Brighton Train

LAST TRAIN TO BRIGHTON

It was some time before he realised he was dead.

It was only when a group of strangers had let themselves into his house
and begun wrinkling their noses at the dust and flicking at the
curtains in the entrance hall that he had realised something was not
right. He came to the top of the landing and looked down on his
visitors and seeing that they did not notice him, moved out of the
shadows. Finally, he had spoken, brusquely asking them what they were
doing in his house, but they could not hear him. He followed them from
room to room. They ignored him, not in the way that people do when they
want to administer passive punishment, but in a manner that made him
realise they were not aware of his existence. He was dead.

There were many visitors after that, none of whom acknowledged his
presence, so he started to play tricks on them, dropping a cup to smash
on the kitchen tiles, or slamming a door while they haggled over the
price of his house. They always reacted with alarm, then laughed the
incident off saying "Ghosts" to each other to reassure
themselves.

One day a family arrived. These visitors did not leave like the others.
They moved his furniture out and moved their belongings in. They spent
the entire day washing down the walls, vacuuming the carpets and
scrubbing the bathroom and kitchen. Two small children watched a
television that had been set up in a bedroom, his bedroom, occasionally
hurling accusations about each other and demands for food down the
stairs. He tried to keep out of the way as much as he could, but
inevitably one of the family passed through him as she bustled with mop
and bucket. The woman stopped abruptly and shuddered. "Anything wrong,
dear?" Her husband asked, on his knees in the fireplace with dustpan
and brush. "No, someone just walked over my grave, that's all."

The man moved into the garden shed after that and never again went into
the house.

The rage that he had felt at being deprived of his dwelling and
possessions left him. Weeks went past, though he was not aware of time
as a burden. He began to feel a sense of bewilderment and also of
loneliness. He had never been a practising Christian but he thought of
God often. What was the purpose of this emptiness, this abandonment he
asked himself. He wondered if he was being punished for some
unremembered sin.

He began to realise what a marvellous gift life had been. And he wished
he'd done more with his. The past whispered to him, taunted him with
memories of opportunities ignored. While alive, he had never regretted
things - it was an ordinary existence shared by millions of others he
reassured himself. But, now if he'd had his time over again, he would
change everything.

The seasons fled past marked by changes in the garden outside his tiny
shed. The golds and reds of Autumn became the blacks and duns of
Winter. Then there was a flurry of activity as birds and flowers
arrived in Spring. He waited for a sign, a message. Nothing came and no
one entered the shed. He began to regard his existence as
purgatory.

One day, the solitude and the waiting were too much. He went to
work.

The man had been a train driver, a train driver for so long he
remembered steam. The sight of the Brighton Belle in black and crimson
livery, hissing at the platform, had been an epiphany. With his child's
eye, he saw it as a dragon preparing to hurl itself down the tracks. He
declared to his father who hurried him along to their carriage that he
would one day stand in triumph on the footplate of the monster. But he
never did. When he joined British Rail and commenced his first day as
an apprentice steam had given way to diesel and the romance was gone.
But he did drive the trains after several years, though the footplate
had by then become a cab.

He had been a driver on the Brighton line, the same one he had ridden
as a child. And that was where he returned, to the drivers' room at
Victoria Station. He found a corner, too small for a chair, so there
was little chance of mingling his ethereal presence with the corporeal
ones. He listened to the banter, enjoying once again, the railwaymen's
chatter about football, the weather, the tiresome speed restrictions,
the loathsome and ignorant management. He stood in his corner watching
them and wished he could have poured himself a mug of dark brown tea
and joined in. He had once been an active member of the railwaymen's
debating group and he wondered if he would hear his name mentioned. He
didn't.

Going out onto the station concourse he examined the indicator board.
The path he followed could have been distinguished easily by the wake
of shuddering commuters he left behind him. Though he dodged and
squeezed through impossible gaps he could not avoid the occasional
collision.

He felt a compulsion to take the train to Brighton again. He wanted to
see what had consumed his life, to confirm that it was a worthy
occupation, that the regret he felt at taking so little risk was
misplaced.

There was train standing ready on platform 12. He recited the stations
to himself - Clapham Junction, East Croydon, Crawley, Three Bridges,
Gatwick Airport and Brighton, the minor stations omitted, recalled only
as concrete strips streaming past the windscreen, come and gone in
seconds.

He flowed into the cab, unable to avoid contact with the driver,
causing him to shudder as he passed. He stood to one side, out of the
way. The young man who sat on the driver's seat was unknown to him,
perhaps his replacement, or a transfer from another depot.

The man longed to ease the throttle forward, feel the ease with which
the engine took the weight of the carriages, but his hand had no
substance and anyway it was no longer his job. The light at the end of
the platform blinked green, the young man eased the throttle open and
the train moved. First, the short section to Clapham Junction, then the
train was hissing through London's southern suburbs, Streatham Common,
Norbury and on to East Croydon.

The journey to Brighton took 56 minutes. It always took 56 minutes, he
remembered.
He waited for the driver to pick up his duty bag and hurry away down
the platform before leaving himself.

On West Street the man paused looking down the hill past the clock
tower to the sea front and beyond to the white flecked waves of the
Channel.

During the train journey the answers to the questions he had asked
himself had formed: he acknowledged sadly that he had taken the easy
path. He could have done more, he thought. He could have married and
had the joy and burden of children, could have encouraged his friends
in their plans to set out on their own, could have gone with them. I
could have grasped any of a dozen dreams, he told himself. I have
turned away from a great adventure and instead sat by the warmth of the
fire. He felt ineffably sad.

Drawn inexplicably to the sea, the man followed the hurrying shoppers
down West Street until he stood before the entrance to Palace Pier. The
illuminations came on.
It was so vibrant, so colourful that he continued walking. He followed
the railing, his gaze turning from the lights to the green rollers that
slopped at the barnacles and sea weed on the legs of the pier.

He passed up the opportunity to enter the arcade and walked to the end
of the pier. He stood in front of a door he'd never seen before. Light
so bright it penetrated the cracks between door and frame poured forth.
He opened the door gripped by some compulsion he couldn't
explain.

On the other side was a corridor that curved out of sight. Somewhere at
the corridor's end was the source of the light. The man began to walk.
Voices murmured, heard distantly as if from an adjacent room. One voice
in particular seemed to speak directly to him, though he could not
distinguish the words.

He began to realise the walls of the corridor were getting narrower.
They squeezed his shoulders until he had to make an effort to go
forward. Still he persisted, pushing himself through the narrowing gap,
until he began to think of going back. But he did not give up.

He emerged finally, bursting into the light, and in that moment of
transition gave a great wail of anguish, struggling to retain his sense
of self, but the glow of it faded.

"Look," said the midwife, showing the struggling infant, "You have a
boy, a beautiful baby boy!"

And the mother, although exhausted, smiled and took her new baby in her
arms and blessed the miracle that is life.

Christopher Slatter, 2003