by John King
Once I realised that the boys who chucked me in the canal weren’t coming down the steps for seconds I relaxed, tried to wipe the muck off my skin and clothes, got rid of some water and slowly began to see the stars, the light fixing and becoming brighter, billions of miles away, outlines forming in the darkness. It was a while before I remembered Smiles, half thought he was on the bridge. Then I realised they’d thrown him in as well. It made sense, and all this time Smiles was in the canal, stuck under the water same as me a minute ago, except I was still conscious and was able to struggle free, fought for survival and made it to the surface. He was tangled up, held down, unconscious when he went under, the next thing he remembered waking up in hospital. Later on I asked him what he saw when he was in the coma, if he had dreams, saw a white light, but there was no magic memory, no angels or spirits, no nothing. Just emptiness. And if I’d been clever I would’ve gone back down and searched in the darkness, found his arms and pulled him up to the surface, leant his head towards the sky and made him breathe.
Eight years later, in 1985, maybe I let him down again, but this time it was more planned, and it wasn’t just me, seeing as it was his brother Tony driving the car back from Heathrow, conning him out of the hotel bar where he was sitting watching the planes coming in to land, off his head. And this is stuck in my brain, wondering if we let him down or did the right thing. We handed him to the authorities, but I push it away, don’t want these memories crowding back in, fighting all the time but knowing I’ve got to work the thing through eventually. I’ll do it when I get home. But Tony battered the engine while I sat in the back with Smiles steaming down the A4 past the lorries parked in the lay-bys, the long trails of grit from the nearby quarries, and I was trying to calm him down, nodding and dealing with the crazy thinking that touched anyone who got too close. We were busking it, not sure what to do with someone acting insane, so the ride seemed to go on for ever as Smiles looked right through me and saw things that weren’t happening, while I kept playing the Adverts single ‘Gary Gilmore’s Eyes’ through my head. I couldn’t help it, madness crossing into humour so there were times I almost started laughing out loud, when he told me his stories, the things he saw at a local level, part of the broader picture, mixing state-of-the-nation politics with everyday life.
We took Smiles to the psychiatric unit where we passed the problem on, conned him because he had to admit himself voluntarily, he couldn’t be sectioned seeing as he hadn’t done anyone any harm, not till he left two days later and slashed his wrists outside the main gates. Then they sectioned him. For his own good. And it was for his own good. That’s true. I know it’s the truth and not a cop-out. I had to tell him a story, make up something that would persuade him the unit was a good place to be, get him through the doors where the doctors could sedate him, pump chemicals into his blood, slow him down and ease the voices in his head, the ranting of the dictators and concentration-camp screams. The boffins were waiting, men and women in wrinkled white coats, except they didn’t act like boffins, more like human beings who cared about this man who was raving, tuned into another frequency.
And it’s going to be a long trip back to England, five days across Siberia and through the Urals to Europe, five days and all those years. It’s a journey I’ve got to make, untangle the different threads, find some sort of peace after three years without any responsibilities, blanking the past and living day-to-day, five shirts and two pairs of trousers, underpants and socks. I have to believe that what I did was right, in the circumstances, helping Tony get Smiles into the unit like that. For three years he was in and out, till finally he sank as deep as he’d ever been, drugged and not speaking to anyone for months on end, a nothing life but better than being out on the streets, the psychosis turning him inside out.
Smiles was dead. The living dead. I never said it, hardly even thought it, but I knew. I went away to the other side of the world. The old Smiles was long gone, and I remember us lot down at the seaside, sitting on the seafront, suppose I was born again when I crawled out of the canal, out of the slime, croaking frogs and bundles of vegetation. And the other boy died, suffocated in the water so the oxygen didn’t reach his brain. He was stillborn, no face and no name, floated face down in the industrial leftovers of the Grand Union Canal, his mother’s love wrapped in there somewhere, stuck in the womb trying to claw out into the open, find the fresh air and feed the brain, a smack on a baby’s bum and a gasp of life. Everything is jumbled together, confused, a mess of pictures, out of place and time, a fifteen-year-old boy sitting on a plastic chair in a hospital waiting room, sick in a toilet, puking my life away next to the canal, along the lines of a railway track.
And we used to call Smiles’s old man Stalin, imagine that, and I’m sitting next to the drinks machine when Stalin comes in and asks me to tell him what happened again, one more time, he’s been down Slough nick and buys me a cup of tea, says Wells reckons we were taking the piss, pointing to the GOD SAVE THE QUEEN badge, Wells doing his best to get the coppers and magistrates on his side, saying he read all about the Sex Pistols calling the Queen a moron in the paper so they lobbed us in the canal to cool down, never meant to harm us, never kicked us like that nutter Major Tom claims, who can believe a grown man who can’t get a job and thinks he’s Old Bill himself? That was going to be their defence, a badge that insulted the monarchy. Wells says he was being patriotic, standing up for England, for law and order.
I’ve still got the story he’s talking about at home and read it when I get in. It says the Sex Pistols song ‘God Save The Queen’ calls the Queen a moron. This is wrong. I listen to the record again. Replay it five times to make sure I’ve got the words right. Rotten gets slashed and we end up half drowned. The song talks about the system, says it makes us morons, people like me and Smiles and those blokes who smacked us up on the bridge, then threw us into the canal, that it turns us into robots who do what we’re told. Wells and his mug squad have proved the point, done as they’re told, so who’s to blame, the people in power you never get near, or the little people, the ones you see walking down the street? I was young, but knew the courts wouldn’t believe a stupid story like that.
It doesn’t take long to settle into a routine, the motion of the train calming things down, smoothing out the flashbacks, time to think rolling through big spreads of grassland that merge into hours of forest, millions of trees flooding down to the railway track, billions of fading leaves easing back to the horizon. We pass Baikal Lake and a couple of towns, smokestacks fuming, another step on from Manchuria, mental seeing industry in the middle of so much empty land. It takes ages to pass the lake, and I’m looking out for these places on my map, trying to get an idea of where we are in the bigger scheme, over a thousand miles of nothing between us and the top of Siberia. There’s no centre to the world, just where you are at a certain time. Now and then we pass a village, the buildings made of wood, patterns painted into the eaves, nailed-together shacks that must be freezing cold in winter. These places aren’t on the map. I wonder how these people ended up here, by choice or maybe descended from political prisoners, what they feel living so far away from the rest of the earth’s population. I think about this a lot, the loneliness and the beauty. I don’t take much notice of the others in here, do my own thing, say hello in the morning. That’s enough.
There’s not much to do except look out of the window and listen to the tapes in my bag. Sometimes I stand in the corridor, other times lie on my bunk or sit on the bottom next to the hippy, walk through the carriages to the buffet car. I eat and sleep, take my shirt off and wash under my arms, try and understand the German being spoken, feel the tension building between the man and woman. It’s a good laugh mucking about with the music, trying to fit different songs to the scenery, but the protest music of Billy Bragg and Public Enemy belongs to cities and systems, a manmade environment where everyone’s struggling for a slice of the pie. The anger is out of place, the sheer range of the land outside shrinking the lyrics
till I give up and stuff them away. It’s lonely out here. Easy to feel small and humble. The rhythm of the train takes over.
On our second day in Siberia we start to slow down. After all this time travelling at exactly the same speed, a tiny shift is like an emergency stop. I’m on my bunk and turn to look out of the window, climb down and go along the corridor. Rika is standing by the door telling anyone who’ll listen that the train is going to stop for four minutes, and then it will leave. There will be no whistle and no warning. It will stop for exactly four minutes. Not a second longer. We can get off but mustn’t wander away from the platform. The train will not wait under any circumstances. If we don’t get back on the train we will be stuck in the middle of Siberia. Things will be hard for us. It will be days before the next train arrives, and that is a Chinese train. She says the words with disgust. The Russian train is much better. Worse than the Chinese service, anyone left behind will have problems with the police. Our visas will run out before we leave the Soviet Union. This could mean a heavy fine and even prison. The laws are very strict. We must stay close to the carriage and she will watch us. She smiles as I pass and I hope she didn’t hear me being sick. I’m looking at Matron differently now, seeing her as woman instead of a cog in the great Soviet transport machine.
The train stops moving and people get off. I don’t see anyone boarding, but there’s a group of Russians waiting for us on the platform, big peasant women straight off the Second World War newsreels. And these Russians are poor women in thick coats, smiles showing off teeth drilled full of holes. They’re all selling exactly the same food, boiled potatoes and the biggest gherkins I’ve ever seen, heat rising into the cold air, this feast stuffed in paper. The gherkins make the wallies you get with your chips back home look like those miniatures they stick in hamburgers. I buy a healthy portion, the smell of chunky European food a change after the steamed noodles I’ve been living off. The women laugh, happy doing business, everyone selling out, tucking our roubles away. Their skin is burnt and tough, and they’re no fools.
I keep watching the train as I walk up and down the platform, suddenly finding that my legs have tightened up, trying to stretch the muscles. Rika’s nervous, standing on the steps of her carriage. I feel sorry for her, the look on her face a mixture of worry that we don’t end up stranded, and the sort of fear I saw in China. She keeps checking her watch and calls out that the train is leaving in thirty seconds. I get back on and stand in the corridor looking into the houses and railway yards, bite into a potato, boiled just right. This is boring food, no spices and loads of starch, and it’s perfect. I crunch into the gherkin and feel the tang of the juice. Beautiful. I watch everyone getting back on the train. Everyone except Mao and two of his cousins. I see the worry in Rika’s face. Mao waits till the train starts moving, winding her up and showing how clever he thinks he is, the sort of thing you do when you’re nine years old, jumping on the steps and strutting down the corridor. He tries to squeeze past without a please or thank-you and I lean into his face and tell him he’s a cunt. He doesn’t know the word, but understands the feeling. I want to smack him in the mouth, but pull back. This bloke gets right up my nose. I go back to the window. I’m a lover not a fighter. That’s what I tell myself. Repeat it a couple of times, just to make sure.
That’s life I suppose. You go to the other side of the world and things are never going to be perfect. A lot of wankers leave home to travel. You’d think it would only be the open-minded people, but it’s not. The West ships its rich kids overseas for a break before they start their careers, and I’ve got this bloke down as a perfect example. Mao isn’t a real hippy either. When we were teenagers going to see Sham and Madness play we hated hippies with a vengeance, saw them as part-timers with a headstart on telling us what to do, another fashion, but at least proper hippies had beliefs they lived by. Mao’s just a fashion victim, arrogant despite his peasant pose. The train picks up speed and I stay by the glass as we pass a shunting yard full of steam trains, all these vintage engines in the middle of tons of twisted iron and stacked sleepers, a locomotive coming along another set of tracks, smoke curling out from its funnel, a hiss of steam smothering the wheels. It’s a great moment, more time travel, and I stay here for a long time, these classics left behind as the Trans-Siberian settles into the same rhythm as before, and it’s soothing, gets rid of the anger. The land’s flat for a while, and the grassland returns, and then the silver birch takes over, a familiar pattern that puts me at ease.
I shouldn’t have said anything to Mao. It was a silly thing to do, shows him he’s getting to me. Going home means reviving old habits, remembering the snobs and posers, our class system looming in the distance, the break in the journey stirring things up. That was the best thing about Hong Kong, being an outsider who could live day to day, free from all that class bollocks, the media back-stabbing and political rows that got inside Smiles’s head. In Hong Kong I was on my own, really free for the first time. It’s all there waiting for me at the end of this trip and I push it away, go back to my bunk and tilt my head so I can see the world pass, more suspended animation. And this is how the rest of the day passes, and I fall asleep, rocked off by the train, don’t wake till late, the only light coming from the corridor, peeping under the door, the window so dark it’s as good as another wall, the blind left up. I have another guess what freedom means. Lots of different versions.
I stay where I am for a while, then leave the compartment. Don’t know what time it is, but there’s nobody about. I knock on Rika’s door and she opens it right away. I feel the warm air and smell her perfume. The heater’s on, radio playing, and looking past her shoulder I can see she’s been lying on a green blanket, the shape of her body cut into it, the pillow with a dent in the middle. There’s vodka mixed in with the perfume, but she isn’t drunk. She’s only wearing her pants and bra, stands to the side and tells me to come in, quickly closes the door. I don’t have a chance to speak before we’re kissing. She’s a beauty and I can’t believe I’ve been calling her Matron. Even the other night I didn’t realise. It’s the uniform.
Suddenly I’m sweating, and I don’t know if it’s the heat or because I’m nervous, trying to remember my last bit of sex, a woman in Hong Kong, both of us pissed and leaning over the balcony of her eleventh-floor flat, looking straight down, humid tropical air and a full moon. She was nice, with long black hair and a sister sleeping in the next room. But that was Hong Kong and this is Siberia. From a leftover of the British Empire to a modern-day dictatorship, firing squads and salt-mine exile, scorched earth and frozen wastes. A desolate land with nothing to offer. According to the propaganda. Just thousands of miles of swaying trees and clean air, a beautiful woman pulling me on to the bed and undoing my shirt. The room’s warm, but she’s warmer, friendly, and this is when you know you’ve cracked it, found the secret of life. When you’re alone, thousands of miles from anyone who knows you, the pressures of life, old mates who end up on the end of a rope, fingers undoing your flies.
My brain’s all over the place, pictures of Soviet gymnasts on the parallel bars, flat-chested kids twisting inside out, blowing the free world away. Maybe she’s on steroids, but I don’t think so somehow. Can’t see any stubble or suspect muscle. And it isn’t about sex, something different in her little hideaway, some sort of affection challenging the bad things that happen, the selling off of our democracy to media barons and big business, the more obvious dictatorship here in the Soviet Union, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the proles, thick knicker elastic you could turn into a catapult, firing stones at the KGB, spies and informers lurking in the shadows, scum of the earth. Rika’s skin is soft and smooth, her uniform hanging on the back of the door hard and creased, the rub of a thick blanket, the voice of the storyteller on the radio, it’s like I can tap into the fairy tale the woman’s humming, werewolves roaming the steppes. And it’s as if I’m hardly here, everything happening by itself until I’m on top of Rika, the cold glow of the window i
nches from my face.
Rika’s head is knocking so I pull back, reach for a pillow. She smiles and says thank you very much. That I’m a gentleman. The famous English gentlemen she’s heard about. I see my outline in the window, the pitch black of the outdoors forming a TV-quality picture of the top half of my body, so it looks like I’m all alone. I imagine a tired Cossack looking up from his fire as the train passes, catching a glimpse and opening his eyes wide, telling his horse that when it comes to love-making the British are in a league of their own. I smile at the thought, but Rika has shut her eyes and doesn’t notice. I can feel her coming and move faster, try not to notice myself in the glass, because with Rika not in the reflection it looks like I’m servicing a mattress, and she’s groaning, sweat pouring off us, I have to concentrate, work harder, just make it in time, blowing away some of the sadness. And out on the prairie that solitary Cossack spills his beans and nods his head, turns to leer at his pony as the Trans-Siberian disappears into the night and darkness returns, the deep loneliness of the land taking over, the horse tethered and nervous.