Smile
by F. Egg
Anyway, the last time I saw my friend, with whom I was formerly so close, although our time together on this occasion had been somehow muted, was at the airport. He was due to go through security, but before he went he had told me the following story, about someone – not, I think, a friend, but apparently a true story – who has had some kind of unspecified episode of mental illness, has attended his dying mother, and now is going to take possession of an inherited house. It sounds far-fetched, and I had the sense my friend was seriously embellishing the story as he went along, or maybe he just made it up there and then. This seems most likely – although the story sounded familiar too, a bit like something from Borges. Maybe he was trying to postpone his departure (he has, you know, a terror of flying), though of course there was a set time for that, or perhaps trying to avoid mention of what we were both thinking: that that this would almost certainly be the last time we ever saw one another. This is the story, as best I can remember:
There’s a groggy feeling that lingers after having slept on a train. Disorientation, and a kind of vague shame or embarrassment. Worse, at the moment he had opened his eyes, an old woman (her face a sunken, immobile maze of deep lines) had been staring at him from her own seat (in a cluster on the other side of and further down the carriage). She had not, as you might expect, looked away immediately - instead it was he who had dropped his eyes first (then rubbed them: they were dull with sleep, and the carriage was painfully bright). Rather, she had slowly shifted her gaze elsewhere, with no modification of the impassive expression her face wore. He was reminded of the Dostoyevsky story in which the smallish narrator is barged into by a stranger - who does not register him - on a crowded thoroughfare or walkway, or perhaps it was on a bridge, and becomes obsessed by this perceived humiliation. It was too ridiculous; the man's eyes were barely open, and already they prickled with self-consciousness.
His watch said it was 7pm. It was a piece of good fortune that he had not missed his stop; his train was due to arrive at the small village nearest his ultimate destination in just fifteen minutes. To miss it would have been disaster, in this remote part of the country (though one which would surely soon become familiar to him, after his having taken up residence), at this cold time of year. He had left London bright and busy that winter’s morning, exhilarated, in an exhausted way, to be finally leaving for good. That city had been his home for all of his forty-five years, it had been the backdrop for his life’s entire catalogue of small dramas, his loves, such as they were, and for his more numerous disappointments and frustrations. He felt he would leave little trace on the city, like a stone somehow cast without ripples.
He had held a small leaving do in a pub a night ago, attended by those of his acquaintances without prior commitments. They had sat around a table and made subdued chat over beers, until quite suddenly music had started to be played at such high volume that their talk was drowned out. So rather than go on anywhere, they had decided it made sense to call it a night. The flat he returned to that night, which he had shared with his mother through her illness and to whose walls the sickroom smell clung still, was now almost bare of furniture; it had either been sold, junked, or sent along with his few personal effects ahead of him to the new house – the house that was to be his new beginning and the prospect of which had seemed at times over the last two hellish years to be a mirage.
He had slept happily; unused to alcohol, he had become mildly drunk on a couple of drinks.
The crowded train had sped away from the capital. He had preferred to study the bright, blurred scenery than read. A change in __________ , by which time a waning sun was low in the sky, onto another train, still busy, but now unpleasantly so. This time he was squashed into the window-seat by the encroaching mass of an obese neighbour, who had immediately begun a crudely flirtatious conversation with a heavily made-up woman opposite. The train's progress now seemed punctuated with unpleasant sensations: smells of hot food, irregular bursts of apparently unprecursed high-pitched laughter that sounded slightly maniacal. He began to feel grave doubts about his decision to go north. He had feigned sleep, eventually becoming real.
Now, waking, most of the passengers had gone, but they had left strewn wrappers, greasy smears on windows, impressions on threadbare seat-cushions. By now it was dark outside. Nothing could be seen of the country save an occasional row of distant yellow lights illuminating an empty strip of road, and the darkness made the carriage seem discontinuous from that outside world’s reality.
With a start he realised that his coat was not where he had left it, bundled between his knees. Momentarily frantic, his eyes searched for his travelling bag - his brain began to calculate the considerable inconveniences of having lost it...
but the bag was stowed safely where he had left it on the rack above his head. His coat too. Confused, he stood awkwardly, joints stiff and aching from the discomfort of sleeping for two hours on a train, and retrieved it. It must have fallen to the floor and been placed on the rack by someone – though turning it he noticed (his throat was suddenly dry at the sight) a dusty footprint imprinted on the back. How long had it lain in the dirt? Quickly, he brushed at the footprint.
How must he have looked to his fellow passengers while asleep? Had he snored, open-mouthed, or mumbled, betraying the wasted secrets of a sordidly mundane existence?
The air in the carriage was becoming stifling.
These thoughts occupied him.
He had been dreaming about his long illness, drifting snatches of conversations, about or directed at him, that had taken place over his bed. Voices - professional, condescending, disconnected, as at the time, like radio waves, breaking into empty dreams of grey sedation, interference in a wash of static.
He had tried to force smiles then at the kindnesses of his attendants, though what had appeared on his face was wrong. He shuddered at the thought of how the echo of that not-smile might have appeared on his dreaming face, now, to the other passengers. He seemed again to scent the cloying sickroom smell in his nostrils as he nervously regarded the empty seat opposite.
The train was going slowly and noisily now. It seemed to have lost the momentum it began with. Every so often there would be a squeal, or a flash of sparks, a grinding of gears, as if it were being dragged against its will. The lady with the lined face, he noticed, was no longer in her seat, despite there having been no stop since he awoke. Perhaps she had moved seats to the one next to hers that was obscured from his angle of sight. He leaned forward to see, but no-one seemed to be there. The only indicator of human presence in the carriage was from the far end; a conversation was being held in low, flat voices, and with an oddly incoherent rhythm: the pauses between each speaker’s contributions seeming overlong. There was no animation on either part, except every so often a guttural noise, like a protracted choke would be emitted, followed by silence.
Without warning, the train began to slow further; the tone of the engine fell steadily. Soon it was crawling through the night, and, though there were no town-lights to be seen outside, the phantasmagoria of a lifeless platform and dark station building crept into view, then shuddered to stillness. It was early, 7.12pm. He peered into the gloom, could just discern the sign: it was his station. Slightly panicking should the train leave, he stood hurriedly, grabbed his bag, pushed the button that caused the door to open, and stepped out into the night. He was the only one to disembark, and he strode a few uncertain paces onto the centre of the platform, into one of the islands of lamp-lit light, not quite knowing what to do next. The place was disconcertingly deserted. A few flakes of snow, heralding the coming midwinter, could be seen drifting sideways in the already bitingly chilly air. Behind him, with a heave, the train began to pull away. He turned to watch it go, noticing with a faint shiver that his carriage was apparently empty.
