Stranger on a Train (12 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Have you slept?' I asked her.

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

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

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

‘Shall I come?'

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

Too Much to Ask

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

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

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

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

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