Stranger on a Train (8 page)

He actually paled at the idea of his proximity to tragedy. Bet shrugged and drank down her beer. Her hand shook as she lit another cigarette.

‘I want to forget it. But that bus ride … it got to me again…'

It didn't seem appropriate to point out that three black killers in a small town in South Carolina had nothing to do with a busload of people going about their business in Jacksonville. It didn't even seem decent.

‘I'm going to look round the shops,' Troy said.

‘You want to shop?' Bet asked me.

‘Not really.'

We sat on while Troy went back into the mall.

‘You think he's … you know?'

‘Gay? Certainly. Sounds like it's difficult being gay where he comes from.'

‘Jesus, small towns. I bet his father doesn't know. This'll be the first time he's been open about it even to himself. I don't have anything against them. So long as they keep it among themselves. Well, good for him for getting out. He's such a scared little kid. It must have been a real effort.'

Troy came back and reported on the shops. There wasn't much, but he'd got talking to a guy at the ice-cream stand. Adventure was coming thick and fast. He thought maybe he'd go back and talk some more. He checked his watch nervously.

‘You won't leave till agreed. Without me?'

‘Absolutely not.'

‘We'll come and drag you away, kiddo.'

Troy beamed happily and returned to the mall.

‘Ah,' crooned Bet. ‘I feel just like his mother watching him go on his first date.'

There were hours still to kill. Bet and I walked down to the riverside.

‘What's the river?' I asked.

‘The Jacksonville,' she told me, as we watched the boats ply up and down. It was wide and flat, a busy river with new developments on both banks. The water was a weird rust-red.

‘Let's go for a boat ride,' I suggested. There was a small ferry going back and forth, just a little boat with a sun shade and two benches on either side for about a dozen people. The heat, once we had left the air-conditioned restaurant, was exhausting. ‘It'll be cooler.'

Bet and I stayed on the ferry for a couple of hours, going from one side to the other, paying the two-dollar fare on each turn. Every so often we got off so that Bet could get another beer.

‘You don't drink?' she asked me as I got a diet Coke.

‘Not much,' I apologised.

‘Well, I
do.
I drink a lot.'

The afternoon on the river was quite blissful, catching the breeze on the water, going backwards and forwards to nowhere. Bet and I congratulated each other on having found a perfect way to spend our layover.

‘What's the river called?' I checked with the captain of our ship on one of our crossings.

‘This is the St John's.'

‘The
Jacksonville?
' I turned to Bet.

‘Hell, I don't know what the damn river's called. I was just trying to be helpful.'

We giggled a lot, though we talked about nothing much. Bet was catching the
Sunset Limited
as far as El Paso.

‘My hero's picking me up and driving me home. There's no connection to Albuquerque.'

‘Your hero?'

‘That's my husband, Jim. My hero. Because he is my hero.'

It sounded fine to me.

‘He didn't go to the funeral with you?'

‘He had to stay home with Mikey.'

‘Mikey?'

‘Our youngest. He can't be left alone. He's brain damaged.'

Mikey was in his late twenties and had just qualified as a policeman when he was in a car wreck which left him in a coma for eight weeks and damaged him enough to be completely dependent on Bet and her hero, who were just reaching retirement age.

‘He's a sweetie. Got the mental age of a kid. Can't remember anything from one day to the next. Hell, one moment to the next. He's got to be watched all the time. He's always trying to do things he can't do, and then he gets mad because he remembers he can't do what he used to do. But he's so loving. And funny. A real joker. He's a joy. Our other kids are all grown and have families of their own, but we've still got our baby.'

Only the words were sentimental. She spoke sharply in the face of a permanent tragedy. She lived with Mikey as he was now. I liked Bet's toughness, though I wondered how deep it went.

Back at Jacksonville station we still had hours to kill. We sat on a bench in the open on the platform, where Bet and I could smoke, next to a huge young black woman, in her mid-twenties, with a voice so loud you felt it in your solar plexus. It was the only place to sit, and at first I felt Bet's uneasiness: she was on her guard at the excessiveness of the woman. She was sprawled lazily on the bench, her great thighs comfortably separated, monitoring the comings and goings of her two tiny children, a boy of six and a girl of three or four, who ran in and out of the station. When they had been out of sight for some internally judged time limit, she would call out their names, and although they were behind a glass wall and closed door at the other side of the station, they came running. She never turned to look at them, her antenna was so highly tuned she knew exactly when the kids needed to be recalled before they got on anyone's nerves. The children returned instantly and amiably to their mother and hung around her knees for a while, being groomed, hair raked, mouth wiped, while she smoked and warned them not to get themselves dirty, before they went off again, both they and their mother reassured.

‘And don't you go bothering people, you hear?'

They were dressed smartly, quite formally, while she wore a voluminous red tracksuit and trainers ground down by the weight they carried. The two children were obedient but never frightened or cowed by her great voice and monumental presence.

Bet relaxed and she, Troy and I were entertained during our wait with watching the way the family worked together.

‘Hey, they're great kids,' Bet said to the woman.

‘They better had be,' the woman boomed in mock ferocity. ‘Or they'll catch it.'

But her pride in the compliment and her smile suggested that they didn't need to catch it often, and whatever they caught wasn't anything compared to the love they received. Bet seemed quite at ease now with the woman, who though black, young, loud and outsized, and perhaps somewhat strange and potentially dangerous at first sight, exhibited what to Bet was a proper understanding of social control and correct public behaviour when it came to the children. They were never going to grow up to be disaffected, morally blank wanton killers. We introduced ourselves. Her name was Gail, she was on her way from Virginia Beach, where she lived with her husband, to stay with a girl friend in Los Angeles. She was exhausted, having had the same ten-hour layover as us, but with the added responsibility of keeping two small children entertained. She had spent the afternoon with them at the movies, window-shopping and buying food and drink for the train journey which was going to be the full three days. She got back to the station an hour or so before we had arrived hoping she had worn the kids out enough for them to fall asleep. She could have dropped off at the snap of a finger, but the kids had hours of energy left in them. Like Troy, they were travelling coach, which meant sitting all three nights in reclining seats which were comfortable by airline standards, but still seats in a public coach. Bet and I had sleeping compartments. Travelling by train is pretty cheap if you don't want a bed and a space to yourself for the night. If you do, the price rises steeply, well beyond the means of a working family with better things to spend their money on than the luxury of a bed on a train. My enjoyment of the day in Jacksonville with my new friends depended on the knowledge that when the train came, I'd have a bed and a door to close. But I was delighted by the way the layover had turned out. Bet and Troy were people I would never have come across travelling any other way, nor by spending time in one place in a hotel, not even staying with friends. I was intrigued by Bet's contradictions and her bearing, and moved by Troy and his lone efforts to be who he was.

A train passed through without stopping, hooting from a distance to warn anyone off the track which was flush with the platform. It slammed past us like a shiny tornado. Troy watched it come and go.

‘When we were kids we used to hang out at the station. They put pennies on the rail when a train was due. Flattened them like pancakes. You ever done that?'

I hadn't. Trains had never been so accessible in the middle of London, and the tracks were always recessed. It was an all-American tradition.

‘I never managed to do it,' Troy said. ‘I always got too scared at the last minute.'

Bet and I gave each other a maternal glance at this confirmation of Troy's timidity.

‘Well, there's another train due before ours comes,' I said. ‘Do it now.'

Troy looked alarmed, and shook his head.

‘It's OK, I was only kidding.'

Troy became silent. The loudspeaker announced the imminent arrival of the next train, which would be slowing but wasn't stopping, so we should keep clear of the track. Gail told us how she had missed the train this morning because her husband had overslept and she'd made him drive them hell for leather to the next station in time to catch it.

‘Or he sure as hell would have caught
something.
But we got there, 'cos he was scared as a kitten,' she bellowed, laughing with every inch of her body so the bench and all of us shimmied in the failing light. It was quite dark by now. Abruptly, Troy got up and took a few steps forward. Then he stopped dead.

‘You OK?' Bet called. Usually when he went off to the lavatory or to get a drink he would tell us where he was going. But he didn't answer, just kept standing with his back to us. In the distance we heard the incoming train whistle. It seemed to startle Troy into a decision, and he began to stride towards the track without looking back.

‘My God, what's he doing?' I asked, quite alarmed at the intensity in his walk.

The train whistled again, it was much closer now. Troy put a hand in his pocket.

‘You know what? He's going to flatten a penny…' Bet gasped.

The three of us watched in silent admiration as he bent down and put something directly on the nearest rail, stepping back just in time before the train arrived. Then, as the train slowed, he turned round to look at us with an expression of perfect satisfaction on his face. Bet, Gail and I cheered, whooped and clapped Troy's achievement. The other people on the platform and even in the station looked alarmed at the rowdiness. After the train had passed through, Troy collected his penny from the track and held it aloft as he came back to the bench. He held it out for me. It was now an elongated oval with distorted markings, and bright as a proverbial new penny from the buffing up it had received from the train's wheels. It was as thin as a sliver of ginger. I was as proud as anything of Troy.

‘Wonderful. Well, done.'

‘Isn't that great?'

‘Yeah, you did it.'

He smiled hugely. ‘Wow, I was really scared. It was just like being a kid again, my heart was in my mouth walking to the track. But this time, I was determined to do it. It's to celebrate my weekend. Here,' he said, holding the penny in the palm of his hand out towards me. ‘It's for you.'

‘Oh, you must keep it as a souvenir.'

‘No, I want you to have it. It'll remind you of your day in Jacksonville with Bet and me.'

I was getting sucked in. America was rolling over on its back and waving its legs in the air, offering me its soft sentimental underbelly to rub. And of course, as with some stray cat that I was determined to resist, which I had not the slightest intention of taking in, I was overcome by its charms, won over quite, in spite of my objections to its shameless methods. The Jacksonville Penny rests proudly above the corkboard in my study, a monument to what a person can do when they make their moment come, and a reminder that, every now and then and in the right circumstances, I really do like people.

*   *   *

I had better come clean, and admit that the right circumstance, the essential circumstance, is strangeness. Strangerhood seems to be what I need in order to see people clearly and be touched by them. On the whole, I'd rather have been Jane Goodall. Well, not Jane Goodall exactly, but a Jane Goodall version of me who spent my life in a forest befriending and observing a troop of chimpanzees. In lieu of that I became a writer, which is not so very different, except that the forest and the chimps have to be imagined, and the discomforts are far fewer. I was once reprimanded at a dinner party for saying as much, by someone who said that she suspected people like that actually preferred animals to human beings. I said I could confirm her suspicions, which were certainly true in my case. At the very least, given a choice between a human family and a troop of chimps, I'd take the chimps. I quite understood her air of disapproval, I disapprove of me, myself, but it does seem to be an inescapable fact.

I have not, so far, given excessive rein to my delight in animals. I have three cats which were accumulated somewhat reluctantly at my daughter's entreaties rather than planned as the beginnings of a home menagerie. I try to keep control of my more questionable desires. Now the daughter has left home and the cats apparently are mine, because according to her, it was I who wanted them all along. She may well be right.

Sometimes, when one of the cats is sitting on my lap, I have one of those rare experiences of existing completely in the present moment, of apprehending the reality of now with a blinding clarity and of being part of something extraordinary. I find myself astonished that a creature of another species, utterly different to me, honours me with its presence and trust by sitting on me and allowing me to stroke it. This mundane domestic moment is as enormous, I feel at such moments, as making contact across a universe with another intelligence. This creature with its own and other consciousness and I with mine can sit in silence and enjoy each other's presence. It becomes remarkable. I smooth the cat's fur, feeling his muscles beneath the loose skin, and trace the structure of his skeleton, backbone, shoulder blade, and skull with my massaging fingers, while he sits and purrs with the pleasure of physical contact, encouraging my exploring hands by pressing his head and body against them, turning his face this way and that to receive extra attention here or there. This is a perfectly everyday scene but sometimes it takes my breath away that another living thing has allowed me into its life.