I had someone on the track my first day on the road. He didn’t jump, but then he didn’t need to jump to get my attention. He slipped down from the platform onto the track like someone slipping into the deep end of a swimming pool. Then he seemed to abase himself on the railbed. He grovelled there in front of the death that was rushing slowly towards him. Of course I’d put all the anchors on, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop in the time I had, the space I had. It had already happened. My first day on the road.
And then he swam up again, scrambled up to the platform surface, and was gone. I of course was in shock, and wandered blankly out of my cab and down the platform. All I could think of was that a suicide had changed his mind or some pranny had done it for a bet. So I was trying to hold both reactions in my mind at the same time, relief and anger, until I could find out which was the one to suppress and which the one to let loose. When a couple of people told me what had happened, I still didn’t know what the right reaction was. What to hold in, what to let out.
It was only a commuter who’d dropped his ticket and nipped down by the live rail to pick it up. That’s the sort of thing we’re dealing with. Then he ran off, to avoid getting a piece of my mind, but perhaps he was lurking just out of sight, waiting for me to get back in my cab so he could sneak back onto the platform, with the smuts on his suit and the rat droppings on his shoes, to resume his interrupted journey. The journey he’d interrupted because his pea brain couldn’t tell him what was important and what was not.
That was my first customer on the line. I’ve been lucky. We drivers don’t deal direct with the public, so in fact we haven’t been trained to use the new words that we hear on the tannoy: ‘customers’ until they’re actually on the track, and then for some reason they’re ‘passengers’. A passenger incident at Marble Arch. I was joking about it with a mate at work, saying that it was mad that they became passengers just when they weren’t going anywhere, and he said with a straight face that he thought it was the right word. Anybody else, you don’t know where they’re going really, but the ones on the track have arrived. They’ve gone as far as they’re going to go.
So far there’s only been one more in front of my cab, and I haven’t seen a death. I’ve been lucky. Still, after the first one, you look out of your grimy window a little differently. If my own little Mum was on the platform waving at me I wouldn’t really take it in. I’m braced for whatever the track has to show me. I’m not moving at any speed, but then nor was Ray. Speed isn’t the only factor.
Number Two couldn’t have been more different from Number One, the ticket collector. This was at Paddington. She wasn’t waiting on the platform. There wasn’t much of a crowd; it wasn’t rush hour. She must have worked out her timing, waiting for the thunder of my train, before she set off. Then she pounded up the stairs, and leaped to end her life.
It’s just that she underestimated her fitness, or even her desperation. What I saw from behind my grimy glass was a person sailing from right to left, and keeping on going. I could see her smart blouse and her running shoes, the shoes she wore to make sure she didn’t slip before she leaped. She would have crashed into the wall and then been crushed against it by my train, except that at Paddington there are two tracks side by side. She sailed right past me, past my train, and broke her ankle in perfect safety on the other track.
Of course, we had to make sure we got her off there before the next train came along. In fact it isn’t the true suicides we drivers are haunted by. Yes, they’re selfish to use our trains for their purposes, to involve us by making us watch. And commuters get vexed. But sooner or later they’ll find their way to what they want, if only they want it enough. It’s different with the casuals. That’s where the trauma lies, for us. When it didn’t need to happen. One lad who started on the road at the same time as me was never the same after a casual. City gent. Father of three. Sees the lace of his handmade shoe is undone. Bends down to tie it up. Not realising that his shoe is safe where it is. But his head. In its new position. Is not.
There’s a thought about Ray I’ve been having for a while now. I’ve been trying it on in my head to see how it feels. It’s a thought about Thursdays. Not weekdays in general. Just Thursdays.
I wasn’t trusted to clean Ray’s bike, though you might think it was just the sort of careful maintenance work I was suited for. Still, Ray had his cleaning ritual. I wasn’t even trusted to oil his leathers, or to run the candlestubs every week or so along the zips to keep them fluent. True, I was trusted to clean his bike boots, but that was a little different. He kept them on. He liked broad preparatory strokes, with me using my tongue at its widest, like a paintbrush, before he signalled that I could start with the brushes and the polish.
So the question is: was I unworthy, or was it that Ray found it hard to let go of certain things? And the follow-up question is the troubling one: if Ray couldn’t delegate cleaning the bike to someone he shared his life with and who would have felt privileged to do it, how could he bear to let a stranger into his private space once a week to clean up?
If you want something done properly, do it yourself. If that really was Ray’s philosophy, then perhaps I’ve found the second point of tallying between him and my little Dad. That was Dad all over, but only Dad before 1975. The Dad who brought me up, not the Dad who came later.
I’m trying to get used to the idea that there wasn’t anybody letting themselves in on a Thursday to do housework. That the household was simpler than I thought, but also more complicated. If I was the houseboy, as I suppose you’d say, Ray was the cleaning lady. If I was the footstool, still, he changed the black sheets on the bed where he slept. I made the bed, and I’d better do it neatly, but once a week it was his turn. He changed the linen and plumped the pillows his head would rest on.
It ought to be a horrible idea, but there’s something about it that fits better than my imagination of a solicitor or a rich kid. It makes me look at my life with him in a new way. The price I pay for that is having to imagine Ray cleaning the toilet’s throat with the brush that his mother used, after he died, to make sure that nothing remained of his life.
I always made out to myself that what happened on Box Hill in 1975, on my eighteenth birthday, was beyond my control. As if I was one of those kidnap victims who become obsessed with their captors — just that it happened very quickly, thanks to Ray’s charisma, so that everything was already decided by the time I first got on the bike behind him.
Well, Ray’s charisma was real, and I wasn’t the only one to feel it. But I went along with it. It’s only exaggerating a little to say that I knew what I was doing when I fell over those long and insolently extended legs. I was ready. I had no real idea of what I was ready for, but still I was ready.
Even sudden things have a history behind them. Maybe it’s the sudden things that have the most history. Sooner or later I was going to have to respond to excitement and danger. It was just a question of when and how I was going to do it. Sooner or later I was going to have to answer the call of the live rail.