Train Man

by Andrew Mulligan

  Jackets on, despite the heat. The boys had dressed up, because it wasn’t an Italian restaurant at all, it was Settle’s finest celebrity-chef bistro, popular with the rich and famous. He could hear their laughter, and the landscape was woodland, with farmers’ fields in between and a sudden rush of white flowers, close to the train. He, Michael, was having a little bit of a problem but they hadn’t felt able to ask him what that was, for fear that he would tell them – and it wasn’t their concern.

  Into a tunnel they went, and it was surprisingly long. Would they ever, ever come out or were they going slowly deeper into solid earth? Might they just possibly run deep into the thick, gooey clay and slow down and down and down as the tunnel roof got lower and the wheels clogged… might they be entombed for ever?

  One thing was clear: they would never be friends.

  What did he want them to do, these poor fellow travellers? And out they rushed, into a new world where everyone could breathe again for there were houses, with long gardens and sheds. What did he want? Did he want a dinner invitation?

  ‘Don’t leave us, Michael! You must meet Percy! Why not? A table for four!’

  What then?

  ‘No, stay the night! We’re just getting to know you!’

  What did he want or expect, or need? Were they going to install him in the spare room of an off-plan flat that didn’t exist yet, and never let him go? The woman would say, ‘Listen. You’re not going anywhere until we get to the bottom of this little problem of yours. We have room! We have that little ensuite guest room, Michael.’

  She would be so unbearably kind, and he – the husband – would be distant but wise. His respect for and love of all human life had been forged in the army, where he’d probably commanded troops as a brigadier or colonel. He’d seen his share of bloodletting, of course. He’d seen his own men blown to pieces by the IRA. Not as bad as the First World War, but you still had bodies cut to ribbons, spread around the tracks with shoes in the grass… and the invoices. Oh, the invoices: they had piled up only because he hadn’t been able to deal with them, or his mother. He hadn’t been able to enter the details onto the spreadsheets. He had hit an obstacle, and could not concentrate properly, and he had been getting headaches because Elizabeth was so long gone as to be one of those old legends you told yourself round the campfire like a sad, drunk Red Indian reliving the good old days when the buffalo roamed.

  The house in which they had never lived together was so, so dark. Every time he typed numbers into the appropriate box, it seemed it was the wrong box. The numbers were sometimes right and sometimes wrong, and it seemed to take such a long time to enter one single invoice, particularly as he became ridiculously, obsessively correct. He would have to have breaks – and that meant trips to the kitchen area, where they had the coffee machine and the fridge. It meant time away from his desk, but nobody ever challenged him because nobody was actually waiting for him to complete a task: the invoices were loaded onto spreadsheets and the finance department dealt with them as and when they came in.

  His desk was his sanctuary.

  He really had pretended it wasn’t happening, and slow, sweet Monica hadn’t asked or probed. After his resignation-dismissal he had continued to leave for work, except he had gone to the park instead. He had taken the bus to the playing fields. Then, he had done two circuits of the perimeter by which time she would have left the house – but she wasn’t living with him. He and Monica had never lived together, so he was misremembering. Who had he been pretending for? Not Monica, not Amy – so had it really been himself? He tricked himself into thinking he was still going to work, and hadn’t been let go, just as he was tricking himself now – for it suddenly seemed he wasn’t ever going to kill himself either, having tried and failed in both Bromsgrove and Crewe. He should have grabbed the steam-train enthusiast and frogmarched him down the tracks. He could have tripped him over and knelt on his chest, and that would have stopped him talking about nothing. He would have coughed out his dentures, the poor man.

  ‘No, mister! No!’

  They would have been cremated together, for half Michael’s head would have lain against the old man’s severed shoulder: a jigsaw for the morticians, making them truly inseparable. If only he’d met the 15.41 – and he was about to be sick.

  It would be over now, and Percy’s grandfather would never have had to move his coat, or say, ‘Do you mind if we don’t chat any more?’

  Do you mind if we don’t chat any more?

  Michael swallowed, and smiled at the thought, realising that he still didn’t have the courage to do anything other than chat. He would find it, though – the courage. It might be at the very bottom of the juice carton, and it might mean crazy, bendy legs that could hardly carry him – but he would find it, and dance down the railway line.

  The train had slowed, and there was another one next to it travelling just a little bit faster. They were racing, and everyone was carefully not looking at each other.

  So many people, treasuring their lives! And he would wake up wondering what his was for and how he had come to have no purpose. How he had come to be so unconnected, for all the strings and strands had stretched until they’d broken and the most meaningful and important thing he had done in the last week was to help Vivienne in the flat opposite with a broken blind – a misaligned toggle, in fact. He smiled at this thought, too – and then laughed. The other train was winning, and he nearly said, ‘Come on! Faster!’

  She – Vivienne – had rung his bell, which was a rare occurrence. She had apologised for disturbing him, but the blind had come off the wall and she couldn’t see to fix it. Did he mind? No, he didn’t. She hated to be a nuisance, but she wasn’t being one if only because she was giving him the chance to show how high his spirits were. She was allowing him to play the role of ‘busy man’.

  ‘You don’t have to come now,’ she’d said.

  ‘No, I’ve just got a couple of errands in town, and then I’ll be over.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  The blind did not need replacing or even repairing – she had knocked it somehow, and the rail had come away from its plastic toggle. It was thirty seconds’ work to fix it, and Vivienne had been so grateful. With both his parents gone, he couldn’t phone anyone to say what he’d been up to, and how he had single-handedly reattached an elderly lady’s blind. He was orphaned, but so were most people: your parents died in the end, because that’s what parents do. They were up in heaven, no doubt, except heaven was the place nobody with a brain could possibly believe in, unless they hadn’t escaped their childhood. Why not believe in it, though? Why not take comfort? They would all meet in heaven and he could tell them his important news:

  ‘It was only the toggle, Dad. She’d knocked it.’

  ‘What kind of toggle, son?’

  ‘You know – one of those plastic curtain tracks. They have toggles at the back. You just have to locate it in the groove, and turn it.’

  The nagging, desolate sameness: it was shaming.

  It was the grief. It was the pushing against doors that were jammed, or swung open so you found yourself in rooms you didn’t want to be in – and they were passing houses again, for the other train had veered off somewhere, or derailed down an embankment and was blazing behind them as they shot forwards victoriously into some suburb, where people really lived. The rooftops spread, and all that stone and slate had been quarried and hauled, the mortar mixed for a town to rise even as the young man on the other side of the carriage watched something noisy on his phone. Michael could hear the inane, barking laughter of a cartoon, and the young man seemed riveted. Everyone was forced to share the squeaking nonsense – and he wasn’t six years old! He didn’t have the excuse a child might have. No, this man was in his early twenties – he was a robust, intelligent-looking Asian man, and a hundred years ago people like him would have been stuck in the mud of the Somme, with bullets sizzling in their chests. He’d have been caught
in the open as the machine guns opened fire, and he would have fallen backwards, or sunk to his knees, astonished and breathless. Six hours of cold, slow suffering lay ahead, as he cried for his mother. Now, he couldn’t even muster the courtesy to wear a set of headphones – despite the sticker on the window: Please consider your fellow passengers! Once again, the train company wanted to look after everyone. It was aching for a little peace and goodwill, and once again it wasn’t working.

  It was the nothing that wore you down.

  The nullity of encounters like these wore Michael down, for he would not be on some touchline cheering Percy and James as they raced towards the goal. If he watched the boys and girls playing football or hockey, someone would notice him and think, Predator.

  Percy needed protection, and would get it.

  Percy lived a busy, driven life. Percy rushed from his lessons to the changing room, and then off to school-supper before he dropped exhausted into his boarding-school dormitory bed, too tired for the pillow fights he’d outgrown. The expensive flat would be left to him in his loving grandparents’ will, and he would marry, and have a baby of his own. The grandparents would die happy, and Percy would wear his grandfather’s watch, which Michael could see on the man’s wrist. It was a wind-up model, of course, and every time Percy wound it he would think of the sweet, strong old man who had given it to him, and how wonderful their times on the boat had been as young Percy learned to navigate by the stars and steer the craft deftly into harbour. Percy wouldn’t be the kind of man to walk out into the thin, scruffy copse of trees at the back of his flat with a rope. Never would Percy find himself blinded by tears, hissing, ‘Do it!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Hang yourself, you crippled bastard! You’ve mended the fucking blind, so get it over with – do it!’

  No, no – and no again. Michael screwed the cap onto his fruit-juice carton, and put it in his bag with the glass and the half-sucked mint. He decided not to say goodbye, because the couple were so ostentatiously concentrating – one with the tablet and the other with a Kindle. He stood, put his bag over his shoulder, and set off to the doors at the end of the carriage, away from the chirping, giggling phone. He walked through two more, and found a pair of empty seats in the third – but he walked on into the little vestibule again. If he could open a door, he could throw himself out: but the doors were locked, and you couldn’t even get the windows down. The toilet was out of order, so he couldn’t drown himself – though of course it probably wasn’t out of order at all. It was simply too expensive to maintain, or they didn’t want it vandalised.

  ‘We would unlock the toilets, sir, but people keep using them.’

  Michael smiled again, because that’s what someone had said to him once, on a station called Fratton. ‘We have to keep the facilities locked, sir. They get smashed up if we don’t.’ We would provide seats, but we’re worried people might sit on them. We would put the heating on, but you might get comfortable and never leave: better to be cold, with the wind racing through the freezing, doorless shelter. That’s the world: live in it.

  They were approaching Preston.

  ‘We will shortly be arriving in Preston,’ he was told – and he watched the town rolling in, the train easing into its very heart. So much work had gone into the place, and the work would never stop. People came and went, working and serving – designing, building and expanding. Michael stood at the door, but it remained obstinately closed until the guard decided it was safe to disembark. He or she pressed a switch, and the door opened slowly, even as a little step appeared before Michael’s feet. Those waiting to board hung back, allowing him to disembark first: they formed a committee to studiously ignore him as he passed through, and walked towards the iron bridge that would lift him over the rails to all the other platforms.

  What if he hadn’t been there? That little crowd would not have had to wait. They would have pressed forwards, three seconds earlier.

  He passed a boy standing in a glass tunnel. It was the waiting area, with anti-vandal prison-cell seats – seats you could hose down quickly. The boy was probably younger than Percy, and he appeared to be on his way home from school, late as it was. He was keying something into his phone. A sports bag lay heavy between his feet, and he had a backpack too. Eleven years old, probably, in a too-big blazer: Michael noticed him because once again it was himself, and he’d finished all those sweets. He’d put on a different uniform, too, and the thoughts were spilt – they seemed to hit the ground and smash, and he found he was standing absolutely still with his eyes tight shut, balancing.

  The boy wasn’t him, but it might have been James.

  He had loved James with the fantastic storybook desire to save him from fires, and be necessary to him. James Seyton, with his effortless grace – did it matter? There were people pushing past, just avoiding him as he stood marooned, for he had liked James so much, and still thought of him as a friend. He had felt the flutter of his heart whenever they met. They had taken the train together, and it didn’t really matter, for the emotions were old now and his love for James had simply been a first tentative outing, like the first small clambering steps that would take him ever higher up the rock face he’d been lost on now for so many years, climbing and clinging, unable to get down. It just didn’t matter, for the tracks were everywhere and a train would come.

  But he had joined the Scouts with James.

  Oh, he could see the two of them still, in beret and scarf – and James was a better athlete than eleven-year-old Michael. He could see James the day they’d worked a little ferry together – that was some Scouting nonsense, no doubt – hauling on a rope to drag the craft across the pond, so they’d both been soaked but only James had taken his shirt off and carried on bare-backed, and extra specially splendid, for you couldn’t be aware of your beauty then; the word had no currency and he had no idea why he found himself ejaculating that night as something visited his dream and left him damp, sticky, shamed and more scared than he’d ever been – with nobody to talk to but Mr Trace, who wanted to see him again about his low mark in a recent test.

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to pay.’

  If he was homosexual, he needed to embrace it. It wasn’t a criminal offence any more: one was allowed to be gay. It was encouraged, for gender meant nothing, the pronouns only revealing how narrow-minded and repressed some people were. There were so many partners out there, and rights to be claimed – there were attitudes to be challenged, too. If he could find James again, they could recall that time on the ferry together, and he could explain that no, he wasn’t homosexual – or, if he was, he had so successfully deceived himself that he might as well not be. What was he, then? How had he evolved or faded or fallen into this?

  ‘Does it matter?’ James might say, holding both his hands.

  No. Not at all.

  It just didn’t, because take any soul from any of Preston’s long, dark platforms, and they would all have similar irrelevant predictable stories, and silly anxieties about their silly childhoods. They would all end up the same: neatly boxed in the back of a hearse, queuing for the crematorium – and once you’d noticed one of them, they seemed to be everywhere. You couldn’t go two miles without a sign reminding you that this town had a crematorium too, and it was closer than you thought, and what you were breathing probably contained a speck or two of somebody – not that it mattered. If he could only stop, then no one would have to listen any more – he wouldn’t have to listen to himself. The self-, self-, self-pity, like morning mist, would evaporate as soon as the sun came up.

  ‘You were never clever enough,’ he said, aloud. ‘Too stupid.’

  He opened his eyes, and the young boy was still there, turned away, wearing yet another set of headphones. He was loved and might even be in love. He might have met his own James, Percy or Michael, and if he hadn’t he would do soon: and then he would be enmeshed. Michael walked on, and found the platform had tilted. He had to work hard, because it was suddenly so stee
p that he needed all his puff just to get to the bridge.

  He felt like crying, of course – so he laughed.

  16

  He climbed up the footbridge, holding the rail.

  Up the stairs, along and down again – and did he want tea in the central café-bar, with its many sets of doors? No, so that meant climbing another set of stairs whether he wanted to go back the way he’d come or onto a platform on the far distant side of this ridiculously wide station, where trains were behaving just like trains, grinding and roaring. The footbridge was heavy old Victorian iron, and had been built long before anyone worried about those who’d lost their legs in the war: it would outlast everyone who dared climb it. The roof was high, and if there were lifts he couldn’t see them, so up he went again, and he thought of the famous picture: the infinite stairs, leading you round and up for ever. This bridge wasn’t like that, for it did its job simply enough: he could see a taxi rank one way, beyond the ticket office. Platform two was suddenly to the right, and he glimpsed people on it, stirring in expectation as a little purple train came in, just like a noisy toy.

  ‘Never, ever clever enough,’ he said to himself, smiling – and even as he realised he was muttering aloud, the train company told him it was sorry. It was still so sorry, because the purple train was just like all the others: it was running twenty-two whole minutes late. Those in charge knew they might be causing the most terrible inconvenience, and he thought for a moment that he ought to find the station manager and assure her or him that it simply wasn’t so: there was no inconvenience at all, because he no longer had any destination in his mind, and all he wanted was another tangerine. Why hadn’t he eaten one already? He still had two or three left.

  ‘Don’t apologise,’ he would say to the manager. ‘Lay your burden down.’

  ‘We are sorry,’ said the announcer.