LAST TRAIN TO ANYWHERE (EXCERPT)

Freedom’s just another word for

nothing left to lose. 

Kris Kristofferson

C1

I never seen this beautiful world in near thirty four years because I only seen me. My eyes took it in, but I didn’t feel no awe in me, not like people do that put happiness and health first and achievement and pride second. I keep telling myself, that’s why I’m hitching a ride on this old freight train. To let the living things in. A simple life that flew by like prizes I didn’t want. It flies by now and I want to grab it all. Stuff the pictures in my backpack to look back on. But not a photo, a feeling that I can’t grasp, and that’s what I’m after. Life is transient, innit? You’ve gotta let it go but also hold it like a flame. And you? You’re the wick.

Miracles do happen, geezer. The blinding sun might burn the heart disease right out of me. Sunlight has that power—radiation innit? Mum always says it’s belief that cures you; the placebo effect. If the mind thinks it’s well, the body gets well. Never sick a day in her life. All the proof I need that a bit of travel and some daft poetry efforts will fix me right up. Give my heart a jolt of life. See? Hop a freight train, cop the French countryside like a flyby, all things I missed in one go. Let my shell feel that there’s something to fight for. Give more than it was taught to feel. See? 

The minute I was shoved into school, and they started filling my head with stuff, I became nothing but a head. Body? May as well have been some empty metal container with no soul. They don’t teach soul in school, do they? So of course I didn’t pay no attention when my heart decided it’d had enough. I sold out on it, didn’t I? Non-stop red top hack for the tabloids—a proper sleazeball effort, too. Laughed off spikes in my chest. So when the doc said, “Two years at best, Calvin,” I was already bare numb. 

“Try writing, mate,” he said, proper cheezy. “And live for now. Maybe a little travel.” 

“Alright Doc.” That’ll cure me, yeah? Grand. Will do.

Near blew me out when he dropped it. Jess walked out on me months later, and I near died again. Left me on the floor like a wreck, took me to court, got the apartment. Mad. Good girl really. I neglected her; drove her bonkers. 

She’d laugh at me hid between stacks of steel girders now. “You’re like a Soho cabbie chasing a fare, love,” she’d probably say. I sit up to draw birds, and duck down so rail workers don’t cop me. Mum’d say, “Stop thinking about her Calvin and keep going. Follow your true heart now—and learn to like yourself again, before the end, love.” If she knew I was dying—the news’d kill her.

French freight trains crawl like funeral processions. Mine’s an old red battled beast of heavy duty industry, concrete pipes, dust and rust. Until she gets going. Then it’s heavy metal thunder and toots galore—heart-jolting. The bloody driver missed his calling, I reckon. “Should’ve joined a band, mate! You’ve got heart disease here, geezer. Go easy.” As if he can hear me a quarter mile back.

Rear engine driver’s just as toot-happy. Motors give a Dagenham terrace roar at the bottom of hills. Then yer man at the front near bleeding gives me a heart attack with four blasts of the tuba inside the tunnel. Inside it! Must be deaf. Engines are scrappy too, blaring against the stone because they probably ain’t had an oil change in years. French ain’t so chic, not the shipping companies anyway; rust buckets. 

When it picks up a good pace, things clear. 

This’d be an ideal way to cop a look at the world, only for the cargo straps—old, could shred any minute. Big concrete pipes could roll back and crush me.

I watch flamingos on a beach and listen to chains tink like bags of bottle caps between the flatbeds. A steady beat of heavy wheels drums over the sleepers too, calming until sopranos get strangled on the bends. When it slows, I sit up. The heavy metal music dies, and the train stops by a strip of golden sand and dunes. A family of wild white horses appear near the edge of a forest. They bolt through the dunes, kicking up dust, bound for the turquoise sea. Their long manes flow in time with their canter, wide hoofs cutting up the wet sand. 

I never seen nothing like it in my life. Wild horses, so free, moving as one, taking turns to break off and smash waves into rainbows. They kick up hind legs for no reason and shake their long white manes. And armies of flamingos scatter and circle in loops. I’m sunk and cry. Cry? Me? Man. Doc said writing would help with running more designer clobber with snot and tears. 

When the horses return to the dunes and flamingos land by the shore, the train drives on slowly, as if considering the balance of things. Something glints in the pipe ahead, I wipe my man tears. It’s hidden in shadow—eyes shifting to see the horses before they’re gone. 

We crane to cop a look at each other. It skulks forward—back arched. 

A cat? A biggun. A mountain lion? Does France have em? We’re near Spain now, innit?

A head of brown curls pops up—a young face. 

A girl. 

I shout across the gap between our two carriages, “What you doing on this thing?” Crawl near so she can hear me over the racket. Dread hits after she moves out, face sour—cute but something rotten. “You scared the bloody life out of me.” 

Bare green eyes. Would turn a killer cold—peels a layer of skin off with a look. Unblinking shots at sparrow wings flashing between us. I see a little terror in that apple-shaped face—cut up sweetness. Cut off? Hiding a shank are ye? Cute but dangerous, alright—I’ve been burned by cuteness before. 

“Anyone else hiding back there?” Fending for herself, I reckon. She stays tense, childlike— alone. “You French?” When she clamps to the end barrier, four feet from me, she looks older—late twenties, maybe twenty-seven or -eight. “Speak English?” The tracks behind curve like a scythe. She stares at them as if a leap is in the cards. “Found a hole in the fence, I snuck through,” I say, but my breath’s in tatters from a French penchant for airless tunnels. “You don’t understand, do ye?” No spark in her. 

I reach across. She scuttles back to the pipe. “You’re good, love. Stay there.” 

I sit, journal open and pretend to write—cop bruises on her arms. A faded black eye, yellowing. Movements are puppet-like. Judy running from Punch? Sex traffickers? Wind whips her brown hair across burned cheekbones, her dress just spaghetti straps—a posh bit and clingy. She’s all shoulders and pumped-up top half. Sees me coping a stare and rocks to the old beast’s hum then. Relief, as my heart can’t take a scrap with a female. 

I inch to the edge, where the coupler is. She’s sat side on with a thousand-yard stare—at nothing. “Calvin,” I say, friendly, hand on the penknife in my pocket just in case. “Calvin Denots—Da-Knows. French, apparently but Dagenham born and bred, via a couple of stints in Bow and Stokey.” I offer her a smile—friendly like, no perv—drop it to catch my breath, fight off the depressing bum note because I ain’t got no smell these days neither. “Named after the designer.” I say. “Mum’s embarrassed about it now, she was a shopaholic back then.” 

When she stays schtum, lips like a lockbox with no key, I go on one of my rambles. “Sports agent. Boxing and football, until I got dropped. Geezers decided they needed diversity—nothing to do with me crying in the bog. I’m rambling. I do that.” I make faces over the train’s metal music, like that’ll sort her head out.

Her eyes study my face, all caverns now, and my hair more grey than brown—almost overnight. Silence stares back. I’ve had enough.

A commuter station blurs past and she melts into the shadow of the pipe. When we’re back in the hedgerows, I suck in huge lungs of the French country air, point my nose at pine trees, try grab a whiff. Still nothing. When a body’s so poorly, catching smell is like looking at a photo of a childhood friend but forgetting all the good times you had. I get a lump in my throat everytime. Keep believing, mate.

I get back to my journal and finish a sketch of a bird that I keep seeing since Biarritz, spoonbills apparently—had to look it up on my phone. 

Some more writing might cut the old me out, see, and maybe the heart disease with it—the pen is mightier than the scalpel.

I still ain’t finished season 1 of Fargo. Gonna need to know what happened. Be no worries if I hadn’t tried to go upmarket—one upped myself. Becoming a football agent did me in the end. Thought I was a baller when I was a rat following players all over the UK—a stalker in any other facet of life. Trying to get them on my books. Bare sleep, worry, lies on lies, making up stories for the families about how their kid was the next Ronaldo when he’d be lucky to make the bench. A slow ripening of cynicism twisted my heart into a big tight knot. 

I miss the old me, the good Dagenham lad I started out as. Before I got into excuses as a fledgling scoop merchant—working for free after I blagged a job by calling in schoolboy scoops heard down Hackney Marshes. I had passion then, before my years as a fully-fledged red top twat; wolfed down baguettes and laughed-off stress. 

I was trying to be somebody else. I succeeded at it. 

A version of me went home every night to Jessica. Loved her like mad. She was a once-loving childhood sweetheart and devoted wife, who grew more distant with each New Year. No wonder she legged it when the doc broke the news, left me alone at 32 to fend it off on my tod. Deserved it. Moaned about the winces for years. Never went to the doc when she always nagged. Ignored her as penance; didn’t deserve love because I was out day and night. Working my nuts off to give her a nice life, mind you. Neglected her because I loved her. Mad that, innit? Then that dull stabbing—convinced it was acid reflux—until a gang of machete-wielding hedgehogs turned up beneath my sternum that night. Shat myself ever since.

Doc was right, journaling stopped me praying on my knee to a god I don’t believe in. God can’t save nobody, but belief can. Maybe I should. 

I clock the girl on the other carriage, not as sour looking now, almost sweet. She still ain’t moved—like one of them mime acts in Covent Garden. 

My words slip out of me, from pricks after tunnels. 

Into gasps of light. 

Everything looks new again. “You real?” She reads my lips, comes closer, eyes my haversack then reads what I’ve written all over the floorboards in black marker—my daft poetry efforts:

Where for art thou, come find freedom

Trees and birds, alive, no words

Me, cursed?

Should not have put you first.

I jab on the lid of the marker. “Ain’t got a finish for it yet.” 

She moves her lips, mumbling to herself and creeps to the barrier.

Her gaze drops to my half-empty water bottle. “Thirsty?” I say. “You want a drop, do ye?”

She nods.

Water’s all I’ve worried about since realizing this train don’t quit. “Go on.” 

She drops onto the coupler—unbothered by the guillotines below—snatches the bottle and downs half the water while stood there. Her shoulders slump like a kid who’s slung off her bag after school. I look at stones flying by—one slip and she’s gone. But not a flicker of fear. Her pupils—sleaze in oily manholes, widen on me. She’s too innocent looking, too sheltered to have been put to work by a bunch of lowlife traffickers. “Come here.” I pull her up.

Slight as she is, she fights me off—all legs, wild kicking power if that hard stare takes a dislike. She welds herself to the barrier on my end, eyes fixed hard on me, tracing my worry, my cavernous neck and half-open shirt. 

“I’m sick,” I say and rap my ribs to let her know. “No threat.” I might regret it. 

You better not have a knife?

I cop a look at her frown, then brow piercings, nose studs, a scarred flower tat on her neck on the right side, a claret rose on her left breast, a black flower between her right thumb and finger with the name ‘Leon’ below it. 

We settle then, familial; the water shared. 

“We’re going east now,” I say and squint at the rear engine slipping through hedgerows. “I reckon this is headed to the Mediterranean Sea, with any luck.”

When she nears my haversack, I flinch, then relax and smile. 

She bolts off, skulks back across the gap between the carriages, sits cross-legged, unzips her bag and lines up medicine bottles. Clozapine catches my eye—antipsychotic. I wrote about Frank Klauhasen, didn’t I? World flyweight champ who hid his schizophrenia. “Serious stuff.”

“Mmmhmm,” she mutters and gives me this look of exonerated disdain.

“So you speak English.”

“Mmmhmm.”

“Going somewhere?”

She nods, trembles like a kid wanting to speak but scared to find out. Her cheeks shake into a cute gapped-tooth smile. Marshland hums in reeds around a lake, reflecting clear blue sky. Her eyes dart to  old burst cattails, their seeds drifting over us as starlings swarm up in a murmuration. Spoonbills rise behind, and the white cattail fluff covers the train.

Her grimace of a smile and whisper are the will to speak and a fear to be heard. 

“You what love?” I say.

With a defeated look down, she tries again, “Are you one of them?”