“Oh, I’m sorry. Should I not be here?”
“You should be here—I invited you. You’re welcome.” And he says this kindly, but it seems to end our conversation, because he reaches over the counter to fetch up a folded newspaper and spreads it, begins reading. “Lot of dying going on.” His voice softened, more closed.
“Hm?”
“Out in the world.”
“Oh. I haven’t . . . I don’t . . . any more.”
“Atrocities, too. There are always atrocities. They can’t help it.” He sucks air between his teeth. “People—they can’t help it.”
I finish my coffee and want more. I stand and pause, as if to suggest that I could be halted by the gift of another cup. “Well, I’ll be getting on, if—”
“Okay.” He doesn’t look up. “I’ll see you again, later.”
And I feel he is scanning his paper to avoid me, to spare himself having to see this need that I suddenly have, this humiliation, this flare of shame.
“I’ll come back then.” Although I’ve done nothing wrong.
“Yes, I’m sure you will.”
“That’s—” This thick disgust bursts up against my teeth and I have to swallow it, swallow again. “That’s right.” I have to go away, to get some space.
He licks at his finger, flips over a page. “Goodbye, Hannah.”
My feet have turned stupid, unwilling. It takes me a moment to kick one forward, shift myself. Then I remember. “There is one difference.” I steady myself on the wall. “There’s a difference between here and what I dreamed. In my dream, you were wearing gloves.”
“But maybe today I took them off.” He keeps on reading, smooth-faced and I can smell his kindness as it pushes at me, trying to save me from further embarrassment.
I take his hint and go.
Outside, the corridor is weirdly solid, aching with stillness—we’ve drawn to a halt. The view in the window keeps jerking, my eyes anticipating motion where there is none. Sioux Lookout is fixed beside the train, its outdoor air calmly rising up the deep steps of the car as I think of sinking down on to the platform. Passengers I don’t recognise are dawdling, smoking, staring at the nondescript wooden houses, at the booze shop, taking photographs of nothing much.
And I am Burnaby, Dorothy Burnaby, at large in her undefined possibility. I could run off and start fires, punch someone born again, I could blacken this name—it’s not my own. But instead I am cautious and peer out along the carriage to see Charles peering back, waiting on the bottom step, next door along. Something about him suggests that I shouldn’t leave the train, that I would be foolish to try. So I only breathe, sample the large, dark air of a continent and then turn, make for my cabin, limping with the slightly unnerved gait of someone grown accustomed to jolts and bounces. I lock myself in.
I stand by the glass, stand close to being outside. And, in a while, the platform clears, the engine shudders up to strength, and we are lost again, blurring, burrowing west.
I don’t expect to see him: Robert.
I don’t expect to catch the shape of him, the way he’ll scurry sometimes, the pale shine of his skin, between squat trees. This bright, short dart of light.
It isn’t him, of course. Can’t be. Because Robert is already somewhere else.
And tomorrow I’ll be there. Tomorrow evening, I’ll be able to sit by the fire and know that it’s warming him, too. So high in the mountains, they’ll still need the fire, its comfort.
He went there without me and then I did the same and it didn’t work. We didn’t get better. We have to be both there, together—that’s what we need to make us well.
Even if they won’t allow us, won’t let us be with each other for a while, not the way we’d like. In the end—in the end everything will be all right.
Last night, I woke so very near to the taste of him—as if, while I was sleeping, we had kissed.
Farlane, Redditt, Minaki, Ottermere—there are a fuck of a lot of trees around here. The dull, triangular, sprucey brand of trees. Malachi, Copeland’s Landing—and the little old ladies’ echoes at every stop and still more fucking trees. I have been staring at fucking trees for fucking hours. And only God can make one and they’re our green and graceful friends and without them we’d have nothing left to breathe, but they are fucking boring.
Plus, I’ve now passed from not liking my cell, to hating it passionately. While I was having breakfast, Charles—as his duties require—came by and packed away my bed, folded out the pair of chairs he’d tucked beneath it and now they are filling the place with a sense of lack—because I am one person, but I have two chairs for the daytime and could have two bunks for the night, could have fun using and not using my two bunks for the night, if I were not just one person—but I am. Half of the shelves and nooks and ledges have been provided for the companion I don’t have. This is accommodation for Burnaby and Duchamps, for a couple—enough room for me and Robert, enough room to let his absence show.
It would be stupid to think he won’t be pleased to see me when I get there.
It would be nerves.
I am very near being depressed when, perhaps fresh from the endless forests and the trials of the wilderness, a monster spider chases past inside my window, long-limbed and glistening. It dashes towards me, then under my chair in the time that I take to lurch up and cling to the sink, understandably alarmed. I am sure I see the final bulk of it squeeze up into one of the cracks that outline where my bed is stowed. Which means that it is hiding in my bed. It is treading on my sheets. It is in there waiting.
And this is what I tell Charles when I find him in the passage, posing with his arm around a blonde girl while her, I would suppose, boyfriend snaps their picture.
“Aren’t you supposed to take photographs of them ?”
“Oh, we did that already. Can I help you with something, Miss Burnaby?” He is neat as ever, his cap at the perfectly jaunty angle.
“A spider.”
“A spy-der?”
“I have a very large spider—I think it’s gone into my bed.” And when I say this it sounds so unlikely. “Hiding. Away from the light.” So much like a pathetic come-on, or some kind of feminine panic attack. “It could be poisonous.” That I blush and then blush more, because I’m blushing.
Charles tugs at his waistcoat, manly and businesslike. I can tell he is thinking of calling me dear or missy, or something equally grotesque. “Well . . . well, Miss. Well, I’ll just come and attend to that?”
I make a point of letting him go in by himself while I stay outside— this is another precious opportunity, after all, to look at trees. And from the corridor, I can see trees on the left side of the track—my cell only offers views of the trees to the right. Blonde and I Would Suppose are entranced by the left-hand trees, oohing and ahing and taking, I’m sure, illegible photographs through the grubby windows. I wish I could share their enthusiasm.
No.
No, I don’t. I just do not.
From my cabin I hear a clatter and then stamping. I am about to go in and investigate when, very definitely, there’s a white shape in the woods. We are moving, but it is moving, too—I believe running—a pale figure on the run and then extinguished by the curtain of harsh green.
But it was there.
Blonde and I Would Suppose don’t seem to have noticed.
But it was there.
As if my love had come adrift from me, is out in the forest searching, naked, lost.
“That’s that then. All dealt with?”
I spin round to meet Charles, tall in my doorway, winking. His face is sheathed in sweat. “There is no spider in your bed.” On his shoes there is blood.
“Because you’ve got rid of it . . .”
He smells chemical, stale. “There is no spider in your bed.” I would like him to leave, but instead Blonde and I Would Suppose are dawdling along the passage and out of sight. There is a lot of blood on both Charles’s shoes.
“So it’s gone, do yo
u mean?”
Charles raises his hands between us slowly, as if he is proud of them, displaying. His fingers almost touch my face. “Nothing.” His breath smells of almonds. “In your bed.”
I step away before I can stop myself—I would rather decide to be brave and stare him down, but at present it’s clear that I can’t.
“Want to check?” There is a film over his teeth, a noticeable texture.
“No.”
There is something wrong with him. “Sure?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’d better go in for lunch now.”
“I don’t want to.” I am already backing along the passage to be further from the dining car and from my cabin and from Charles.
He doesn’t follow, apparently feels there is no need. “They’ll miss you.”
“I don’t care.”
“That’s not a very friendly attitude, Miss Burnaby.”
“Fuck you.”
“Tu n’aspas une attitude très agrèable. Pasdu tout. Pas-du-tout.”
I head for the bar.
Where there is no one.
But that’s good—no one is good—exactly what I want. With no one around I get a chance to concentrate.
Because I am not going mad. That isn’t something I would do.
So the train is mad.
I slip round behind the bar, looking for coffee.
But thinking a whole train is mad—that’s mad in itself. A circus train, a freak train—that doesn’t happen.
I find the flask, but it’s empty.
I have been ill and stressed and I am tired. Things like this can make your thinking cloudy.
No coffee. And I’d been hoping for some. Nothing like coffee to cheer you. I walk back into the body of the room, sit in one of the upholstered booths.
I haven’t been sleeping well. You brainwash prisoners by keeping them from sleep—so no wonder I’m not at the peak of my game. This is a form of torture, this is against international laws.
But here I could get my head down. Curl up in this corner and take a nap.
This is a comfortable place. The booth smells of clean, new leather and peace—even when I rest right up against it, snuggle in. This is good.
This is good.
And my sleep is in a blue-black forest. It lopes under cover, rushes, tears to the edge, to the border where everything stops.
“Announcement for Mr. Doheny. That’s pour Monsieur Doheny. You are wanted in the observation car. Than -kyou.”
But I know that’s not a real announcement, only another rag of thought, a live thread that connects, then burns to nonsense, disappears. My sleep stands at the margin of the trees and it watches the prairie: the boiling horizon surrounding, dragging the land as tight and flat as cloth, the hunger at the end of everything. My sleep is warm, fast breathing: it remembers to sweat after playing in the trees, it remembers another sweat, gives me the feel of my bare feet on pine needles, the heat of Robert’s arm as it curls close from behind me, touches my side.
This makes me too wakeful, though, and I can’t stop the rock of the train from breaking in, the stiffness in my shoulders, a small, wet noise I can’t identify and the sound of the bartender’s voice, very gentle.
“Ah, Hannah, you’re awake. Good morning. Or good afternoon, rather.”
I roll on to my back and stretch, while I hear him give a kind of laugh.
“D’you know Nuxalk? No, you wouldn’t, I suppose. They still speak it in the Bella Coola Valley. Do you know the valley? Anyway, it has great words—a man told me.”
I clear my throat. “In a bar.”
“Yes, a man in a bar, perhaps. A man walks into a bar— languages are so lovely, they can let you say all that—all anything . . . Well, in Nuxalk, they have this one word.” The wet noise is continuing, odd. “Unqaaxlamc—it means drunk, always drinking, that kind of drunk.”
“Must come in handy.” I sit up and then don’t say anything.
The bartender sits in the next booth with his paper flat across the table, studying. He is wearing black plush gloves. It’s illogical that I would register this before anything else, but still I do. That, and the strange headlines, blurred on his pages, unreadable.
I give this my full attention, while the wet noise carries on and then I have to look round, I have to see Charles. His right hand is busy. His right hand is where the wet noise is happening.
Along the top of the bar, the woman with the shaking hands is lying. She is nude. The mottling of cellulite, the fingers clasped across her breasts, the blush, the tremor in her arms, the frightened eyes—these do not make sense, because she is also attempting to smile, giving me a tiny, bashful nod while her knees are spread, riding the counter, feet hanging down to either side, surreally hidden in her white shoes, the appliquéd cherries still bright, the canvas slightly smeared now. She sweats, she winces, she smiles again while Charles takes a sip of coffee and keeps his right hand working, driving up hard to jolt her spine, her teeth and then withdrawing almost to the knuckle, before punching in again, his shirt and jacket sleeves pressed tight to the hair of her cunt.
Although, of course, this is impossible.
“Yes, Nuxalk.” The bartender frowns mildly at a photograph in his paper. “One of so many fine tongues. A whole world full of them.”
“What are you—”
“Shit, she’s tight.” Charles rubs his forehead with the back of his free wrist.
The bartender ignores him. “Do you want a coffee, Hannah?—I have some.”
I discover I am already standing. “I’m going. I have to go.”
“No—you need a coffee.” Bracing his left hand on her stomach, Charles snaps himself free of the woman, making her yelp and then cry quietly, folding her arms. “Here you go. Had it ready for you.” He holds out a mug of coffee, his fingers glistening, streaked with threads of blood. “You will need it before you proceed to the dining car.”
And the bartender does nothing, plays no part.
“I . . . I have to go.”
There is no help.
And this is not real, is undoubtedly not real, but I would like there to be help.
“I have to go.”
Just beyond the doorway stands the huge attendant, completely blocking off one side of the corridor and leering in to see the bar. He is wearing black plush gloves.
“You want to come in and try her. My arm’s tired? She might be able to take you now.”
As Charles laughs I go the only way I can, back towards the dining car, past the rows of other cabins, where I don’t want to listen and don’t want to see—except each is unoccupied, door open, possessions exposed, but nothing more. And the train is halted in the waste of a great plain, the sunset yawning overhead. There is no sound beyond the breeze against the carriage and the click of heated metal settling.
I reach my door, which is closed.
Inside, my bed has been pulled down into place and freshly made. Laid out on the coverlet are a pair of long white stockings and a pair of long white gloves.
In the window, the sunset is swelling and bleeding. It will break above us soon.
I would stay here, I would lock myself away until tomorrow, if it weren’t for the gloves and the stockings: they frighten me.
But then there is the murmur of a voice I recognise and I follow it into the passage and then forward.
The next car is full of people—the Christian with the teeth, the blonde, all kinds of other people—all crushed against the windows in the cabins and passageway, swaying, breathing quickly, taking photographs of things outside, of things that smell of petrol and of burning and that scream.
I can also hear what has to be a crowd around the carriage and I run from it and from the bodies that lean and rub against me as I fight through to the curtained bunks, the car full of bunks, where there is only a pink-limbed sighing, a senseless writhe, heavy on either side, and the stink of ammonia, raw sap, but no harm, no actual harm yet, no more than fucking, al
though I am still running and maybe missing bad details, signs of injury, but what could I do if I saw them, I couldn’t do anything and I can hear slapping, a very loud slapping, and a familiar voice I would like to be with and there, there is the dining car, where I don’t want to go and—as soon as I think this—I am inside.
The last sitting diners are ready at their tables, only a few new empty seats and, in one motion, they glance at me with a preoccupied contempt and then they turn back to the Doll Woman—her plate the only one filled with dainty, slippery morsels, tricky to cut, the blood thick on her knife. And closer, there’s that slapping sound—very near, in fact—but no voice to go with it, no words leading me on.
The Doll Woman’s cutlery glitters, almost silent as she slices. Her husband sits opposite her, nodding, trying to pat her arm fondly and, each time, failing. His hands are fixed together, palm to palm with a thin meat skewer, and they are awkward. The spike of the skewer keeps catching on the tablecloth, making him wince. Then he attempts to reach down and press a napkin to his crotch, cover up the bleeding that has soaked both trouser legs, but his injuries make him clumsy and the spike gets in the way, so he sits back, sighs and then giggles. He smiles at his wife and she giggles, too, and then the whole car is moving and is smiling and there are pliers and each group is adjusting clothing and set to proceed with its own business, which I cannot bear, when the Railway Bore yells, “Everyone’s equal on the railway, eh? Gotta stay.”
Doll Woman claps then, once, and there is stillness. “No. She has to go to the kitchen, the galley. She’ll enjoy it there—it’s what she’s looking for. Go on—make your mother and your father proud for once.”
I go where she tells me, because there is nowhere else and because the dining car has filled with the pleasant din of a happy mealtime and I know that I shouldn’t turn back to it, can’t look, that it will all be terrible.
Through the far door, and I’m in a tiny room lined with cupboards, everything made of stainless steel. This may mean I am lost.
“No. You’re not.” It’s the bartender—he must have followed me. “Galley’s the next one along.” But he’s out of uniform, dressed in an old linen suit, a soft hat, smoking a cigar. “I just wandered along to be sure you were properly dressed.” The fingers of one hand search his waistcoat pocket idly. “A special occasion like this . . .” He tilts back his hat and studies me, takes time. “Yes. I suppose. Why not.” He breathes out milk and azure smoke that touches me, brushes my skin.
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