CHANGING TRAINS

This story was short-listed for the Aspire First National Story Awards (1997) and published in an anthology entitled Short Work.  I still like it although I have removed a lot of the commas.

When as now I find myself travelling on a main line railway with two trains moving in the same direction at similar speeds, I am drawn to look across at the people in the other vehicle. Out of idle curiosity mostly, a focus for my wandering eyes, half hoping to see some drama played out, a lady vanishing perhaps.  But  I encounter only a mirror image of my own compartment, dumb-show conversations, a head thrown back in mimed laughter, readers intent on papers or paperbacks, vacant faces gazing out on vacancy. Or as now overcome with a strange fancy, the suspicion that if I look out at precisely  the right moment, I will see myself staring back, speeding as the tracks fork and separate to a different and new life. Strangers suddenly becoming dear friends, and those I think I know now unrecognisable to me.

All fancy, of course. Wishful thinking even. For though my life is undeniably satisfying and fulfilled, I can't help regretting all the other possibilities carelessly discarded. And now, as the train hurtles on its lonely destiny into the darkness and there is nothing for my eyes to see but darker shapes and the occasional string of lights that suggest but do not define a landscape, I seem to glimpse the hide-and-seek peekings of small girls as at a birthday party. Dressed in their best pastel satin, with smocking and puffed sleeves, hiding but not too well, giggling in the anticipation of a speedy discovery. And prizes for the winners and bitter tears for the losers until Mammy.... or big sister... finds presents for everyone, winners and losers alike.

To be frank, I seldom have time to daydream like this. Mine is a hectic existence, the envy of many of my settled acquaintances, as I have so recently established, having so recently met up with them again. As a writer on film, my work entails a merry-go-round of festivals from Berlin to Montreal, Tokyo to San Sebastian, Venice to Moscow,  and to my old friends this lifestyle seems burnished with reflected glamour. I am after all personally acquainted with stars -- admittedly from minor constellations --  and have a fund of scandalous anecdotes to curl the most rigidly lacquered hair. But however dazzled I was at the start of my career, it's now just a job -- meeting people no more interesting though often vainer than anyone else -- and I have come to consider myself simply peripatetic, a wandering scribe, my only base far from the cradle of my youth. It is to that base, nevertheless,  that I am currently speeding, hoping to find there some sort of home, somewhere to lie down and cover my head.

As long as my latest very dear friend isn't still installed there, as long as he has taken his bags and his beautiful young body and decamped as ordered by me.  On the other hand, it would be comforting to imagine waiting there patiently and lovingly some large, slightly scruffy elderly male person, perhaps even smoking a pipe... My God, that sounds like my father, long dead! But there are too many dead and I am now gone to the top of the queue.

Back to those little girls. Of course, the reason I can picture them so well is because Marie brought along that old photograph album. In general I prefer to leave the past behind. The only place for nostalgia is in some sentimental or "feel good" movie, as we say in the business. Otherwise the effect is almost inevitably "feel bad". Too many memories of lost opportunities, failed loves, failed hopes, irretrievable youth. It's only after all in movies - and fairy stories - that you can believe in  happy endings. In life it always, sooner or later, ends badly. But we girls, girls no more, twitter over the coloured paper reproductions of ourselves as six-year-old dolls. "Imagine that!" we exclaim. "Over forty years ago! You don't feel the time passing, do you?" And then, looking at each other's withered cheeks, matronly bodies -- though in my case I like to think I'm still in fairly good shape and Avril, considering the life she's led, looks amazingly well -- we go suddenly silent.

Nothing would have drawn us together if we had met for the first time now, of course: we are too different. But we share a starting point, like all those trains rushing to the dark ends of the continent. We share those years when we stood in a ragged row and smiled at the camera and hadn't a clue where we were going. And as charted in Marie's album, we grew up together, our baby bodies thinning -- arms and legs become like twigs -- and then again plumping and rounding. And there we all are, almost fully grown, Marie, Avril, Ginnie and I and all those others, names now escaping the tips of our tongues, in our last school photograph smiling and holding some sort of diploma, wearing those terrible puce coloured uniforms, ties like nooses round our necks.

Puce, incidentally, is the colour of the blood spurting from the body of a squashed flea.

Funny how the memory works. I more and more frequently have the experience of glimpsing by chance some person in the street, at some festival, at some airport,  whom I'm convinced I once knew long before. Only it can't be, for they look fresh and new and not at all as they would appear now. Just a moment ago, for example, as the train started to accelerate slowly away from some station, the name of which I didn't notice, I thought I caught sight of Ginnie sitting waiting. Ginnie, dark-haired again, young again. Waiting but not getting on the train. Absurd, of course.

Not that it wouldn't be appropriate and that's probably why I thought of it. Ginnie, waiting all those years for something to happen. While the rest of us threw ourselves onto speeding trains, she remained unwilling to limit her choices. While Marie married her Derek that she met at college, instantly  getting pregnant and never finishing her course, going on to breed a whole tribe, festering as Avril said rather bitterly in domestic bliss, with Derek the ideal DIY husband putting up a hook or constructing a shelf whenever Marie needed to hang something up or lay something down. Which reminds me of the graffiti in the less than luxurious train loo I had to use again just now: "I wish," someone had written, " I could hang up my hat and hang myself beside it."  Then apparently in another hand, "Why don't you?"  Underneath the answer: "Because I don't have a hat." Marie has lots of hats, that's the way she turned out: with a hat for every occasion. And hooks to hang them on, put up by the redoubtable Derek. But without any other more sinister compunction. Almost sickeningly contented, in fact, except for that dreadful business with her eldest son, a drug addict who one day robbed and threatened his own parents. Marie was instructed to practice tough love and exclude him from the family circle. Now she doesn't know where he is. If he is.

And Avril, divorced from her husband and knocked about, so Marie confides, by her current partner, something I find hard to believe because she has been in such amazingly  good form over the few days, even under the circumstances. Prozac, whispers Marie, plus an unethical involvement with Avril's AA counsellor, a married man in his sixties. Marie may be right, who knows. I wasn't around long enough to be told secrets. In fact I stayed the minimum time necessary. The place oppresses me. I seem to meet my shadow round every corner: that solemn, clever girl with her stupid dreams. And then I stumble over the memory of my previous visit, of Ginnie in that dreadful dark basement room filled with the rubbish she could never bring herself to throw out in case it would ever come in useful, the stench of the decaying food people brought her that she never ate, her skin blue white from the years deprived of sunlight and strangely not dirty, though I imagine she seldom washed, her once black and glossy hair become grey as cobwebs. Ginnie, who never wrote to me because, as she said, she never had anything to say,  nothing  ever happened, but who loved to receive news of the exciting lives the rest of us were supposedly living, warming her cold hands on our passions.

No one knew for certain, though we all speculated of course, what had driven her inwards. Marie said, remember how we played a game of statues at that long ago party. I didn't nor did Avril, but there was the photograph to prove that it had really happened, Ginnie grinning widely and openly, not that secretive smirk she later wore even when there was nothing left to smile about. Marie said that Ginnie had forgotten to move when the music started up again. That she remained frozen and wilfully deaf, not responding to the banal themes that had the rest of us jerking and gyrating. Avril, who puts everything down to sex, reckoned that Ginnie had had a bad experience, maybe even as a very young child, maybe something repressed which subsequently paralysed her. Having no evidence of the sort, I wondered if she had simply come to believe the movies and the fairy stories and was waiting for a handsome prince to arrive. Then suddenly one day she had simply realised, sitting on the platform, waiting for a train, that it was too late. They had all gone without her. She was become Miss Haversham without even the memory of a beau.

Fanciful of course, I know that. I know too, as Marie says, that probably nothing any of us could have said or done would have made a difference. That our small messages from our various planets maybe even kept her longer than she otherwise would have stayed. Marie has learned over the years not to burden herself with guilt. As for Avril, she can't seem to grasp anything. She smiles too much, under the circumstances laughs too much. I conclude that  Marie is right about the medication.

The police broke in at last. They found her, Ginnie, Virginia, hanging from the light fixture in her dark room. She had been there for three weeks though the smell, I understand, wasn't as bad as might have been expected. Not much worse than it had ever been. Foul play wasn't suspected even though there was no note. As usual she had found nothing to say.

A train has just flashed by, going the other way, too fast for me to see if I am on it, travelling with empty hands back to the funeral or perhaps to call on my good friend Ginnie, attractive and successful, an object of envy to all who know her, or even simply muddling along, the way most of us do, getting up too late or too early, a life of sunshine glimpsed through showers.

Don't upset yourself, Marie had said, over and over. There was nothing any of us could have done.

Only I am suddenly half afraid of what I will discover when I finally get back to the bleak little apartment that passes for a home. What will I find, dangling from the light fixture, turning slowly in the draught from the suddenly opened door? Turning its empty gaze towards me as I turn now to my reflection against the endless night.