Frankie Styne & the Silver Man (12 page)

On their set a couple were kissing in a kitchen with a pot of soup boiling over behind them on the stove. ‘Did I tell you about
The Kissing Disease?'
she said, trying to settle down. ‘A good film.' The pan was smouldering. Soon it would burst into flames. Jim was quiet, though he smelled sour.

The image froze. It was an advertisement for smoke detectors. Liz snorted. Then at last a film began, an old one in black and white. A turreted castle was perched on top of a sheer cliff. The title appeared in Gothic script:
Crusade.
The credits began. Point of view switched to inside the castle. Someone was looking out from an arrow slit. In the distance a thin line of cavalry inched across the plain. The column was headed by two heavily built men in chain mail. Between them, roped to his horse, was a bedraggled dark-skinned man in a loincloth with tears streaming down his face. His eyes were fixed on the exact window from which the previous long shot had been taken. Liz nudged the volume up.

‘I don't trust him,' one of the two leaders said to the other. The picture, she thought, could do with a bit more contrast.

‘Can I help you?' said Andrew Myers.

‘Just looking,' said Liz, her eyes fixed on the screen.

‘Please don't fiddle with the controls.' In the castle the watcher stepped back from the window: a woman, olive-skinned with oval eyes. The light caught her face.

‘I think it's him!' she whispered.

‘Look.' Andrew Myers crouched down, took the remote from Liz's hand and grasped her elbow. ‘Please get up. This isn't your lounge at home.'

‘Thank God,' said Liz, but very quietly. She folded her other arm protectively around Jim.

‘You're going to have to leave the premises.'

Premises? Liz thought. Don't let it get out of hand, she warned herself. Her heart raced. She wanted to shout: Call these premises? I call them an arsehole!

‘Don't give me trouble, please. I've been here since seven this morning,' Andrew Myers said suddenly. ‘The cleaner's sick. I've got to stay until six-thirty because it's Thursday.'

‘Traitor!' the woman in the castle sobbed huskily. There was a fanfare of trumpets, abruptly curtailed as Andrew Myers switched off the set. Liz wanted to cry. Then she wanted to hit Andrew Myers, to shoot her fist straight into the soft triangle of flesh beneath the lower ribs, the bit that went in and out so horribly with each breath he took. He'd fold up. They were all brain and no brawn, these beings from elsewhere . . . It was getting out of hand all right.

Stop me! she thought at Jim, as hard as she could. Stop me! And it worked. She stood very slowly, and adjusted Jim's position.

She noticed that Andrew Myers was wearing a string vest under his shirt. He was not any kind of alien, not in that. Just a boy. Liz turned her back, kept her eyes only on Jim as she wove through the gibbering television sets to the door. She'd walked the length of the High Street before she realised where her legs were taking her.

‘It's quite a way,' she muttered to Jim. ‘You're getting so heavy.' She turned right, up Kimberlake Avenue. The pavement was wide, and bordered on the roadside with grass, the houses set back, detached and imposing. Each one was different, though all were well maintained. Some had brick walls five feet high and big gates in front, some had banks of earth planted now with daffodils, others savagely cropped hedges of box or cotoneaster. One even had broken glass on top of a brick wall. One had a circular window in the eaves, behind it a curtain half drawn; it looked like an eye. At the very top of the avenue stood an ornately gabled house that had been rendered and painted in a muddy red that reminded Liz of drying blood. There, Station Road forked to the left, descending sharply. At the end of it was the wooden structure of the station, brighter than Liz remembered it. The window frames had been painted white and there were brand new roof tiles that didn't look quite real. A car park was being built in what used to be a piece of wasteground demarcated by a half-collapsed chestnut paling fence. But on the other side of the building site the path was still there, just. She picked up a discarded length of timber to deal with the brambles, and hurried towards it.

The sky, clear all day, was gathering pinkish clouds. Perhaps an hour and half's light remained. To their right was a cutting for the first half mile or so, the railway some twelve feet off below. On the other side the undergrowth sloped gently up to a row of fences that separated railway property from people's back gardens. There were sheds, compost heaps and greenhouses, here and there a short row of trees, their first leaves small and fresh, planted as a screen. Gradually the slope grew gentler, and the path tended closer to the line. The brambles, sprouting new growth, were higher than before, making it impossible to see very far ahead. Liz's feet remembered the way. ‘Not far,' she told Jim.

‘Thanks for not making a fuss. It's downhill now.' She quickened her pace as she drew closer to the sidings, where suddenly everything flattened, opened up. She stopped.

There was no trace of the carriages. The ground on which they had stood was indistinguishable from the rest: a scattering of pinkish chippings over earth, spring weeds thrusting vigorously through.

‘Oh,' Liz said dully, to herself, forgetting for a moment that Jim was even there. Something in her sagged. ‘Wouldn't cut much ice with Bettahire as a previous address.'

Did they have to clear it all away? She was sure the carriages hadn't been put back into service; they were far too old. Had they been taken apart, the useful bits saved? Or had they just been smashed and burned? Or maybe even just moved somewhere else? She walked slowly on, head lowered, examining the ground. There must be something left.

‘You can see where we had the fire,' she said quietly. Not for long though. The black patches would, by summer, be greener than the rest, the surrounding ring of breeze blocks a mystery. How things burned! she thought, seeing for a moment brilliant orange flames, head-high, against the night sky, hearing them snap at the air. She walked on. There were other signs as well, things that had escaped the clean-up: a pair of blue oil drums that someone had thought could be used to collect rain water from the carriage roofs, a wizened scarf she remembered seeing around a woman's neck, a scattering of plastic bread crates, some of them charred. And where her carriage used to be were the two sleepers it had used to rest on: almost a foot in section, the timber dark in its oily coating of preservative. She sat down on one of them, facing the lines. She untied the sling, unbuttoned her coat and cardigan, and slipped Jim inside so he could feed.

The carriages were the best place she had ever found herself to live. There were six of them. She had slipped through the fence for no particular reason, and made her way about a mile along the embankment on the thin path bordered with leafless brambles. Winter was drawing in. At that time the line was under threat of closure, and the trains very rare. It was dusk. Nobody else was about, just a few foxes scampering across the track. The carriages were set out in a row like houses. She'd walked through them one by one. It was strange to be in a train without hearing the noise it made: her footsteps sounded unnaturally loud.

Five of them were first-class carriages, divided into little rooms. Inside, there were spotted mirrors and wrinkled oblong pictures in frames. The sixth, set slightly apart from the rest, was different: part of it had been a kitchen galley, though none of the equipment was left, and the rest was divided between an area with plastic benches and tables and another with padded seats, tables and luggage racks. She liked it best, sat down and rolled herself a thin cigarette before she decided to stay.

The carriages, resting on their massive wooden sleepers, travelled slowly through the seasons: the dried undergrowth around the sidings grew wet, then rotten, then disappeared beneath thick snow that banked up into deep drifts on the windward side, making those doors unusable. The path on the embankment became icy and Liz's shoes were worn smooth, but she knew it by heart and rarely slipped. In the streets beyond, cars were freezing overnight and lonely people died in front of meagre fires, their veins freezing like unlagged waterpipes. The high road was packed with couples and families and school children in uniform, clouded with their many breaths. If she'd stayed at home, Liz would have been one of these.

She begged. Money seemed to last longer now that she was settled. The winter after Grammy's death was the first winter in which Liz didn't feel the cold—or rather, she felt it but liked it, because beneath a skin tightened with cold she felt her own warmth more clearly. She imagined herself as a solid shape, drawn with a firm line against white; often she sat on the steps with the carriage door open and just watched the snow fall. Overnight it buried the line, so that she might almost have been looking out on fields.

It reminded her of a film she had once seen, where there was a vast kingdom of ice and snow. There were packs of wolves and pine trees and a pale princess who rode through her empty kingdom in a sleigh drawn by albino wolves. She wore white furs and sped by, then disappeared, blending with the snow which covered her tracks as soon as they were made. She couldn't remember the story, just that. That winter was beautiful. Liz spent the whole of it alone. Her hair grew long. It was good to be somewhere safe.

In spring, just as she was getting bored with it, others started to come. Most of them were around her age, though one or two of the men were older. Some of them brought dogs and motorbikes. She showed them how to remove the carriage seats and extract the foam for use as a mattress. At night they built big fires, scouring the embankment for fuel. Liz slipped into their circle, and took the bottle as it was passed around. No questions were asked. People sang and cooked. Sometimes there were fights, but they never lasted long and she could always walk away. There was talk of a network of places like the carriages, which spread all over Europe or even further afield. A beach in Mexico where you could sleep in hammocks in the open air, and a single pound would last for weeks: though of course you needed the fare to get there. Sometime soon they'd all up sticks and go to Greece perhaps, or Corsica.

Liz invited Henry Kay up into her carriage. He was quiet, only talking when he was high, and then he didn't mind if she listened or not. She reckoned she would have to share anyway, so she might as well choose the person. Also, he had a television with a tiny screen not six inches square. It ran on batteries. Often they sat together and watched it late at night. At first she'd thought they liked the same things, but really it was just that he didn't much care what they watched.

Henry Kay grew cold when the second winter came, and somehow no one had got to Greece or Mexico. He'd lost weight and began to take risks without knowing it. His teeth chattered and he said none of him was ever warm, however many covers he had. He cried when he asked Liz to let him sleep next to her. There in the pile of covers and foam on the carriage floor, they grew warm. Henry Kay felt under her clothes. His hands were rough from the cold and chopping wood but his more intimate flesh was smooth and slid easily inside her.

That first time it was nice; afterwards sometimes not, but she never complained. She didn't want him to try and please her; she didn't try and please him back. In this way, she thought, she could keep faith with Grammy's command, without being absolutely lonely. But deep down she knew she was cheating. Now and then he offered her powders and liquids which brought her a distant kind of happiness, a sense of omnipotence—like being the princess on the sleigh herself, instead of the one watching. But, for the same reasons, she never asked for it. The ties that bound lay all around, just waiting to tighten up the first time she made a mistake.

Henry Kay left suddenly, taking his miniature television with him. Some people called him a bastard for leaving Liz, her belly filling slowly out. She didn't see it that way. She thought how she had been a fool, and decided, quickly and without fuss, that none of it should ever happen again. Instead, as the baby grew week by week inside her, she practised her skill in forgetting. She forgot each separate day as it passed into night; buried it in snow and began again in the morning. She formulated a new command for herself:
take each day as it comes.
It was just the kind of thing Grammy might have said.

It was an angry, hot summer. The rubbish began to smell. Someone tried to ride a motorbike along the path and slipped down onto the track. His leg was trapped under the bike and no one saw him until it was too late. Residents complained about stolen milk, the flies, the bonfires and the noise. With autumn, a health inspector came, and an overalled workman nailed a notice to quit on each one of the carriages. Some people left, but Liz just tore hers down. It was only a piece of paper, she remembered saying.

Finally the carriages were cleared in an early-morning police raid that was shown on local TV. There were three arrests. Most people got away by crossing the lines, but Liz, at the end of her eighth month by then, slept soundly through the whole thing on her pile of second-hand eiderdowns, woke only when torches shone on her face. When they saw, they grew suddenly gentle and drove her to the hospital handcuffed to a WPC.

‘It'll be warmer there, love, and you can wash that hair,' the WPC had said. ‘Look at it that way.' And there it was: a Silver Lining, rustling in the dark.

And another: she'd reached eighteen and no one could send her anywhere, nor tell her what to do. They could ask things but they couldn't make her stay. As soon as the baby was born she could walk straight out of the hospital and go to Greece. She could leave the baby behind, or she could take it with her. She wasn't sure . . .

‘So,' Liz said to Jim with her back to where all this had happened, looking down the line, ‘here you began. Perhaps there are
still
people here,' she continued lightly. ‘People who are better at hiding than I was. People who manage not to be seen by the rest of us . . . I saw some of them once in a film—people who lived in old tunnels underground—but there might be all kinds, everywhere. At night, if you cover your hands and face and sit somewhere quiet and still for several hours, you might spot them. Figures creeping by, close to a wall. You might hear voices and not be able to tell where they're coming from, however hard you look. You might see the flare of a match, then think you were mistaken. A group of tramps that have a van, and you might see that sometimes, driving slowly without lights on one of the minor roads, the engine muffled and quiet like a sewing machine. Or you might see one of the signs they leave for each other chalked on the ground, or bits of skin and fur, the remains of one of their meals, or the dryness left after a secret fire has been cleared away. But mostly they'd eat raw things, to save the risk. And you might see a bit of earth that looked somehow new, even though the stones are on the top, same as elsewhere, and the weeds are beginning to grow. And that's one of their graves. Ssh, now. Ssh.'