Stranger on a Train (5 page)

Within a couple of months, Udi was back in hospital. This time things looked worse. He reduced his estimate of surviving three to five years down to maybe a couple of years. Udi's life expectation drained dramatically away over the next few weeks. His time grew less with each new medical intervention. Eventually, after an operation intended to give him some respite, he was told that there was nothing to be done except pain management, and that he had only a matter of weeks to live. He had never ridden the Harley. Now he had grown too weak to hold it upright. He sold it back to the dealer. The dealer was upset about Udi.

‘I'm gutted,' he said.

‘Me too,' Udi replied.

During the final weeks, Udi held court at home. A kind of permanent party began, as his hundreds of friends came to be with Udi before he died. Judy had to organise a timetable to accommodate them all, so that there wouldn't be too many people at once, and there was time also for his family to be with him alone. It was the most explicit dying I've ever come across, a wake with the subject the living host. In hospital they had to give him a side room because of the number of his visitors. At home, Udi received us on his sofa, manipulating his morphine machine to keep pain at bay, allowing us to provide a lap for his sore legs, demanding that we massage his feet, and continuing his life-enhancing seduction of the world. He was smoking again, having given it up when he got ill, and given up giving up when he was pronounced terminal. ‘So shoot me,' he responded in hospital when a nurse in the day-room told him he was in a non-smoking ward.

I last saw him the day before I left on my freighter trip. He had left hospital. We sat at the kitchen table, drank coffee and smoked. I could see him tiring after an hour, but I found I couldn't make myself get up from the chair. I had never said goodbye to anyone before, never a goodbye that was so consciously, so absolutely final. I had no idea how it was to be done. My difficulties in ending a friendship were as great as in beginning one. I didn't know how to approach Udi's person and kiss him and then leave the room, the house, knowing that I would never see him again because he would die before I returned. It was outrageous, something that neither my mind, nor my muscles could take in. Monstrous. It was another half an hour of sitting as if we had all the time in the world before I managed to stand and walk to the end of the table. I bent down and kissed him.

‘I know you're sure there's going to be nothing, and I expect you're right, but just in case it turns out that there is … feel free to haunt me if you find you can,' I said.

I meant it. I didn't want to lose this man, this friend who made it so easy to be a friend, to oblivion. He had made a place for himself in my memory, but I didn't want to lose my place in his. Death is always about the loss of self, even when it's someone else's death.

*   *   *

After three weeks we landed at the commercial dock in Tampa. It would take three days to offload the potash. Roz and Fogey left to fly to their son's funeral. The crew, spruced and eager, took off into town with the waiting girls on the dock to buy American bicycles for their children and cruise the bars. I walked unsteadily after so long at sea across the blank tarmac to a small wooden building on the other side of the dock where the stevedores drank coffee and played pool, and where there was a public phone. A small, salmon-pink cartoon cloud frothed by over my head. Flamingos, I realised, more astonished by that than by a salmon-pink cloud. Exotic, vividly coloured, weirdly ornate flowers grew in the bed in front of the unassuming building, and a US flag flapped lazily on a pole beside the door. Mack trucks, shiny leviathans, polished lovingly by their keepers, were parked, like horses tied up while their riders drank in the saloon, waiting to pick up goods. Telegraph wires sang high-pitched and tuneless in the bathwater-hot air. Behind the door of the building as I approached it, I heard Stan shouting, screaming actually, in German. Then the door flew open and he came storming out, followed by Dora. He was wiping his arms across the air in front of him in a repeated gesture of annihilation. Seeing me approach, he changed to English.

‘They are no good. America is no good. In Germany the phones work. In America nothing works. No good. No good.'

He was an infant having a tantrum. The phone used cards which the waiting girls on the dock sold to the crew, so that they could phone home before their night on the town. Stan couldn't get his to work and so the phone system was defective, the card a scam, America already a broken dream. I offered to help with using the card, but he wasn't going to try again. There was no point. It was all no good. Dora followed behind, her eyes icily inexpressive, as he stamped back to the ship.

My phone card worked fine. I called Edinburgh to speak to my daughter at university, for the first time in the best part of a month. She sounded pleased to hear from me, everything was OK. That lurking anxiety fell away. Then I called Udi's number. Judy answered. Where was I calling from? How had the journey been? Was it what I'd hoped for? It's still an event to phone someone from far away after a period of silence. Then – how had we evaded it for so many moments? – how is Udi?

‘Oh, Jenny. Udi died a week ago.'

It was no surprise. I echoed her sigh with ‘Oh, Judy'. I probably said I was so sorry. Neither of us spoke as if something unexpected had happened. Judy told me how the end had been. He had been in a hospice for ten days, holding court as usual. Judy said it seemed impossible that he was going to die. But he deteriorated over the final two days until he slipped into a coma and died in the early hours with Judy and his two older daughters sitting at his bedside. The funeral was in a couple of days.

I left the stevedore's building and returned to the ship. I spent the rest of the day out on deck, watching the bird life through binoculars, and the men craning the potash out of the holds on to moving belts that dumped it via a hopper into the warehouse. If I thought at all, it was about how my nothing happening for weeks and weeks on an ocean-going freighter had not been so uneventful after all. Not for others. Not for me. Well, that is life. Around five, as evening was setting in, I went in to the galley to make a cup of tea. I put on the water heater and stared out of the window waiting for the water to boil. Explosively, as if I'd received a blow in my lower spine, I doubled over and tears started to flow. Udi's death, the reality of his not being in the world any more, hit me, kicked in, quite literally it felt. By the time I got back to my cabin the tears were streaming down my face, and once the door was shut and I was private, I began to sob. Mostly I cried for myself, for the loss of Udi as a friend. I was wracked with sadness, bereft, quite unable to stop crying. It went on for an hour or so, and then there was a knock at the door. I wiped my eyes, though not very effectively, and opened the door. The third engineer, whose cabin was next to mine, stood in the hallway looking worried.

‘Are you ill?'

I explained that I had just heard that a friend of mine had died. He looked sympathetic, and said he was sorry. I said that I'd known he was going to die, but still, hearing that it had actually happened …

‘Yes. It is always terrible. Were you very close?'

‘He was a friend.'

He nodded seriously. ‘I am going in to the city for the evening. There is a cab coming. You come too. We will go to a bar and have a drink and see America.'

I thanked him, but said I thought I would stay on board and have a quiet evening, I wasn't feeling very much like socialising. My friend's smiling face took on dark, worried expression, and he shook his head.

‘It is not good to be alone when you are sad. You must make an effort. Come out for a drink. Enjoy yourself.'

No, I said, thanking him for his concern, I was all right, but I wanted to be on my own and quiet this evening.

‘It is bad to be alone. You must not be sad and cry. Yes, your friend is dead, that is a shame, but you are alive. You must live. Life goes on. You should come out and enjoy life.'

He spoke insistently, almost angrily, it was more now than just going into the city with me. I said as definitely and finally as I could manage without offending that I appreciated what he was saying, but that I would be staying on board. He shook his head one final time against mourning what was lost rather than grasping what still remained. I wanted to remember, he didn't. He had his reasons, I've no doubt.

‘Well,' he said. ‘I must get ready.'

The following day I called my friend John in Phoenix, Arizona, who I'd met on a previous trip to Antarctica. We'd kept in touch by email.

‘Come and stay,' he said.

I had another couple of days aboard the
Christiane,
before I disembarked in Savannah, and no definite plans.

‘Let us know what flight you're coming in on. We'll meet you at the airport.'

‘No, I don't think I'll fly. I'll take a train.'

I hadn't thought about it before I said it, but it seemed I wasn't finished with watching the miles go by.

I returned to the
Christiane,
my cabin and my bunk, happy to feel again the gentle uncertainty of a watery existence. There was just a day or two left before I was permanently back on dry land. I idled the rest of the afternoon away recalling a message I once, long ago, left for myself and had only recently picked up.

I am nine years old, in bed, in the dark, in my bedroom. The detail of the room is perfectly clear. I am lying on my back. I have a greeny-gold quilted satin eiderdown covering me. I have just calculated that I will be fifty years old in the year 1997. Hard as I try, ‘fifty' and ‘1997' don't mean a thing to me, aside from being the answer to an arithmetic question I set myself. I try it differently. ‘
I
will be fifty in 1997.' 1997 doesn't matter, it just complicates the thought I am trying to grasp. ‘I
will
be fifty.' The statement is absurd. I am nine. ‘I will be ten' makes sense. ‘I will be thirteen' has a dreamlike maturity about it. ‘I will be fifty' is simply a paraphrase for another senseless statement I make to myself at night: ‘I will be dead one day.' Or, ‘One day I won't be.' I have a great determination to feel the sentence as a reality, but it always escapes me. ‘I will be dead' comes with a picture of a dead body on a bed. But it's mine, my bed, and a nine-year-old body. When I make a picture of the body as old, it becomes someone else. I can't imagine myself old, or dead. I can't imagine myself dying. Either the effort or the failure to do so makes me feel panicky.

Being fifty is not being dead, but it is being old, inconceivably old, for me at nine, that is. I know other people are fifty, and I will be fifty if I don't die beforehand. But the best I can do is to imagine someone who is not me, though not someone I know, being fifty. She looks like an old lady: the way old ladies currently looked. She looks like someone else. I can't connect me thinking about her with the fact that I will
be
her in forty-one years' time. She has lived through and known forty-one years to which I have no access. I can't believe I will become her, although I know, factually, that I must. I can't dress myself in her clothes or flesh and know what it feels like being her as I know what it feels like being me. This is immensely frustrating. I do the next best thing: I send a message out into the future, etching into my brain cells a memo to the other person, who will be me grown to be fifty, to remember this moment, this very moment, this actual second when I am nine, in bed, in the dark in my room, trying to imagine being fifty.

In my cabin moored at the dock in Tampa, Florida, I have been fifty for the past year, and I am recalling the nine-year-old who tried to imagine me. I mean that I am recalling her trying to imagine me, at that moment, in bed, in the dark in her room, some forty-one years ago. It is easier for me to acknowledge and know her than the other way around, for all that I have learned about the unreliability of memory, because I have lived the missing forty-one years that she could know nothing about. There is a track back for me. The vividness of her making a note to remember the moment in the future when she is fifty is startling. But it is not a simple, direct link. I have the moment, but the person I connect with is someone whose future I know. I do not know the nine-year-old as she was then, at all; the one who had not yet experienced the life I led between her and me. I can't imagine her as a reality, in her striving to understand what kind of fifty-year-old woman she would be, because she doesn't exist any more except as a pinpoint in time. But she now has an indelible relation to me looking back through time, that I could not have for her aiming forward. There is a sense of vertigo, something quite dizzying about having arrived at the unimaginable point she reached out towards, at recalling her message and being in a position – but not able – to answer her question: here I am, it's like this.

It's not just the nine-year-old's illusive reality that prevents me from responding, it is also my own present inability, aged fifty, to imagine what it is like to be fifty. I know no better than she. I've heard a lot about it, read plenty, seen numbers of fifty-year-olds, both depicted and in real life, but that seems to be no help at all. This isn't surprising. The fifty I seek to understand in order to answer her question is the same fifty I wondered about as a child, and it turns out to have nothing much to do with having lived for fifty years or more. I don't know what it means to be fifty. I have no idea what to say to my nine-year-old self who thought that she would know what fifty was like once she had reached it. And I suppose the other question she asked herself, the one about the reality of death, will also remain a question, even though I etch into my brain cells a memo for the time of my dying to remember me now, this moment, as I lie in my cabin in the dock in Tampa, wondering how it will be.