Just Like Misery

If it was Sunday lunchtime, it had to be Portland, Oregon. By Monday breakfast I would be in Sacramento, California; by Tuesday suppertime in Denver, Colorado. Then I had to spend the night in a hotel I had booked near the station and catch the bus at 6.15 the following morning – Wednesday – to Raton in New Mexico, to arrive twenty minutes before it was time to pick up the 10.56 a.m. Southwest Chief that would deliver me to Albuquerque by Wednesday at 4 p.m. – half a week away from Portland.

This was my social visit to Bet and her hero. Five days in real America with real Americans. Instead of just heading round the States in a moving corridor, I had a destination, people to meet me at the station, a house to stay in for five days that didn’t move, didn’t shake or rock or go any place at all. In England nothing would induce me to go and stay with perfect strangers for five days, but this was a journey, a contrivance, and it seemed like a good idea to renew a previous accidental meeting that offered a new insight into an America I didn’t know. What made me think it would be all right was that I liked Bet, and had enjoyed her company on the train. You meet someone you like, you arrange to see them again. What could be more reasonable than that? More normal? Perhaps it was an attempt to give up being a stranger. At any rate, to see if I could give it up.

When I called Bet from London and proposed the visit, she sounded delighted. What was more, she and the hero had just bought a trailer, and I could stay in it, a place of my own, while I was there. So I wasn’t going to be on exactly rock-solid foundations during my time off the train, but I was delighted at the idea of living in a trailer in suburban New Mexico for a few days, and, of course, of having a bolt hole, as well as not having to feel too bad about being in my hosts’ hair day in and day out. For all the apparent normality of the visit, the trailer made the five days I planned to spend with these very generous perfect strangers seem less insane.

‘Stay a couple of weeks,’ Bet urged. ‘More. A month.’

‘No, really, I have to get back on the train and finish the journey, and I have to be back in New York by the end of the month.’

‘Just the five days, then. Well, you can always come back.’

*   *   *

Meantime, the glancing acquaintances of train travel continued. In the waiting room at Portland, before the train arrived, a well but quietly dressed, unshowily good-looking man in his mid-fifties smiled at me and asked the regulation question. He was delighted to hear that I was English. I was intrigued by him because he was the only executive type I had come across so far on these travels. He was an estate lawyer, he told me in a quiet, slightly anglicised, cultured voice. Eugene was taking the train to Sacramento from his home in Rochester, NY, because he had a meeting there first thing in the morning and it was cheaper and simpler to take the overnight train than to fly out the previous day and book into a hotel for the night. He didn’t strike me as someone who chose very many cheaper options, so I took him to mean that he preferred to travel this way. By the time the train arrived, he had quoted Pliny at me on the subject of serving bad wine to one’s guests, told me that there had been a great cultural falling away since the eighteenth century and that we had passed from the Golden Age, through the Silver Age, beyond the Bronze Age to something a good deal more leaden. He was, he said, a Yale man, and an active but old-fashioned Christian (there was nothing happy-clappy about Eugene), working in his spare time at trying to save the Book of Common Prayer. Cranmer had done for prose what Shakespeare did for poetry. Eugene was a different kind of American from my other train acquaintances, alarmingly wrapped up in lost worlds and boastfully ill-at-ease in the present one. He had been married for thirty-six years, he said, and then his patrician manner softened.

‘We dated every week for every one of those thirty-six years, as if we were lovers. We were always lovers…’ They had five children who were now grown up. In fact, he was well into his sixties, a decade older than I had taken him for. ‘I missed the Sixties,’ he said. ‘But I am having a good time in my sixties.’

He wasn’t speaking salaciously. He meant that he had started to find life enjoyable again. One evening five years before, he was waiting for his wife to appear for a drink in a bar on their weekly date. She always did her hair and make-up and wore an elegant dress, as she had when they were courting. ‘We were always courting.’ She never arrived that night. She collapsed and died of an aneurysm on her way to meet him. For a moment Eugene’s eyes looked blank. Then he lifted his chin slightly. He was getting over it. It was time, his children told him, to think about remarrying. I had the strangest feeling as he said this that he was looking very closely at me. The train came, and we agreed that we might have a drink that evening before dinner in the observation car. As it turned out, I had other concerns that made me forget our vague arrangement.

The journey from Portland to Sacramento passed in a blur of discontent. The Coast Starlight was intended to bring back the American traveller and overseas tourist to the trains, with a pastiche of rail travel of days gone by. It was clearly designed to be the New World equivalent of the Orient Express, with all the printed matter, logos and furnishings echoing art deco. It was a luxury superliner of a train, much more glossy and well appointed than either the Sunset Limited or the Empire Builder. In keeping with the class values of days gone by, first-class passengers – or rather guests – defined as those with sleeping accommodation, had exclusive use of the Pacific Parlour Car, an observation coach with upholstered rotating armchairs by the panoramic windows and a bar of its own. There was no mixing of the classes on this train. First-and coach-class passengers met only in the dining car. Flowers, embossed stationery and branded soap in the sleeping compartments completed the trying-too-hard-in-the-wrong-areas feel of the train. And as for the usual other place of miscegenation, the smoking compartment – my first investigation after I stashed my bag in my room – well, there wasn’t one. The Coast Starlight was, it turned out once I found myself trapped in its swaying comfort, a no-smoking train. There was no place for the bad guys to congregate; for the young, the poor, the phobic, the wealthy, the old to discover that they had at least addiction to nicotine in common. More to the point, there was nowhere for me to smoke. Although the specially produced brochure (‘the Coast Starlight with a tradition of excellence harkening [sic] back to the glory days of the “Streamliner Era” of the late 1940s’) assured me that I was on ‘Amtrak’s hottest train with the coolest scenery … offering some of the most spectacular scenery in the west’ with a ‘Crew that makes the magic happen’ and unequalled views of the Cascade Mountains, Crater Lake, the Klamath Falls, Mount Shasta in all its 14,380-foot glory and the Sacramento Valley, I concluded that the only way to survive the 650-mile, 16-hour, cigaretteless journey, was to sulk. I couldn’t just sleep through the agony because there would be brief puffing opportunities at the nine stops between Portland and Sacramento, but that wasn’t smoking, that was damage control. A cigarette is a ritual of pleasure that takes its own time, involves the entire body (posture, arm and hand movements, facial expression, tilt of head, cross of legs) and is at its most gratifying when smoked either in meditative solitude or as a buffer against social nakedness. It is not a thing to be snatched at in a moment of someone else’s devising. The whole idea, once you are an adult smoker, is that whatever you happen to be doing, you can pull a cigarette out of a pack, light it and enhance the moment. Everything is made better, the good as well as the not so good, with the addition of a cigarette in the hand, the inhalation, the exhalation, the tapping of ash, the grinding out of the stub. The point of the body is made clear by smoking. Smoking is an art form that combines the separate capacities of the parts of the body and fulfils the meaning of the whole. The chastely limited satisfaction of gratifying the physical requirement for nicotine is quite far down on the list of the desirable effects of smoking. However, it is true that once the virtuous outside world outlaws smoking, the nicotine craving surges to a critical level and every minute of every hour is spent thinking about cigarettes and longing to scratch the itch in the blood and muscles with a fix. The entire Cascade mountain range could have erupted into a synchronised ballet of exploding fire and smoke, and it would only have put me in mind of the lack of ashtrays on the train. Crater Lake could have opened up and swallowed us whole, and my first thought would have been to wonder if under such special circumstances it would be permitted to smoke in the Parlour Car. When I was young and the world was in the grip of the Cold War, the question of what one would do if the four-minute warning sounded was on every pubescent’s lips. The answer was almost invariably that we would grab the nearest member of the opposite gender and have the sex we were unwilling to die without experiencing before we were blown to smithereens. In those days, four minutes seemed like plenty of time for the short, sharp, explosive and by all accounts pleasurable experience we had only heard tell of. But for a long time now, though the question is no longer asked (the warning likely to be much longer, or much shorter than four minutes), my answer would be to have a final smoke. Even the harshest of authorities appeared to agree with me. No one is expected to face a firing squad without the lingering taste of tar and tobacco flavouring their last breath. What if the choice was to be between never having a cigarette again or having that last firing-squad fag, and of course the firing-squad? Well, I would have to think very carefully about that.

Have I conveyed the shock and dismay I felt at learning I was on a no-smoking train? Barely, I think. If there had been an international airport in Salem, the first stop after Portland, I would have been off the train and booking a flight back to the UK. The hell with meeting people, sod being an anonymous traveller, a stranger to myself and everyone I met, I wanted a cigarette, and more to the point, I wanted a cigarette whenever I wanted it.

I managed a few puffs at Salem, and then slept my way through the afternoon. I woke when my alarm went off to alert me to a stop at Eugene–Springfield just before I was due to be called for dinner over the loudspeaker. I managed a few inhalations before the conductor hustled me back on the train. I asked him when we were due to arrive at Chelmut.

‘Eight-o-seven, ma’am.’

‘Good, that’ll be just about when I finish eating. Then I can light up, inhale a little nicotine and sleep until six thirty tomorrow morning, when, thank god, we’ll arrive in Sacramento. I’ve got a six-hour wait for the Denver train, so I can smoke up a storm.’

‘Well, ma’am,’ the conductor told me with an inscrutable expression, ‘unfortunately, they’ve got a law against smoking in Sacramento.’

‘That’s OK, I’ll stand on the street and smoke. The weather’s fine in Sacramento.’

‘No, I mean there’s a law against smoking on the sidewalk in Sacramento. They’re very advanced in their thinking in that part of California.’

I was not feeling very companionable when I arrived at my table. Neither, it seemed, was the small, round, elderly man who sat opposite me. We nodded a brisk greeting to each other and then proceeded through our dismal salad and halfway through the steaks we had both ordered without a word being said. This was a first and I was grateful. A silent fellow-traveller. Although we were at a two-person table, he showed no sign of wanting to begin a conversation, and was concentrating hard on his dinner. I was in no mood for learning about anyone’s life, no matter how fascinating. I’d had it with interesting strangers. I would have been quite happy to eat and stare at the scenery passing by. But it was dark. Looking out of the window simply reflected my own face back at me.

It’s very hard to sit through a complete meal with others in silence, though I’d had a certain amount of practice at it when I was fourteen. Although I spent my days riding the Circle Line, during my sullen silence while living with my father and stepmother, Pam, I nonetheless had to eat. It helped that the evening meal (‘tea’) was arranged to be at the same time as the immortal rural family radio saga, The Archers. There wasn’t much conversation to be had, apart from comments on the doings of Phil and Jill and their brood on Home Farm. I, of course, despised The Archers, and sat with Lolita on my lap, trying to read it until it was snatched away by Pam or my father, either because reading at table was rude or because it was deemed a dirty book, and in any case having your head in a book was an unhealthy habit. Then I had nothing to do but stare icily ahead, eat as fast as possible and ask to be excused from the table, when permission was given with relief. I was dying to talk, but I had been locked into a silence by the secret deal Pam had made with my mother, the ineffectualness of my father, and by my own rage and sense of strangeness and dependency. Awful meals. I remember them as cold damp food (lettuce, tomato and cucumber and a slice of wet ham laid on a plate with salad cream available for those with exotic tastes) and icy atmosphere.

I have always liked best to eat alone with a book in front of me. When I was little I would take a plate of something to my hiding place in a corner behind two armchairs and sit cross-legged, reading and eating. The next best thing is the convivial conversational meal. Table talk. Easy suppers with people laughing and arguing. Silent tables chill me. The last silent table I sat at was in a monastery I stayed at a few years ago. The monks were silent, and the rest of the company was on retreat. You nodded to your fellow diners as you arrived at the table and then kept quiet for fear of disrupting their meditations. Getting the salt or the water jug from the other end of the refectory table was a matter of eyebrow raising, pointing and mime – and not complaining when you got the mustard instead. I like silence, but silence and food in company is a very bad combination in my view. And as for meditation, the only thing I managed to think at these monkish meals was how no one was talking and how everyone had their own special, and increasingly disgusting, way of shovelling food into their faces. A little talk helps you forget the purely physical aspect of eating. Perhaps that’s what the silence requirement in the monastery is for, to remind us of it.

‘Going all the way?’

I was quite relieved when he spoke. ‘No, just to Sacramento,’ I replied.

‘My name is Joseph.’

Joseph was spherical and shy, an inoffensive, reticent man, mostly bald, not at all at ease, I thought, with strangers. I was, of course, quite wrong. Joseph was naturally timid, but he had learned to take himself in hand. He lived on Paulet Island, off the coast of Seattle, and had kids in San Diego and San Francisco. He was on his way to visit them and his three grandchildren, the youngest, just one month old, he had never seen. Between bits of information, Joseph chewed his steak conscientiously. I was pleased that there was nothing especially interesting about Joseph. Just a nice old widowed grandfather on his way to visit the family. No story, no insight into the secret heart of humanity. I could cope with that. My enthusiasm for the remarkable story that everyone had to tell was already seriously on the wane. Joseph required nothing more of me than to take a brief polite interest in the eventless routine of a quiet life. I felt perfectly safe in asking him if he was retired.

‘Yup. Retired and living in suburbia. I was born in the Bronx. In Hell’s Kitchen. Where I live now is very quiet, very quiet. Just front lawns and empty streets apart from the cars going to and fro. People keeping themselves to themselves. Suburban life is much too unfriendly for my taste. You don’t meet people. I don’t have a car. I have a bicycle with a basket on for my shopping. I was an engineer.’

‘Ah,’ I nodded, relieved that my assessment of him as narratologically safe and bland was confirmed.

‘Uh huh, weapons and space. I worked on the Apollo engines. I guess the stuff I made is still up there, going round and round. But I’m a professional dancer now, since I retired.’

In spite of Joseph’s clue that he was the only cycling shopper on Paulet Island, I had been lulled into relaxing. I was only half listening. I did a double take.

‘Pardon?’

‘On cruises. I’m a dance host.’

I looked at him harder, but nothing I could do in the way of squinting and refocusing could turn podgy Joseph into Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire or Shirley MacLaine. But I did see the eyes take on a confident gleam and bald round reticent Joseph begin to warm up as he explained what he had done with his life these past ten years or so. In return for being available as a nightly dance partner to a great surfeit of older single women on board pleasure ships, Joseph got free cruises all over the world. He’d never been out of the US before he began his new career, but in just the past couple of seasons he had been to Egypt and Australia, ‘dancing,’ he said with a delighted smile, ‘all the way.’ But it wasn’t easy. It wasn’t the sinecure it might seem to the uninitiated. This was by no means a cushy number. There were no days off in the dance-host business. Seven nights a week he was on duty. And he had to look smart to a very high standard, wear a uniform of white patent shoes and a blue blazer (the cost of which came out of his own pocket) to show he was a member of staff. It was necessary because single men who went on cruises could be weird.

‘You know, looking for moneyed women. You get a lot of wealthy single women on these cruises. Mostly they’re on their own, spending their husband’s life insurance. They want fun. They don’t want to stand around and watch other people dancing. They paid good money for a good time. But they’re a prey to fortune-hunters. So the cruise companies employ respectable retired single men like me – you don’t get any wages, but the trip and the food is for free – to keep the single women company without them having to worry about what we’re after. Of course, there are strict rules and we’re carefully vetted. No drinkers or gamblers. And you have to have diplomatic as well as dance skills. Some of the girls can get very possessive, you know. You’ve got to be careful about that. You have to treat them all equally, and be seen to do that. The other ladies notice and complain to the purser if a host dances too much with one particular woman. It’s completely against the rules to get emotionally involved with the passengers. You get into any kind of relationship, or get caught slipping out of anyone’s cabin, and they put you off at the next port. Doesn’t matter where it is. It happened on my last cruise. They put one of the dance hosts off the ship, because he’d been fooling around with a passenger and someone told the captain about it. Right in the middle of nowhere. A million miles from America. God knows if he ever got home. You’ve got to be very, very careful.’

And did he know how to do all the dances?

‘Oh sure, it’s part of the qualifications, along with being presentable and being able to talk pleasantly.’ Joseph was beaming with pride now at what he had achieved with his life in retirement. ‘My late wife and I used to go ballroom dancing. We got medals. I took a refresher course when I decided to sign on as a dance host. I can do them all. I myself am not too crazy about the cha cha or salsa. But you got to do them, and do them well. Me, I like to tango. Tango is my favourite. But you’ve got to be able to handle everything, and some of the ladies aren’t the best dancers. You help them round the floor. You make conversation, and make them feel that you are enjoying their company. I get to travel and see the whole world, but I think I’m being useful, you know, as well. I help people enjoy themselves without worrying that they are being taken advantage of. That’s not a bad thing, is it? It’s a good life.’

Dinner was over and that was Joseph, who had spent his working life with weapons and space ships, and now twirled lonely women around a peripatetic ballroom in white patent shoes. There was not the slightest possibility, I realised as I stubbed out my last cigarette of the evening on the platform of Chelmut station, of coming across anyone who led the kind of uneventful and routine life that the vast majority of humanity were supposed to lead. Wherever these hoards of the normal were, they didn’t travel by train. Or not on my trains.

In bed I watched the moon swinging erratically in the dense black night as the train curved and snaked down the West Coast. The stars were within reach, bright circles, so close that they appeared to hover like torchlights just above the level of the treetops. The bed swayed gently from side to side as our caravan moved through the night. And aside from the scratchy nicotine need in my belly I felt right then so content that I didn’t want the trip to end. I was entirely detached from everything. From life back in England. From family, friends and lover. I felt I was nobody’s, and nobody was mine. Like the stars: suspended, just passing through landscape and nightscape and by people, or those things passing by me, and there was little distinction. It was delicious, but I also badly wanted a cigarette.

We arrived at Sacramento at 6 a.m., half an hour before schedule. Amtrak trains are only late, apparently, when you are in a hurry. Six in the morning is too early to arrive anywhere. But the conductor had knocked on my door and warned me to get myself together, and there I stood with my bags on the grandly spacious concourse of Sacramento train station. The no-smoking signs were everywhere, and I had been warned that even the air was protected against my vice. Eugene turned up beside me. Apparently, six in the morning is too early to arrive even if you have got somewhere to go.

‘My appointment is not until nine thirty. Would you like to have breakfast?’

We put our bags in Left Luggage and found an open diner a block or two away from the station. It was just far enough for me to light up and smoke a cigarette. Eugene didn’t smoke, but he didn’t mind me smoking. It did no violence to his libertarian views.

‘Let me know if you see a policeman,’ I said, feeling cagey. ‘It’s against the law to smoke even in the open air in this land of health and never-say-die, I’m told.’

Eugene laughed. Apparently, the conductor had been having me on, but I was prepared to believe any no-smoking rumour going.

The diner was a bright Formica and chrome canteen, already busy with workmen who brought in their own mugs for coffee at a discount and had piled their plates with hash browns, sausage and egg. I piled mine up with the same at the counter, being famished and particularly partial to American breakfast, stopping to ponder between over easy and sunny-side up. I decided on over easy because I liked the idea of saying it. I once wrote a short story called ‘Over Easy’ because the phrase appeals to me so much. Eugene had waffles and maple syrup. At six in the morning in a strange city, in the pearly Californian light, we were comfortable with each other, like old acquaintances. We talked more of books. He asked me who I wrote for and was pleased when he heard the name of a respectable literary journal he had seen. Although our styles were quite different, I could speak his language, as it were. And I was not married. I was possible. I suspected that Eugene took his children’s wishes very seriously.

‘Are you sorting out someone’s estate down here?’ I asked.

‘No, I’ve got a doctor’s appointment.’

‘Oh.’

‘I’m going blind.’

Dear god, more story. Eugene had a hole in his macula, at the centre of his retina. He was already blind in one eye and now the other was deteriorating. He would be completely blind within a couple of years. He was doing everything he could to prevent this happening, but all the doctors he had seen had told him that nothing could be done, and that he should begin to prepare for living without his sight. Finally, he had come across a specialist in Sacramento who performed an operation that was said to work. He was having his initial examination today and if he was suitable they would operate. It was an extreme measure because the post-operative procedure was arduous. It involved the patient being tipped forward so that his head was facing the ground and remaining in that position with as little movement as possible for three weeks. Gravity and immobility aided recovery. Eugene acknowledged that this was an awful prospect, as much as anything because he wouldn’t be able to read, but it was his duty, he said, to save his sight if he possibly could. This procedure might not work and if that was the case then there was nothing left to do. Then it would be his task to accept the situation and learn how to be an effective blind man. Eugene presented his situation starkly and without drama or emotion. Somewhere in all this was a kind of muscular Christianity, but behind that, I suspect, a Stoicism of the ancient sort that I imagined he would admire. Marcus Aurelius was surely on his list of good guys.

What was more, in his careful account of his diagnosis and prognosis, I caught the note of someone laying his cards on the table. Of making his situation quite clear before going any further. He had a very pleasant house, he told me, and he was semi-retired. Once again an unlooked-for change of direction in my life beckoned; sort of picked me up and played with me the game of unconsidered possibilities. Mrs Ivy League Eugene in my late middle age, five stepchildren, a well-appointed house in Rochester, NY, regular concerts, visits to European cultural centres, time and room to work in a civilised and mature relationship. Of course, in my current real life I had time and room to work, as well as something rather more than a civilised and mature relationship. I lived in a European cultural centre. My home in England was fine and I prefer CDs to going to concerts. Still, I slipped into the possibility of a new existence as, in the changing room of a frock shop, I would try on a dress of the kind I would never wear, just to see who I would be if I wore such a thing. We got on to politics. Eugene praised the eighties as the dying hope of a lost civilisation. Thatcher and Reagan were last-stand heroes of fiscal sanity. Thatcher, in particular, he admired, for her single-minded belief in free-market economy. I itemised the damage her single-minded belief had done to the British health service, affordable housing and state education. Eugene shook his head against my soft, wrong-headed and unthinking leftist attitudes and explained that the poor could only benefit from a strong independent economy and became feckless if supported by the state. This was a civilised disagreement, not like the occasion at dinner with Glenys and the awful man who was so upset by her. Eugene and I argued politely, even enjoyably from our mutually irreconcilable positions, but it became clear that the wedding was off. I took off the life in Rochester, NY, and let it drop to my feet, and Eugene gave up his dinner parties with his acerbic English novelist wife. We veered into talk about London and the theatre, and other harmless topics, but the edge was gone. I hadn’t seriously considered myself as Eugene’s consort, but now that our unsuitability was so clear, I had just a momentary twinge of disappointment, as if I really had lost something that had come into existence and died all in a fleeting moment. With a degree of regret on both sides, we finished our breakfast and, when the time came for him to go to his appointment, wished each other good luck. I hoped the eye operation was successful and he trusted my book would turn out well. I also wished very much, though I did not say so aloud, that he would soon find the sort of person he was looking for. I didn’t think it would take very long.

*   *   *

I had three hours before the train to Denver was due, so I followed the signs that pointed to ‘Old Sacramento’, forgetting, for a moment, that I was in America. That’s how much train travel insulates you. ‘Old Sacramento’ meant, of course, ‘New but Distressed Sacramento’. It was the old part of town that had been suffering from inner-city blight for decades. In frontier days, the handful of streets had indeed been the original site of the town, but for a long time since, the area had been derelict and a hangout for junkies, the homeless, the criminal. But all that had been swept away by a city council who knew the value of investment in history. Old Sacramento had been pulled down and rebuilt as a replica of a chocolate-box American West. You’ve seen it in the movies – though they were more likely to be Audie Murphy oaters than Sam Peckinpah meditations on the passing of the old. Of course, it was only the frontages that were rendered out of date. By-laws and health directives required that the interior of the buildings provided late-twentieth-century safety and comfort, however much timber clad the modern building materials, and shopkeepers were not going to risk tourists missing items for sale with out-of-date lighting or old-fashioned displays. You clattered along the boarded, porched sidewalks complete with horse-retaining rails, but entered bright air-conditioned emporia selling cheap, tatty replicas of items that were once desirable mainly for their practicality: durable hats, boots, leather bags for cowboys to improve their peripatetic existence, now remodelled in shoddy materials and badly but equally suitably made for the life they would lead in the backs of wardrobes. Subsistence supplies had changed, too. Barrels of flour were replaced by Perspex containers keeping popcorn warm. A slug of whisky was more likely to be a Tequila Sunrise. A lunch of just-off-the-hoof steak with beans became toasted goat’s cheese and oakleaf salad. Old Sacramento turned out to be theme streets of tourist shops. Heritage with fries. But signs (done as old ‘Wanted’ posters) boasted proudly of the restoration of the deteriorated and decayed ‘historical district’, at the sweeping away of inner-city blight and the reclaiming of the past for the edification of visitors. Of course, the past was not so much reclaimed as sanitised and sold, and it is startling how quickly these bright new versions of history become tawdry, as the gilding wears off and reveals the paper-thin profit motive. Apparently, if you tidy things up in order to sell crap, the crap wins out. Glum-looking men and women wearing western outfits greeted me with weary bonhomie, welcoming me into their empty, pointless shops. I slouched around, killing time before I could return to the interior of a train that was in every way more of a destination than any of this, staring at stuff made of plastic that lit up, or made a sound, or turned out to be something it didn’t look like, and came away, eventually, with a small rubber replica of a brain, the size of a walnut, which was guaranteed to swell to twenty times its size when placed in water.

*   *   *

‘Why do you make sexist assumptions?’

I had just asked the woman sitting next to me at dinner if she was a nurse. She was travelling with two other women and I was sharing their table for lunch. The three of them were on their way to a convention of franchised sales representatives who bought and sold to their friends and acquaintances a large sea-green capsule that was filled with dehydrated extract of vegetables. It was, apparently, the latest way for West Coast would-be entrepreneurs to supplement their income. The three were a group of gay women in their late twenties who all had other jobs. The woman sitting next to me worked, I was told by her friend opposite, in a medical facility.

‘Are you a nurse?’ I asked.

Which brought down the accusation of sexism by her friend who seemed to be in charge of testing the world for wrong thinking.

‘Why don’t you ask if she’s a doctor?’ she snapped.

‘Because why would she be selling vegetable capsules in her spare time if she had a doctor’s salary? Are you a doctor?’

‘No,’ the woman next to me said. ‘I’m a nursing assistant.’

There was a short silence.

‘We believe in what we sell,’ the one in charge berated. ‘It’s a complete supplement. One capsule gives you all the nutrition that you would get from the recommended daily intake of fresh fruit and vegetables.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘I hate vegetables. So if I have one of these a day, does that mean I won’t ever have to eat vegetables again? I’ll take a lifetime’s supply.’

‘You don’t seem to be a very serious person,’ I was told. And it was true; except for in the area of eating vegetables, which I seriously do not like to do.

I was aware that I should have taken more interest in the veggie-for-life-selling lesbians on the way to their feel-good convention, but I had suddenly come over profoundly uninterested in all things vegetable, lesbian and feel-good. The smoking coach beckoned and then my new sleeping accommodation. The California Zephyr was a satisfyingly dog-eared change from the Coast Starlight, with ageing rolling stock and worn upholstery. And it had a smoking coach as shabby as any I had seen. I smoked a couple of cigarettes in it, keeping my eyes on the increasingly empty landscape to avoid being drawn into any conversation. Then I padded off to my bed and slept until 5.15 p.m., when the train drew into Reno, Nevada.

Back in the smoking car the sun was setting, but it felt more as if the light was dying. Outside the desert passed by, grey-green, sparse, bleak and getting bleaker every moment. The sunset should have been beautiful, slipping through pastel shades from pink to blue to beige, but it only increased the sadness of the landscape and brought out that dying-of-the-light desolation that lurks in some corner of me waiting for the physical environment to match it. The coach was empty apart from a man with a face as long as my gloom, who sat opposite me, saying nothing. I was halfway through my cigarette before he spoke.

‘I hope it’s not cold in Winnemucca.’

His voice was as doom-laden as his face. He wore a suit and tie and lace-up shoes. A regular guy. A salesman, perhaps. We were due to arrive in the improbably named Winnemucca at seven forty-five that evening. I had no option but to ask why he was worrying about the temperature. He nodded his approval at my question.

‘I left my coat on the door knob at home. Clean forgot it.’

‘That’s a nuisance. You’ll have to get a new one when you arrive.’

He sniffed. ‘Stores will be closed by then. That’s not all. I left the car in the three-hour car park. The wife was going to pick it up after work, but when I got on the train I found the spare keys in my pocket, so she won’t be able to. I’m away for three days. It’s better not to imagine what the parking fine’s going to be.’

‘That’s terrible.’

‘Yes. And I left my travel bag in the car,’ he shook his head and then looked at me with real distress as it all came together in a single dreadful fact. ‘You know, I can put up with only having white socks to wear, I don’t like it, but I can tolerate that if I have to, but what I can’t even bear to think, what is really too awful to face, is having to spend three whole days using a hand-operated toothbrush.’

I began to feel much better. He was a gold-mining consultant, he told me when he could get his mind off his many tribulations.

‘There’s still gold in the Sierra Nevada, but it’s all dust. The nuggets they mined for in the Gold Rush days are long gone. There’s still plenty of money in the dust, but only if you can afford to collect it. It’s not a game for individuals any more. Just recently they moved an entire mountain – I mean a real mountain-sized mountain – and sifted it, every last ounce of earth, to get out the gold dust. Then, because of the environmental lobby, they remodelled it. They rebuilt the whole damn mountain back where it had been. This is the landscape of gold and gambling. That’s all that happens here. Sifting through the dust and playing on the tables. I don’t remember the last time I brushed my teeth by hand.’

It was dark by the time we arrived at Winnemucca and it looked decidedly cold, I was sorry to note. That night we were passing through Salt Lake City, invisible in the dark. By the early morning we would have passed through the towns of Provo and Helper in Utah. Before reaching Denver we had to cross the Colorado Rockies in the daylight, and it was the most stunning part of the whole trip. Visually, it was extraordinary, chugging at a slow, careful speed around the mountains, carpeted at that height with snow, along a twisting track only just wide enough for the train, so that through one window was sheer rockface while through the other, if you dared look out, you stared straight down at an apparently diminutive ribbon of the Colorado River winding through the canyon two thousand feet below. And then there was the thought of those who made, and often died making, those tracks, blasting away the mountain to make a ledge for the rails or a tunnel through the solid rock. Human life was no impediment to humanity’s will to press on. It was one of the most precarious and moving journeys I have ever made. Absurd really, to look at implacable mountains and decide to go straight through them. But perhaps not so absurd when you consider that the men who blasted and sweated and died were for the most part Chinese or Irish labourers working for a pittance, desperate for whatever work they could get, while the entrepreneurs followed on in moving staterooms making corrupt deals with the politicians. The usual background to humankind’s most monumental achievements.

We approached Denver, spiralling down from the top of the Rockies, as the sun set. Denver proudly calls itself the ‘Mile High City’, but we dropped down into it like a plane making its grand and gracious descent towards a runway. Except that this runway was a whole city, flooded, sparkling and twinkling with light, spread out in front of us for half an hour or more before we were finally down at ground level.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,’ the conductor breathed over the loudspeaker. ‘Isn’t that a beautiful sight?’

*   *   *

Which was considerably more than could be said for Raton, New Mexico, when I arrived there after a three-and-a-half-hour bus journey that began around six in the morning. I hadn’t slept much that night, being quite unaccustomed to the six-foot bed that remained perfectly still and the oceanic pleasures of the black jacuzzi that mysteriously was plumbed into a corner of my hotel room. I tried to enjoy both, but being in transit and geared quite differently, I found them only delicious distractions that I didn’t want to become accustomed to. They were not what I was presently about so I rather wanted to get them both over and done with and on to the main business of moving on. I’ve never been able to take pleasure as it comes. I need warning and practice. In any case the edge is taken off the joy of a luxury room, giant bed and bubbling bath when you know you have to stagger out of bed at five the next morning to catch a bus to a godforsaken spot whose name you can’t remember except that it has something to do with rodents.

Raton (pronounced Ra-tone, though I can’t help but think of it, even now, as Rat-on) wasn’t much to write home about. The station building was a squat, square, concrete and asbestos affair, though the stationmaster clearly took pride in the concrete planters on the platform, which were profuse with fiery red and orange flowers in the otherwise grey surroundings. The single track cut through the flat drab landscape extending right and left into empty infinity. If destiny in the form of gunslingers was on the train heading your way, you could see it coming for miles and watch the speck in the distance grow into looming inevitability. The train came through Raton once a day, every day of the year, including Christmas, and every day, including Christmas, the uniformed stationmaster, a man of quiet if slightly amused efficiency in his thirties, was there to greet it and wave it off. He greeted the half dozen or so of us off the bus, checked our baggage on to his trolley and told us that the train would be a couple of hours late. No one was pleased. We had got up early and now found ourselves with the choice of waiting in the blazing sun or the un-air-conditioned station building. On the other hand, Raton in the midday heat did not look promising to explore as we peered at the empty featureless streets we could see from behind the station. But people lived there. Surely they had lunch, or drank in a bar?

‘It’s a pretty quiet town,’ the stationmaster told us. We nodded grim agreement. ‘But there’s Bertha’s Tea Rooms.’

People fanned themselves like eighteenth-century courtiers who had inexplicably found themselves in the wilderness. They decided it was safer to keep still than venture into the blank unknown of Bertha’s Tea Rooms in Ratone. I more or less agreed, but Bertha sounded European enough to allow smoking in her tea room, and I really fancied sitting at a table, drinking tea and smoking in a public place. I hadn’t done that since I left the UK, so I asked for directions. A young woman in jeans and a T-shirt with a large backpack strapped on to her said she would join me. We collected orders for doughnuts and Danish from several of our less intrepid fellow travellers, then we trudged off into town. It turned out that the shops were more shut down than just shut. It was a hopeless sort of place. We passed a cinema, but it was closed, and had been for a while by the look of it. It seemed that people in Raton had better things to do than go to the movies, though what those things might be was hard to imagine.

Bertha’s Tea Rooms, however, were open, though there was only the one room, with plastic tables and chairs, and a handful of customers who seemed to have been specially sent from a Hollywood agency to play the role of regulars hanging out in a smalltown café, reading the local paper, throwing the occasional comment back and forth, and raising their heads in unison as my new friend and I opened the door. Bertha was behind a counter piled not just with regulation jelly doughnuts but with pastries and biscuits that would have been at home in any tea room in southern Germany.

‘We’ve found the jewel of Raton,’ I murmured to my companion as we ordered a plateful of delicious home-baked goodies and coffees.

Caroline was nineteen, and, she told me, had just finished college and was on her way home to a small town in Illinois. I asked what she had studied and she looked a little cagey.

‘It was a theological college.’

We both waited to see how I would react.

‘Are you going to be a priest?’

‘No. I trained for missionary work. I’m planning to go overseas to work as a missionary after I’ve spent some time back with my parents.’

‘Where will you be going?’

I wondered what part of which dark continent still welcomed missionaries.

‘France.’

That dark continent.

‘France?’ I spoke too loud, and too astonished. She was startled. ‘France, Europe?’

‘Yes. That’s where they want to send me.’ Caroline looked nervous now. I tried to get the surprise off my face.

‘I didn’t realise there was much call for missionaries in France.’

‘Yes,’ Caroline said dubiously. ‘I was sort of surprised when they told me. But I guess there must be a need or they wouldn’t send me.’

I wasn’t at all sure that she knew where France was, but I suppose that just the fact of it not being in America justified the sending of a mission. She was from a fundamentalist family, who were pleased that she had followed in their footsteps. This was a new encounter for me.

‘So you believe in the whole creation thing?’

She nodded.

‘And evolution? And genetics?’ I felt weary as I said it.

‘It’s wrong. God made the world just as it says in the Bible.’

Caroline was nineteen. I know I’ve said that already, but I had to repeat it to myself.

‘Seven days? The whole shebang? What about fossils?’

‘Well, we’re taught that God put fossils on the earth when he made it.’

‘For what? For fun? To tease? To trick us?’

‘No, I think the idea is,’ she thought hard, back to her lectures, ‘that God made the world already old, with all its history already made. That’s what accounts for the apparent age of the world.’

‘But why would God do that?’

‘Well, you have to have history, don’t you?’

We finished our coffee and cakes and began to walk back to the station with the doughnuts for the others.

‘You don’t have any qualms about converting people to your beliefs?’

‘I shouldn’t. I’m sure what I believe is the truth. But, you know, I have been a bit worried about being a missionary. I don’t know if it’s right to go to other parts of the world and tell people what to think. Even if I believe it’s the truth, I’m not sure I’ve got the right to tell people twice my age what they should be doing. I haven’t really sorted my feelings out about it. It does seem odd for me to go to France and tell them to change their ideas.’

I was both dismayed and encouraged by Caroline. Not the world’s most independent thinker, but still, perhaps because she’s young, perhaps because ideas can still impinge on belief systems in the young, she’s wondering about the nature of what she’s planning to do, of the notion of one group of people having a truth that they are entitled to impose on others. It wasn’t much, but it was something. Or better than nothing. And anyway, I figured that France would be able to withstand the persuasions of Caroline, and even, possibly, teach her a thing or two of its own.

*   *   *

Bet, Mikey and her hero lived in a small, four-roomed one-storey adobe house in a suburb of Albuquerque. I immediately gave up hope of seeing Albuquerque itself, which might have been Jacksonville the way Bet shuddered, ‘We never go into the city. It’s all drugs and young people, these days,’ as the hero drove us rapidly through it in his big blue Dodge four-wheel-drive on the way home from the train station. This wasn’t the immaculate suburb of exquisitely green front lawns I’d seen in Phoenix. It was less uniform, less affluent, more utilised, with the front spaces of the houses serving more practical storage functions for the extra trucks or cars that wouldn’t fit in the garages. Bet’s space was gravelled. A trailer stood in front of the garage.

‘There’s your new home,’ Bet said, pointing to it as we drove up. ‘We’re real proud of it. We just bought it this summer.’

‘Huh,’ grunted Hero.

‘Ah, take no notice of him.’

‘Sure, don’t worry. But if you wake up one morning in the woods, ma’am, don’t be concerned. It’s just me taking advantage of the hunting season. Which is why I bought it.’

‘Ignore him.’

‘Hey, Jenny, you won’t mind being surrounded by bears and cougar. Don’t worry, I’ve got plenty of guns. Just give a yell and I’ll come running. I’m only kidding.’ Hero smiled broadly. ‘You make yourself real comfortable. Just make sure you’re gone before the hunting season’s over.’

‘I thought I’d stay for four or five days,’ I said nervously. ‘But if it’s difficult…’

‘No, I’m pulling your leg. You don’t want to take me too serious. You’re real welcome. I’ll head off for a few days after you leave.’

He didn’t mind my coming to stay, but he had been genuinely worried that I would be around for a month or so and wreck his hunting plans. The trailer was new: his treasure, his hunting lodge and his den. But my promise of staying just five days reassured him. Perhaps he was also worried about how things would go with Mikey.

The single-storey house was cramped and dark. All the curtains were drawn, and they stayed drawn when we went in. Jim, Bet’s hero, went straight to an old armchair in the living room and turned on the TV. Bet showed me into the cluttered kitchen, which was the real communal room. Only Hero and sometimes Mikey used the front room where the TV was always on and the curtains always closed the better to see it.

There was nothing ambivalent about Bet’s pleasure in having a visitor.

‘This is so great. Can’t you stay for longer? I thought you’d be staying a month.’ No wonder the hero was anxious. ‘Well, what about making it a couple of weeks? He can still go off with his pals on a hunting trip if you stay a couple of weeks. He’s only kidding you, really.’

Actually, he wasn’t, and I was glad enough to have a reason not to stay longer.

The floor and the shelves of the eating area of the kitchen were piled high with the overflow of Bet’s train memorabilia, which also lined the walls of the hallway and snaked into a tiny room at the back which Bet called her study. Bits of track, old train and station signs, timetables, model engines, postcards and other mementoes were piled precariously on top of each other. In the dim light the dusty disorder made the place look like a junk shop. A small circular dining table in the kitchen provided a slightly less chaotic island in the middle of it all. There were three kitchen chairs and one wheelchair set around it.

‘Never mind his hunting lodge. This is my guest bedroom,’ Bet said, showing me to my sleeping quarters in the all-purpose everyone’s-dream-come-true trailer. ‘I’ve never had a real guest. You’re the first. Well, the kids come, and the grandchildren, though not to stay, but I’ve never had my very own guest before.’ She was as excited as a schoolgirl. She clutched me on my shoulder and gave me a little shake. ‘Hey it’s so great you’ve come to stay.’

By now I was beginning to panic. What was I doing in the home of these strangers, just one of whom I’d met on a train journey? Why had I put myself in such a situation? I couldn’t remember why I thought it would be all right to do it. It could only be because I had completely forgotten who I really was. The coming five days loomed ahead and stretched out, elongating like a dark unfriendly cat settling down for the day. Five days. I imagined each night, each day, the hours, the minutes, and my heart rose into my throat, making my breath come in short gasps.

‘Are you OK? Look, here’s your bed. Jim made it up this morning for you. He’s really pleased you’re here. He’s glad I’ve got someone to spend time with. Now let me show you where everything is. And Mikey’s really excited. He’ll be back soon. He can’t wait to meet you.’

I was soothed by the interior of the trailer, which was another version of my cabin on the freighter and the sleeping compartment on the train. A small, highly ordered, shipshape living space, where everything could be done that needed to be done, life could be lived, but with not an inch of space to spare. The double bed was built-in to the width of the trailer at the back. At the foot of the bed to the right was the kitchen – a sink, a fridge and a gas cooker, an electric kettle and cupboards above and below stacked full of cleaning equipment and dry food.

‘We keep it ready to go. You help yourself to anything.’

Bet opened canisters and we peered in to admire the contents: biscuits, breakfast cereals, Ryvita, tea, coffee, sugar, and she pointed to tins of pilchards, pot noodles, luncheon meat, corned beef and soup.

‘You just take whatever you want. Treat the place like home.’

Opposite the kitchen was a table with benches on either side where I could sit and work, and at the front was a diminutive bathroom with chemical loo, a basin and a shower.

‘Jim’s hooked it up to the mains water and electricity. Everything’s working. It’s your very own palace.’

And it was. My doll’s house home for the next few days delighted me. I’d once written a novel about a wild old woman, presumably a forward projection of myself, who took to life in a mobile home, and, until I learned about the trouble and expense of caring for the hull, I entertained serious fantasies in my late twenties of living in a narrow boat on the Regent’s Canal. The precisely formulated, limited space attracted me just as when I was a child I loved diminutive dolls’ houses, farmyards and play houses, or that dark triangular space of my childhood behind the two armchairs in the corner, where I spent so many hours, keeping away from the raging fights between my parents, being what they called ‘moody’ and reading or playing out dramas of my own devising. And the trailer was, of course, outside Bet’s house, a separate space, a retreat, just like ships’ cabins and train sleeping compartments, a place away from everyone. Bet was the best and most enthusiastic of hosts. I was the worst of guests, wanting, before it even started, to hide away in my trailer against the conviviality and the talk, the addition of me to the family, quite unable to make the move from amiable stranger in control of my own sociability, to the responsibilities of a guest in the family house.

Bet was completely herself, but lighter-hearted than when we met on the Sunset Limited. She wanted to talk. She drew me back to the kitchen table, settled down with a large gin and tonic and told me about her life, her difficult childhood with her alcoholic mother, her youthful wildness, settling down with Jim and making a family which, when it was young, she herded from army base to army base all over the world – Germany and Japan – without ever setting foot outside the American-ness offered by the enclosing camps. She didn’t consider herself well travelled, or travelled at all. Like Jim, she had gone because America had sent her to make war or keep peace. Now, the three older children were married – no divorces in Bet’s family – and earning livings as clerks and tree surgeons, and all lived quite nearby. She told me about the youngest, Mikey, who in his late twenties, not having found what he wanted to do, had finally settled on being a policeman and was in the middle of training when his accident happened. A pure accident, if that is possible. Bet, at any rate, accepted it as such. The woman who ran into Mikey’s stationary car couldn’t have avoided it, and Bet felt no resentment that she was hurt not at all. Mikey was in a coma for weeks and it was more or less accepted that he was going to die, even by Bet, when he suddenly came round, his right arm and leg paralysed, his speech profoundly slurred, his short-term memory all but destroyed, his mental age retarded to a nine-year-old. But he was alive.

‘Oh, Jenny, it just broke my heart, but we got our baby boy back, and now he’s going to stay a baby for ever. You could say we were lucky.’

Jim spoke very little. He broke into large amiable grins when teased for his silence at the table by Bet, or sat low-slung in the near-dark in front of the endless daytime game and talk shows on the TV. If he seemed morose to me, it was likely my own anxieties being projected. There was no obvious tension between Jim and Bet; she chattered and he remained quiet, they had different ways of getting through life but neither expected, or even appeared to want, the other to be more like themselves. They were as solid a couple as any I’ve come across. Quite different in style, but understanding and tolerant of each other. Each of them knew the burden of sadness they both carried and let the other be the way they had to be to get through it. Though Bet’s high-strung neurosis showed itself as tense and fidgety, with a need to drink and talk sadness away, Jim seemed the more troubled because he was the least able to express it. His quietness was not restful, just as his hours in the armchair with a can of beer and the TV blaring did not seem an expression of relaxation but of suppressed anger, of feelings he had no idea what to do with except control like the military man he had been. He was a professional soldier, and had served unquestioningly in postwar Europe, Vietnam and the Gulf War. He had retired because it was coming up for mandatory and because he needed to be home to help Bet with Mikey. Once a day he would go off in the Dodge to the nearby base where he would sit and chat with old comrades and buy cheap cigarettes for him and Bet from the commissary. It was his club, his male home. He’d run a wholesaling business after he came out of the military, but it hadn’t worked out. He wasn’t a businessman. Now he and Bet lived well enough providing they were careful on their pensions, and Mikey had his own disability allowance. Still, whenever he was at home, I had the impression of an explosion continually not occurring. Jim came alive, however, as if he had been charging during his daytime silence with his on-switch flipped, when Mikey returned home in the late afternoon from his day at the sheltered workshop. The ambulance would pull up and Jim was already outside with Mikey’s wheelchair, grinning and joking with the driver and joshing Mikey, standing back as he made his slow, lumbering way out of the back of the vehicle with the aid of a walking frame.

‘Hiya, Mikey,’ Bet chirruped when Jim wheeled him into the kitchen, as if he were making a rare and delightful surprise visit, and was not just coming home as he did every day, and would be for the rest of their lives.

‘Hey, Mom, how ya doing?’ Mikey shouted, playing back at her, and chuckling his pleasure at seeing his mother and father and the kitchen all there, still unchanged, still welcoming their long-lost boy home.

Mikey was delightful. He entered a room, took a deep breath into his heavily overweight belly and bellowed a great ‘Hi’, smiling long and hard into your face, then roaring with laughter, and you were lost in the gaiety. It worked such a charm that, whenever things went a little quiet and a silence fell between people, Mikey would bellow, ‘Hi, how ya doing?’ Like a comedian’s catchphrase, it was irresistible and touching, that and Mikey’s sweet need to keep everyone happy.

‘Oh, Mikey,’ Bet laughed, all sadness and fondness.

‘Hey, son, how’re you doing?’ Jim said.

‘Well, I’m doing just fine,’ Mikey would shout, like the punchline of a joke, and the hilarity would shimmer around the room.

God knows what Mikey had been like as an undecided youth or a trainee policeman, but as a damaged survivor he made magic. It took a little while to understand his speech, but once your ear was in, you compensated for his slowness in getting his syllables out, his heavy arrhythmic sentences and his stuttering difficulty in articulating words. It even added to the fun, knowing what was going to come (‘Well, I’m doing just fine.’ ‘Hey, Jenny, will you marry me?’ ‘When are we gonna eat?’), and then its eventual arrival, just as expected. I learned quickly to make fun of Mikey’s little ways and to avoid responding to them as tragic symptoms of a broken body and mind.

‘Come on, Mikey, spit it out.’

‘Just … just … just … you w … wait. Donut be in su … su … uch a god … d … d … dam hur … hurry.’

‘Watch your language, young man,’ Bet would say severely.

‘Huh, sorry, god … god … goddam it.’

Mikey was like Udi, he wouldn’t let you not love him. It was a gift.

But Mikey was no less aware of his affliction than we were. We joked and he joked about the dozen exactly similar radios he had in his room and the multiple copies of his favourite CDs, which he bought over and over again on his Saturday outings with Jim to the mall to spend his week’s wages because he forgot he had them already. He stubbornly refused to listen to Jim when he told him he had the new Santana, and insisted on getting it again, because he had no recollection of the pleasure of getting what he wanted the first time, and then the next. If everything felt new, nothing felt old and safe and regular. He forgot that he had eaten and demanded another pizza because he was genuinely hungry, if not for food then for satisfaction. That and the fact that he couldn’t exercise had made him considerably overweight. Often he tried to do things for himself that took two or three times as long to do than they would if someone did them for him, but you stood back and let him. Sometimes, though, the frustration would mount up, he would be too slow making a coffee, lighting a match for my or his mother’s cigarette, or getting to the loo in time, and he would crash down the mug, sweep the matchbox on to the floor, or slam the door shut on himself in his room, cursing darkly in a way that Bet couldn’t stand. Mikey knew exactly what had happened to him, how he had once been, that he could once drive cars and go out with the boys, meet girls, get drunk, have sex, make plans, fail exams because he didn’t care, not because he couldn’t write, and stay out wherever he wanted for as long as he wanted. He remembered in his grown man’s body that he had once been a grown man in other ways before he had been condemned to play the lovable child for all his life. When he shouted his anger at Bet, Jim responded immediately.

‘Don’t ever talk to your mother like that.’

Mikey, of course, got over his tantrum quickly enough, forgetting it had happened, but for the rest of the evening Jim would be sunk deep into his armchair, his hand over his forehead, half covering his eyes, while a game-show host urged his contestants to ever higher peaks of hysterical, squealing excitement.

Jim was particularly pleased that I got on with Mikey. It was what had most worried him about my visit. Right at the beginning we had established that he and I had different views of the world. While driving back from the train station Jim had made some passing remark about welfare and liberal pinkos, and I decided I’d better establish my credentials and leave it at that.

‘Listen, Jim, I’m so liberal pinko, I’m virtually blood-red. But we’ll manage to coexist for the few days I’m here, won’t we?’

‘Sure, so long as you don’t try any of your communist world domination tricks on me.’

‘It’s a deal. Not a domino will fall. I’m so wishy-washy liberal that I’m prepared to coexist with you.’

‘Just for five days, right?’

‘Yeah, just for five days.’

But his real concern was how I would manage with Mikey. He feared, I think, pity, sentimentality or an open expression of sadness. Once it turned out OK, he relaxed, pleased that Bet had someone to talk to, taking off on his own to the base for longer periods because he felt that she had company. But I was not the best of company, staying for long periods, when Mikey was at work, in the trailer, reading, avoiding Bet’s engulfing need to talk, to have the company of another woman, to go over and over the childhood pain she had experienced. I listened for as long as I could, but it was never enough. Jim, full of love for Bet as he was, had stopped listening years ago. Not that Bet stopped talking to him, but he switched off and you could almost see the words slithering around and over him as he sat at the kitchen table thinking his own thoughts or not thinking them. On the second morning of my visit I woke with my eyes pouring tears and feeling as if knives were being turned in the irises. When I staggered into the kitchen from the trailer, Bet found some drops which we tried at the kitchen table, and then, my eyes red raw and streaming, not much improved, she continued with her monologue while I held paper tissues to my face, using up an entire box as each got drenched. She was concerned, but whatever was happening to my eyes had happened before, I told her, and having established that I didn’t have to be rushed to hospital, her need to talk reasserted itself, and I sat, weeping and flinching in pain, while she continued with whatever story it was she was telling me.

The same morning I received a letter from England. It was proofs for an article I’d written just before I left, and I had given Bet’s address to the editor to send them to me for checking. I was quite pleased to get something that looked like work to keep me in my trailer. That evening, early, I took my hosts out to eat. We went to Bet and Jim’s favourite Tex-Mex restaurant. It was in a local mall. Mikey liked it. They knew him well there and joked with him easily. The food was neither here nor there, except there was plenty of it, and as Jim said, ‘It ain’t fancy.’ Always a plus in his eyes. We had to eat very early because the final game of the World Series was on TV that night. Baseball, American male ritual, Jim and Mikey in front of the TV eating chips and popcorn, drinking beer.

When we got back, Bet snapped on the small TV in the kitchen to see how the preparations for the game were going. What I know about baseball is nothing except that it functions quite like religion for American men. I even had to be told, with eyes rising towards heaven, that the World Series was baseball and not football. I worked out for myself that ‘world’ in this case meant just the USA, revealing what Americans really thought of themselves. The men were in the kitchen, Jim explaining that the final was between the Raging Somethings and the Wild Whatevers, when disaster struck. The Wild Whatevers were owned by Ted Turner, and the commentator said that Turner and his then wife, Jane Fonda, were in the stadium to watch their team.

‘Shit!’ Jim barked, and Mikey looked up astonished to hear such language from his dad.

‘Oh, Jesus,’ Bet groaned.

‘What?’ I asked. The atmosphere was thunderous.

‘Turn it off,’ Jim said.

‘Jim, it doesn’t matter. Just watch the game. You always watch the final of the World Series.’

‘I’m not watching anything that bitch is watching. Hanoi bloody Jane. I don’t want to see her ugly traitor’s mug on my TV set. Turn it off.’

‘You’re not going to watch the game?’ I asked.

‘I saw men die in Vietnam while Miss Ho Chi Minh Fonda was prancing around in Hanoi encouraging the Commies to kill American soldiers. She should have faced a firing squad. She ain’t going to show her face in my home. Turn the frigging TV off.’

It was the first time I’d heard a real person use the word frigging.

‘But she was young. Even the GIs thought it was a bad war.’

‘I don’t know what kind of war it was, except my country asked me to fight and if necessary lay down my life. I didn’t see Hanoi Jane risking anything. Or she thought she wasn’t. But I tell you there are people even now who wouldn’t go to any picture she was in, not even to spit at the screen. We won’t forget. She deserves a bullet for what she did. She’ll never be forgiven. How dare she sit in the fancy seats of the World Series final under an American flag? She used to burn it.’

‘Turn that bitch off,’ he ordered Bet.

‘Don’t be silly. Mikey wants to watch. Jenny’s never seen the World Series. Just don’t look at her when she comes on screen. Come on, let’s pop some corn.’

Jim made a popping noise of his own and stomped out of the kitchen into the darkened lounge. The noise of a quiz show blasted out of the large TV, drowning out the commentator on the kitchen set.

Mikey, Bet and I watched the game with the sound down low. Mikey tried to explain the finer points of baseball to me, while Bet got intermittently excited and punched the air at some unfathomable thrilling moment. We all felt slightly guilty and treacherous, aware of Jim’s powerful sulk next door, but equally committed to common sense and doing what all America, except Jim, was at the very same moment doing. I watched the game in much the same way I watched the test card as a child – waiting for something to happen. So far as I could see it was rounders but so slow it made cricket look like an extreme sport. Men in ridiculous clothes posed and gyrated and almost invariably produced no-balls, and so had to begin the posing all over again. When a ball was good, someone ran a few yards to the next base, people cheered, the commentators did arcane arithmetic and the whole sequence began again.

‘Excuse me, does anything else happen in this game?’

Mikey and Bet looked at me reproachfully.

‘It’s a great game. You don’t understand.’

The camera picked out Ted Turner and a matronly, most unrevolutionary Jane Fonda cheering their team on. At the mention of their names by the commentator, the TV in the next room rose several decibels.

‘Hey, Jim, keep it down.’

But he couldn’t hear over the yelps of glee as someone gave the correct answer to a question that was worth a whole laundry room full of white goods.

*   *   *

‘How do you like the trailer?’ Jim asked the next day.

We had made a trip to Santa Fe, Mikey took the day off work. Santa Fe was, according to Bet, ‘where the artists all live’, but wandering around it seemed more full of posers than last night’s baseball. Hampstead on a bad but sunny day. In fact, there was the Georgia O’Keeffe museum, which might have been interesting, but when I mentioned it I got a distinctly cool response from my hosts. We went to the tourist shopping street, and once again I found myself staring at modern parodies of cowboy boots and modified saddle bags with mobile-phone holders. I managed to get them to the strangely jolly cathedral, all light and colour, the Mexican influence overriding morose Catholicism. Though the Catholicism fought back. A notice informed the congregation that the holy bones of the tepidly virtuous St Thérèse of Lisieux would be arriving to be venerated on the New Mexican leg of their American tour. Bet lit a candle for Mikey. I just lit a candle in the belief that there ought to be as much light as possible in the world.

‘The trailer’s wonderful. Love it. A great place to work.’

‘Yeah, I can’t get her out of it. I think she’s hiding from me,’ Bet complained, only half joking.

‘No, honey, she’s like me, busy doing nothing. I got nothing to do and I’m still only halfway through it. Hey,’ Jim said to Bet. ‘I’ve had a great idea. You like Jenny, I like Jenny, Mikey likes Jenny. You like Jenny, don’t you, Mikey? Why don’t we keep her?’

‘Yeah,’ Bet agreed. ‘Good thinking. How we gonna do that?’

‘Hell, no one knows she’s here. We can keep her in the trailer. It’ll be just like Misery. You know, that movie about the writer? We lock her in one night, and I’ll take it off on my hunting trip. We’ll go way out in the woods, and I’ll just shoot deer and let my hair grow until the search for the missing English Commie lady writer blows over.’

‘Just pinko, Jim.’ I tried to join in with the game.

‘Nah, it’s no good,’ Bet said. ‘She got a letter yesterday. She told her boss our address. She must have known we’d decide to keep her for ourselves. They’ll know she was here.’

‘That’s OK. We can say she was here but she left after a couple of days and we don’t have any idea where she’s gone. Did you see Misery, Jenny? You remember James Caan was a storywriter and…’

I’d seen Misery. I thought it was quite funny. A nice take on the folly of writers’ best hopes and worst fears. But during the drive back to the empty suburbs of Albuquerque, Bet, Jim and Mikey took on a more shadowy reality in my mind. As if they’d turned inside out, an underlying darkness gleaming glossily on the surface. The veneer of joking affection was replaced by a mythic malevolence, and an overriding will to action. My vision adjusted. Rationality, which I had held on to so far, receded, and I began to see only the gothic underbelly, the monsters that are created by lurking unresolved pain and disappointment; the underworld of decent normality, of suburban vacancy, of the ordinary turning to horror, that American movies understood so well. I passed from America-in-the-movies into movie-America, just as Buster Keaton had wandered dreamily from his seat in the cinema to slip through the screen and become part of the celluloid action.

When I got back to the house, I tried to walk the fearful feelings, the absurd feelings away, through the wide empty streets that went nowhere. I found myself in anywhere and everyplace, the empty space of modern American living, and I recognised it with an increasing chill in my heart. The movies were my only guide to these depleted suburbs, the bedrock from which the contemporary monsters of America emerged. In the cinema I had seen Freddy Kruger and his ghastly peers stalk these unending, dangerously clean, lethally clipped, vacant, peopleless, inhuman streets, free to pick and choose among the near identical residences which front door (always closed except to enter or exit the car) to storm, to which blankly normal household he would announce his beastly reality. Now I saw how these films came about, how they couldn’t not have sprung into the head of anyone who walked along the antiseptic avenues, as I did, looking for signs of life. I walked for what seemed to be miles, but house after house stood mute, a clipped bit of lawn, a car or two, maybe a truck or a trailer, but no shops or bars or cafés appeared where locals could meet, greet and gossip. There was no sound of kids, no sight of the young, mixing and injecting life and play into the emptiness. It was uncanny. So safe that danger echoed with every footstep. Hitchcock, John Carpenter, Wes Craven and Stephen King understand this vacuum, this white hole available to be filled with all that is darkest and murkiest in the human psyche. The new gothic landscape, a heaven that whispers hell in all its neat, inhumane silence.

By the time I was back inside my trailer – now hovering impossibly between a haven and a threat – I was feverish with unreality, or, as it increasingly seemed to me, clearly observing the reality that I had until now failed to see. I have never been mad as such, by which I mean that I have never thought myself someone or somewhere other than I am, not heard voices informing me of truths inaccessible to the rest of the world, not seen visions that bore no relation to what was happening in the sight of everyone else. At any rate, whenever any of these things did occur, it was usually in my twenties and directly attributable to a very carefree use of drugs. But I do know a kind of madness that lies low in the mind, half-buried in consciousness, which lives in parallel to sanity, and given the right circumstances or even just half a chance, creeps like a lick of flame or a growing tumour up and around ordinary perception, consuming it for a while, and causing one, even when not at the movies, to quake in fear of the world and people and what they – I mean, of course, we – are capable of.

In the dark, that night, I had no doubt that the joking threat of kidnap was no joke at all. As a matter of fact, even in the cool sanity of this present moment, I suspect that there was something more than just a tease, but that night in my head the threat combined with Jim’s evident fury, Bet’s need for company and the wish of both for a sympathetic soul to keep Mikey happy, and whatever portion of cool sanity I possess couldn’t be seen for dust. I spent the night in lonely terror, like all the children who had been spirited away in grim folk tales, like James Caan in Misery, like Tony Last at the finale of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, condemned for ever to read Dickens to a madman in the jungle. I believed, by morning, that I would be consumed by these emotional cannibals I had unwittingly set myself among. They would refuse to let me leave. I would be secreted by them. Imprisoned. Sequestered. Killed. The waking nightmare lasted into the daylight. When I say I believed this to be the case, I mean that I absolutely knew it to be my situation. I knew also that it was ridiculous. That I was in a condition. That I might be pleased these kind and generous people with whom I had little in common liked me enough to joke about wanting to keep me. But knowing that was nothing like as powerful as knowing that I was enmeshed in a horror movie that had come to life. The horror, of course, was my horror at having got off the train; at joining the parade instead of letting it pass me by. Even for five days. I felt that I was dying and made it easier on myself by letting myself think that someone out there – instead of me – was doing the killing. That day, in order to shake the horror off, I read books (Zizek, for God’s sake, on fantasy), I worked on the proofs, I lay on the bed breathing deeply, fighting for calm, but the fear that I would never leave that place remained. I wasn’t due to catch the train until after lunch the following day. Until then I was trapped in anxiety: until the moment when I was due to leave, I couldn’t know for certain that they would let me go. They just don’t take me to the station. They keep me away from the phones. There is no other form of transport to get myself to the train, no passing pedestrian I can appeal to for rescue. They just drive me away in the trailer and I am lost. Getting to the train became crucial. And the more I tried to feel the absurdity of my fear, the more my fear told me that such things happen, that craziness occurs, that I might well be captured and … and what? Killed? Kept as a friend for lonely Mikey? Punished for having an easy life? It didn’t matter what. The sense of threat was everything. An engulfing black cloud descended over me, and made a nonsense of all attempts at rationality or efforts at distraction.

I gave no indication to my putative captors of my state of mind, I think. I am rather good at keeping my madnesses private. I kept to myself as much as I could, but I ate with the family, laughed with Mikey and listened to more of Bet’s stories of her childhood. Yet all the while the bizarre threat remained. Several times Jim and Bet reminded me of it.

‘Hey, ain’t it great having Jenny living with us all the time?’

I laughed along with them. I dreaded the coming night when the fantasy would gain full control and the terror of abduction grow massive. During the night my heart beat so hard I thought I might die of it. In the morning all I could think of was catching the train, but that I was dependent on Jim getting me to the station on time. He might simply disappear to the commissary. What if he took me but contrived to be late enough to miss the train? What if he kept taking me to the train, every day, and I kept missing it, day after day, and we all began to live in a pretence that they were letting me go when it was perfectly clear that I was in fact imprisoned? I feared the politeness of a nicely brought up child who doesn’t dare be rude enough to say to the stranger offering her a lift to oblivion that she doesn’t want to get in the car with him. I thought of suggesting that I get a cab to the station, but I knew my hosts wouldn’t hear of such a thing. I would be trapped by good manners into an eternity of out-of-town Albuquerque. In fact, I had the phone number of the daughter of a friend who lived in the city and worked at the university, but I didn’t phone her. The phone was in the kitchen and I didn’t want to be overheard. You remember that scene in the movie? And I feared too that I would blurt out my panic and reveal myself to a sane stranger to be ridiculous, as well as hear my own absurdity as I spoke the words. ‘I’m afraid I’m being kept prisoner here…’ So idiotic, she would send a doctor to me, and in consultation with Jim and Bet it would be decided that the best thing would be for me to stay where I was, on calming drugs, and wait until the madness passed over. It would, of course, take for ever. I would never be free. I was their prisoner. No, no, I’d remember as the fantasy took off, the point was that I would be revealing myself to be paranoid, in a state of unreality, but all scenarios led back to the pit of fear I had dug for myself.

What all this was about was that I had got off the train. I’d stopped moving, meeting and withdrawing from people. I was grounded in a house with a family, and I wonder if Jim and Bet hadn’t made their Misery joke whether I wouldn’t nonetheless have generated the fear all on my own. Just five days, not even a week, and I was beside myself with despair that I was trapped, that I would never get away from people. To be a stranger on a train is to be inside a private anonymous bubble of one’s own, waving at other passing bubbles; to be staying in a house with a family was to be engaged in a way that I found nearly intolerable, actually dangerous. And when the partial safety of my separate trailer was taken from me with the notion that it might become a gaol, full-blown panic ensued. The people I know at home I trust to let me keep a certain distance, to withdraw when I need, to need a degree of withdrawal themselves. Bet and Jim and Mikey I didn’t know and couldn’t trust to give me leeway, or to want it. The people I know at home I trust up to a point, but not enough not to need to feel I can withdraw. Bet, Jim and Mikey I didn’t know or trust even to that point. I knew exactly what I was doing when I put myself on a train. I forgot myself, or mistook myself, when I got off it.

The final morning was spent in a haze of anxiety, added to by a flurry of will-we/won’t-we-get-her-to-the-station jokes, and by Jim taking off with a teasing grin to buy cigarettes at the base at around midday, an hour and a half before my train left. I did the only thing I know to do when panicking about something that might, but probably won’t, happen: I fast forwarded. I put myself past the time of danger, into the future, and had myself seated safely in the train moving away from Albuquerque. It’s always worked a treat so far.

It worked, for example, when I was coming out of my last major depression in 1984. I’d spent three months sitting on the sofa, immobilised by the worst episode yet. But as you do, though as you don’t believe you ever will, I was beginning to come out of it. I went to Vermont to stay with a friend and spent the final two days (having been warned against it) alone in New York before flying back. I’d never been to New York and I walked for miles around the only city I would recommend during a depression – the energy level buoys the most leaden of moods. I wandered around the park in the late summer sun, and settled on the grass to listen to a jazz band. A Japanese man began to speak to me. Well, I thought, strange city, strange times, go with it. That old grabbing-experience habit again, not quite guttered. We walked around the park and he told me that he had just returned from Edinburgh where he had been researching the use of lithium in pure depression rather than only bipolar illness. I kept a straight face, but was most impressed at my capacity to attract the appropriate professional. I asked him questions and then he was impressed.

‘Are you in the field?’ he asked.

‘No, I just take a lay interest.’

Soon we were talking about diagnosis, and as we sat on a bench he explained to me the set of ten to fifteen questions psychiatrists use to diagnose and assess depression in patients.

‘Like what?’

He asked me the first and then waited, as if we were playing a game, for my answer. After six or seven he began to look at me more carefully, by the final question he looked very serious.

‘A severely depressed patient is expected to give certain answers to half the questions. You have given them to two-thirds.’

‘Oh, I was just trying to put myself in the mindset…’

He was not convinced. Nonetheless, he told me he was meeting a Japanese friend at Columbia and then going on to the best Japanese restaurant in New York. Would I like to come along? He was a round-faced, amiable man in his early thirties, who spoke gently and smiled kindly. Here I was in NY, I was being invited to eat great Japanese food with two Japanese people. Why would anyone in their right, or righting, mind, turn such an offer of spontaneous experience down?

We picked up the friend who had a car. As soon as they met, everything changed. I was put in the back of the car and the two men got in the front. They spoke to each other in Japanese, and addressed not a word to me. I began to wonder … One Japanese bloke in a strange city is another person; two, it turned out, became a cultural phenomenon. I was ignored, geisha-like in the back of the car as we approached the bridge.

‘Um, where are we going?’ I asked.

‘Restaurant’s in New Jersey,’ my friend barked and then continued his incomprehensible conversation with his friend.

My friend in Vermont knew I was in New York, but no one knew I was in New York in the back of a car with two complete strangers whose language I couldn’t understand, heading for the wilds of New Jersey. Now it crossed my mind that I had not behaved with caution. I thought of asking to be let out of the car before it crossed the bridge, but decided it would force the issue, and I didn’t want to know quite so definitely if I was really in danger. I sat in the back, listening to the two men in intense conversation – about how to rape and murder me, or about the funding of psychiatric research in Edinburgh? – and I ran through the newspaper files in my mind for reports of rape and murder by Japanese men abroad. I came up with nothing. I decided to sit it out and fast forward to them dropping me off at my hotel after a pleasant meal in New Jersey. It didn’t make me feel good, so I forwarded further to my arrival at Heathrow the following night. This was good because it also took care of my mild flying anxiety. I stayed very calm and decided that sooner or later death was inevitable and that now was as good … Perhaps I was not quite as over the depression as I thought.

The meal was good. It was ordered without reference to me by my companions in Japanese, which they continued to speak to each other. They did not once talk to me. I picked at this and that, trying not to think of it as my last meal. Finally, a credit card was produced, I offered mine and it was flipped back at me. I followed them out of the restaurant back to the car. I felt a little better after we crossed the bridge back to New York, but only for a moment.

At 11.30 on a Saturday night my friend’s friend stopped the car at the subway in Harlem and said goodbye.

‘Don’t forget you get the A train. It must be the A train,’ he said in immaculate English and he left us standing.

It was a warm night, but that wasn’t why my friend was sweating. Saturday night in the subway in Harlem was not where tourists were supposed to be, especially ones with expensive Japanese cameras around their necks. He was paralysed with fear, but there was no chance of getting a cab. There is nothing like someone else’s panic to induce calm, I find. I led him gently down into the subway, to his doom he supposed. While we waited for the A train, large young men with blaring boom boxes stood and scanned up and down the platform. My friend was now saturated with fear, but it occurred to me that all these dangerous-looking guys were no different from the kids I taught at the Islington Sixth Form Centre. In fact, they might have been very different, but it’s always good to find a familiar point of view. Anyway, I was depressed, I had just escaped rape and murder and I had a man with me who was much more scared than I was. I stayed in charge, put him on the train and we clattered along under the pavements of New York until we got to a stop that my friend knew was near a jazz club he’d heard of. He jumped up and left with a slight wave of the hand. What the hell. I got off half a dozen stops later, still unmolested, at Central Park where, at midnight, there was not a cab in sight. I had no idea where my hotel was – because I am the only person in the world who, having no spatial sense, cannot orient herself in New York City. I was lost, and not feeling so brave any more. Finally I saw a cop. I asked him for directions to my street.

‘I can’t work it out.’

He looked down at me with wonder.

‘Carn’t? Carn’t? You carn’t work it out?’ He was doubled up with amusement at my accent.

‘Listen, that’s how they talk where I come from.’

He shook his head in wonder and chuckled as he wandered off, quite failing to set me in any direction at all, let alone the right one. And yet, here I am, a couple of decades on, alive and well enough, because moments later a cab drove by, stopped and took me to my hotel, once I had convinced the driver that I really didn’t want a drink, just a ride home. And the next night I was indeed walking through the arrivals door at Heathrow, just as I had pictured on my way to New Jersey with two perfectly strange strangers. Fast forwarding. The same thing, I suppose, as I did when I was a kid, imagining myself dead. The technique has never let me down.

*   *   *

Seated safely in the train moving away from Albuquerque I shook my head against the power of my fancies. Not that my friends hadn’t had fancies of their own, but what we rely on, and what usually works, is that people have fancies but also the capacity to control them so that they do not spill over into reality. It doesn’t always work, some people lack that capacity, but society depends on it mostly working in order to function. Mine had run too far amok in my mind, though not out into the world. They had kept theirs under control, only letting a little sadism spill out. I wonder, though, if I had not controlled my fears even as much as I did, whether theirs might not have edged closer to reality. So we depend on each other.

I arrived a few hours later back at the oasis in Phoenix. John and Maria had no idea what had been going on, but once again left me to my own devices by the pool. It was a place of refuge, but what I wanted very urgently was to be back home. My trip had come to an end. I would have to continue on the train back to my starting point in New York to get the return flight, but it was now just space to be crossed, not a journey. And the idea of the planned four or five days in New York and Long Island with a writer friend was more than I could contemplate. I called the airline. Could I bring my flight forward? I could at a price. I paid it, and then went to bed and sobbed with relief.