We gathered speed. We lurched and rolled on tracks that we knew were precarious beneath us. We slowed down again. People up and down the carriage groaned.
No way, the girl said into her phone, and coughed.
It’s like this every bloody time, every bloody time I take a train, a man was saying behind me, probably into a phone but possibly just out loud to himself like a madman. Nobody takes responsibility, he said. Nobody’s responsible. Nobody does anything about it. Nobody’s in charge. Who’s to blame? Nobody.
I saw the scuffed cheapness of the material of the seat I was sitting on. What, I thought, if there was nobody there when I got home? I walked in and you weren’t there. I opened our mortgaged front door and came in and took my coat off and sat down with the takeaway bag of food and you weren’t there. I didn’t take the greasy tops off the cartons, careful not to spill on the floor, while you didn’t bring through the plates and forks: you, lifted into the sky like in stories; gone, the way we expect people to vanish into thin air in faked magic, like something only supposed to happen in other people’s lives, the lives that don’t touch us and our lives. You were gone and the roof blew off our house and left cracked rafters dangling above upturned furniture. The earth below our house broke open and swallowed it whole. I went home and it wasn’t there; just a crater in the ground between the other houses, like those old wartime photographs. So someone I didn’t know was dead. I didn’t care, and why should I? Instead I scared and dared myself into feeling something by imagining what it would be like when what was mine wasn’t mine any more, and beyond that was the knowledge, as blunt and undebatable as the glass in the window next to me, that none of it had ever been mine at all.
I looked at my own reflection in it, and through me, behind me, was the dark of the land. It was the end, I’d gone as far as I could go. When the train juddered to a stop at a small station and the overhead voice said we’d be stationary here for at least an hour and a half, possibly for longer, depending on information, and the doors opened and the surge of angry passengers from up and down the train demanding money, taxis, explanations, converged on the one small station manager standing blinking with panic outside his office, I stood up and got off too. I pushed through the people on the platform and followed the exit signs. I didn’t know what station or what town I was in until I was outside by the empty taxi rank and saw the name for where I was.
It was a garden city. That was something to do with trees, wasn’t it? It meant a city with a lot of trees and green and it meant something historical, but I couldn’t remember what. Maybe it stated in its town statutes that there were a certain number of trees that had to be planted here, maybe there was a certain acreage that had to be green; I had no idea, or if I’d ever known in the first place I couldn’t remember now.
I looked up the road, then down the road, but I didn’t know which was the right way. So I went back in through the station still full of its angry voices. I bypassed the crowd and walked the length of the train I’d just been on, nodding to people I passed who had stepped off for a smoke. We’re all in it together, we told each other in shrugs, in little jerkings of the head, what can we do? I got to the front of the train. The driver had his feet up against the window and was reading a paper. I walked what was left of the platform till I’d gone as far as it went. This far along the noise of the station was surprisingly muted. I sat down on the edge then shinned down the side of it on to the track.
It was April, I could feel it. It was slight and cold on the backs of my hands and all through my clothes – my coat was still on my seat on the train. The whole of the lighter part of the year, all the light months, stretched away ahead of me. I put my hands in my pockets and walked, trying to hit a sleeper rung with each step. I avoided the toilet paper and sewage and my feet hurt from hitting the uneven rubble in the dips between the sleepers; my legs already hurt from the short distance I’d come. The rims of the rails curved off ahead of me in what was left of the townlight and the further away from the station I walked the purer the dark beyond me got. Now what I could hear was dark, the passing of cars on roads somewhere in the distance, the occasional rustling of the leafing bushes and the litter on the railway banks on either side of the tracks. I could smell it all, I had cold air in my nose and at the back of my mouth and it tasted of diesel or petrol and behind that it tasted of stripling wood, grass and earth.
I answered it as soon as it rang.
Hello? I said.
An automaton asked me if I would accept a reversed charges call from – and then there was a gap and your voice on the automaton tape, recorded wherever it was you were, saying your name.
Yes, I said, loud and firm in the space left for me to speak into, so there could be no mistake.
Hello, you said.
You were fine. There was nothing wrong with you at all. You were phoning from a call box in an all-night supermarket. You had been on a train that kept stopping because of some kind of accident. You were walking home. You reckoned you were still about thirty miles away. You’d walked on the tracks for hours until three railway workers in fluorescent jackets had run after you, given you a row and threatened to prosecute you. Then you’d walked on the grass verge of a back road and you’d seen the lights of the supermarket across a field. You had mud up round your ankles, all over your shoes and even inside your shoes. You smelt of farm.
I held the phone against my ear with one hand and rubbed my eyes with the other. I was still thinking about your voice saying your name, small and accented and guileless, fastened into the air on the phone tape.
It’s surprisingly busy for the middle of the night, you were saying. There are a dozen people, maybe even more, doing their shopping. They’re buying, like, Elastoplast, or orange juice. One woman just went through the checkout, she’d come out here in the middle of the night and she bought a child’s pair of socks. Why would you buy a pair of socks for a child in the middle of the night?
I don’t know, I said.
I really didn’t. At that moment I didn’t know anything except the small noise of your name. It was the fact that it was just your first name; something about it by itself in all that machinery was making something inside me actually hurt.
I wish I’d asked her, you were saying. She’s gone now. I’ll never be able to ask her. There’s a man over there, his basket is piled completely full of biscuits, they’re all the same make, some kind of French biscuit. He told me he drives round all the towns buying this one special kind of biscuit because you can only get them at this chain of supermarket. Amazing what people will do.
Yes, I said. Amazing.
A couple of the people who work here are dancing with each other in the tea and coffee aisle, you said, they’ve got the radio on over the loudspeakers. And there’s boxes of stuff everywhere, they’re unpacking it for tomorrow, I mean today, they’re putting the things on the shelves. While we’re usually asleep someone somewhere is cutting open great big boxes of stuff and arranging them, or cutting bales of new newspapers open for newsagents in supermarkets and shops, and we never even think about it when we buy a paper or whatever.
Uh huh, I said.
It’s really interesting being in a supermarket with no actual money to spend, you said.
Yes, I said, I’ll bet.
You told me about how you’d left your wallet and your jacket on the train, also the books you’d bought, the work you were bringing home, your glasses and your mobile phone.
It was dead anyway, you said. Though I’ll have to try and get the glasses back.
You should cancel your bank cards, I said.
Should I? you said. There’s a twenty-four-hour number in the inside of my chequebook, it’s up the stairs. But listen, did I wake you? I didn’t know what the time was till I got here and saw their clock.
No, it’s okay, no worries, I said. Well, you know. I was kind of dozing on the couch.
Oh, and I heard this bird, you said. I was walking along and it was just singing, like they do in the mornings, except that it was completely dark, and there were no other birds singing. I wonder what kind of bird it was. What kind of bird does that, just sings like that in the middle of the night?
Thing is, I said. You’ll need to cancel your bank cards and I think it has to be you who does it. I don’t think they let other people. If I phone up they maybe won’t let me.
I really don’t care, you said. I don’t care about any of it. Whoever finds them can have them. They can have all the money that’s in the wallet. They’re welcome to it. It’s not as if there’s that much left in either of the accounts anyway. Well, except for the one account. Actually, there’s quite a lot in that account. Actually, maybe you could phone about that one. The goldcard one. Would you mind? But the other one I don’t care about. Oh God. And my credit card. I think my credit card was in there too.
I wrote down the words
credit card
and said that if they wouldn’t let me cancel them I’d demand that they registered the loss so you couldn’t be charged for anything beyond the time of my calling them up. I looked at the clock. It was ten-past three.
So I’d better go and do that now, I said.
No, wait, you said. Wait a minute.
But that man buying the biscuits. What if he’s buying them on your credit card? I said.
I don’t care, you said. Don’t go. Listen. Can you hear that?
What? I said.
Shh. Listen, you said.
I heard a muffled regular thudding at the back of you like an industrial heartbeat. Possibly this was the sound of my own heart. Certainly something was thudding inside me so hard that I was swaying while I stood in the hall holding the phone.
Can you hear it? you said.
Kind of, I said.
You had started singing along with it. The moment I wake up, you sang. Before I put on my make-up, make-up.
I could hear someone else behind you singing it too.
That’s Kerry singing, you said.
Who? I said.
Kerry. She works on the checkout, you said. She’s nineteen and has three kids already, all under five, and it’s really terrible because she and her husband have to work day and night just to keep their heads above water.
It was quarter-past three on the kitchen clock. You were singing down the phone. I run for the bus, dear. While running I think of us, dear. I realized it was possible that you weren’t on the phone at all, that I was just hallucinating that you were. Now you were telling me about Dave, Kerry’s husband, who was an apprentice painter and decorator, and how work for painters and decorators was quite hard to come by at the moment because of the boom in DIY.
I interrupted. What happened about Death? I asked.
They stopped the train, you said.
Because of that man? I asked.
Was it a man? you said? Was it on the news? What happened?
Well, you saw him, I said. In the white clothes, at the station.
Oh, you said. Oh, that. I forgot all about that. Honestly. Imagine seeing someone and thinking such stuff. Looked like Death.
You were laughing. I better go and call the bank for you, I said.
No, don’t go yet, you said, and your voice was tiny and light in my ear. It’s going to be morning soon. The sun’ll soon be up.
I know, I said. I’ve got work in four and a half hours.
Oh. Right. Okay. Quick then, before you go, you said. Tell me. How was your evening? What did you do tonight?
What did I do tonight, I said. Well. First I was torn off the ground with my legs and arms flailing in the air. Like I was a fish on a hook.
Eh? you said.
Like someone in the sky was reeling me in on a huge rod, I said. Or like my middle was tied to a rope and the other end was tied to a plane. And after that, I watched our house collapse in on itself and I spent some time lying in the rubble. Then I vanished completely. I wasn’t here at all. Then you phoned.
I what? And you what? you said.
I took a deep breath and counted to ten. While I was counting I thought back over my evening.
One. It is early evening. I am lying on the couch watching TV while you come home from London on the train. There’s a programme on about a woman who has sent her mother off for the night to pick up the woman’s husband, her son-in-law, in Dorset, while some people from the BBC come and secretly remake the mother’s back garden. The garden is huge and as they dig up the long green lawn and start laying the slabs that are going to replace it, the TV people keep shaking their heads at the camera about how difficult it will be to do this week’s episode in such a short amount of time, especially with the weather being so bad. It rains and rains. There are lots of shots of the TV people and the woman whose mother’s garden it is, sheltering under a big old tree. They decide the tree is diseased. In the next shower break they saw through the tree with chainsaws and dig up its roots with a JCB. By the end of the programme the TV people are excited, hiding behind a new pagoda as the woman brings her mother through and shows her the garden, which looks like a modern cemetery. She looks round, bewildered. When the TV people jump out and surprise her she bursts into tears. I can’t believe it’s really you, she says. I can’t believe it’s really them. There’s a montage of shots of before, during and after. Champagne is opened. The TV people affectionately jostle the woman, the husband and the mother. The mother is still shaking her head, wiping her eyes and staring at the TV people.
The programme finishes. I go through to the kitchen to look at the clock in case the time on the video is wrong.
Two. I phone the restaurant. They tell me I owe them £22.50.
Three. I walk round to the restaurant and pay for the food which I take home and put, still in its bag, in the off oven.
Four. I try your mobile. It passes me through to the answering service. A recording tells me I can leave a message. I leave you a message in which I know I sound slightly high-pitched and strange. At the end the recorded voice tells me I can re-record my message if I press three. I press three and delete my message. I switch the television back on and lie down on the couch again. Firefighters are at risk from there being too few firefighters. A commercial for Special K. Snooker. A woman saying to a man, I’m sorry, Luke, I really am. A footballer is appealing against a ban for using steroids. The answer is Gormenghast. An old EastEnders in which everyone looks younger and the clothes look dated. Of one hundred people who were asked to name a kind of animal featured in children’s stories, no one has answered elephant; a man’s family loses a life when he answers elephant. A cartoon. A football match between someone and Brazil. A photograph of a bridge in a village a hundred years ago, a voiceover saying, in those days there were no cars in my grandmother’s village. A boyband. A commercial for Kalms. An old Star Trek. A baseball team wants to change the name of its playing field. The weather tonight (clear). Heart-shaped bakeware for sale. An old Coronation Street in which everyone looks younger and the clothes look dated. Jerry Springer saying to an old man with one leg, so you met her in a convenience store? A commercial for digital TV. A: Morecambe and Wise, B: Mulder and Scully or C: Bonnie and Clyde. A glowing brain and a voiceover saying, I think there really is no inner conscious self. All we are is a machine built by genes. An idea can affect your mind like a germ, a parasite. We are the creations of our genes and our memes. I begin at the beginning of the channels again and it is like watching thrown-away rubbish come bobbing in towards me on a tide, stuff that has floated in from all over the world made of substances that will never decompose.