Chapter 2: Carriage 74

The tea, when it came, was terrible.

Not bad in the way that tea can be bad — over-steeped, or weak, or made with water that tasted of the tank. This was bad in a way that suggested the person who made it had been given a description of tea by someone who’d once stood near some, and had done their level best with the information available. It was brownish. It was hot. Beyond that, Elliot felt it would be uncharitable to speculate.

He drank it anyway. Recovering the kettle had taken Mr Plum two trips and a long, low conversation with a teenage boy who clearly felt the kettle was his by right of occupation, and the large man now watched him with such hopeful attention that refusing would have been like kicking something that had brought you a present.

“Good?” said Mr Plum.

“Remarkable,” Elliot said, which was true.

Mr Fixer, who had watched this exchange with the quiet pleasure of a man who knew exactly how the tea tasted and had been waiting for someone else to find out, sat down cross-legged on the floor and began to talk.

He talked about the carriage: who slept where, and why, and which bunks rattled worst on the curves. He talked about the water, which was complicated, and the food, which was worse. He talked about the upper seals along the roof, which let the weather in whenever there was weather, and which nobody would mend because mending them needed a maintenance request, and the request had gone forward to the Office three months ago and was sitting on a desk there waiting to be stamped.

“Waiting for what?”

“To be stamped received. Nothing’s received till it’s stamped. And they’ve lost the stamp.” Mr Fixer said this with deep satisfaction. He had never in his life been received by anyone, and did not intend to start. “Three months. There’s people forward been married three months that the Office still considers engaged.”

He did not ask where Elliot had come from. He did not ask what Elliot remembered. He talked round the gap where those questions should have been, and Elliot, who had not yet worked out how to say I died in a supermarket without sounding unwell, was grateful.

“Now,” said Mr Fixer. “The important thing. You’ll need a bunk. And you’ll need the rules.” He pointed his knife at Elliot, instructively rather than otherwise. “Rule one: don’t ask what people had before. Rule two: don’t tell them what you had. Rule three—” He paused. “Rule three’s more of a guideline. Something about the toilets. Plum, what’s rule three?”

“Don’t use the one on the right,” said Mr Plum, from behind the shirts.

“Don’t use the one on the right,” Mr Fixer confirmed. “The bolt doesn’t hold.”

He said it with the flat finality of a man who had learned it empirically, and moved on.

The bunk was on the top tier, above Mr Fixer’s, which was above Mr Plum’s, in a row near the rear wall three rows in from the aisle that Mr Fixer called the Strand for reasons he declined to give. The mattress was a slab of something compressed and wrapped in canvas. When Elliot sat on it, it made a sound like a polite cough.

“Nora had this one,” said Mr Fixer, patting the frame as if introducing two people at a party. “Good woman. Went forward in the spring, just before they lost the stamp — job in the laundry. Very clean. Left you the blanket. Some people get a bunk with no blanket and have to make one out of coats, which is fine until the owners of the coats come looking.”

The blanket was grey and had been washed many times in water that had not been enthusiastic about it. Elliot lay down on it, and the ceiling was a foot from his face — painted boards, cream once, crossed by the shadow of a laundry line. He could have put his palm flat on it. He did, and felt the whole train shudder through his hand.

Then he turned his head, and the carriage went on and on beside him: bunk tops in rows like the roofs of a town seen from a hill, lamplight in the smoke, a child’s sock on a line, and beyond that more lamps, smaller, and beyond those a dimness that might have been more of the carriage or might have been the end of the world. The ceiling was close. The carriage was not.

He lay there for a long time.

The day went down without his noticing. Carriage 74 had no lights to switch off, only lamps to turn low, and it did so a few at a time, from somewhere far off towards him, until the stoves were the brightest things left. The noise thinned into murmurs and the creak of frames. Someone was humming. A child cried once and was hushed. Below him, across the aisle, an old man slept with his mouth open, breathing slow and even, as if he had all the time in the world and intended to use it.

Elliot did not sleep much. When he did, he dreamed of nothing at all, which was a relief.

Morning on the train did not arrive so much as accumulate. The light came in through slots high in the walls and moved slowly over the roof as the train curved, so that waking felt less like sunrise and more like being inside a lantern that someone was turning very carefully in their hands.

By the time Elliot climbed down, Carriage 74 had been up for some time and had opinions about it.

Mr Plum was at the stove plate, stirring a pan of something dark and grainy with a wooden spoon. Mr Fixer was three bunks down, leaning on a post, in conversation with a woman whose wrapped parcel moved from her hands to his coat without either of them appearing to notice. The old man across the aisle was awake — or at least his eyes were open, which with him, Elliot would learn, was not conclusive. He was very old, with a face of deep lines and hair as fine as thistledown, and he looked at Elliot from under his eyebrows for a long, slow moment, and nodded once. The nod seemed to cover Elliot’s existence, his situation and his probable state of mind. Then the old man closed his eyes and went back to sleep.

“Satterly,” said Mr Plum, handing Elliot a bowl. “He does that.”

The porridge was darker than oats and faintly bitter, and Mr Plum had poured something thick and amber over it from a small bottle that hung on a hook by his bunk.

“Malt,” he said. “From the brew car.” He thought about it. “Don’t go to the brew car.”

A square woman with a square jaw came round the end of the row, stopped, and looked at Elliot. Then at his bowl. Then at Elliot again.

“New,” she said, as a matter of record.

“Yes,” said Elliot.

She took from one of her bags a lump of dark bread roughly the size and weight of a half-brick, set it on the edge of his bowl without looking at him, and went back behind a low barricade of crates and blankets two bunks along, where she lived.

“That’s Doss,” said Mr Fixer, arriving from nowhere in the middle of a sentence, which was how he arrived everywhere. “Don’t take it personally. She does that. The bread’s good, actually — she trades a morning on the farm for a loaf of that.” He watched Elliot hold it. “She does that too.”

The bread was dense and sour and the best thing Elliot had eaten since the not-apple.

A boy and a girl went through the carriage at speed, perhaps fourteen and twelve, all elbows. The girl slowed long enough to look at Elliot with frank interest before the boy towed her on by the sleeve.

“Jem and Pip,” said Mr Fixer. “Runners. Messages, parcels, gossip, a chit a carriage. They know every door on the train.” He raised his voice. “And the kettle lives here, Jem!”

“Who said it didn’t?” came back from a long way off.

After breakfast Mr Fixer walked him the length of the carriage, “so you know where you live.”

It took longer than Elliot expected. Seventy-four was laid out in blocks of bunks, three high, with aisles running between them across the carriage and two long aisles running down it, and every block was a street with its own character. One had strung a canvas over its top tier and become, in effect, a room. One was entirely children and one woman, who was either their mother or had given up asking. In one, a man was cutting another man’s hair with great seriousness and a pair of shears meant for sheep. There were stove plates at intervals down the carriage, each with its own small society round it, and a water tank halfway along with a queue that Mr Fixer said was the best place on the train to hear things, if you could stand the wait.

“Gran Marl,” said Mr Fixer, at the second stove, nodding to a very old woman wrapped in three shawls of different ages, like a parcel that had been sent on several times. “Train-born. Been in Seventy-four longer than anyone but Satterly. Argue with her about the past. Everybody does. She likes it.” The old woman lifted a hand without opening her eyes.

He named people as they went — a blacksmith’s striker, a family of five called the Ambreys, a woman who sold thread, a man who sold nothing and was always busy — far too many and far too fast, with a sentence of history for each that stopped exactly at the point where history became rule one. Elliot nodded to every one of them. By the forward end he could turn and see their bunk only as a gap in the smoke, a long way back, with a shape in it that might have been Mr Plum.

“You’ll forget most of that,” said Mr Fixer.

“I’m good with names.”

“Are you.” Mr Fixer looked at him for a moment, pleasantly, and then looked away, and Elliot had the uncomfortable feeling of having been written down somewhere.

The rung at the top of Elliot’s ladder turned out to be held on by habit. He mentioned this, and Mr Fixer said Plum had bolts, and Mr Plum, who was sitting on his bunk with a magnifying lens on a jointed arm and the opened back of a small tin bird, said without looking up, “Tin on the shelf.”

The shelf was above Mr Plum’s bunk, behind his curtain — an old sheet printed with flowers that had faded until they might equally have been stains, or a map of somewhere. Behind it was a narrow world. Tools hung on hooks along the wall, small and fine, the kind for work that has to be done with the breath held. There was a rack of stoppered pots. There was the bird, whose key had stopped turning sometime before Pip was born, and there was a faint warm smell of beeswax over everything, as if the bunk had been polished along with whatever was mended in it.

On the shelf sat a square tin labelled BOLTS in careful capitals.

Elliot opened it. It was full of tea — dark, curled leaves that smelled of smoke and something like orange peel, and even from the tin it smelled more like tea than anything he had been given yesterday.

A hand came past his shoulder, took the tin gently out of his, put the lid back on and returned it to the shelf. Then the same hand passed him a jam jar of bolts from under the bunk.

“Nobody steals bolts,” said Mr Plum, and went back to the bird.

The man in the next row was called Tullis. Elliot learned this at midday, when Tullis came back down the Strand with a buff envelope gone soft at the corners and sat down on the edge of his bunk like a man setting down something much heavier than an envelope.

“Not received?” said Mr Fixer.

“Not received.”

There was a job waiting for Tullis in the laundry, the same laundry that had taken Nora. It had been waiting three months. It could not begin until his transfer was received, and his transfer could not be received until it was stamped, and the stamp was lost. Every third day he walked forward to the Office — most of an hour each way — to ask whether it had been found, and every third day it had not, and he walked back.

“They’re very nice about it,” Tullis said. “There’s a girl on the desk who writes it down every time. In a list. I’m four hundred and something.”

“Two thousand, the whole list,” said Mr Fixer. “Half the train’s behind that stamp. Births. Bunk transfers. That seal.” He nodded upwards at the roof, where there was, now that Elliot looked, a brown stain the shape of a county.

Elliot opened his mouth.

“Don’t,” said Mr Fixer.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were about to be helpful. I could see it coming up your neck.”

Elliot shut his mouth. He had been about to ask something — he wasn’t even sure what — and it lodged in him and stayed there, a small hard question with nowhere to go. In his old life he had been paid to ask it. Where did it break? Not where is it. Where did the thing stop happening that was supposed to happen? That was the job, more or less: walking round a building full of people who were all certain they’d done their part, until you found the desk where the part had stopped.

He went and fixed the rung instead. It took four bolts, and he gave the rest back.

That night, when the lamps were low, he went to the viewing slot by the rear door.

It was not a window. Windows implied glass, and frames, and the civilised business of looking out. It was an opening in the wall a foot wide and two feet high, with three bars across it, and the cold came through it with a hiss.

He put his face to the bars.

There was nothing out there. The moon, or something doing the job of one, was low and behind cloud, and the land under it went away flat and grey and empty to a horizon that seemed much further off than horizons had any right to be. No roads. No lights. No orange glow on the underside of the clouds where a city ought to be. The rails ran back into the dark behind them, two thin lines, and the dark took them.

Somewhere back there, a long way down the rails, was a Tesco in Bedminster. It wasn’t. He knew that the way he knew the floor was under him. But the knowledge didn’t stop his eyes from following the rails as far as they could, as if there might be a light at the end that was the self-checkout.

His mother would have had the phone call by now. He found he could not think about that directly, so he thought about it from the side. She would have rung his mobile first. It would have been in an evidence bag, or a drawer, or wherever they put the phones of people who died holding sandwiches, and it would have rung, and nobody would have answered it, and she would have been furious, for a while, before she knew.

There was no way back. Not off, not down the rails, not anywhere. He stood with that until his hands were stiff on the bars.

When he got back to his bunk there was a second blanket at the foot of it, folded in three.

From behind the flowered curtain below, Mr Plum’s voice said, very low, “It gets cold. In the passes.”

“Thank you,” said Elliot.

The curtain didn’t answer. He climbed up, and lay down under both blankets, and after a while he was warm enough to sleep.