by Sue Gee
‘Ma-maaaa!’
Footsteps, running. A door flung open.
‘Jerzy, Jerzy … it’s all right.’
He leaned against her, pyjamas soaked in sweat, hearing the terrifying sound of his own breathing, like a pump, filling the room. Distantly aware of Ewa, bewildered, told to go back to bed. Then another door banged, and there were more footsteps down the corridor, and a dark figure against the light.
‘What the hell is going on?’
‘Ssssh! Can’t you see …’
‘Is he ill?’
‘What do you think? He’s had a nightmare …’
The rasping, pumping, horrible sound, his lungs filled with knives.
‘Call the doctor – tell him it’s asthma, it’s urgent …’
‘He’ll be all right in a minute.’
‘Go on, Tata, quick!’
‘It’s almost midnight…’
‘You bloody fool, that’s what doctors are for. Call him!’
‘I’ll go, Mama …’
‘No, no, Ewa, stay here. Jan, for God’s sake –’
A long, tearing, terrible gasp, and a rush of air. He fell back on the pillow, breathing. He could breathe.
‘There! And no wonder he has nightmares.’
‘Go away, Jan. Go away.’
‘I told you …’
‘Go away!‘
The footsteps leaving the room, walking down towards the sitting room. The door there closed. He went on breathing, in and out, in and out. Yes, it was all right now.
‘Mama?’
‘Yes, darling.’ Stroking his hair.
‘The train was rattling.’
‘Outside?’
‘In my dream. You were on a train, and I was trying to find you, and it was rattling and rattling. Very close. I could really hear it.’
‘I know!’ said Ewa. ‘The sewing machine. Mama’s sewing machine. Were you working, Mama?’
‘Yes. At the table in the sitting room. Just as usual.’ Still stroking. ‘Are you all right now?’
‘Yes.’
‘Tata was horrible,’ said Ewa.
Anna shook her head, straightening Jerzy’s bedclothes.
‘I’ll be back in a minute.’ They heard her in the bathroom, the kitchen, coming back. ‘Here.’ She sponged Jerzy’s face with a warm flannel, changed his pyjama jacket, gave them both cups of warm milk. She sat on the end of Jerzy’s bed, as they drank. ‘Tata doesn’t understand things, sometimes. He doesn’t mean to be like that.’
‘Why is he, then?’
‘I don’t know … He was terribly young when all those things happened. In the war.’
‘So were you.’
‘Well … never mind now. Go back to sleep. I’ll leave both doors right open.’ She bent down, kissed Jerzy’s forehead, put the empty cups on the tray. ‘No more nightmares, now. Everything’s all right.’
‘Yes, Mama. Goodnight.’
Over to Ewa’s bed. ‘Goodnight, darling.’
‘Goodnight, Mama.’
She switched off the light again, and went out. They heard her walk down the corridor, and open the sitting room door, just a little. Low, angry voices.
‘How could you behave like that?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Storming out of the flat, storming in again, refusing to call the doctor – how could you just stand there and watch him suffer?’
‘Why do you think he had the nightmare in the first place?’ Jan was sitting at the table. He had lit a cigarette, and inhaled deeply; as he did so, Anna thought his face looked cruel, even vengeful. She sank into her chair.
‘You will say he had a nightmare because we were talking about the war,’ she said bitterly. ‘But I can tell you that what upset him was your anger. What is the matter with you – do you want him to be afraid of you?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Well, then … I just don’t understand. Anyone would think I had been telling them dreadful tales, trying to set them against you. Jerzy asked, he insisted on knowing something of what happened to you – what is so terrible about my telling him? What are you ashamed of?’
‘I’m not ashamed of anything!’ Jan shouted, and banged his hand on the table top.
Anna leapt out of her chair. ‘Sssh! Stop it – you’ll frighten them to death.’ She ran to the door, just ajar, and listened. Not a sound. She made her way back to her chair. ‘I was hoping for such a lot from this evening. I must have been mad.’ She began to cry. ‘And don’t shout at me for crying, because I can’t help it. I have to be strong for them, isn’t that enough?’
‘Listen,’ said Jan. ‘Listen. I was thinking, this evening, at work, after you rang. I cannot be who you want me to be, can you understand? I feel half dead, most of the time, can you understand? And I don’t like to be made out a hero. What is the point of those two thinking they have some kind of father they don’t have at all? So I did a few things in the war. And what did it gain? Nothing! And who am I now? No one! That’s how I feel, all right, and I can’t bear talking about it, or to have my children ask me questions – I’d like to be different, to feel different, but I can’t. We gave everything, and everything was taken away, I feel as if – as if my spirit was taken away.’ He got up, and made for the door. ‘I never want to talk like this again. Now leave me alone – please.’
‘I loved you,’ Anna said helplessly, no longer crying. ‘I loved you so much – please – let me help you, let me try …’
‘No.’
He lay in the darkness, absolutely still. When he heard Tata’s footsteps coming down the corridor, he shrank. Then the door of his parents’ bedroom opened and closed, quietly, and he gave a sigh of relief.
Across the room, Ewa was pushing back the bedclothes: she tiptoed over.
‘Jerzy?’
‘Yes?’
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes.’
She got into bed beside him, put her arm across his chest.
‘You sounded terrible.’
‘Were you frightened?’
‘It doesn’t matter. Let’s go to sleep now.’
Silence.
‘Ewa?’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m frightened of Tata.’
‘It’s all right. I’m here.’
‘Don’t leave me.’
‘No.’
7. England, 1968
He stood inside the engine shed, and waited. Outside the open doors was the siding, and in the bright morning light the main-line track beyond gleamed into the distance, cutting east through the Pennines towards Leeds. Thick white clouds, piled high and lit by the rising sun, moved fast in a fresh wind over the hilltops; sheep were scattered like white stones on the rippling grass. Every now and then, on his walk here from the youth hostel, he’d heard the call of a curlew, spiralling to the sky. The streets of south London, with their litter, the closed-in feeling of school, and the uneasy feeling he often had at home, had all been flung away on the wind, like dark pieces of paper. In the hostel bunk last night he hadn’t even thought about asthma.
The engine shed was filled with clanging, echoing noises: spanners and hammers striking iron; hissing sparks flying from a welder; the men shouting to each other, passing tools and crowbars. They didn’t mind him there, they were used to train spotters. He was waiting for them to swing round the huge Black Five engine on the turntable in the middle: it must have come in late last night, and to go back to Leeds they’d have to get it facing the track again. The Black Five was rather ordinary, like the Jinty, which made him think of Thomas the Tank Engine, but then most of the beautiful passenger steam trains had given way to diesel now – it wouldn’t be long before goods haulers like this went too.
He felt in his anorak pocket for his notebook and wandered over, taking down the number: 47548. He’d check it when he got back against the Allen directory. He never felt he’d completed a weekend journey until he’d neatly underlined each number spotted in the directory
, kept beside his bed. There were regional directories, and a national. He had the national, filled with photos of engines, their numbers listed; at the last count he’d underlined four thousand eight hundred and six.
A couple of men were moving across to the turntable now; another came over, quite friendly, as he put the notebook back in his pocket and returned to his watching place.
‘Morning, lad.’
‘Good morning.’
The man was in his fifties, solidly built with grey hair and a bald patch. He wiped black oil off his hands on to his overall. ‘She’ll be off in a minute.’
He nodded.
‘How many numbers you got now, then?’
‘In this notebook? About six hundred.’
‘Not bad. Been here before?’
‘No – I’m just up for the weekend. From London.’
‘Oh aye.’ The men at the turntable were bending with their levers, ready to swing. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Jerzy.’
‘Eh?’
He cleared his throat. ‘Jerzy. It’s Polish.’
‘Oh aye? there’s a lot of Poles up this way, expect you know that. Came over after the war.’
He nodded. ‘Yes.’
Then the shed filled with grinding and squeaking, the huge table began to turn, and the engine slowly swung round towards them. He nodded briefly at the man, then escaped, moving with the face of the Black Five as it met the sunlight. The turntable shuddered a little, then ground to a halt, and the engine moved slowly off it on to the track of the siding and down to the main line. He followed, stepping over the rails until he was beneath the embankment, and had a good view as six trucks from beyond the shed were shunted up to the rear and coupled on. They were carrying coal, the trucks chalk-marked on the side as coming from Preston; just a short local journey, then, perhaps to Stockport, or Crewe – he’d done Crewe two months ago.
The Black Five began to puff. It didn’t matter how many times he heard those first slow breaths, or where he heard them: always, they filled him with happiness, with a feeling of release, the obliteration of unease. The track shone, waiting. Slowly the engine slid along the rails, and the driver saw him, raised his hand, and pulled the whistle lever. It sounded, two hoarse notes, and he began to run, panting as the train increased its speed and the steam chuffed through the funnel; when he could no longer keep up he stood watching it into the distance, the steam rising and drifting higher and higher with the wind, until it was only a few thin threads, and might have been steam or cloud, and disappeared.
Jerzy climbed the coarse grass slope of the embankment and walked along a little, the Brownie bumping against his chest. The 10.15 from Preston was next; he turned and stood waiting, observing the sharp gabled roof of the engine shed in the siding against the curve of the hills behind. He unbuttoned the canvas case and raised the camera to his left eye, squinting and shifting until he had roof and track and hill in view, and then saw through the shutter the Preston train approach, the steam meeting the wind and puffing thickly. Quick. He waited until it was almost level with the dark entrance to the shed, and snapped. Then he braced himself for its roar past, and snapped again, the whole engine in profile, plume of white steam trailing, black coal shining wetly. He began to cough, and lowered the Brownie, watching the shapes of the passengers through the last coach windows as the mist cleared; another few minutes and they’d be at Burnley station. He never wasted time really noticing or wondering about any of them, not even the ones who got off and on when he was taking numbers on a platform. Nor did he bother much with other train spotters, a bunch of show-offs on the whole, always wanting to compare how many you’d got with how many they’d got. He didn’t make these trips to talk, though he didn’t mind the railway men – usually they never bothered to find out anything about him, just answered his occasional questions, or volunteered something about one of the engines: neutral, professional talk.
It wasn’t just the trains, though, which made him come, it was the travelling. From the windows of second-class carriages – he always got to the stations early, to be sure of a window seat – he was learning the landscape of England, had been as far north as Carlisle, as far south as the Isle of Wight, with Manchester, the Lakes, Plymouth and Southampton in between. At school, he shone at physical geography, was expected to get a Grade 1 at O-level, and intended to take geology in the Sixth. In the word geomorphology he found the beginning of everything: glaciers, and their retreat; the movement of land under the prehistoric pressure of ice and fire; igneous, sedimentary, metamorphic rock; chalk and limestone underground rivers, mysterious places and pools where water dripped in darkness; ridge and hillside, mountain and valley, boulder and clay; the eternal arc of the sky witness to each shift, each heaving alteration, fall and settlement. Cloud and wind and sun and rain – he was pacing along the top of the embankment now, back and forth, waiting for the diesel due in from Bradford, noting the swift change of light and shadow at his feet as the wind blew the clouds across the sun, feeling it against his face, through his hair, lost in his own world, where he could find himself for a while.
He spent most of the day on the embankment, going into the town for chips at about two, browsing in a second-hand bookshop where he bought one book, and late in the afternoon beginning the walk back to the mill town. He watched the sun slide down the sky towards the hilltops and gleam in the river. Not far from the hostel was a millstone grit memorial to the Battle of Waterloo; it stood high above the factory chimneys in the town below; from the dormitory window of the hostel itself you could see right across the valley. He liked it there; he was at home with the usual props – the large reception area smelling of disinfectant, local pictures and posters and pennants on the walls; the noticeboard with bus timetables, duty rota, a map, a list of Places of Interest. The office lift-up counter where you registered with the warden often had the shop there, too: shelves of baked beans, tinned steak and kidney, instant coffee, instant mashed potato, Mars bars and shoelaces, Ordnance Survey maps, John Hillaby books. It was safely familiar, and anonymous: you didn’t have to talk much in the kitchen, just wait for your turn at a burner or at the sink, and answer people at the table if they spoke to you. Afterwards, most of them went into the neon-lit table-tennis room or the lounge, but he usually went upstairs and read on his bunk.
This evening, he found the reception hall filled with a party of German students, humping off rucksacks on to the floor, queueing to register, laughing confidently, calling to each other. The girls’ hair shone, the boys were tall and fit; they all wore new-looking, lightweight cagoules in yellow or bright blue and expensive walking boots. The asthma had made Jerzy rather thin; his lined anorak was brown, the hood trimmed with nylon-fur fabric; he wore a British Home Stores blue sweater and a drip-dry shirt; beneath his jeans his feet were in greyed gymshoes. At Polish Scout camp, in uniform, he supposed he must look quite smart; now, he saw himself as this lot would see him, if they were to notice him, and felt his chest constrict. He stood reading the bus timetable until he had each stop by heart, breathing lightly because if he took the deep breath he wanted to take it might start an attack, clasping the Ventolin inhaler, his whirligig, as Ewa called it, in his pocket until it was slippery and wet. When the last loud voice from Cologne had registered, and they had all heaved their enormous nylon rucksacks with their aluminium frames on to their shoulders and made their way up the stairs, he took surreptitious puffs of the Ventolin and began to feel a bit better.
He went over to the counter, and looked at the shelves. Last night he’d had a tin of pork sausages in curried beans; he had about eight shillings left, which had to cover the tube fare tomorrow evening. He usually bought Mama something from his trips, but this time he’d have to leave it.
‘Can I help you?’ The girl behind the counter hadn’t been there last night; perhaps she was the warden’s daughter, or perhaps she came in from the town to work part time. She had very clean straight brown hair, what he thought of
as a country skin, and clear eyes with flecks of green. She wore a green jumper, was small-boned and self-assured. He thought she was about eighteen, like Ewa. She smiled as he hesitated.
‘Just, um – a tin of spaghetti. And … er … do you do single eggs, at all?’
She laughed. ‘I can do you a single egg if you want.’ She took one from a box and set it carefully on the counter; they watched it slowly roll. He picked it up and asked for a small sliced white. Then the front door opened again and she looked towards it, calling ‘Hi!’ casually, confidently.
A boy came up to the desk. He was dark and lithe, suntanned above an open cotton shirt, with a sweater slung round his shoulders. He had no rucksack or anything; he looked as if he’d just got out of a bath. He must be local.
‘How’s it going?’
‘Just fine.’ She turned back to Jerzy. ‘Was there anything else?’ He shook his head. ‘No … no, thanks.’ He paid and quickly left them, taking spaghetti tin and bread through the door to the kitchen at the back. Behind him, he heard the girl say something and the boy laugh, and he didn’t know if they were laughing at him, and his egg, or at each other. He didn’t care, he just wanted to get his meal over with quickly, before the group came in.
There was no one in the kitchen yet. He found the tin opener and took a blackened saucepan from the shelf. He’d forgotten matches; last night he’d managed to use a flame before the last person put it out, now he looked round and thought he’d have to go back to the desk and buy some. Idiot. The door squeaked open again, and a man came in. He looked like a teacher, somehow: glasses, V-neck sweater – Jerzy had noticed him last night, but he seemed to be alone, not leading a group or anything.
‘Evening.’ The man set a plastic carrier bag on the table; it flopped a little, revealing bacon, sausages, a box of eggs, other packets and tins beneath.
‘Evening,’ Jerzy said. ‘Er … have you got a match?’
‘A match? Of course.’ The man brought a box from his pocket, and Jerzy lit the grill, keeping the blown-out match to relight there for the saucepan. He passed the box back. ‘Thanks.’