Stranger on a Train (31 page)

‘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.

What State I'm In

Journeys come to an end before they end, just as they begin before they begin – with the arrival of anticipation. I was as good as home. I had put my curiosity about the human race, us, me, them, back where I was most comfortable with it: in my study at home. When I was there again, I'd do some thinking; right now, I had a trip from A to B to take to get me there. John got up at 4.30 on Wednesday morning to drive me to Tucson train station. I waved him off gratefully and he, equally gratefully I imagine, drove back to bed in Phoenix, while I settled down on a bench to wait for the
Sunset Limited.
It would take me to New Orleans for the night of Thursday, then I would catch the
Crescent
early Friday morning heading up north and get in to Penn Station, New York at 2.10 on Saturday afternoon. I had just an hour or so to wait for the train, plus an added hour for how late it would be. As far as I was concerned, I was heading home. My journey was done, even though there were three and a half days and an Atlantic flight before I'd be in my study. I wasn't watching, listening, waiting. I was travelling to a destination. Game over.

‘I heard you speaking to your friend. You sound English. And you look Jewish. My two favourite peoples on the planet are the English and the Jews. The English gave us our blessed language. The Jews gave us the Book. I thank you, ma'am.'

The speaker was an elegant tramp sitting on a bench opposite me with the rising dawn glowering over his shoulder through the waiting-room window. Spread on either side of him was his breakfast, a thermos, sandwiches and biscuits, which he had been eating and drinking absentmindedly while leafing through unruly sheaves of papers perched on his knee. He wore an ancient but once good, long raincoat, a pair of very worn but sturdy walking boots laced with string, a flat tweed cap, and had a well-aged, open, but still bulging satchel propped between his feet. He sat straight and was long-legged, in his late sixties, perhaps.

I nodded an acknowledgement that he was right about my English- and Jewish-ness and smiled weakly at the reasons for his reverence of both.

‘Jack W. Grey.' He bobbed his head. ‘I would be honoured if you would share my breakfast.'

He held out a packet of digestive biscuits. I wanted to say, I'm on my way home, I'm not being a curious traveller any more, I'm no longer on the lookout for interesting encounters with eccentric types – perhaps I wasn't really in the first place. I swear, I'll just stay put once I get home. Not go out. Stay in. Keep quiet.

I took a biscuit and thanked him.

‘Ah, your lovely accent. What do you do?'

I have often answered this question with the information that I am a biscuit packer in the Peak Frean factory. At the look of blank boredom that comes over my questioner's face on hearing this news I'm inclined to embellish.

‘I work on the Fancy Assorted Tins line. It's so much more demanding than you might think. First there's the responsibility to the product. A Fancy Assorted Tin is
designed,
you know, and not just on the outside. It isn't at all superficial. Each biscuit type has its place in the overall scheme and if the packers don't concentrate it would be easy to ruin the whole thing by slotting a careless jam whirl in the coconut cream section. It only takes a moment's distraction and the whole pattern is destroyed. And then again think about the nature of the tin of biscuits. It's a Special Occasion product, people bring out their tins of biscuits for Christmas, give them to people for their wedding anniversaries. Imagine the disappointment in finding that half of them, or even one, just one Viennese Dainty say, were broken. The whole illusion is smashed, the luxurious becomes the tawdry. Packing biscuits is not just packing biscuits. There's a whole social and cultural aspect to it…'

Usually, my listener is casting about desperately for an escape route, but I get to the point where I convince myself of the importance of my work. Why shouldn't biscuits be packed with the same sense of accountability and obligation to others that scientists and social workers bring to their tasks? It isn't important what you do, it is the attitude with which you proceed through the world that matters. But the burden of persuasion is generally lifted from me by the sudden departure of my new acquaintance. Sometimes, as a change from biscuit packing, I explain that I am a retired member of the cult disco-dancing troupe Pan's People, or, if the questioner is of the right generation, of the high-kicking arms-linked Tiller Girls. This involves explaining that the life was by no means all glamour and late night supper parties. People imagine that it's non-stop fun, fun, fun, but no. I go on to tell of the sheer sweat and labour required of precision dancers, the rehearsals that continue until the feet bleed, the exhaustion, the staying up night after night sewing fallen sequins back on to one's costume.

But this morning I had no stomach for distancing daydreams. I gave up and allowed another interesting character into my trip.

‘I'm a writer.'

‘And I'm a poet.'

Of course he was. He riffled through his papers in the satchel and read me his poem about being in San Francisco in 1967 and how everything was changed in 1997:

What do dyed hair and plastic flowers

Have in common? Only the beauty is real.

Jack told me he had read this to some young people while he was waiting at another station recently. Thinking Jack was out of earshot one young man had said to another, ‘That man's poem was awesome.' I congratulated him and thanked him for reading it to me. More and more pages came out of the satchel and were declaimed in the manner of Ginsberg and his chums. The stationmaster wandered into the waiting room and then wandered out again. I short-circuited the reading of his entire works by asking him what kind of travelling he was doing. Jack was doing pretty much what I was doing: travelling around America on the trains. It was some kind of annual salute to Kerouac and the boys. At home in Minneapolis he lived with his Polish-born Jewish wife Emily, the mother of his three children. She had been shipped out of Poland as an adolescent in 1938. Their marriage had been long, passionate and artistic.

‘I still to this day, old as we are, worship at the shrine of her breasts. I kneel before those ruined works of art of nature and take them in the palm of my hand and caress them. On my knees, with my face nestling between them, I tell her, “These empty hanging sacks I have loved and have fed on just as our babies fed on them for life and strength.”'

I said I was pleased to hear it. Did she accompany him on his Dharma Bum travels?

‘She understands about my need to be free sometimes. I have to tell stories in poetry and I have to travel. She says to me when I leave, “If you meet a woman on your travels, you can fuck her, but don't read her our poem.”'

‘It is one you wrote?'

‘No. It begins:
Had we but world enough, and time
…'

‘Marvell.'

‘Ah yes. It goes on—'

‘But you promised not to recite it.'

‘Yes, I know, but perhaps you are to be something different.'

‘No, really, I'm not.'

There was a pause.

‘My greatest conversation on this trip was on the bus from Vashon to Tacoma with a man whose wife is Greek Orthodox. He is of Protestant roots – something like Emily and me, although she is Jewish. He knew about the Second Crusade around the year 1205 which diverted and sacked Constantinople and Hagia Sophia church. His work partner was with him – in computers – very alert and laughed etc. He said nothing, but he liked my talk so much, he scribbled as I spoke. That's rare. I think he had a Polish-Irish-Catholic name. One of them left a briefcase when they got off. I asked the bus driver to wait and I ran after them. “That shows what a good talk can do!” he said.'

I explained I had to go outside on to the platform to smoke.

‘I don't smoke, but I will come with you. You must give me your address in London where I can write to you.'

Back in London, I got several fat air-mail letters from Jack W. Grey. Photocopies of letters he'd written to other people and to newspapers, excerpts from his journals, messages from Emily and his favourite poems by himself and others, including one by Frances Cornford because ‘women I like like this'. One segment of letter ended: ‘Since I met you in Tucson and talked with you several hours that day, what do I think of you now? I've been around drunks (what's the difference in the drunk and the alcoholic? – they both drink the same but the drunk doesn't have to attend all those meetings). So AA saves their jobs: I ask them after a year of no booze and a medal: how often did you think of a drink? – “about each 15 minutes”. So I think of you each day.'