Stranger on a Train

by Jenny Diski

  The man sitting opposite signalled to me. He caught my eye, attempting to draw me away from my sideways conversation with Glenys with a tiny repeated sideways wagging of his forefinger at just above the level of his plate, urgently indicating that what I was being told was completely in error, shifting his eyes, inviting me to follow them, in a direction away from Glenys, closing his eyelids against what was being said, and echoing the negating movement of his finger with a rapid shaking of his head. It was an extraordinary performance, quite as exotic and busy as any of Glenys’s suite of tremors, and rather more alarming. I found myself just staring at him in wonderment for a moment. He was indicating to me, as if Glenys were blind, that everything she said was absolute nonsense, and that I shouldn’t give any credence to it. When he spoke, it was in a lowish tone that was supposed to exclude the woman sitting on my left, as a doctor might speak in an aside to a responsible adult about a sick child who was present but not able to comprehend. Glenys was considered mentally defective, deaf and blind by this man who thought it was vital I understand the truth.

  ‘Don’t listen to her. This is the result of what happened in the sixties. The liberals and hippies and lefties let them all out, closed the institutions, and now they’re on the streets, making trouble, a danger to society. Retards, loonies, drug addicts. Mental cases like…’ – he tossed his head in Glenys’s direction – ‘who shouldn’t be allowed to be in ordinary society. That’s why normal decent people can’t walk around freely and without fear any more. Those kind of people begging and sleeping in doorways, spreading diseases and demanding rights … You can’t even have your dinner in peace.’

  His voice, a whine of fury and frustration, matched the disgusted curl of his mouth as he corrected the misinformation I was receiving. I spoke politely.

  ‘Sorry, but I was one of those liberals, hippies and lefties. As I remember it, what we wanted to do in the sixties was close the institutions and use the money saved to provide for local, humane care and education for people who were mentally and physically disabled, instead of locking them up and forgetting about them while they rotted for the rest of their life. In fact, nothing actually happened until the eighties when Thatcher and Reagan closed all the old asylums down, chucked the inmates on to the street and took the money and ran. They didn’t put anything in their place, no system of care and no funding to rehabilitate or provide long-term treatment for the people they turfed out. It was the far right that filled the streets with people who had nowhere else to go, then walked away, not the left. When I was growing up in the centre of London, I never saw young people sleeping on pavements. It didn’t happen until Margaret Thatcher was elected.’

  Glenys and I now shared our dining companion’s gaze of disgust. However, it was still only to me he spoke, since, leftie though I had been revealed to be, traitor though I was to what he thought of as normality, at least, in his eyes, I was not retarded. He was dreadfully disturbed by Glenys.

  ‘No, no. It was the left who led the movement to close the institutions. Reagan and Thatcher were wrongly blamed for it. It’s all in the history books. My god, where would we be today without Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher supporting him? We’d be under the thumb of Russia. We’d be ruled by communists. Is that the kind of existence you want?’

  I gaped in astonishment.

  ‘Oh, sure, you can look like that but I’m telling you. It was Reagan’s Star Wars plan that scared Gorbachev into giving up his ideas of world domination. And you see what’s happened? Now Russia is run by the Mafia. That’s the Ruskies for you.’

  This was a pointless conversation, but I was stuck in it. ‘But the US has been run by the Mafia since the Twenties.’

  Suddenly his wife looked up from her plate, and in an entirely neutral voice said, ‘He thinks they’re all right.’ She looked down at her food again and he continued as if she hadn’t spoken.

  ‘And we’ve got traitors in our midst. Pat Buchanan has turned belly-up. He had this epiphany and decided that welfare was a good thing. Why the hell should decent hard-working people pay to keep them in benefits?’

  ‘Just out of self-interest,’ I tried, feebly. ‘If “they’re” left destitute what kind of a society will you hard-working righteous people have to live in?’

  ‘We ought to return to the agrarian economy.’

  I tried not to laugh. ‘But that isn’t a choice—’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, his face quite contorted with disgust and despair. ‘It’s too late now.’

  It was enough. I waited for Glenys to finish her sweet and we left the table. There was nothing to say. I just shook my head. Glenys would have shrugged but it got all caught up in a great involuntary circular motion that indicated the whole world and everything that was included in it. When it was completed, we laughed and I went off for a cigarette.

  We pulled in to St Paul’s–Minneapolis at 10.25 p.m., dead on time. The train was taking on fuel and water, so we had a forty-minute break to stretch our legs, wander about the station and walk on solid ground. It was dark, and as I was walking back from the station building along the broad empty tarmac towards the train I heard my name.

  ‘Hey, Jenny.’

  It was Big Daddy. I went towards him.

  ‘You like to dance?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘OK. I’ll show you the Sound of Music routine I worked out. Remember when they are dancing on the terrace? I played it over and over on my VTR and worked out the steps. Here.’ He extended an arm and took my hand gracefully in his. ‘OK, just shadow me.’

  He called out the steps in an undertone – step, step, back, step, and sideways step, step … We walked through the routine. A sort of minuet, between our extended arms, closing up and backing apart with the odd twirl, twirl, twirl in-between. ‘Got it?’

  We practised it two or three times. People on their way to and from the train stopped to watch.

  ‘Yeah, you got it. Now.’

  He began to sing the wordless tune of the dance and we did the routine in real time. Then, with more confidence, again, and finally, when we had a good crowd forming a circle around us in the dark night-time train station, with real sashaying pizzazz, ending with me swirling half a dozen times under his upraised arm. We dropped a bow and a curtsey to the applause and whistles of appreciation from our audience.

  ‘Hey, you picked that up real good. By the time we get to Whitefish we’ll get it perfect. Ready to shoot.’

  ‘You’re a good choreographer.’

  Big Daddy smiled modestly. ‘It’s only one of my many talents, my deah.’ He slipped an arm around my waist. ‘Why not make a detour and spend a day or two in Whitefish? Who knows what dances we might choreograph together? We’d make a fine pair … of dancers.’

  Stepping out in the night to perform a pas-de-deux on the platform at St Paul’s–Minneapolis in the shadow of the Empire Builder was one thing, and quite delightful, but what about a weekend detour with a shameless new-world/old-world flirt in Whitefish, Montana? I liked the improbability of it. I was quite tempted by the spontaneity and irregularity of the idea – until I remembered how many hours there are in even a single day let alone two, and how easily charm turns sour, and that I am, for all my temporary keen listening and participatory interest in the world around me, deeply intolerant of other people, especially when the conversation flags and the cracks in the performance begin to show. To save us from me, to save us both the disappointment that more time than a quick dance routine requires would bring to Big Daddy and me, I declined the offer, but with something like genuine regret.

  Grabbing experience was something of a habit I had acquired when it was the watchword of the late Sixties. If someone handed you a drug, you took it, because it would be an experience. If someone invited you to have sex with them you did, again, for the experience. It was most important not to let anything pass you by. The drug or the sex might, and sometimes did, turn out to be bad experiences, but that was still valuable. For what? It w
as hard to say. To know life, or to know about life. But sex and drugs and forays into ancient eastern texts seemed to us at the time to be the main routes to experience. No one suggested that getting up at eight in the morning was an experience we needed to have (though to have stayed up all night smoking dope or dropping acid and then to greet the dawn qualified), nor that the experiences of going off to work day after day, or paying bills or phoning home, were essential to the full life. On the other hand, most of us ended up doing all those things eventually, so perhaps we weren’t entirely wrong. It was a bit like the Duke of Edinburgh Award without the virtue. We took risks, and some people suffered very badly, but then you can fall off a mountain you’re climbing for the experience. The war was over before most of us were born – that generation had taken risks without choosing to do so. It must have seemed mad to them that we were messing around with our heads and emotions, taking unnecessary risks when the world had just been made safe for us. But the world was not safe, of course. What most of us knew about was nuclear weapons, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Cold War, and I was not alone in truly believing that I wouldn’t live to old age.

  That was the rhetoric. In practice, I was in the midst of depression, and every drug I took that was potentially dangerous was all right by me. While I have no doubt others were genuinely trying to expand their minds and have all the experience they could before kingdom came, I was in reality playing a kind of Russian roulette. I knew that I was the last person who should take acid or speed, that I sank too fast into depression without any chemical help to risk taking them. I took acid and I injected methyl amphetamine into my veins. I woke in the morning with a joint ready rolled so that not a minute would be wasted not being stoned. The speed was the most lethal in its after-effects, and therefore the drug of choice. But while it thrummed through my system it was extraordinary. I remember sitting in the flat in Covent Garden I’d moved into – a nursery land of drug availability – the first time I fixed. I sat on the floor with my back against the wall. There were half a dozen strangers, maybe more, in the room smoking dope, listening to music. The most extraordinary feeling came over me, once the initial rush of speed had coursed through my blood. It took a while to identify it, but eventually it dawned on me that I was at ease, comfortable, where I belonged, with people I belonged to – and what was astonishing about this feeling was that it was genuinely the first time I had ever experienced it so totally. Until then I had always been in the wrong place, with the wrong people, or never quite the right ones, never really with a sense that I belonged exactly where I was, that I wasn’t just alien enough to be a watcher not a member of the group. I felt at ease for the first time in my life. Thank you, methyl amphetamine. See you soon. Very soon.

  Actually, I was familiar with meth. When I was in Ward 6 of the Maudsley I was under the care of Dr Krapl Taylor, then head of the hospital. There are varying views about Dr KT’s ministrations, but he was quite keen on experimental techniques. One of these was abreaction. A depressed patient was injected with methyl amphetamine and then goaded by a therapist into a state of anxiety and distress. The resulting explosion was supposed to be cathartic or something. Psychiatrists go pale these days when you tell them that they used this technique at a respectable psychiatric hospital. One doctor who was actually on staff there just before I was a patient said he had no knowledge that Krapl Taylor was using such a treatment. So I knew about meth. I had it twice a week when I saw my shrink, who then spent twenty minutes assuring me that I was worthless in the eyes of Dr Krapl Taylor. Being depressed I could only agree with KT’s assessment. So what’s new? Can I have some more meth, I think I could get to like this if you gave me a larger dose? In fact, I did finally abreact – went berserk as required – but instead of shedding my depression I lost quite a lot of blood from a slashed wrist. The best-laid plans … Finally, after nine months, I wandered into the drugs room and started to open the cabinet, while the nurse in charge watched in open-mouthed astonishment. I was just going to take myself a decent dose of meth. There was a scuffle and I threw my clothes into a bag and left. I headed for the Arts Lab in Drury Lane, sat in the café and turned round in my chair to talk to the complete stranger behind me.

  ‘Do you know where I can get some meth?’

  He grinned. Effortless, I had found the speed king of London, WC1. Those were the days.

  For a while my non-medical doses of meth continued to give me a feeling of rightness in the world, but the comedowns were murderous. They were my own depressions doubled and blacker than night. Even so, I figured them worth it. Meth was very easy to get hold of, the depression could be sorted with another fix. I was never in any real danger from heroin addiction. I lived in the kitchen of the Covent Garden flat with a registered heroin addict, and my only experience of it (yeah, you had to try that too) just made me feel very ill. It takes time and effort to become a heroin junkie, I was in too much of a hurry. Speed was my speed. At least until the comedowns and the depression combined to make me take a large enough overdose of barbiturates to land me in hospital with plans to send me back to St Pancras North Wing – back to Go, Do Not Collect £200. That was when I decided I really didn’t want to become a revolving-door psychiatric in-patient. I quit drugs, all of them, and decided to take the going-to-work-every-day experience – just for the experience, you understand.

  * * *

  After my dancing on the platform at St Paul’s–Minneapolis and declining a weekend of delights and experience with Big Daddy, I slept like a baby rocked in untiring arms. I missed all the night stops – St Cloud, Staples, Detroit Lakes, Fargo, Grand Forks – and woke at 6.50 a.m. having just passed Devil’s Lake, North Dakota. We were a mere twenty-five minutes behind schedule. The landscape had utterly changed. We had entered mile after mile, hour after hour, of non-stop prairie: my first view of prairie outside of the movies and those patronising, cutifying Disney nature films that caused a generation to grow up terminally anthropomorphic. This prairie was a thing to behold as the sun shone on red-gold grass and scrub. Brown, you might have said if you were being inattentive, but from my bed, gazing hypnotised out at the land, I caught infinite variations on the theme of orange, ochre, yellow and gold. What I didn’t know until I went to the observation car and heard a couple of bucolophobic Chicagoans expressing what they thought of the landscape (‘Hey, didn’t we pass that fencepost a couple of hours ago?’), was that North Dakota is the butt of urban American jokes, and to Montanans the folk from North Dakota are what the Polish are to New Yorkers.

  ‘But it’s extraordinary. Vast. Beautiful,’ I said to my neighbour who was shaking his head in pity at the lot of the North Dakotans.

  ‘Honey, this land is flat, featureless and it ends in mountains. That’s good. It keeps the inmates from spreading out into the real world.’

  It was true that sitting there for an hour or two there is nothing to see but the grass and scrub, with occasional glimpses of the Mississippi winding and trickling through the land. Then suddenly you see a farmhouse. Just there, plonk in the middle of nowhere. Cows and horses standing about. Trees. Fences. Fences to keep the cows and horses in, I suppose, not to keep anyone out, because for 360 degrees around these signs of human life, and stretching to every horizon, there is blank nothing. No road; nowhere for a road to lead. Just empty space filled with wilderness. And how, I wondered, and continued to wonder for the next day as North Dakota became the grasslands of Montana, had these homesteaders decided that it was here, just here, in this actual spot, that they were going to build a house and a life. Why not a couple of hundred yards further along? Or back? Or to the right or left? What difference would it make? How could you ever make a decision? I imagined myself pacing back and forth trying to place my stake in the spot where I would build my house, but never managing to decide, because in the absence of defining detail, and assuming the Mississippi near enough by, absolutely any spot would do. And wouldn’t you need, having travelled God-knows-how-far – from the East by wago
n train, or from old Europe by ship – to feel that the place where you decided to settle was the most particular place you could find? Here is the perfect spot, your eyes and your heart sing together, recognising what and where it is you came all that way for, risked everything to find. But no, hang on, perhaps it’s just a little to the left, or a mile and a half to the right. Well, let’s assume that the pioneers and refugees had more practical minds than me daydreaming on a train, and had the good sense to get down and digging. Any place they hung their hat was home.

  I gazed out of the window, a member of the audience for the moving picture that we were passing through, and started to see how it had all come about. The geography of movie America, the reason for all those celluloid dreams, rolled across the picture windows like a festival of film, freed from individual stories and script, but including all of them, making them necessary, inevitable. The genres had sped by. The industrial landscapes of Pittsburgh and Chicago, the railyards, the smoking factory chimneys, all spoke of fast urban tales of people doing their best and worst to make a living in a thundering black-and-white world. The poor and destitute, living rough, riding the rails, the dogged workers falling away from the civilised centres to the drab and dangerous peripheries, the corruption, the blind bland rich. The clichés jostled in my head as those movies had scrolled by until gradually they were replaced by the flat, featureless plains of Montana that caused the heart to pound in alarm at such endless space. For hours, for whole days, miles and miles of agricultural land, unrelieved by the slightest incline or hollow, each mile indistinguishable from the last, from the last hundred and the next hundred. This was the vastness that the pioneers had sought, the good living, the chance to do more than subsist. It was almost unbearable.