by Rob Grant
If country folk offer to take you on 'a brisk walk', don't do it. Don't even think about it. A brisk walk is likely to involve what any sane person would consider intercontinental exploration, and will certainly include a touch of mountaineering, and possibly a spot of wading through white-water rapids, and it will definitely include a lot of scrambling over enormous stone precipices that were specifically designed to keep civilised people safely out of reach of barbarians -- and what were barbarians, anyway, except country folk? It is not an activity that is 'good for the constitution', nor is it a desirable means of 'working up an appetite'. It is a cruel and deliberate torture, and it is likely you will never make it back home to your loved ones again.
To a city dweller like myself, the phrase 'just down the road a step' means somewhere very close. Somewhere within extremely comfortable walking distance. Somewhere you could probably reach with the tip of your head if you simply relaxed your knees and fell forward. It would certainly require your destination to be visible from your starting point, and with the naked eye, rather than the Hubble Space Telescope. So imagine my dismay when I rounded the little bend where Pappa had dropped me to find no evidence of train stations or timetables or waiting rooms or even railway tracks within the perceivable environs.
Still, there was, at least, a road of sorts, albeit of a crude, probably Bronze Age sort, and I was superbly equipped with footwear more than equal to the challenge, so I set off walking.
Walking.
After a quarter of an hour that felt like a season of Turginev plays, I made out what looked like a straight line on the horizon that might well have been a railroad. A step down the road indeed. What, to Pappa, would constitute a marathon? Signing on for one of Magellan's lengthier expeditions? Throwing a thermos and a ploughman's lunch into a backpack and following the Voyager probe out of the solar system?
I don't want to start backtracking on the whole hatred of walking thing, but it did seem to help me get my thoughts in order. It struck me that old Johnny Appleseed had contrived to be ahead of me at every turn I made. What I had to start doing was being unpredictable. Going back to London might not qualify in that category. On the other hand, I was operating with extremely diminished resources. Giving away Cardew, I'd lost yet another identity, my third in as many days. I was down to my core ID now. Like it or not, I had to stick to being Harry Salt. On balance, though, I figured my best course of action would be to keep Klingferm's appointment with Twinkle. Anything else would have been going backwards.
The train station was surprisingly modern. It was also surprisingly large. It seemed shockingly out of place and unlikely, nestled in the middle of this primordially rural outback where electricity feared to penetrate and political correctness dared not tread.
There was a vast, paved concourse at the front of the building, with an elaborate fountain of golden mermaids gushing water from their shells as its centrepiece. To the left, a multi-storey car park that might have housed thousands of vehicles twisted up into the sky. It looked more like a station that would serve a major European port than a backwater farming community comprising eighteen cows, four tractors and seven men who tilled the land and dated sheep.
There was a huge bank of timetables ranked along the walls by the entrance, which seemed to promise that the station was well served by trains. I studied them for some considerable time, trying to find a service that might actually take me closer to civilisation, as opposed to deeper into this pastoral purgatory. Finally, I identified a train that promised to deliver me to Vienna.
Vienna was good. Vienna was where I wanted to be.
Of course, I'd have needed several years of legal training to work out what time the Vienna train ran, or from which platform, because every single service was marked with a bewildering array of caveats and exceptions. The 12.27 service, for instance, didn't run on Sundays or Saturdays or Tuesdays, bank holidays or leap years, unless it had a buffet car that didn't serve hot snacks, in which case it only ran on Wednesdays, though not in August, or on alternate weekdays during officially designated engineering maintenance work periods. Provided, naturally, you didn't want a first class carriage, which was a whole nother ball game. This is par for the course in modern railway services. It serves to minimise successful complaints by making it impossible for customers to prove any particular train arrived unreasonably late, or, indeed, was actually ever meant to arrive at all.
Unfazed, I wandered into the station entrance. My new boots clicked satisfyingly on the marble floor.
There was a large, well lit, pristine-looking cafeteria on the left, next to a coffee and croissant stall, a generous newsstand and a small but elegant bistro. Naturally, they were all closed.
I clicked over to the windowed counter on the right which claimed to provide tickets and information. I needed both.
The ticket office was protected by a reinforced window that appeared to be capable of repelling tank shells, which I thought seemed overkill in this unthreatening rural setting. But then, I hadn't met the station manager yet. Behind the quadruple-thick glass there was a small office, housing an elaborate ticket-printing machine and a computer screen set on a desk. The office was distressingly deserted, but by the screen a coffee mug was steaming promisingly.
There was a bell on the counter, mounted above a sign which read: 'Please Do Not Ring This Bell'.
Oh fucking dear.
I peered in through the glass. There was a door at the back of the office, which was open. I strained to listen, and I could definitely make out the sounds of someone engaged in some kind of business back there. There was some paper rustling, and what sounded like the occasional scrape of a chair.
I waited a while.
I waited a while longer.
I waited long enough for the ticket clerk to have gone to the loo, washed and brushed up, made a couple of phone calls, read the morning newspaper and filled in the crossword.
I had waited sufficiently, I thought, to earn me the right to use the English coughing technique to attract attention.
I coughed. I thought it unlikely that, given the otherwise utter customerlessness of the place, the person who'd left the coffee mug steaming hadn't heard me arrive, but I coughed anyway.
I waited. Then I coughed again, only louder.
I coughed again, this time directly into the circular grille cut into the window. And again. I must have sounded like I was in the terminal stages of tuberculosis.
When I was satisfied the coughing wasn't going to get me anywhere, I decided to employ the crass American system of actually asking for assistance.
'Hey?' I called. Then again, more forcefully: 'Hello there?' Then: 'Anybody there?' and again: 'Hello?'
From behind the open door, I heard a weary sigh.
I waited.
Still, I waited.
I tried again, only slightly angrier this time. 'Hello? Is there anybody manning this ticket office?'
I heard another weary, resigned sigh, a kind of mumbling barked expletive, and the rustling of paper.
The ticket clerk emerged from his den. He was a short man, always worrying in these circumstances, with thick wiry black hair and matching eyebrows that made him appear in a constant state of surprise. He had a newspaper folded under his arm. It was folded neatly. Too neatly. That newspaper spelled trouble to me. A man would have had to use a set square and a steam iron to achieve newspaper-folding precision like that.
He didn't acknowledge me. He didn't even glance over at the window. He strolled slowly over to the desk, opened a drawer and placed the newspaper inside it. When he was completely satisfied, adjusting the newspaper so its edge was absolutely flush with the side of the drawer, he closed the drawer gently. Then he opened a second drawer, removed a clipboard and set it on his desk. He crouched over it like a snooker player, making tiny adjustments to its position until he was certain it lay precisely at right angles to the leather trim of the desk. He closed the second drawer and opened a third. From this he select
ed a pencil. He held the pencil up to the light, to check the lead was a hundred-per-cent sharpened.
I could see where this was going.
'Excuse me,' I said. 'Could you tell me when the next train to Vienna is due?'
He closed his eyes and winced at the sound of my voice, but that was his only reaction. He took out a pencil sharpener and pulled a wastebasket from under his desk. He checked the pencil again, narrowed his eyes at the tip, trying to decide if it truly needed honing, and, if so, precisely how much honing it truly needed. He mulled it over with the same level of intensity as a stunt rider might contemplate a leap of death on a 125CC motorcycle over an erupting volcano, and finally decided the pencil would, in fact, benefit from a little bit of a sharpening.
Slowly, very slowly, as if he were a microsurgeon threading a fibre-optic probe through the most delicate part of a beloved friend's brain, he inserted the pencil into the sharpener.
I tried again. 'Listen: I just want to know the time of the Vienna train, that's all.'
He bit his lip. I could have sworn I saw a tear of frustration welling in his eye. He shook off my intrusion, found his concentration again and gently twisted the sharpener. A thin curl of wood edged out between the blades. His tongue edged out of the corner of his mouth.
'The Vienna train?'
A bead of sweat started to drool down his forehead. He carried on twisting.
'What am I? The invisible fucking man?'
There was an abrupt snapping sound. He stopped twisting and slowly removed the pencil from the sharpener. The tip was gone. He looked at me with Mafia-quality hatred. He held up the pencil for me to see what I'd made him do. Then he bared his teeth, held the pencil between his hands and snapped it in two. He threw the ends into the wastebasket and started rifling through the drawer for a second pencil.
Well, he'd baited me. He'd asked for it. And now he was going to get it.
I rang the bell.
He froze over the drawer.
In for a cent, in for a euro. I rang the bell again.
His body remained immobile, but his head twisted towards me, exorcist-like. There was horror on his face, mingled with disbelief. Had I actually, truly gone and rung the bell?
We stared at each other. I stared long enough for him to start believing maybe he'd been hearing things, and maybe I hadn't rung the bell, after all.
Then I rang the bell again.
And I rang it again. And again. I rang out the allegro climax of 'The Ride Of The Valkyries' on the bell.
When the final ring had finished echoing round the marble hall, the ticket clerk straightened and spoke, for the first time. His voice was low and calm. 'Did you ring that bell?' he said.
'I rang the bell,' I said.
Gently, he asked: 'What is the matter with you?' He took a tentative step towards the window. 'Can you not read?' And another step. 'Is there not a sign beneath that bell?'
I leaned back and pretended to focus on the sign. I pointed at it. 'You mean this sign?'
'I mean precisely that sign. That's exactly the sign I mean.' He reached the window. 'And does that sign not say "Please Do Not Ring This Bell"?'
I leaned back again, pretending to focus, and concurred. 'That's pretty much what it says, yes.'
'No. That is not pretty much what the sign says. That is exactly what the sign says.' He still hadn't raised his voice. All his anger, and he clearly had plenty of anger, was internalised. His entire stomach was probably one giant ulcer. But his voice was calm and controlled.
Once again, I leaned back slowly. 'You're right. That's exactly what it says.'
'"Please Do Not Ring This Bell".'
I nodded, and repeated: '"Please Do Not Ring This Bell".' Just to show him I wasn't the argumentative kind.
'Good. Because, for a minute there, I thought I was somehow mistaken about what the sign says.'
'No.'
'So the sign doesn't say: "Please Do Ring This Bell"?'
I shook my head. 'Nope.'
'And it doesn't say: "Please Do Not Ring This Bell, Unless You Feel Like It"?'
'Not as far as I can see, no.'
'And yet, even though that sign was there, even though you read and understood it, despite all that, what you did was: you went ahead and you actually rang the bell?'
I showed him my palms and grinned. 'Guilty.'
'Please don't grin,' he asked politely.
'I wasn't grinning.'
'That sign is there for a reason. Didn't you think that sign was there for a reason?'
'I'll be frank with you: I couldn't work out why there would be a bell here that nobody was supposed to ring.'
'You couldn't?'
'It didn't make a whole lot of sense to me.'
'Would you like me to tell you the reason?'
'Actually, for my money, we can forget all about bells and signs now. All I want to know is the time of the next train to Vienna.'
And in exactly the same tone of voice, with exactly the same inflection and at exactly the same, measured volume, he said: 'Would you like me to tell you the reason?'
Clearly, I was dealing with a man on the edge. I wasn't going to get anywhere without humouring him. Flatly, and definitely without grinning, I said: 'Yes.'
And again, as if I hadn't replied at all: 'Would you like me to tell you the reason?'
I began to feel grateful for the bullet-proof shield between us. I nodded. 'I really would like you to tell me the reason.'
He stared at me for a long time, his face unmoving, his lips pursed. 'Well, I'm not going to tell you the reason. It isn't for you to know the reason. You know why? Because you're a customer. You don't work here. You're not even an employee of Railouest, are you?'
'No.'
'You're not by any chance the managing director of Railouest South? You wouldn't be, perhaps, the chief executive officer of Railouest Intercontinental, Lord of the Railways?'
'No. I'm just a poor traveller, trying to travel, that's all.'
'Do you expect us to train every single customer in every single aspect of Railouest procedure? Do you? Have you any idea how long that would take? To talk every single passenger through every element of every single procedure? Explain every single reason why every single thing is done the way it's done here? Nobody would ever catch a train, my friend. Nobody would even reach the platform.' He grabbed a very thick red book from under his counter and slapped it down. Then he carefully aligned it with the edges of the brass counter tray. 'That volume is the Railouest training manual. Would you like me to run through it with you?'
'No.'
'It wouldn't be a problem. So long as you have six weeks to spare, plus another three months for on-the-job training. If you've got a four-and-a-half-month window in your schedule, I'd be glad to take you through it.'
I closed my eyes. 'I just want to get from here to Vienna. That's all I want.'
'I mean, you could see I was busy, couldn't you? When you rang the bell you shouldn't ring? You could see I was occupied with vital Railouest administrative business?'
'You were sharpening a pencil.'
'I was sharpening a pencil?'
'You were sharpening a pencil. Slowly.'
'Is that what it looked like to you? Is that all it looked like I was doing? Sharpening a pencil?'
'It looked to me like you were sharpening a pencil. It looked to me like you were sharpening a pencil slowly. Very slowly.'
The ticket clerk flung his hand towards the clipboard on the desk. 'I was about to fill out a safety report, my friend. A network safety report. Can you even begin to imagine what might happen if I filled out a Railouest network safety report with a blunt pencil? If, because the pencil was blunt, just one letter of that report turned out illegible? Say, an "F" turned out like a "C" or an "M" or even, God help us, a "J"? It may not seem important to you, Mister. It may seem a trivial thing. But that's because you haven't worked your way through this baby!' He slapped the training manual, hard. 'That one small error
, that "J" instead of an "F", that could result in the death of thousands. It could send a train heading for "Jontainebleau" instead of Fontainebleau. It could derail the entire network and cause carnage beyond imagining. And what would I say in my defence? What excuse would I give to those poor families whose loved ones would never return? "I'm sorry, I didn't bother to sharpen my pencil properly"? "I'm sorry little Johnnie's head got ripped off his shoulders in the worst rail disaster of all time, but I simply couldn't be arsed to sharpen my pencil"? Could little Johnnie's parents live with that? Could I? Could you?'
'There's no such place as Jontainebleau.'
"Which is why sending a train there could be so potentially lethal.'
'Can I see the station manager, please?'
'You want to see the station manager?'
'You do have a station manager, don't you? A station this size?'
'Yes, we have a station manager.'
'Then I would like to see the station manager, yes.'
'Why do you want to see the station manager?'
'Well, I think that's between me and the station manager, don't you?'
'I have to know why you want to see the station manager.'
'Why do you have to know?'
'Because I have to know if you have a problem that needs dealing with at station manager level.'
'That's in your book, is it?'
'Page five five seven, my friend.' He started leafing through the pages. 'Paragraph thirty-nine b.'
He found the page and twisted the book round for me to see.
I wasn't about to read it. 'All right. I'll be blunt with you. I want to see the station manager because I'm not happy with the service I'm getting here, at the ticket and information desk.'
'You're not happy with the service?'
'No. I'm getting plenty of information. Unfortunately, none of it is the information I want. And I'm certainly not getting any ticket.'