer from England he chatted and charmed me with local information, telling me what I needed to know about the upcoming places of interest.

‘Let me help you with your task, little lady…’

Shelby, for example, which we wouldn’t be reaching until teatime the next day, was somewhere I should watch out for. Not that it was of any interest these days, but it was once famous for the gala World Heavyweight Championship fight between Jack Dempsey and Tom Gibbons, arranged for 4 July 1923. Thousands of fight fans hired trains to get them out west, then, a few days before the fight, Dempsey’s manager Doc Kearns cancelled the match. The fans cancelled their trains and then at the last minute Kearns agreed that the fight could go ahead after all. There were 7000 spectators with tickets and 17,000 gatecrashers, pandemonium, of course, and while all the excitement of the bout was going on, Doc Kearns quietly slipped out of town with the $300,000 purse. Dempsey got nothing for his win over Gibbons, and four Montana banks went bust.

‘And that’s the story of Shelby, my deah. Now, soon we’ll be crossing a bridge that a local man called Geary kept free of snow during the winter with his snowplough, the one and only snowplough in town. He was a rowdy fellow, this Geary, who liked his liquor, and one day after a real bender and whole lot of broken streetlamps he was hauled in front of the judge who gave him thirty days in the local jail for drunk-driving and banned him from driving for six months. When he got out he had to visit the probation officer to show he had changed his ways, so he got in his snowplough and drove there. “How did you get here?” the probation officer asked Geary. “Why, I drove here,” says Geary. Well, Geary went right back to jail for another thirty days for driving without a licence. But by then the snows had arrived, and all through those winter days while Geary was back in jail, and while the driving ban was in force, every single train crossing the bridge had to run slow, real slow, at walking speed because the bridge wasn’t being cleared of snow and ice, not being beautifully maintained by Geary who was in jail, warm and comfortable and well fed. And the snowplough being Geary’s snowplough and the only one in town, no one else was permitted to drive it. The railroad company complained, but the law was the law.’

Big Daddy’s entertaining stories came thick and fast. Strangely mythic, strangely inconsequential. A train guard was taking a smoking break on the seat opposite and enjoying the tales, nodding and smiling. Big Daddy grinned at him. ‘Great job, you got, huh?’

The guard’s smile turned sour. ‘Used to be,’ he grunted. ‘Time was. Hey, don’t get me started. Now … It’s all run by management and friends of friends. It ain’t professional like it used to be. These guys don’t know how to run a railroad. They ain’t professionals, they’re businessmen and cronies. They sit in their boardrooms with charts and it’s me who gets the customers shouting because they’ve oversold the train and it’s late and it’s broken down. Then they send you to charm school instead of fixing the problems, so you can learn how to calm the customers down. Keep everyone sweet but don’t deal with the problems. It’s the liberal way. The big liberal lie. They’ve taken over everything in this damned country. The government. The railroads. They’ve ruined everything with their big lie. The great socialist lie.’

His fury had grown to federal proportions.

‘What big lie?’ I asked.

‘You know. The Big Lie. The Big Socialist Liberal Lie.’

I looked baffled and asked him for more detail, but he was at a loss to know where to start, it was so obvious. Hell, everyone knew about the Big Lie.

‘They just tell lies. Socialist lies. Socialist double-talk. Political correctness. Like they don’t say you have to pay higher taxes, they tell you you’re making contributions. And they shoot their mouths off about gun safety and freedom when what they’re actually doing is making gun law and restricting our freedom that was enshrined in the constitution of the United States of America. The right to bear arms. That’s where our safety and freedom is ensured. Those are the kind of lies they tell, the socialists. The liberal lies that don’t say what they mean. Hell, they mean the straight opposite of what ordinary folk understand by their words.’

He paused, as if waiting for applause, but no one seemed eager to support him, or urge him on further, though we listened politely. Neither Big Daddy nor the black woman in the Cardinals T-shirt seemed very interested.

‘Hell,’ he petered out. ‘Don’t get me going on the liberals. Just don’t get me going.’

And he retreated into silence and soon muttered that his break was over and left. It was the first time that politics had come up on my train journeys.

By now it was early evening and my name was called over the tannoy system, summoning me for dinner, which occurs at a very early hour on the railroads. Lunch and dinner were served at set times and everyone had to reserve a slot and keep it. Lateness was frowned on. The dining car, if not the train, ran on a strict schedule. By nine it was cleaned and emptied, and if you passed through it there was always the head steward with receipts and a calculator totting up the takings, reconciling the pieces of paper. Paperwork seemed to be a major activity in the dining car, and the diners themselves a bit of a nuisance, to be dealt with as quickly as possible so that the real business of adding and subtracting and keeping the ledger straight could go ahead. I waved to my smoking companions, and then made my way to the dining car. It turned out that politics was going to be the theme for that evening, as if in travelling west, we were also moving politically to the right. The waiter seated me opposite a smoothly groomed, respectable-looking middle-aged couple, who smiled politely enough as I joined them. We said good evening and exchanged regulation information on our origins and destination. In a few moments a fourth member of our table was seated by the waiter. I had seen her earlier making her way between the seats through one of the coaches. She was a very slight woman with unkempt grey hair, in her fifties, wearing tapered twill trousers and a practical shirt with a leather bag strapped across her body. She suffered from some medical disorder that caused her continually to jerk and tic on a grand scale, and I remembered seeing her careering along the aisle of the moving train like an irate windmill. As she began to speak, her words were interrupted so that she could perform a wide arc with one arm and a series of staccato twitches of her neck and head, seemingly in a prescribed order. When it was done, the words could come.

‘I’m Glenys,’ she said as she sat down neatly before performing another set of ticcings and then relaxing. ‘What are your names?’

She was clearly much more used to being Glenys and taking it for granted than were her dining companions. The couple opposite looked alarmed; I tried not to, which amounted to the same thing. Glenys had a proper understanding of her condition. She allowed her twitches full rein, to blossom and then to die down before she attempted to reach for the salt, or put a forkful of food in her mouth. Her activities and conversation fitted into the intervals between her ticcing – or perhaps it was the other way round, and the tics took their opportunities as they may between the pauses in eating or talking. In either case, she and her condition had accommodated, and cohabited, as they had to, each giving time to the other.

‘Are you on your own?’ the man opposite asked Glenys, in a frigid voice that was too loud, over-carefully enunciating each word as one might talk to a foreigner or an idiot.

Glenys explained that she was having a two-day vacation in Whitefish, to see the mountains. She had never spent time in mountains, but she couldn’t afford to stay at the resort longer than the two days, not on her fixed income from her disability pension. The woman opposite had absented herself from the table. That is, she was still sitting there, but she had withdrawn her social self from what was an impossible situation, apparently, so that her attention was entirely given over to her plate and the movements of her knife and fork. Her husband had another way. He glared at Glenys with unconcealed repugnance, as if he were looking at something that had landed by some mishap in our midst; something filthy that was without consciousness and had no capacity to see or look back at him. I have rarely seen one human being look at another with such naked disgust. For the rest of the meal, he addressed himself exclusively to me, as if there was no one sitting beside me. Glenys asked me where I was from and what I did. We exchanged information. She worked for an educational group which lobbied for special schools for the developmentally disabled, she explained. People I knew in England with disabled children were battling in the opposite direction, to get their children taught in the mainstream sector. Glenys was firm, her position was radical and separatist. Disabled people were always at a disadvantage in mainstream schools where they stood out and their particular needs were not catered for. They were in a minority and inclined to measure themselves against a norm that was normal only by virtue of greater numbers and unachievable by them. Only schools that specifically catered for disabled children, where they were the norm and the majority, gave them the sense of their quality and rights in the world, and in both development and education children had been shown to perform much better in schools with specialist teachers and dedicated design rather than piecemeal structural adaptations. The move to close special schools and colleges down was, in her opinion, reactionary, regressive, a way of saving money, not a way of giving the disabled the best education and the ability to explore their full potential. She made a passionate case, all the while gesticulating and ticcing up a storm as if her strong feelings increased their intensity.

The man sitting opposite signalled to me. He caught my eye, attempting to draw me away from my sideways conversation with Glenys with a tiny repeated sideways wagging of his forefinger at just above the level of his plate, urgently indicating that what I was being told was completely in error, shifting his eyes, inviting me to follow them, in a direction away from Glenys, closing his eyelids against what was being said, and echoing the negating movement of his finger with a rapid shaking of his head. It was an extraordinary performance, quite as exotic and busy as any of Glenys’s suite of tremors, and rather more alarming. I found myself just staring at him in wonderment for a moment. He was indicating to me, as if Glenys were blind, that everything she said was absolute nonsense, and that I shouldn’t give any credence to it. When he spoke, it was in a lowish tone that was supposed to exclude the woman sitting on my left, as a doctor might speak in an aside to a responsible adult about a sick child who was present but not able to comprehend. Glenys was considered mentally defective, deaf and blind by this man who thought it was vital I understand the truth.

‘Don’t listen to her. This is the result of what happened in the sixties. The liberals and hippies and lefties let them all out, closed the institutions, and now they’re on the streets, making trouble, a danger to society. Retards, loonies, drug addicts. Mental cases like…’ – he tossed his head in Glenys’s direction – ‘who shouldn’t be allowed to be in ordinary society. That’s why normal decent people can’t walk around freely and without fear any more. Those kind of people begging and sleeping in doorways, spreading diseases and demanding rights … You can’t even have your dinner in peace.’

His voice, a whine of fury and frustration, matched the disgusted curl of his mouth as he corrected the misinformation I was receiving. I spoke politely.

‘Sorry, but I was one of those liberals, hippies and lefties. As I remember it, what we wanted to do in the sixties was close the institutions and use the money saved to provide for local, humane care and education for people who were mentally and physically disabled, instead of locking them up and forgetting about them while they rotted for the rest of their life. In fact, nothing actually happened until the eighties when Thatcher and Reagan closed all the old asylums down, chucked the inmates on to the street and took the money and ran. They didn’t put anything in their place, no system of care and no funding to rehabilitate or provide long-term treatment for the people they turfed out. It was the far right that filled the streets with people who had nowhere else to go, then walked away, not the left. When I was growing up in the centre of London, I never saw young people sleeping on pavements. It didn’t happen until Margaret Thatcher was elected.’

Glenys and I now shared our dining companion’s gaze of disgust. However, it was still only to me he spoke, since, leftie though I had been revealed to be, traitor though I was to what he thought of as normality, at least, in his eyes, I was not retarded. He was dreadfully disturbed by Glenys.

‘No, no. It was the left who led the movement to close the institutions. Reagan and Thatcher were wrongly blamed for it. It’s all in the history books. My god, where would we be today without Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher supporting him? We’d be under the thumb of Russia. We’d be ruled by communists. Is that the kind of existence you want?’

I gaped in astonishment.

‘Oh, sure, you can look like that but I’m telling you. It was Reagan’s Star Wars plan that scared Gorbachev into giving up his ideas of world domination. And you see what’s happened? Now Russia is run by the Mafia. That’s the Ruskies for you.’

This was a pointless conversation, but I was stuck in it. ‘But the US has been run by the Mafia since the Twenties.’

Suddenly his wife looked up from her plate, and in an entirely neutral voice said, ‘He thinks they’re all right.’ She looked down at her food again and he continued as if she hadn’t spoken.

‘And we’ve got traitors in our midst. Pat Buchanan has turned belly-up. He had this epiphany and decided that welfare was a good thing. Why the hell should decent hard-working people pay to keep them in benefits?’

‘Just out of self-interest,’ I tried, feebly. ‘If “they’re” left destitute what kind of a society will you hard-working righteous people have to live in?’

‘We ought to return to the agrarian economy.’

I tried not to laugh. ‘But that isn’t a choice—’

‘Yeah,’ he said, his face quite contorted with disgust and despair. ‘It’s too late now.’

It was enough. I waited for Glenys to finish her sweet and we left the table. There was nothing to say. I just shook my head. Glenys would have shrugged but it got all caught up in a great involuntary circular motion that indicated the whole world and everything that was included in it. When it was completed, we laughed and I went off for a cigarette.

We pulled in to St Paul’s–Minneapolis at 10.25 p.m., dead on time. The train was taking on fuel and water, so we had a forty-minute break to stretch our legs, wander about the station and walk on solid ground. It was dark, and as I was walking back from the station building along the broad empty tarmac towards the train I heard my name.

‘Hey, Jenny.’

It was Big Daddy. I went towards him.

‘You like to dance?’

‘Yes.’

‘OK. I’ll show you the Sound of Music routine I worked out. Remember when they are dancing on the terrace? I played it over and over on my VTR and worked out the steps. Here.’ He extended an arm and took my hand gracefully in his. ‘OK, just shadow me.’

He called out the steps in an undertone – step, step, back, step, and sideways step, step … We walked through the routine. A sort of minuet, between our extended arms, closing up and backing apart with the odd twirl, twirl, twirl in-between. ‘Got it?’

We practised it two or three times. People on their way to and from the train stopped to watch.

‘Yeah, you got it. Now.’

He began to sing the wordless tune of the dance and we did the routine in real time. Then, with more confidence, again, and finally, when we had a good crowd forming a circle around us in the dark night-time train station, with real sashaying pizzazz, ending with me swirling half a dozen times under his upraised arm. We dropped a bow and a curtsey to the applause and whistles of appreciation from our audience.

‘Hey, you picked that up real good. By the time we get to Whitefish we’ll get it perfect. Ready to shoot.’

‘You’re a good choreographer.’

Big Daddy smiled modestly. ‘It’s only one of my many talents, my deah.’ He slipped an arm around my waist. ‘Why not make a detour and spend a day or two in Whitefish? Who knows what dances we might choreograph together? We’d make a fine pair … of dancers.’

Stepping out in the night to perform a pas-de-deux on the platform at St Paul’s–Minneapolis in the shadow of the Empire Builder was one thing, and quite delightful, but what about a weekend detour with a shameless new-world/old-world flirt in Whitefish, Montana? I liked the improbability of it. I was quite tempted by the spontaneity and irregularity of the idea – until I remembered how many hours there are in even a single day let alone two, and how easily charm turns sour, and that I am, for all my temporary keen listening and participatory interest in the world around me, deeply intolerant of other people, especially when the conversation flags and the cracks in the performance begin to show. To save us from me, to save us both the disappointment that more time than a quick dance routine requires would bring to Big Daddy and me, I declined the offer, but with something like genuine regret.

Grabbing experience was something of a habit I had acquired when it was the watchword of the late Sixties. If someone handed you a drug, you took it, because it would be an experience. If someone invited you to have sex with them you did, again, for the experience. It was most important not to let anything pass you by. The drug or the sex might, and sometimes did, turn out to be bad experiences, but that was still valuable. For what? It was hard to say. To know life, or to know about life. But sex and drugs and forays into ancient eastern texts seemed to us at the time to be the main routes to experience. No one suggested that getting up at eight in the morning was an experience we needed to have (though to have stayed up all night smoking dope or dropping acid and then to greet the dawn qualified), nor that the experiences of going off to work day after day, or paying bills or phoning home, were essential to the full life. On the other hand, most of us ended up doing all those things eventually, so perhaps we weren’t entirely wrong. It was a bit like the Duke of Edinburgh Award without the virtue. We took risks, and some people suffered very badly, but then you can fall off a mountain you’re climbing for the experience. The war was over before most of us were born – that generation had taken risks without choosing to do so. It must have seemed mad to them that we were messing around with our heads and emotions, taking unnecessary risks when the world had just been made safe for us. But the world was not safe, of course. What most of us knew about was nuclear weapons, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Cold War, and I was not alone in truly believing that I wouldn’t live to old age.

That was the rhetoric. In practice, I was in the midst of depression, and every drug I took that was potentially dangerous was all right by me. While I have no doubt others were genuinely trying to expand their minds and have all the experience they could before kingdom came, I was in reality playing a kind of Russian roulette. I knew that I was the last person who should take acid or speed, that I sank too fast into depression without any chemical help to risk taking them. I took acid and I injected methyl amphetamine into my veins. I woke in the morning with a joint ready rolled so that not a minute would be wasted not being stoned. The speed was the most lethal in its after-effects, and therefore the drug of choice. But while it thrummed through my system it was extraordinary. I remember sitting in the flat in Covent Garden I’d moved into – a nursery land of drug availability – the first time I fixed. I sat on the floor with my back against the wall. There were half a dozen strangers, maybe more, in the room smoking dope, listening to music. The most extraordinary feeling came over me, once the initial rush of speed had coursed through my blood. It took a while to identify it, but eventually it dawned on me that I was at ease, comfortable, where I belonged, with people I belonged to – and what was astonishing about this feeling was that it was genuinely the first time I had ever experienced it so totally. Until then I had always been in the wrong place, with the wrong people, or never quite the right ones, never really with a sense that I belonged exactly where I was, that I wasn’t just alien enough to be a watcher not a member of the group. I felt at ease for the first time in my life. Thank you, methyl amphetamine. See you soon. Very soon.

Actually, I was familiar with meth. When I was in Ward 6 of the Maudsley I was under the care of Dr Krapl Taylor, then head of the hospital. There are varying views about Dr KT’s ministrations, but he was quite keen on experimental techniques. One of these was abreaction. A depressed patient was injected with methyl amphetamine and then goaded by a therapist into a state of anxiety and distress. The resulting explosion was supposed to be cathartic or something. Psychiatrists go pale these days when you tell them that they used this technique at a respectable psychiatric hospital. One doctor who was actually on staff there just before I was a patient said he had no knowledge that Krapl Taylor was using such a treatment. So I knew about meth. I had it twice a week when I saw my shrink, who then spent twenty minutes assuring me that I was worthless in the eyes of Dr Krapl Taylor. Being depressed I could only agree with KT’s assessment. So what’s new? Can I have some more meth, I think I could get to like this if you gave me a larger dose? In fact, I did finally abreact – went berserk as required – but instead of shedding my depression I lost quite a lot of blood from a slashed wrist. The best-laid plans … Finally, after nine months, I wandered into the drugs room and started to open the cabinet, while the nurse in charge watched in open-mouthed astonishment. I was just going to take myself a decent dose of meth. There was a scuffle and I threw my clothes into a bag and left. I headed for the Arts Lab in Drury Lane, sat in the café and turned round in my chair to talk to the complete stranger behind me.

‘Do you know where I can get some meth?’

He grinned. Effortless, I had found the speed king of London, WC1. Those were the days.

For a while my non-medical doses of meth continued to give me a feeling of rightness in the world, but the comedowns were murderous. They were my own depressions doubled and blacker than night. Even so, I figured them worth it. Meth was very easy to get hold of, the depression could be sorted with another fix. I was never in any real danger from heroin addiction. I lived in the kitchen of the Covent Garden flat with a registered heroin addict, and my only experience of it (yeah, you had to try that too) just made me feel very ill. It takes time and effort to become a heroin junkie, I was in too much of a hurry. Speed was my speed. At least until the comedowns and the depression combined to make me take a large enough overdose of barbiturates to land me in hospital with plans to send me back to St Pancras North Wing – back to Go, Do Not Collect £200. That was when I decided I really didn’t want to become a revolving-door psychiatric in-patient. I quit drugs, all of them, and decided to take the going-to-work-every-day experience – just for the experience, you understand.

*   *   *

After my dancing on the platform at St Paul’s–Minneapolis and declining a weekend of delights and experience with Big Daddy, I slept like a baby rocked in untiring arms. I missed all the night stops – St Cloud, Staples, Detroit Lakes, Fargo, Grand Forks – and woke at 6.50 a.m. having just passed Devil’s Lake, North Dakota. We were a mere twenty-five minutes behind schedule. The landscape had utterly changed. We had entered mile after mile, hour after hour, of non-stop prairie: my first view of prairie outside of the movies and those patronising, cutifying Disney nature films that caused a generation to grow up terminally anthropomorphic. This prairie was a thing to behold as the sun shone on red-gold grass and scrub. Brown, you might have said if you were being inattentive, but from my bed, gazing hypnotised out at the land, I caught infinite variations on the theme of orange, ochre, yellow and gold. What I didn’t know until I went to the observation car and heard a couple of bucolophobic Chicagoans expressing what they thought of the landscape (‘Hey, didn’t we pass that fencepost a couple of hours ago?’), was that North Dakota is the butt of urban American jokes, and to Montanans the folk from North Dakota are what the Polish are to New Yorkers.

‘But it’s extraordinary. Vast. Beautiful,’ I said to my neighbour who was shaking his head in pity at the lot of the North Dakotans.

‘Honey, this land is flat, featureless and it ends in mountains. That’s good. It keeps the inmates from spreading out into the real world.’

It was true that sitting there for an hour or two there is nothing to see but the grass and scrub, with occasional glimpses of the Mississippi winding and trickling through the land. Then suddenly you see a farmhouse. Just there, plonk in the middle of nowhere. Cows and horses standing about. Trees. Fences. Fences to keep the cows and horses in, I suppose, not to keep anyone out, because for 360 degrees around these signs of human life, and stretching to every horizon, there is blank nothing. No road; nowhere for a road to lead. Just empty space filled with wilderness. And how, I wondered, and continued to wonder for the next day as North Dakota became the grasslands of Montana, had these homesteaders decided that it was here, just here, in this actual spot, that they were going to build a house and a life. Why not a couple of hundred yards further along? Or back? Or to the right or left? What difference would it make? How could you ever make a decision? I imagined myself pacing back and forth trying to place my stake in the spot where I would build my house, but never managing to decide, because in the absence of defining detail, and assuming the Mississippi near enough by, absolutely any spot would do. And wouldn’t you need, having travelled God-knows-how-far – from the East by wagon train, or from old Europe by ship – to feel that the place where you decided to settle was the most particular place you could find? Here is the perfect spot, your eyes and your heart sing together, recognising what and where it is you came all that way for, risked everything to find. But no, hang on, perhaps it’s just a little to the left, or a mile and a half to the right. Well, let’s assume that the pioneers and refugees had more practical minds than me daydreaming on a train, and had the good sense to get down and digging. Any place they hung their hat was home.

I gazed out of the window, a member of the audience for the moving picture that we were passing through, and started to see how it had all come about. The geography of movie America, the reason for all those celluloid dreams, rolled across the picture windows like a festival of film, freed from individual stories and script, but including all of them, making them necessary, inevitable. The genres had sped by. The industrial landscapes of Pittsburgh and Chicago, the railyards, the smoking factory chimneys, all spoke of fast urban tales of people doing their best and worst to make a living in a thundering black-and-white world. The poor and destitute, living rough, riding the rails, the dogged workers falling away from the civilised centres to the drab and dangerous peripheries, the corruption, the blind bland rich. The clichés jostled in my head as those movies had scrolled by until gradually they were replaced by the flat, featureless plains of Montana that caused the heart to pound in alarm at such endless space. For hours, for whole days, miles and miles of agricultural land, unrelieved by the slightest incline or hollow, each mile indistinguishable from the last, from the last hundred and the next hundred. This was the vastness that the pioneers had sought, the good living, the chance to do more than subsist. It was almost unbearable.

At breakfast I saw Glenys and joined her. She was sitting opposite a very small, wisp of an elderly black man, who still wore the natty clothes of his heyday. His face was creased and crumpled, but along with the feather he wore in his pork pie hat that had ‘Indianapolis’ written above the brim, he sported an embroidered waistcoat to put Big Daddy to shame, flared denims and a black leather string tie. This – I’m aware that I am forever describing Americans in terms of their likeness to movie or showbiz stars, but try though I might, this was inescapable – was Sammy Davies Jr revisited. Tiny, spry, fast-talking, and, in our breakfast companion’s case, a little mad. He was as inclined to talk to himself as to us, so sometimes he was hard to follow, but he was, as his hat indicated, from Indianapolis, and he was, like Glenys, taking a long-waited-for vacation on his own. He was going to Seattle to, again like Glenys, see the mountains he had never been in. It is astonishing how many Americans tell you of longing for American landscapes but fail to get to them decade after decade. The remarkably untravelled lives of many of the people I met on the train quite pulled against the notion of a continent in flux, all its people on the move. Actually, for the most part, they seem to stay still and dream. Indianapolis, who was in his sixties, I guessed, had only a few days away to see the mountains at last, even though he was retired, presumably because his funds were too limited for a longer holiday, but his train to Chicago to catch the Empire Builder had been so late that he had missed his connection. He muttered much of this out through the window, but Glenys had begun his monologue by asking where he had got on the train, so it seemed all right to interrupt his private recollections.

‘So you had to lose a whole day out of your vacation waiting for the next train?’

He looked up and shook his head.

‘Nope, this here is the train I was booked on. Amtrak flew me from Chicago to St Paul’s to pick it up. I was waiting when it arrived. The plane was on time.’

I was impressed. He wasn’t.

‘Yeah, but the train was part of the vacation, and the reason I travelled by train is that I’m afraid of flying.’

I’ve rarely seen a man look so mournful, as he shook his head, dismayed at the memory of finding himself flying courtesy of the train company.

In the smoking coach were a new collection of people along with the old. Sitting in the near corner was a tired-looking woman with a body that had broken free of its youthfully contained voluptuousness and weary blonde hair with roots so badly in need of doing that it was almost half and half fair to black. Opposite her was a young man with severely cropped hair and dim, close-together eyes that I guessed not only tiredness had rendered unalert, but with a body that rippled with youth and fitness under his white T-shirt. I took him for a soldier. He was indeed a soldier on his way back to his base after a couple of weeks’ leave. A woman called Martha, who I had met in line in Chicago station and who had immediately begun recounting in detail her adventures on the internet discovering her genealogy, and how everyone should do it, I should do it, and what, precisely, she had discovered, and who I had been avoiding ever since, was bending a willing acolyte’s ear, as indeed she was whenever I came across her. She talked on and on and on. When she finished with the importance of finding one’s roots, she moved to canonical books by women and feminist history. She was unstoppable, as if her every word was of everlasting interest and it was her duty to induct any lone female (and, because of the loudness of her voice, anyone nearby) into her world of historical self-justification. I wondered now, though, if perhaps she was manic, from the way she shot out the words as if they were all queuing and jostling to be said and couldn’t wait their turn. Next to her, but turned firmly away, was the conductor on another break, telling a man next to him almost word for word about the liberal lie. Martha finished some exposition about the invisibility of women in the historical record by blaming ‘the usual suspects’. Uncharacteristically, she paused and looked around the coach.

‘Ha,’ she gloated. ‘The joke went over their heads. No one got the reference to Casablanca. The usual suspects.’

‘I never saw that movie,’ the soldier said, trying to be helpfully dumbed down.

‘That is so sad. We’ve become ignorant of our own culture. Movies are very important…’

And she continued with a lecture about the educational and social value of film. But Martha’s cultural understanding was stuck in the Forties. She clearly did not know that the film the soldier hadn’t seen was not Casablanca (which he could hardly have missed if he were an avid TV watcher), but the more modern cultural must-know The Usual Suspects. Thankfully, no one cared to explain the gap in her knowledge and Martha was allowed to remain satisfyingly superior.

‘Were you in the Gulf?’ the tired woman asked the soldier.

‘Yes, ma’am.’ He spoke quite neutrally. He was a soldier describing where he had been, not venturing an opinion. He seemed too archetypal to be true.

‘My son was in the Gulf,’ she said, looking quite haunted. ‘I watched it happening on the TV all the time. I never turned it off, slept in front of it, ate in front of it. The doctor put me on tranquillisers and said I had to turn off the TV and stop watching the war. But I couldn’t. It was like I had to to keep my son alive. And, my god, when that stuff about friendly fire came out … Jesus, friendly fire, killing our own…’

‘Yeah,’ the soldier said, without any kind of expression on his face. ‘My sergeant said watch out for friendly fire. He said friendly fire kills you worse than enemy fire.’

There was a small pause while we took this in, but no one indicated their appreciation for his exquisite irony. I looked at him a little harder, but I couldn’t see anything in his face that knew the weight of what he had just said. The eyes stayed dim, the voice flat.

The blonde woman nodded. ‘It’s all the stuff they don’t tell you. Like when they killed JFK. God, I cried and cried over that. I loved that man. We still don’t know what really happened. They kept the truth from us.’ She spoke with raw passion and a grief that dated back to 1963. ‘I’m telling you, if we knew what we don’t know, we’d be angry.’

The young soldier nodded, slow and solemn. ‘Yes, ma’am, if we knew what we don’t know, we’d know more.’

And for me it was one of those moments when, like the transition that occurs when an oil and egg-yolk mixture suddenly emulsifies into mayonnaise, the texture of human existence cohered and thickened. I have no idea if life does this sort of thing accidentally or because it has an independent sense of humour and it knows you’re listening. Whichever, or whatever else, the humanity of humanity was on a roll just then on that train, and it wasn’t going to stop until I did. It was altogether a day of rich textures.

Later that afternoon another stranger, Annie, seemed to be having the same thoughts as me about the arbitrariness of the homesteads.

‘Now why did they put that house right there?’ she wondered aloud, as we both happened to be staring out of the same window while we puffed on our cigarettes.

Annie was from New Orleans and on holiday from her regular life. She had six kids aged from thirty-three down to ten. She was a single mother, black, and used to be a cook but had retired, earning extra money by doing a little babysitting now. She told me about her twenty-one-year-old boy who was diagnosed as hyperactive. He still lived at home, needing full-time attention, but the older children took it in turns to have him sometimes so that Annie could have a break.

‘The boy has trouble with angritude,’ she explained.

She took him regularly to classes to help him deal with his emotional ups and downs. They wanted Annie to become a volunteer and work with other troubled kids.

‘You got to listen to kids. It’s no good shouting. I grew up with my grandmother shouting and screaming. I cried a lot. No need for that. There’s enough hatred in the world without having it in the family.’

While she was away she called her son twice a day. He resented her leaving him. Her other kids were good with him, but if he was having a tantrum they couldn’t cope with, they’d get her on her mobile and she’d speak to him.

‘Sometimes it takes two hours of me talking to him before he can calm himself down. He needs to hear someone speaking quietly to him, and he needs to talk himself and be listened to. Then he’s all right. Hey, life is like a train, it goes round and round.’

‘And it’s always late.’

Annie laughed. ‘Yup. And why the hell did they put that house just there?’

Human life in all its inescapable difficulty and the astonishing human capacity for somehow coping with or enduring it was positively parading itself on the Empire Builder. By mid-afternoon we were at Havre, another water stop where passengers could get out and air themselves. Taking advantage of a regular captive audience, the platform at Havre sported a large signpost explaining how the town got its name when two rivals in love fought over a local beauty. After hours of fisticuffs the loser stormed off shouting, ‘You can have’er.’ Every American town likes to have its mythic founding story, but Havre, I felt, just hadn’t tried hard enough.

‘Dumb, huh?’ a voice said in my ear as I finished reading it. ‘I hear you’re a writer.’

A man in his late thirties or early forties stood beside me. He was short and stocky, in regulation baseball cap, jeans and a T-shirt. As ordinary-looking a man as you could imagine. ‘I don’t mean to intrude, but hearing you’re a writer, I’ve got a story for you.’

I lit another cigarette and waited, trying to project a look that said I was interested but I wasn’t going to get in any way involved in his life no matter how terrible his story was. It was clearly going to be pretty terrible, because the ordinary guy’s eyes had taken on an intense and fiery look as he prepared to relate, yet again but never often enough, what had happened to him.

‘I was OK until nine years ago. I led a normal life working as a joiner in a local firm. I lived at home. We were a regular family. Then my mom died. I got bad feelings about it, but I carried on. Then five years later, when my dad died, I went berserk. I got suicidal. Real crazy. Putting a gun to my head. Playing Russian roulette and stuff. I packed in the job and went to live alone in the woods for a long time. I got crazier and crazier out there in the woods, and then one day I realised that I had to get help. I saw a doctor, a psychiatrist who put me on Prozac, thirty milligrams twice daily. It was depression, he said. That shit hit me hard. In a month my teeth were chattering so bad that they broke. My teeth actually shattered to pieces because they rattled so bad. I thought my brain was going to be shaken to a froth. If I was crazy before, I was twice as crazy on the fucking – excuse me – Prozac, and it wasn’t even my own craziness. When I finally saw a dentist, the state had to pay out seven thousand dollars to fix my teeth, I’d done that much damage to them. But they should have paid me a lot more. Damages. I should have sued them for what that stuff did to me. Prescribed by a doctor. I was trying to get better and it ruined my life, with the shakes and panics and what not. They still haven’t gone away completely.’

‘How do you live now?’

‘I’m an artist, like you. I carve sculptures out of wood. I live alone, and I have my work and fifteen acres of land my dad left me. I manage OK on a day-by-day basis, but I’m not the same man I was. I lead a very isolated life. I stay very quiet. If I didn’t have my sculpting, I don’t know if I’d be OK. I guess I’m still depressed. It all preys on my mind, what happened to me and how I felt and everything. It goes round and round in my head, you know, the whole thing. My mom and dad and the pills and the depression. I think about depression twenty-two hours a day, every day. Every day of my life. I try to get it into my work, but I’m a visual artist. I can’t write my feelings down. People should hear about what happened to me. About the Prozac and depression. You’re a writer. So you can write my story.’

*   *   *

By the late afternoon the unchanging landscape in the distance ahead of us seemed to be coming to a conclusion. We were approaching the outskirts of Glacier Park, which was the far edge of the prairie and the beginning of the Rockies. The great plain just came to an end and the jagged snow-topped mountains rose abruptly like a retaining wall. The train commenced its climb of the foothills just when the sun began to set and as we headed into the new landscape, rising towards the snow level, the daylight went out. We had to take the beauty of the Rockies and Glacier Park on trust. The man sitting next to me in the observation car sighed at the last dying rays of the sun.

‘Just when there was something to see, there’s nothing to be seen.’

I laughed and said I supposed we’d have to take the train in the other direction to see the Rockies in daylight. ‘Holidaying?’ I asked.

‘Yes, kind of. I’m recovering from brain surgery. I’m sixty-seven. I was an engineer. When I retired I started to get these seizures. I reckon it was because I was bored. Nothing to do apart from walk the dogs. The wife still works. So they operated. Said I had to lead a quiet life, but I figured it was the quiet life that was killing me. So I’m taking trips around the country by train. Just for something to do.’

‘What do the doctors say?’

‘That I shouldn’t.’

He looked gloomy as he spoke, though his features had a natural downturn to them. Then he changed the subject, asking me about how things were going in Northern Ireland. He was Irish by descent. He’d supported the IRA for a long time, but now he was beginning to think he’d been wrong.

‘I want our side to be good, but they turn out just to be terrorists, the way they behave, the way they treat people.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s all wars. It seems like people just don’t want a quiet life.’

‘You don’t, either,’ I said.

‘No, you’re right. But I don’t want to be dead more.’

At dinner life let up a little as a rather upmarket elderly gentleman in a good suit of clothes expressed delight that I was from the UK and regaled me with the pleasures of British television. Imported programmes from Britain were all he considered worth watching on US TV, especially the crime dramas. Through three courses he told me about his favourites and asked me about upcoming series that had yet to be shown in the States. He lovingly listed the programme names with the relish of a connoisseur: Morse, Cracker, A Touch of Frost, Bergerac, Midsomer Murders, Poirot, Prime Suspect, Miss Marple … did I know them, were there any he had missed, he wondered anxiously? And Oxford, Manchester, Jersey, Denton, Badger’s Drift, St Mary Mead: were they just as they were portrayed? Morse, he had heard, though the episode had not yet arrived, had revealed his first name. Was that true, no, don’t tell him what it was. And there was a rumour that Morse was going to die. Had I heard that? It was just terrible. How could they do such a thing? And there didn’t seem to be a date for a new series of Cracker. But Jack Frost, Inspector Frost of Denton police, was still all right, wasn’t he? Could I at least assure him of that?

I went to bed early, my head reeling with the intimate instant lives of others, strangers who popped up next to you, told you everything you needed to know about themselves and then waved as you or they moved on. You acknowledged people you’d spoken to with a nod and a smile as you passed them again in the aisle or at the bar or in the smoking coach, but you didn’t have to speak to them just because they’d told you about their despair or their sickness or the looming shadows of their lives. Nor did they require that you tell them anything about you. The niceties were over once you had said where you were from and where you were going. It was OK by them if you wanted to tell them more, but it wasn’t compulsory. You could stay as private as you wanted to, and when they told you about themselves, even terrible things that brought tears to your eyes, you weren’t expected to make a long-term commitment to them. They told for the sake of telling, you listened because you were there.

I also went to bed early because I had to get up early. In the middle of the night, at Spokane, the Empire Builder split in two. One half went to Seattle, the other half, my half, went to Portland, Oregon. Unfortunately, the smoking coach went with the other half of the train to Seattle. There would be no smoking from Spokane until we reached Portland. The next stop after Spokane was Pasco at 5.23 a.m. There would be a few minutes while the train waited at the station. I set my alarm.

No one got off at Pasco, and a couple of very chilly-looking travellers got on in the steely, freezing dawn on the far foothills of the Rockies. The tired woman whose son had been in the Gulf was the only other passenger standing on the platform smoking. We looked at each other, puffing and shivering, and laughed.

‘Did you put your alarm on, or did you just wake up and decide to have a cigarette?’ I asked.

‘Alarm,’ she rasped.

‘We’re the last of the serious addicts.’

‘Dying breed.’

We concentrated on smoking while stamping our feet to keep out the chill air. I managed the best part of two cigarettes before the conductor called out, ‘Suck hard, ladies, we gotta go. That oughta hold you till Wishram.’

Incredibly, in spite of what everyone knows about US trains, in spite of my own experience of being hours late on the previous two trips I had taken, in spite of the Empire Builder having travelled 2256 miles since I boarded in Chicago, we pulled into Portland’s Union station at 9.55 a.m., fifteen minutes ahead of time.