The most painful thing one can hear

 is spoken in one’s own mind

1: ON THE RAILS 

             BEYOND THE FORKED TRACKS,  a gaping mouth of a tunnel swallowed the late morning light. The freight train groaned through the bends like an old man nearing the end. Rusty joints clinked as each flatbed met the other, slowing to a prowl. Four short warnings with a tuba-like horn sounded before the engine powered up again. Inching the haul of bulky cargo, the smoky engine gathered speed and huffed into the shadows until engulfed. Birds scattered as the cacophonous clatter of heavy metal thundering against the stone reached one of its earthy red carriages. The scraping of shifting metal plates under their frayed green tarp ended in a smash against the flatbed’s rusted rear barrier. Towering over everything, a wooden roll of black industrial wire rocked like an abandoned ferris wheel, never breaking free from its tattered lashings.

In its shadow, two souls huddled, intertwined by a deathly contract; one with a heart that had endured too much, and the other harbouring a need for a heart to beat anew. 

“What are we doing, what are we doing, what the fuck are we… ?” said Nelly, gripping the barrier and moving back and forth on knees and hunkers.

“Try to relax,” said Tim, his voice deep with relaxation as he flipped open a small black pen knife.

She fell back against the rusted side barrier and stared at him, shaking her head. “Why did I let you convince me to do this? I could… I might… you might die.”
“Relax, relax, relax. We’re grand, I won’t let anything happen.” He searched the old flatbed’s floorboards—scarred, weathered and stained by countless heavy hauls—and found a spot and began hacking out a letter. He looked up to see her press her fingers into her forearm and watch the creamy freckled spots turn burnt red again.

After she had calmed down, her eyes returned to that distant glazed look.
“Are you hoping this’ll put you into remission,” she muttered. “I’ve heard of terminally ill people recovering after going travelling. Nature is very restorative.”
“Steady, Nelly, let’s not go from one extreme to another.”
She dropped her head and waited for him to speak. He gazed ahead as a baritone blast clattered around the dimness until they were swallowed by the cold, pitch-black centre. After the last stop, he reckoned it would be a mile of nothing and lay back against the wooden wheel, his casual laugh lost to the wind. He had pushed for this reckless odyssey, to prove a point about living on the edge and perhaps challenge her views on life and euthanasia.
27.5% chance of survival with her heart.
As dim light poured back into a bend, Nelly rested her chin on the barrier, eyes distant, searching the murkiness. He listened to the melody hummed from her lips until their carriage emerged from the tunnel, the harsh Mediterranean sun glinting off the jagged stones.

A glassy mirage on the horizon up ahead shimmered like a promise as he handed her the water. “Wide open space,” he said, exhaling the heaviness from his chest. “City dwellers need it more than they know.”

With hands no longer shaking, she took a sip and drifted her stare to the distant industrial towns they had left behind. 

“We’re higher. I didn’t notice the climb,” he said, craning over the barrier to see past the mountain they’d passed through. 

“Your face never shows what you’re thinking,” she said, licking her lips pressed into a thin line. 

He let out a slow, controlled breath. “At the minute, I’m thinking about… nothing.” He cleared the lie from his throat and fumbled with the edge of his sleeve. “I’ve had that song in my head since Biarritz, ‘Me And Bobby McGee’,” he said, with a fading smile. When she shrugged, he continued, “by Janis Joplin,” and sang tunelessly, “Busted flat in Baton Rouge, waitin’ for a train… freedom is just another word for nothin’ left to lose.”

“I don’t know it.”

“It’s a great tune. Apt for two people hopping freight trains to God knows where.”

She screwed the cap back on and put the bottle between her thighs. “This wasn’t what I had planned when you agreed to take me with you to France,” she said. “Are you sure you don’t want to go back to Paris? You won a week in a plush hotel; you could be having pedicures and massages now.”

He shrugged a shoulder. “I had no plans to come until you said you wanted to say goodbye to Biarritz. I don’t think I’d have enjoyed Paris. Too stimulating, too much anxiety, too high a chance of…”

“You’re talking about me and not you, aren’t you?” she muttered, lowering her eyes.

“I need to get to know you, Nelly.”

“Why? Because you think you’re getting a bad person’s heart?”

“No.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Why…” She rapped her knuckles on the train’s old splintered floorboards. “Why this?”

He stared up ahead as the train passed a logging machine piling trees. The clatter of its rattling petrol engine drowned out his voice as the engine powered down around a sweeping bend in the tracks. When all was quiet again but for the clop of the sleepers below, he looked at her. “I’ve been living out my last few months with spontaneity. Hopping a freight train felt like something I needed to do. I dunno why.” That ghostly distance in her neared again. “You okay now?”

“No, but as long as you are, I am.”

He smiled at her and looked up ahead. The coast was a blinding glare of miniature shimmering waves. Low above the sea, a thin white cloud stretched its long embrace all the way back to the Bay of Biscay.

.“We’re going north,” he said, looking at his digital Casio watch and then at the sky.

“Doesn’t matter really where it goes,” she said, tucking her green floral dress under her legs to stop it blowing. “Does it?”

He shrugged his cheek. “No.”

The slow wagons clopped through small rural towns and miles of dry, hedge-lined farmland, and bigger towns with ugly grey industrial centres and potholed tarmacked car parks. Then a city that had life but was strangely lifeless. 

Other than mutters to check if the other was okay with continuing the journey, they remained quiet, sweating in the shadow of the wheel. She leaned back on her hands, let her brown hair drape over her drenched chest and back, wiped dirt and sweat across her sunburned cheeks. He gazed at her with intense curiosity as the deranged look left her eyes as each stolen mile passed by, unrecognisable from their first meeting six weeks before.

She arrived stoically at the cheerful restaurant to meet him, following her generous offer posted in a chat room and weeks of DMs. He remembered being clumsy due to a horror that had filled him; wild and vague emotions in comparison to her deathly composure.  Her tattered brown hair obscured her empty face, resembling a ghost ship among pleasure boats. His nervous small talk went unanswered, rambling about his luck at having found a suitable heart donor in her and how rare it was for a heart to go from a woman to a man. She simply nodded along, repeatedly folding a napkin on the table as if it were a flag on a coffin. 

After an hour, he understood the reasons for her suicide attempts but quietly harboured thoughts that she was self-obsessed, dramatic and childish. Ruminations were nothing new to him, however they didn’t consume, distort and haunt him as they did her; to the point that she ignored strangers and looked through even the kindest eyes; as if above everyone; as if the world was hers alone, hers to destroy if she liked. He remembered how anger gripped him with an icy intensity, and how he tried to focus on her positive traits, noting her bored attractiveness, which seemed to be the only aspect she paid any attention to. Body art was a way to cover up what she was, he had thought: a brow piercing in an oval hole; a small faded tattoo of a black rose between her thumb and index finger; two elongated, indistinct tattoos poking up from her yellow sweater on each side of her neck. To him, the reasons she gave for her euthanasia—a myriad of serious mental illnesses and multiple suicide attempts—felt like cries for help; possibly Munchausen Syndrome. 

These niggling questions persisted.

As they shared the last of the two-litre bottle of sun-boiled water, he studied her as she gazed at the straight lines of a forested reserve ahead. Her eyes widened with fear as strange hums filled the air, coming from the nascent recesses of marshland. The cylindrical brown spikes of cattails burst, their fluffy seed heads spread by hundreds of panicked wings as a black swarm of starlings lifted off in a shapeshifting dance. Together with white spoonbills, taking flight in their own morphing formation, the diaphanous cloud of cattail seeds rose and then fell to envelope the train. When the air cleared and the birds ascended out of sight, she sat further back in the shadow of the wheel.

“They’re like the Rorschach test,” she said.

“Blot tests, yeah I know what you’re saying.” He rubbed his forehead with a sigh, his fingers lingering as if trying to soothe a mild headache. He put the knife in a pocket of his beige cargo shorts. “You said your family is dead. Do you have nobody at all?”

“I’ve a distant uncle left. Haven’t seen him in twenty years. Tried to contact him a while ago but… he’s probably dead now too.” Her eyes bulged, revealing veiny signs of sleeplessness. “The men that follow me kind of feel like family. Walter doesn’t like me bringing this up. He says,” She sat up and put on a haughty voice: “You’ve become attached to that fantasy.” She  slumped back down. “He said I’ve created the idea that someone is always watching me and knows everything I do because of psychosis due to my abduction at nine and separation anxiety after my parents died.” Her eyes glazed over. “I can’t talk about this stuff… I might try to jump off this thing.”

Tim tensed his shoulders, his body stiffening for a moment before he forced himself to relax.  “I’ll shut up so.” 

The freight train continued without stopping, trundled on through built up urban areas until it returned to the countryside. She said she was worried the train might not stop in time to rehydrate. Her lips had cracked and her skin was flaked enough to complain regularly again. He complained in support. When it passed a mountain range, overheated and tired bodies gave in; too weary to continue their gripes. 

“I think that’s the Pyrenees,” he said. “That means we’re going into Spain.” He gazed at the sun behind him. “No, we’re headed more south east, maybe towards the south coast of France, I’d say.”

The day’s inferno had reddened her arms and shins. “I really need to drink something.”

“It’ll stop soon.”

It was several more hours before the train slowed at a quiet town and entered a desolate industrial park. Filthy now, with coal black faces and arms, clothes torn—snagged on splinters—she looked down at a big rip along the hem of her dress and a small cut on her thigh. She smeared blood into a mucky mess above her knee. “Really need a drink.”

“We look like a couple of hobos,” Tim said, pointing out a sign. “Toulouse. It’ll probably stop soon. Do you want to go back to Paris? A free week in a plush hotel?”

“I think I want to go on now, to live these last days or weeks to the fullest.”

“You do?”

“I think so.” She gazed back at the lonely tracks. “I do.”

END OF EXCERPT

***

CALLING ALL ADVANCED READERS

As of November 22 2024 until Feb-March 2025, I’m looking for Advanced Readers to give me their thoughts, feelings and ideas on the book/novella. A full readthrough is required. Currently the wordcount is 60,000 words, so not huge. If interested, you can contact me via one of the options in the Contact tab or email me at [email protected] . You’ll be required to sign and NDA. 

I look forward to hearing from you.

Darran