0513485001343534196 christopher fowler (38 page)

'That does it, we all spend the rest of the night in the waiting room,'

said Ben firmly. 'It makes the most sense.'

'Oh, you get to decide what's good for everyone, do you?' Claire snapped. 'Of course, you're
American
.'

'Just what is that supposed to mean?'

'Just that you always boss people about.'

'Only if we know what's best for them.'

'You're trying to make up for being beaten in Vietnam and the Gulf by telling everyone else what to do.'

'At least we're capable of making life-decisions, which is more than you guys. I suggest you try it sometime.'

'Great advice coming from a country where people eat with their fingers and send money to TV evangelists.'

'Now you're being offensive.'

'Come on, you two, give it a rest.' Kallie pushed between them and led the way back to the waiting room. They had to break the lock to get the door open, but found a dry fireplace with dusty bundles of wood stacked beside it.

'I read that bird-watchers use places like these as hides,' said Masters, digging out his lighter. Outside, the rain began pounding the roof. It took a few minutes for the wood to catch, but soon they had a moderate amount of light and heat. Paint hung in strips from the ceiling, but the floor appeared to have been recently swept.

'I'm going to use the john,' said Ben, rising from the corner where he had been seated glaring balefully at Claire. 'If you hear a crash it's me kicking the lock off, okay? Give me your flashlight.' He pulled the waiting room door open. 'Hey, listen to that rain.'

'This is like the station in
Brief Encounter
.' Claire hunched down inside her overcoat. Kallie had already fallen asleep. 'I've seen it dozens of times on TV and I always want the ending to be different.'

'I'm surprised you like it at all,' said Masters. 'Surely your generation prefers more recent stuff. You'd rewrite the ending, then?'

'Only in my head. Don't you ever do that, change the endings of things?'

'All the time, Claire.'

Kallie fell asleep in front of the fire. The rain was still pounding the platform roof. 'Ben's been a long time. Do you think we should go and look for him?'

'No, it's okay, I'll go,' said Masters, forcing his aching limbs into action. He checked his watch but condensation clouded the face. As he picked his way along the dark platform, he tried to imagine what had been responsible for stranding them here. The carriage had been coupled at both ends. There had been a guard in the carriage with them. None of them had been paying much attention - they'd been too busy grandstanding each other with crazy stories. Perhaps they'd missed some kind of emergency announcement. But didn't the staff always come around and check the carriages if there was a problem? In this day and age surely people were protected from accidents of fate? Wet leaves plastered the backs of his legs as he walked. He reached the door of the ladies' toilet, but found that it was still locked. There was no sign that Ben had ever reached this far.

He turned slowly around and studied the dim forms about him. No sound but for wind and rain. But there was a faint glimmer of light, no more than a pencil beam, from somewhere near the far end of the platform. As he reached it, he realised that it had to be from Ben's torch, and it was coming from the underpass to the other platform. Wary of slipping on the wet steps, he descended.

•

'They've probably found a telephone by now and called someone,' said Summerfield vaguely. 'There's really nothing to worry about.' He and Jane sat side by side in the pitchblack carriage, protected from moonlight by the hill behind them, as the art historian emptied the last of the wine into his glass. At least she had stopped crying now.

'I want to know why this is happening,' she said finally.

'That's like trying to explain the moon, or the course of people's lives.'

'It's all so random, and it shouldn't be. We've been telling each other stories all night, but they're not like life because they have plots. Nothing is left to chance. All this - there's no plot here, just a stupid accident, someone not doing their job properly.' She wiped her nose with a tissue.

'I don't want to be worried all my life. I'm tired of always thinking of others. When the children were ill, when my mother died, when Harold had his breakdown I was always the strong one. I had the answers and the energy to go on. It seems like there was never a moment in my life when I wasn't prepared to face disappointment. I feel like a fictional cliché, the academic's neurotic wife, and only
I
know that I'm not in someone else's story, that I'm real. Well, I don't want to be like that any more. I want someone else to take care of the worrying for a while. I want to go away somewhere warm and quiet. Where could I go, Peregrine?'

'I know a story about a special place,' he whispered.

'Is it real, though?'

'No, of course not. I don't know anything about real places.'

'But you must do. You're so much more practical than Harold.'

'Darling, I'm not real, any more than you are. In your heart you must know that.' And she knew he was right, for she remembered nothing before boarding the train.

•

Masters reached the bottom of the dripping tunnel and peered ahead. He could see nothing but the glare of the flashlight. 'Ben?' he called, and the reverberation of his voice was lost in the falling rain.

The torch lay in a shallow puddle. He picked it up and allowed the beam to cross the walls. There was no sign that anyone had been here.

He continued through the underpass to the other side, but a rusted iron trellis barred the way to the opposite platform, so he made his way back.

When he reached the waiting room once more, he found it deserted.

The fire burned low in the grate. Kallie's jacket was still lying across one of the benches, but the three students had disappeared as completely as if they had never existed. Masters was a rational man. He tried to remember their faces, but found he could no longer conjure their features in his mind. Shocked, he dropped down into the nearest seat and tried to understand what was happening.

They had been on a train, and the carriage had become separated, and they had walked to the station ... Jane and Peregrine were still waiting for him, that much he remembered. He had just decided to walk back to them when he heard a distant pinging of the lines. Impossible, of course, but it sounded as though a train was coming. He ran out on to the platform and peered into the murky night as the sound grew louder.

Now he saw the bright, empty carriages swaying around the bend ahead, heard the squeal of brakes as the locomotive pulled into the station and came to a sudden stop before him. The green-painted carriage threw yellow rectangles of light on the platform. It bore the initials GWR on its doors. The compartments were separate and lined with colourful prints of British holiday resorts. The seats had anti-Macassars on their backs. The train was a flawless reproduction of one from his childhood, but why? And how? And surely it occupied the same line as their poor stalled carriage?

He had barely managed to climb inside and shut the door before it lurched off once more, running to its timetable as surely as Alice's white rabbit, and as Masters fell back into the seat he thought; this is a memory, an idealised moment from the past, correct in the details down to the curious acrid smell of such carriages and the itchy bristles of the seat, but not something that's really happening now - merely a culmination of fragments seen and experienced, not fact but fiction, someone else's fiction.

He pushed down the window and leaned from it, searching the track ahead. Where the stalled carriage should have been was nothing at all, no carriage, no track, no hills or sea, no night or day, just nothing.

And he thought; I've fallen asleep like one of my students, that's all it is. There's nothing to be afraid of. It's simply that I've lost the ability to tell reality and fantasy apart. Right now it seems I'm fictional but I know I'm real, for I have real memories. He thought hard and tried to recall something, a moment so exact and specific to his life that it would prove he was real, so that the fiction would break up around him like an unfinished short story. He tried to think of Jane and Peregrine, whom he knew had been having an affair for nearly two years, but could not conjure a single past memory from either of them. He thought about this evening, and the way it conformed to the most absurd conventions of a typical Hallowe'en short story; the stormy night, the train ride, the mystery destination, the tale-telling guests. Stay calm, he told himself, and remember, remember, he repeated as the train hurtled toward a stomach-dropping oblivion, remember something real and true, remember the last time you were truly happy.

And then a real moment came to him.

A dead, hot day in mid-July The air is countrified, dandelion
spores rising gently on warm thermals, the lazy drone of a beetle
alighting on dust-dulled hedge leaves. A suburban summertime,
where the South London solstice settles in a sleepy yellow blanket
over still front gardens.

Westerdale Road has its characters; the bad-tempered widow
who appears in her doorway at the sound of a football being kicked
against a wall, the deaf old couple whose pond freezes over every
winter, so that they have to thaw their goldfish from a block of ice in
a tin bath beside the fire. Some of the houses have Anderson shelters
in their gardens, converted to tool-sheds in time of peace. Others
still keep chickens, a distinctive sound and smell that excites the
neighbourhood cats. Further along the street is a 'simple' man who
sits on his front step smiling inanely in the bright sunlight
.

Masters forced himself to remember, to stop himself from ceasing to exist. These weren't his memories, he realised with a shock, they belonged to someone else entirely. What were they doing in his head?

Many street names conjure pastoral imagery; 'Combedale Road',

'Mycenae Road', 'Westcombe Hill'. At noon the silent sunlight
scorches the streets. Housewives stay deep within the little terraced
houses, polishing sideboards, making jellies, listening to wirelesses in
cool shadowed rooms. Their men are at work, mopping their brows
in council offices, patrolling machine-room floors, filling out
paperwork in dusty bank chambers. Their children are all at school,
reciting their tables, catching beanbags, and in the break following
lunch there is a special treat; the teacher unlocks a paddock behind
the playground of Invicta Infants, and here is a haven from the hot
concrete, a small square meadow of close-cropped emerald grass
hemmed in with chicken-wire. Here we are allowed to lie on our
stomachs reading comics, passing them between each other. It is
peaceful, warm and quiet (the teachers do not tolerate the vulgarity
of noise) and although we are in a suburban street, it feels like the
heart of the countryside. And here is the heart of all remembered
happiness
.

Confused, Masters began crying as the carriages dissolved around him and tumbled away through the night sky, the foundations of his life evaporating as he fought to recall anything at all that made him human.

What was it about this area, what did it possess to make it so
special, so irreplaceable and precious? A few roads, a pond behind a
wall where sticklebacks were trapped in jars and dragonflies
skimmed the oily water, a railway line with a narrow pedestrian
tunnel beneath it, a station of nicotine-coloured wood and rows of
green tin lamps along the platform. Some odd shops; a perpetually
deserted furniture showroom, damp and dark, its proprietor
standing ever-hopefully at the door, a model railway centre, a
tobacconist selling sweets from large jars, a rack of Ellisdons jokes
on a stand, none of them living up to their packet descriptions, a
chemist with apothecary bottles filled with coloured water and a
scale machine, green and chrome with a wicker weighing basket, a
bakery window filled with pink and white sugar mice, iced rounds,
meringues and Battenburg cake. An advertisement painted on a
wall, for varnish remover of some kind, depicting a housewife
happily pouring boiling water from a kettle on to a shiny dining
room table. Cinema posters under wire. A hardware shop with tin
baths hanging either side of the door.

This confluence of roads and railway lines is bordered by an iron
bridge and an embankment filled with white trumpet-flowered vines,
and populated by families with forgotten children's names;
Laurence, Percy, Pauline, Albert, Wendy, Sidney. No ambitions and
aspirations here, just the stillness of summer, the faint drone of
insects, bees landing on flowerbeds in the police station garden,
tortoises and chickens sheltering from the heat beneath bushes, cats
asleep in shop windows with yellow acetate sunscreens, and life
being lived, a dull, sensible kind of life, unfolding like a flower, the
day loosening as slowly as a clock spring - an implacable state which
children thought would never change, but which is now lost so
totally, so far beyond reach that it might have occurred before Isis
ruled the Nile
.

The lecturer had no memories of his own because he did not truly exist. Just like any flesh and blood human being, the creation that was Harold Masters reached his time unexpectedly and without resolution, and so dissolved into a tumble of threadbare tissues. With no plot momentum to drive him and no memories of his own, just borrowings from the mind of his creator, he turned over and over into nothing and was gone. And in that moment, he was the most real.

The storyteller in the mind's eye of Harold Masters sits at his chipped writing desk staring up at shelves of books, his eye alighting on an old 78