Train Man Read online

  ‘I forgot all about him,’ he said.

  He remembered Elizabeth again, the first woman he’d so nearly married and then not. Not Amy: he’d nearly married her, too, but Elizabeth had been so different and sometimes he still tried to blame her for leaving him, even though he knew she was to be congratulated. Nothing had been her fault: she’d just seen too clearly, and it wasn’t the fault of Polish Pete, the man she was probably being held by now, tenderly, he hoped – though why would lovers be holding one another at this time of the morning, when they had busy jobs? It wasn’t Polish Pete’s fault, that was the main thing: and for a moment he wondered how people always became trapped in the endless apportioning of blame, and how that disciplinary procedure had been all about narrowing it right down until he was caught in the net, or skewered on that point – that javelin – of indisputable, shameful incompetence. There he was, running as fast as he could as they came after him with the great big skewer. And he tripped. He fell, and rolled onto his back and wham! In it went, just below the ribcage, and he was pinned to the paperwork, blamed for ever as the crowds trundled by on buses and trains. It must come from childhood, he thought, when blame is apportioned extra rigorously, and you have no right of appeal.

  ‘Twelve per cent in your Latin test.’

  Whose fault was that? His form tutor apportioned blame, as had his parents.

  ‘It was my fault. I didn’t understand it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t know what the teacher’s talking about, sir.’

  ‘Who teaches you Latin?’

  ‘Mr Trace. He says words I don’t understand – I don’t know what a “declension” is. I don’t know what “passive voice” means, so I have to pay. That’s why I have no defence, sir, when he calls me back at lunchtime, sir. Ignorance is no plea, so he helps me, but… do I really need help?’

  Every boy knows: Mr Trace loves nothing more than to help boys pay, and he does so until his glittering eyes get the special glitter. Why tell the story, when everyone knows? What surprise can there be, when we’re all abused every day in some way or another? We abuse, because it’s what we are: I abuse, you abuse and he was abused. The man reflected in this window, there he is again – and he will be abused, pluperfect passive had been abused. ‘When Caesar came to the water. The water? No, the river – sorry, sir. When Caesar came to the river, he called his legions together and said, “Is there a man amongst you who has not been abused? Let him stand forth.”’

  Michael wasn’t smiling.

  ‘“Sexually abused?”’ said Lepidus, or Cicero – the names had gone but the text was in his head still: Caesar’s Gallic Wars. ‘“Show us a man who has not – nihil – never taken the penis into the mouth. Let him make himself known that we may salute him!”’

  ‘Good,’ said Mr Trace. ‘It’s not as hard as you thought, is it?’

  The boys laughed when he said that.

  No, it wasn’t so very, very hard – and Mr Trace was not, thankfully, on this particular train because he was dead, his dust spread wide and ungatherable in a garden of remembrance.

  ‘Did he cum?’ said someone.

  ‘What?’

  Michael hadn’t known what that meant, the first time.

  ‘Come where?’

  Screams of laughter, and the wonder and the fear. ‘Did he give you something to eat, Michael? Did you get your lunch?’

  Everyone knew about Mr Trace, so was everyone to blame? Julius Caesar must have sat in his tent, just like Mr Trace, and in came young Mikilus in his soft leather servant uniform – he’d probably fought for the privilege of fellating the great leader, and perhaps it had even been love? That was how it was back then, before the legislation.

  Boys got over it.

  Michael slowed down his breathing.

  His hands were shaking, so he took the carton from his bag and drank a mouthful of whisky straight from it – then he ate a tangerine. The train was still utterly on time, and would get him into Gloucester soon after noon which was just minutes away, giving him a moment to sweep the peel together and put it in his pocket for disposal in the first litter bin he saw. Nobody was looking at him.

  It was this very service that he had picked up all those months ago, travelling in the other direction: he had sat with himself as he was sitting now, looking at himself wanting to be rid of himself. The train had been just like this one, and he’d stepped onto it late one night, to find the vandalised table with its oh-so personal message and the small, polite, helpful Sikh who’d tried to make it go away. He wasn’t fond of Gloucester station, but it was coming towards him now: the slow motion of the braking train. It had long, busy platforms which seemed disconnected and spread out, and the trains came in from every direction. North, south, east and west: you could never be quite sure which way you’d end up going, for there were too many options. To get to Southampton, for example, meant going north first of all, and coming back on yourself. If you missed Cheltenham you’d end up lost in the Midlands, but if you got it more wrong than that you might end up in deepest Wales.

  Was it the Gloucester station waiting room where they had no chairs? He’d noticed the sign, which was actually a drawing of a vacant seat, and stepped inside to rest. Six people were standing up, and the room was bare.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he’d said – at the ticket office. ‘What’s happened to the chairs?’

  ‘Sorry, sir? I’m not with you.’

  ‘In the waiting room. There’s nowhere to sit.’

  ‘Oh! No. They were vandalised, so they’ve been taken out.’

  ‘But there’s nowhere to sit.’

  ‘I know, sir. It’s a problem.’

  ‘People are tired. They want to sit down.’

  The woman had simply looked at him.

  ‘If the seats are being vandalised,’ he wanted to say, ‘you repair them. You put staff in to protect them, or CCTV – you can’t give in to vandals, because if you do – they’ve won. It’s not important,’ he wanted to say. ‘In the great scheme of things, it’s trivial. But it’s as if we’re not worth anything any more, and we don’t deserve comfort. Civilisation is a myth – we’re going backwards.’

  The woman handed Michael a customer feedback form, and he said thank you.

  When he stepped onto the platform he was almost weeping, for he knew now that he would miss his connection – but he wanted a last cup of coffee, in a mug. He didn’t want to drink out of a paper cup, and he knew the café in Gloucester used proper crockery. He deserved china. Why should he drink from paper? He refused to do that when this was his last hot drink, and why should he be sad about it? He had time, and he had to drink more whisky to make himself drunk. Crewe was only two hours away – or two hours and six minutes, to be precise, via Birmingham. Even he could get to Crewe, and if he missed whatever London service he’d been aiming to meet, so what? The trains were hourly, he was sure of it – he’d looked it up and worked it all out, so… ‘Please,’ he said to himself. ‘Stop crying.’

  There was a receptacle for litter, and he paused beside it to unload the orange peel, and wipe his weak, foolish eyes. He glanced up to see a camera, and wondered for a moment if anyone was watching him here. Was there anybody at the monitor?

  ‘There’s a man with watery eyes,’ they’d say.

  The bag that held the rubbish was transparent, so you couldn’t conceal whatever it was you were throwing away. The bomb-planting terrorist would lift the lid and realise he had been thwarted. Where could he hide his bomb now? He would slink back, shamefaced, to his bomb-making friends. ‘It’s impossible,’ he’d say. ‘We have been out-witted.’

  Michael looked away, smiling again, and made for the café. He walked past the waiting room and saw that it was full of chairs.

  6

  Inside, he thought of Spain, where it had been so hot.

  Elizabeth saw the advertisement in a shop window, with a photograph of the house – this was after two nights in a hotel, and they had bo
th agreed that what they wanted most was a cottage to call their own. They wanted to cook for themselves, and buy bottles of cheap local wine – not because they needed to save money, but because even the most friendly hotel imposed a formality.

  Casa Elouisa was named after its owner. Michael phoned her from the lobby, and thankfully her English was excellent. His Spanish was poor, so ‘Habla Ingelzi, senorita, por favour…?’

  That was about all he said.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ she replied. ‘How are you?’

  The house was available the very next day, and for the whole fortnight, which meant it was bound to be unsuitable and disappointing. They prepared themselves for the difficulty of saying, ‘Well, we’ll think about it. We have one more place to see.’

  ‘It will be next to a noisy quarry,’ said Elizabeth.

  ‘A slaughterhouse.’

  ‘A power station. In the slums. By a brothel.’

  ‘She said she hadn’t really got round to advertising it yet. Just a few photos here and there – she hasn’t got onto the books of any… you know, tourist offices or big brochures.’

  ‘Maybe we’ll be lucky.’

  They had been lucky all through the holiday, and they were to be yet luckier. The flight to Malaga had been simple, and the hire car was waiting. Michael drove, then Elizabeth took over, and they squealed at every roundabout because it felt so strange to be turning right. He was twenty-six. She was two years younger, and he could still remember the disbelief when one thing led to another and they found themselves going to the cinema, to a pizza house and then to meet her parents. Suddenly, they were on holiday together.

  The hotel in Granada was expensive, and it turned out to be a secret jewel behind high walls – an ex-convent with twisting corridors and sudden gardens. They moved on sadly, shaking the hands of the staff who wished them well because love was a blessing, and they had blessed the whole place.

  They blessed the car, and blessed the white villages they drove to – villages that were strewn down the sides of high, dry mountains like bleached rubble. Every restaurant they visited blessed them, for they were discovering the wonders of Spanish food: their tongues came to life in their mouths. They were discovering how life changes in the sun, so Casa Elouisa had to be the anticlimax two shy English tourists surely deserved.

  It wasn’t, though.

  Michael ordered an Americano with warm milk, and remembered Casa Elouisa again, with its cool, thick-walled bedroom in which making love had seemed so possible. The barista served him with a smile that was almost a laugh, and her ‘thank you’ as he handed her twenty pounds sounded to Michael as if he had saved her life. She had the same eyes as Elizabeth, and yet ‘thank you’ was a phrase said how many times a day?

  ‘Thank you!’ she said, taking the note.

  It was a new-minted ‘thank you,’ so fresh and soft, and it was for Michael only – she looked at him as she said it, and sex was not on her mind or his. Of all the station cafés in the world, he had selected this one. He had dignified it – blessed it, again – and the coffee was soon dripping into a cup like oil, the grounds having been tamped and squeezed. The correct measure of hot water thinned the mixture, making the intensity manageable, and it was another girl organising this part of the process. The first took your order and your money, and thanked you – the second made your drink.

  She was no doubt nineteen or twenty, the one now holding his cup, but she looked twelve or thirteen, and her short dark hair was pulled behind her ears – she looked like a boy, in fact, James or Luke. Flat-chested, in a too-big shirt with the sleeves rolled, she reminded him of himself. She could have played Oliver Twist and broken hearts, and she was about to pour milk into a jug when she remembered there were options.

  ‘Would you prefer hot milk?’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Michael. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You’re like me,’ she replied. ‘Strong coffee. Hot milk.’

  ‘I’m trying to cut down, actually.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh, the usual. Blood pressure. Two coffees a day, maximum.’

  ‘Yes, you mustn’t overdo it.’

  She smiled too, just like her colleague. She smiled right at him, and she was like the first girl but more beautiful. Her face fell naturally into a smile, just as Elizabeth’s had – just as so many people’s did… and her eyes glittered like Mr Trace’s but differently, for hers were merry and young and she might have been a Romanian Gypsy, born on a bank of wild flowers. She placed the crockery briskly, but precisely, her movements so economical – she didn’t know it was Michael’s last ever hot drink, but she was preparing it as if she’d somehow guessed. And if she had a boyfriend, did the fellow realise how lucky he was? If she lived with her parents, still – if she wasn’t from Europe, but lived in grey old Gloucester – did they realise what a privilege it was, having access still to this person they had created and reared? It wouldn’t be long before she spread her wings and left them. As a customer, did he really appreciate the kindness of her attention? Could he write to her manager, and get her promoted? Could he be responsible for her earning a substantial bonus?

  Would she take twenty pounds, if he offered it?

  She was too beautiful, and for a moment he imagined the horror of her being assaulted. A man could subdue her so dreadfully easily – whilst two men, working together… Michael’s imagination plunged, and he looked down at his hands, appalled at the pit that was opening around him. I’ll hold her for you, you hold her for me – he had read that phrase somewhere, and she wouldn’t stand a chance unless she practised martial arts, or unless he came by to rescue her. Perhaps she would be able to fight her own way out of their terrible grip, but she looked too delicate and he could see her thin arms twisted behind her back as the first man dragged her down to the railway tracks, her scream unheard for an express train was passing, screaming louder. There were her parents looking at the clock, just beginning to wonder where she was. And what if the men put her body on the rails? What if those poor parents had to wait at the mortuary to see what was left? He felt a sob rising in his throat.

  She smiled, and Michael had to hold the counter more firmly, weak with self-loathing. She turned away. She put the milk jug under the steamer, and for some reason she looked at him again. She should have said, ‘Go on. Get out.’

  ‘I beg your pardon. Why?’

  ‘That train for Crewe. The one you said you’d be in front of, old man – it’s about to come hurtling through.’

  ‘There’ll be others,’ he would say. ‘I can wait for the later train—’

  ‘You’re not going to do it, are you?’

  She would be whispering.

  ‘You’ve not got the balls, so to speak. You’ll be back here this evening: “An Americano, please! – can I have a china cup?” Kill your fucking dead-self, Michael – do us all a favour.’

  She said, ‘Where are you off to today, then?’

  Shame washed up from his feet again, and he smiled.

  ‘Oh,’ he said – and he elongated the vowel to suggest mystery, or uncertainty, or the possibility that he was on some epic voyage.

  Don’t ask me! That was what his ‘oh’ implied, and he backed it up with a broader smile and a headshake, trying to mix weariness with the excitement of the challenges he faced. ‘I am young, really,’ he wanted to say. ‘This journey that I’m making today is not to Crewe at all… it’s a spontaneous trip that could take me anywhere. I’m free, and the world is wide open – my life is not a disappointment.’

  ‘Up country,’ was what he said.

  The girl nodded, of course. Her name was Zara – there was a badge saying so. Up country meant north, perhaps – or simply some distance from here.

  ‘I’m going to see my daughter,’ he said.

  ‘Where’s she?’

  ‘I don’t have one!’ That should have been his jaunty riposte. ‘I caught you out there, Zara! I was joking. Crikey, no! I am a childless man, can you not see
that? Smell my clothes. Look at my skin.’

  ‘She’s at Leeds University,’ he said, because that’s where Elizabeth’s son was or had been studying, so he’d learned somehow, even as Zara nodded. The rubble of his life was all about him, but he was still holding onto the counter and he felt the tears prick his eyes again as he smiled even harder. Zara was still making his Americano, it seemed – sorting out the milk. She served it at last, and put the jug beside the cup. His time with her was almost up: he had ten seconds left, if he moved slowly. In ten seconds’ time he would cease to be a safe, harmless customer, and he wanted more than anything to remain a safe, harmless customer.

  He said, ‘People who know you are very lucky.’

  The blood rushed to his face, in a tide. He couldn’t look at her. He heard her laugh, because laughter always diffuses intimacy. She hauled everything back to a safe area, and said, ‘Oh, how sweet.’

  The word turned him into what he was – a stupid old man – and he moved away before she could think he was dirty, or predatory, or worst of all lonely. No, he was off to see his daughter, in her mind – and a man who was off to see his daughter could not be dangerous. He could have a daughter of university age – he wasn’t too old – and she would be looking forward to seeing him. Might she even be joining him at Crewe, on platform number seven?