Metroland

by Julian Barnes

  ‘Sexy, saucy Sixties.’ You almost got hard at the sound.

  ‘I suppose it all happens in cycles.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, sex for a start. They had a lot of it in the Twenties as well. It probably all goes in cycles, like: Twenties, Thirties, Forties, Fifties – Sex, Austerity, War, Austerity; Sixties, Seventies, Eighties, Nineties - Sex, Austerity, War, Austerity?’

  Toni cocked an eyebrow. Put like that, it didn’t sound too big a deal.

  ‘Which gives us,’ I interpreted, ‘eight years of sauciness, then a thirty-year wait, with a chance of being killed in the middle. Terrific’

  ‘Still,’ said Toni, determined not to be downcast, ‘what could we do in eight years?’

  ‘Who could we do in eight years?’

  ‘Just think, though, it could be worse. If you were born in 1915, by the time you were up to it, there’d be Austerity; after that you might get killed; and by the time you got any, you’d be forty-five.’

  ‘You’d have to get married, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘There were Army brothels.’

  ‘What if you were in the Navy?’

  It did seem as if our parents’ generation had been very unlucky.

  ‘Well, we can’t help the way their cookie crumbled.’

  ‘Do you think we ought to be nicer to them?’

  But it didn’t really work out like that. As my Complaints Book proved, every year was full of the same landlocked desires, the same gangrenous resentments, the same modes of inactivity. They say that adolescence is a dynamic period, the mind and body thrusting forward to new discoveries all the time. I don’t remember it like that. It all seemed remarkably static. Each year new curricula were fed us, which closely resembled the old curricula; each year a few more people sirred us; each year we were allowed to stay up a bit later on Saturday evenings. But none of the structures changed; power and irresponsibility resided where they always had; the levels of love, awe and resentment remained the same.

  ‘Eight years, then.’

  Somehow, it didn’t seem very long.

  9 • Big D

  There were a few private things which I didn’t confide to Toni. Actually, only one: the thing about dying. We always laughed about it, except on the rare occasions when we knew the person involved. Lucas, for instance, wing-forward in the Thirds, was found one morning by his mother, gassed. But even then, we were more interested in the rumours than in the fact of his death. A girl friend? The family way? Unable to face parents?

  There must, I suppose, have been some causal connection between the arrival in my head of the fear of Big D, and the departure of God; but if so, it was a loose exchange, with no formal process of reasoning present. God, who had turned up in my life a decade earlier without proof or argument, got the boot for a number of reasons, none of which, I suspect, will seem wholly sufficient: the boringness of Sundays, the creeps who took it all seriously at school, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, the pleasure of blasphemy (dangerous, this one), hymn-singing and organ music and the language of prayer, inability any longer to think of wanking as a sin, and – as a clincher – an unwillingness to believe that dead relatives were watching what I was doing.

  So, the whole package had to go, though its los sdiminished neither the boringness of Sundays nor the guilt o wanking. Within weeks, however, as if to punish me, the infrequent but paralysing horror of Big D invaded my life. I don’t claim any originality for the timing and location of my bouts of fear (when in bed, unable to sleep), but I do claim one touch of particularity. The fear of death would always arrive while I was lying on my right side, facing out towards the window and the distant railway line. It would never come when I was on my left side, facing my bookshelves and the rest of the house. Once started, the fear could not be diminished by simply turning over: it had to be played out to the end. To this day, I have a preference for sleeping on my left side.

  What was the fear like? Is it different for other people? I don’t know. A sudden, rising terror which takes you unawares; a surging need to scream, which the house rules forbid (they always do), so that you lie there with your mouth open in a trembling panic; total wakefulness, which takes an hour or so to subside; and all this as background to and symptom of the central image, part-visual, part-intellectual, of nonexistence. A picture of endlessly retreating stars, taken I expect – with the crass bathos of the unconscious – from the opening credits of a Universal Pictures film; a sensation of total aloneness within your pyjamaed, shaking body; a realisation of Time (always capitalised) going on without you for ever and ever; and a persecuted sense of having been trapped into the present situation by person or persons unknown.

  The fear of dying meant, of course, not the fear of dying but the fear of being dead. Few fallacies depressed me more than the line: ‘I don’t mind being dead; it’s just like being asleep. It’s the dying I can’t face.’ Nothing seemed clearer to me in my nocturnal terrors than that death bore no resemblance to sleep. I wouldn’t mind Dying at all, I thought, as long as I didn’t end up Dead at the end of it.

  While Toni and I never discussed basic fears, concepts of immortality naturally came under discussion. Like self-respecting maze-rats, we looked for ways out. There was partial survival to be considered – a gruelly bit of essence nimbusing around in a Huxleyan goo – but we didn’t go much on that. There was immortality through one’s children; but looking at how we represented our own parents, we couldn’t be sanguine about our own chances of surrogate survival when it came to our turn. Mostly, in our sneaky, whining dreams of immortality, we concentrated on art.

  Tout passe. – L’art robuste

  Seul a l’éternité.

  It was all laid out for us there, in the last poem of Emaux et Camées. Gautier was a comforting sort of hero. There was no messing with him. He looked tough as well – like a grizzled prop-forward; he’d had lots of women, too. And he said things in ways we could follow without notes.

  Les dieux eux-mêmes meurent.

  Mais les vers souverains

  Demeurent

  Plus forts que les airains.

  Belief in art was initially an effective simple against the routine ache of Big D. But then someone communicated to me the concept of planet death. You might be able to get used to the idea of personal extinction if you thought the world went on for ever, with generations of kids sitting back in amazement as your works chattered through on computer printout, and murmuring a mutated ‘Stone me’. But when someone in the Science sixth pointed out to me over lunch that the earth was floating inexorably towards a last burn-up, it gave a new look to the robustness of art. LPs syruping; sets of Dickens flaring up at Fahrenheit 451; Donatellos melting like Dali watches. Get out of that one.

  Or get out of this one. Suppose, just suppose that someone came up with a cure for death. It wouldn’t necessarily be any more improbable than the splitting of the atom or the discovery of radio waves. But it would be a long process, like finding a cure for cancer. And they aren’t exactly hurrying along with it at the moment. So you can be pretty sure that if ever they do find a way of delaying death, it’ll be just a bit too late for you …

  Or get out of this one. Suppose they find a way, even after you are dead, of reconstituting you. What if they dig up your coffin and find you’re just a bit too putrefied … What if you’ve been cremated and they can’t find all the grains … What if the State Revivification Committee decides you’re not important enough … What if you’re in the middle of being brought back to life when some dumb nurse, overcome by the significance of her task, drops a vital phial, and your clearing vision hazes over eternally … What if …

  Once, foolishly, I asked my brother if he were frightened of death.

  ‘Bit early, isn’t it?’ He was practical, logical, short-sighted. He was also eighteen and about to go to Leeds University to read economics.

  ‘But don’t you ever worry about it? Try and work out what it’s all about?’

  ‘It’
s quite obvious what it’s all about, isn’t it? Kaput, finito, curtains.’ He drew a flattened hand across his throat. ‘Anyway, I’m more interested in studying la petite mort at the moment.’ He grinned, knowing that I wouldn’t understand, even though I was meant to be the linguist in the family. I didn’t.

  I must, however, have jumped at his gesture, because he then drew out of me with a show of sympathy all my personal and cosmic fears. Strangely, they meant nothing to him, even though his entire reading consisted of SF, and he daily absorbed stories about extended life, reincarnation, transubstantiation and the like. My own delicate and appalled imagination couldn’t cope with such stuff, neither with the prose nor the ideas. Nigel either had a less touchy imagination, or he had a firmer, less anguished grasp of the termination of his own existence. He seemed to treat the whole of life as a sort of transaction, a deal. It was, he would maintain, a taxi-ride which was good fun, but had to be paid for eventually; a game which would prove pointless without a final whistle; a fruit which, once come to ripeness, had fulfilled its function and must, of necessity, fall from the tree. Easeful, deceptive metaphors, they seemed to me, compared to a vision of infinitely receding blackness.

  Nigel’s discovery of my fears brought him sharp pleasure. Every so often, he would look up from his copy of New SF or Asteroids or Worlds Beyond and with a serious expression encourage me to

  ‘Keep going, kid. Last out till 2057 and you’ll be able to check in for Body Renewal.’ Or Time Transfer, or Molecular Stabilisation, or Brain Banking, or any of a dozen phrases which, I suspect, he made up to tease me with. I never bothered to check in his mags; there may, after all, have been a tiny percentage of truth in it; or if not that, then something different to start my fears and my imagination.

  I often wondered about Nigel, and why things seemed so much clearer to him. Was it more, or less, intelligence; more, or less, imagination; or simply a more stable personality? Was it merely perhaps a question of time and energy: that the more industrious you were (and he was always doing something, even if it was only reading pulp), the less broody you got?

  When doubts stirred in me, Mary at least could be relied upon to make me feel better. She was always a comforting shambles. My favourite memory of my sister was of her kneeling on the floor bawling, with one of her pigtails neatly plaited and the other undone: the rubber band had broken and there were no more left in the house. She had been faced with the harrowing choice between ribbons, which she hated as cissy, and using the remaining band on a single, central plait.

  Her crying jags were a constant feature of my childhood. The dog had a thorn in its paw, she didn’t understand the subjunctive, a friend of hers at school knew someone whose aunt had been slightly hurt in a road accident, the retail price index was rising – everything would set her off. Good for morale though it was to have her bawling, it was a noisy way to feel better. Once, I made the mistake of asking her what she thought happened after death. She looked up with that help-me, pleading, blubby look in her eye. I didn’t give her time to flee the room. I ran myself.

  10 • Tunnels, Bridges

  Life at sixteen was wonderfully enclosed and balanced. On one side, there was the compulsion of school, hated and enjoyed. On the other side, the compulsion of home, hated and enjoyed. Out there, vague and marvellous as the Empyrean, lay capital-L Life. There were sometimes things – like holidays – which seemed as if they might give a foretaste of life; yet they always turned out to count as home after all.

  But there was a point of balance in the oscillation between home and school. The journey. An hour and a quarter each way, a time of twice-daily metamorphosis. At one end, on the whole, you appeared clean, tidy, hard-working, conservative, responsibly questioning, unworried by sex, attracted by a fair division of life between work and play, not unhealthily interested in art: a pride, if usually less than a joy, to your parents. At the other end, you slouched out of the carriage, shoes scuffed, tie askew, nails neurotically bitten, palms forested by wanking, satchel held in front of you to conceal an expiring hard, loud-mouthed with merde and bugger and balls and fug (our only euphemism), lazy yet smirkingly confident, obsequious and deceitful, contemptuous of authority, mad about art, emotionally homosexual for want of choice, and obsessed with the idea of nudist camps.

  Needless to say, you never noticed the transformation yourself. Nor would an outsider have spotted it: at the point of change, he would merely have seen an averagely clean schoolboy, his satchel on his knees, testing himself on French vocabulary with a sheet of paper half-covering the page, and every so often looking up and staring out of the window.

  Those daily journeys were, I now realise, the only times when I was safely alone. Perhaps that was why I never found them tiring or boring, despite sitting for years with the same chalk-striped men and watching out of the same window the same scenery and then the same tunnel walls, their sides corrugated with dusty black cables. And every day, of course, there were games to be played which never failed.

  The first of these was getting a seat: which was a far from boring business. Frankly, I never cared much where I sat on a train; but I did enjoy sitting where other people wanted to sit. This was the day’s first subversive action. Some of the old fuggers who got on at Eastwick actually had favourite places: favourite carriages, favourite sides, a favourite spot in the knotted string rack for their bowlers. Frustrating their contemptible hopes was a fine game, and not too hard, since you weren’t forced to play by the adult rules. The pinstripes and the chalkstripes always forced themselves to get their favourite place without appearing to care where they sat, yet casually sticking out their fatty hips and metal-cornered attaché cases in an attempt to grab pole position. As a kid you were obviously a rule-free beast whom self-restraint and the laws of society had not yet forced into not grabbing what you wanted (or actually, in this case, not grabbing what you didn’t care whether you had or not). So as you waited for the train you would lurk around uncertainly, changing your place on the platform to put the wind up the old fugs. Then you might make a dash for a door as the train came in; even break all the rules by wrenching a door open before the train had stopped.

  The coolest thing of all to do – though it took a lot of nerve – was just to beat some old turd to his favourite seat and then, as you saw him settling resentfully for second-best, get up casually and flop down in some obviously less desirable area of the compartment. Then you stared at him knowingly. Since they rarely owned up to their desires, but clearly knew that you knew them, you won twice.

  The tricks of travel were learned early. How to fold a full-size newspaper vertically so that you could turn over in the width of one page. How to pretend you hadn’t seen the sort of women you were expected to stand up for. Where to stand in a full train to get the best chance of a seat when it began to empty. Where to get on a train so that you got off at just the right spot. How to use the no-exit tunnels for short-cuts. How to use your season ticket beyond its permitted range.

  These preoccupations kept you limbered up. But there were fuller experiences to be had as well.

  ‘Don’t you ever get bored?’ Toni once asked as we were adding up the months and years of our lives we had spent on trains. He only had a ten-stop ride round the Circle Line: uneventful, all underground, no chance of rape or abduction.

  ‘Nah. Too much going on.’

  ‘Tunnels, bridges, telegraph poles?’

  ‘That sort of thing. No, actually, things like Kilburn. It’s Doré; it really is.’

  The next half-day, Toni came to try it out. Between Finchley Road and Wembley Park the train goes over a high viaduct system at Kilburn. Below, as far as you could see, lay cross-hatched streets of tall, run-down Victorian terraces. Half a dozen television aerials interwoven on every roof implied a honeycomb of plasterboard partitioning beneath. There were few cars in that sort of area at that time, and no visible greenery. A huge, regular, red-brick Victorian building stood in the middle: a monster school, infirma
ry, lunatic asylum – I never knew, nor wanted that sort of precision. The value of Kilburn depended on not knowing particularities, because it changed to the eye and the brain according to yourself, your mood and the day. On a late afternoon in winter, with the egg-white lamps faintly beginning to show, it was melancholy and frightening, the haunt of acid-bath murderers. On a clear, bright morning in summer, with almost no smog and lots of people visible, it was like a brave little slum in the Blitz: you half expected to see George VI poking around the few remaining bomb-sites with his umbrella. Kilburn could suggest to you the pullulating mass of the working class, who any moment might swarm like termites up the viaduct and take the pinstripes apart; equally, it could be a comforting proof that so many people could live together quietly at close quarters.

  Toni and I got off at Wembley Park, changed platforms, and went back over the area. Then we did the same again.

  ‘Christ, there’re so many of them,’ was Toni’s eventual comment. Thousands of people down there, all within a few hundred yards of you; yet you’d never, in all probability, meet any of them.

  ‘Well, it’s an argument against God, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah. And for enlightened dictatorship.’

  ‘And for art for art’s sake.’

  He was silent for a while, awed.

  ‘Well, I take it back, I take it back.’

  ‘Thought you might. There are others, but this is the best.’ Toni silently got back on the next Baker Street train for his final run over the stretch.

  From then on, I was not only interested in my journey, but proud of it. The termitary of Kilburn; the grimy, lost stations between Baker Street and Finchley Road; the steppe-like playing-fields at Northwick Park; the depot at Neasden, full of idle, aged rolling-stock; the frozen faces of passengers glimpsed in the windows of fast Marylebone trains. They were all, in some way, relevant, fulfilling, sensibility-sharpening. And what was life about if not that?