South by Southeast

The train drew out of the station at a stately speed, a restrained speed.

The train drew out of the station at a stately speed, a restrained speed. Alone in my booth, I unzipped my boots, dropping them on the floor. The man in black, sitting across the aisle, talked into his mobile but stared at my legs. His hair was black too, sprinkled with white.

A disembodied voice informed us that the buffet car was now open, that the smoking car was located to the rear of the train, and that coaches C and D were designated quiet areas where mobiles and other distractions were banned. A steward would be along shortly with a trolley selling a range of hot and cold beverages and snacks. Passengers were advised to read the safety notices located near the exits. “Thank you for travelling with us. We wish you a pleasant journey.”

Beyond the windows of carriage B, the city passed. Not the well-presented front of sand-blasted stone, but the rear side: ugly brick walls blackened by a century of soot; industrial architecture old and new, hammering home the message that beauty and industry have no place together.

Rather like trains and destinations as it turned out.

At the city in the east, a woman came on, mid-forties, perfectly dressed in a camel-coloured coat and wool trouser suit. She lifted her briefcase onto the rack before taking the seat facing me. A youth came on eating a burger, sitting down opposite the man in black. A mother with three noisy kids, two boys and a girl, took the booth behind mine.

Travelling south, we hit the coast. The sea lay to my left, dark grey like the sky above. For days there had been heavy rain, but now the sun peeked out from a patch of blue. Gradually the patch got bigger. The sea rippled beyond land which swept up and down like a wave, a wave that only moved because the train moved.

The train did move in those days.

When the trolley came, I bought a hot chocolate. The stewardess handed me the lidded cup and I looked at her painted nails, her artificial smile. Turning away, it was only then that I noticed we’d stopped. Outside, the rain had come on, speckling the windows. The sea was obscured by a hill that rose up beyond the embankment. I read a book and some time later, some chapters later, looked up to see the same hill outside, the same landscape, unchanging.

The man in black had his mobile out again, warning someone of the delay. He talked about connections, another train to catch.

The woman across from me began to talk. She described a journey she’d made on the Swiss network, explaining the concept of a clock face timetable where trains arrive at a station at the same time. Then perhaps ten or fifteen minutes later they all depart. In this way, commuters never miss a connection.

The man in black launched into a list of all the failed connections of his life. For a moment I thought he was still talking into his phone, but he was talking to us. And as he gave his account, it was clear that these were not merely the failed connections of broken journeys, missed appointments, holidays spoiled, but deeper fractures in his life. Because of one delay, he failed to make an important job interview. Because of another, the woman he loved left the country before he had the chance to say three very simple words, I love you.

Our carriage, which was neither C nor D and therefore not a designated quiet area, fell silent for a moment.

The mother behind me took up her story, leaning over the headrest of the seat next to me. A train cancellation stopped her from seeing her father before he died. Others too told their tales. Meanwhile rain poured down the windows. It ran like a river, like time, which we were wasting sitting here, going nowhere. People fretted, used their mobiles.

I went back to my book. After about two pages, the disembodied voice announced that there’d been a landslide up ahead. Apologies for the delay. Workmen were clearing the lines.

As late afternoon approached, darkness descended. My journey was only due to last three hours. I lived alone. There was no one to inform about the delay. The conductor came along to reassure us we’d be moving soon. The man in black wanted a word with him about the connection he’d missed. The conductor told him help was on the way.

This is how I imagined help coming: first of all, just by someone clearing the lines. Then I decided that buses would arrive and we’d get off the train and on to the waiting coaches. Except, when I mentioned this possibility to the man in black, he told me there were no roads around here.

Getting up, he came over and said, “I’m Lewis, by the way.” He took down his bag from the luggage rack and brought out a map, opening it on my table. The woman opposite lifted her magazine away. I breathed in his aftershave as he leaned towards me. My eyes followed his tracing finger as he worked out exactly where we were.

We were in the middle of nowhere. Actually, it was more like the edge of nowhere, since we were right by the sea. But it was definitely nowhere. It was a place with no name.

The disembodied voice was back. The landslide was worse than expected. It was impossible to say when we would be on our way again. But dinner was available in the buffet car and passengers were reminded again that the smokers’ car was located to the rear of the train.

Quite a few people disappeared to the rear of the train, in search of food or a nicotine hit. But instead of growing quieter, the noise in the carriage increased with the ringing of mobiles and the collective angry voice of complaint. Children ran up and down the aisles. One tripped over the edge of one of my boots. Lewis, who had taken his map and returned to his seat, had just finished trying to call someone. The sight of me pulling my boots on and zipping them up seemed to please him. “You didn’t tell me your name,” he said.

“Tara.”

“I’m Helen,” the woman across from me added. She told us more about her recent trip to Switzerland. Later, I found out she was a divorcee with a son at university. The youth facing Lewis unplugged himself from his hi-fi to say his name was Jace, which we all assumed, after he’d plugged himself back in, was something to do with Jason.

I made a visit to the loos and saw an altercation between the trolley stewardess and an older man who was threatening to “take action.”

As the hours passed, nobody came for us, even though the passengers phoned out for help and made their complaints. Nobody came.

The children, previously noisy and bored, fell asleep, curled up on empty double seats. “Maybe the rest of the world has gone,” an elderly lady said to me, pausing on her way to the loos. “Maybe we’re the only people left alive.”

Maybe we were. Because when midnight came, then one o’clock, we were still in the same place. There was no moon outside to light up the landscape. Just blackness.

At twenty-past one, a youth came along to say that the emergency doors weren’t working. “We’re sealed in,” he claimed.

Lewis went off to investigate. I followed for want of anything better to do. He’d taken off his jacket earlier and I watched the flexing of his arm muscles beneath his T-shirt as he tried to open the doors. He took out a pocket knife to pry them apart, but it didn’t work. We were distracted after that by the sound of someone assaulting the conductor. A male passenger had to be pulled off him. The conductor went scurrying down the aisle into the next carriage.

Some people just wanted everyone to shut up and sit down. They had faith that help was on its way. But when morning dawned, we still hadn’t moved. The trolley came round for breakfast. Only those in first class were allowed into the restaurant car. We were advised not to leave the train. The line would be cleared soon.

More hours passed.

Lewis wanted to take a window hammer and smash our way out, but when he went to get one, he found they’d all gone. There was no use asking the stewards about it either because after serving breakfast, they’d disappeared to the driver’s cabin at the front, flashing artificial smiles and carrying holdalls. Lewis found the conductor in one of the loos with a bloody hole in his head.

When informed of this, the passengers in first class claimed to know nothing about it, though they looked back at us with guilty faces.

“They’re lying,” I told Lewis later when we were back in our booths. “Someone took a window hammer, knocked a hole in his head, and now the stewards have taken all the hammers.”

But Lewis had other things on his mind. “Aren’t your feet tired,” he said, “walking around in those high-heeled boots? Why don’t you take them off?”

Sitting on the aisle seat, I crossed one thigh over the other, sliding the first zip down under Lewis’s dark gaze. Then I pulled the boot off and started on the other one.

Someone nearby commented on the absence of the disembodied voice. It was true. We hadn’t heard it in ages.

“God is dead,” Lewis said, taking one of my feet in his hands and massaging it. His fingers pressed firmly into my instep. God, of course, had been the conductor, spinning out our fate with lies. Unless the train company was God, and the conductor a mere representative, an angel. The company who owned the track could be the deity presiding over our fates. Or it was simply an act of God, something related to the weather. The other possibility was an uncoordinated pantheon whose inability to communicate had left us stranded.

It was something to think about as we headed towards another night here. A night of darkness since the lights no longer worked.

At one point, in the flickering illumination of matches, luggage was thrown at the windows, knives used again to pry open the doors, but nothing worked. We were sealed in. No one talked to us now. We only talked to ourselves, or each other. Sometimes it was less talk than cries of rage or frustration.

Helen had been on her way to a business meeting. Now her phone was dead and her carefully arranged hairdo was coming apart. Everyone was rumpled, tired, creased.

We survived the third day on the remains of the drinks and snacks we had and the food we found in the restaurant. Someone found a multi-pack of bottled water which they distributed to the children. Outside, the rain continued, and condensation fogged the windows so much we couldn’t see the world outside. My watch stopped. When I asked Lewis for the time, his had stopped too. Jace, whose personal hi-fi no longer worked, went up and down the train looking for a watch that worked. But we were left with nothing more than the watery light of day and the darkness of night to measure the passing of time.

The food was all gone, but worse, there was nothing to drink. Children licked condensation from the windows. Parents stood outside the driver’s door screaming for help.

More hours passed and the doors would not open nor the windows break. We were cold. The loos were choked up, the smell filling the carriages.

“Who’s missing you out there?” Lewis asked me, sitting beside me, sharing his warmth. “Who cares that you haven’t come home?”

“Nobody.” I tried to imagine my friends and family wondering what had become of me. I’d tried to phone them on the second day, but no one answered. As time moved on, those people, some of whom I’d known all my life, became a concept rather than a reality. Work too became a concept. It was something vague and related to an office.

A number of people had taken the opportunity to move back into first class. The youngest children were slumped and lethargic. Lewis talked about the effects of dehydration. The safety notices at the doors were no help. Instead they presented us with the hieroglyphics of a vanished world. The mobile phones were all silent and dead. After a long discussion, we decided that the answer to our problems lay in the driver’s cabin, in the window hammers, the door release mechanism, and the driver and stewards.

Unless they’d escaped through the driver’s door.

Lewis sat outside the cabin, putting his head to the door from time to time, nodding in satisfaction. He held the knife, cleaning his fingernails. His jaw was dark. He hadn’t shaved in days. He was joined by two other men, all armed with knives.

Everyone else quietly moved back to the last four carriages. There were eight in all. The children were moved to first class in carriage F. We all kept silent. It was of course a lure, a trap.

What was going through the minds of the stewards and driver when they ventured out? Did they think we were all dead, or at least, weak from dehydration? Later we would find their empty cans of juice and snack wrappers. But now, their throats were neatly cut, and after trying to open the train doors from the driver’s cabin, we resorted to the window hammers, smashing our way out.

When we climbed down from the train, it was into a snow-covered landscape. Over the hill, the sea glittered. There were fish in that sea, and snow at our feet, snow to melt into water. Water to drink and water to wash with. We were in the middle of nowhere which on the map looked like a small place.

The Middle of Nowhere.

In reality it was a big place, a huge place, practically a continent. It had lines leading away from it. We sent out search parties. We sent them out in both directions according to a clock face timetable. They left at the same time and, as it happened, they returned at the same time too.

The world was gone, the world had retreated, and the space that had opened up in between stretched into infinity, like the railway tracks heading off into the distance.

Helen has taken up with the youth, Jace. Turns out he’s almost twenty-four, older than he looks. All kinds of relationships have formed. At night I lie down with Lewis. Flowers have sprouted up around the train and between the tracks. On rainy days we cook our fish catches in the restaurant car. Some of the men have made weapons and set traps. More meat for the pot. The conductor’s remains and the other bodies are long buried, the loos cleaned out and sealed. The smokers’ car is now a greenhouse, where two elderly ladies planted the seeds they carried in their luggage.

The past and the future mean nothing to us here. As time goes on, the memory of rail travel falls back into mythology.

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This story was written when smoking cars were still a thing! I don’t think they are now.