Chapter 2: The Other Train

He stepped off the gangway and the wood underfoot changed.

That was the first thing — a small, structural welcome. The Meridian’s gangways were decked in what The Meridian had to hand, which was salvaged plank in a uniform working brown that had been replaced and replaced and replaced until the gangway itself was a mosaic of small, old browns. The Calloway’s gangway terminus was painted. The slats had been red, once, and were now red where they were not worn through to wood, and the worn-through patches had been touched up by hand with a brush that had clearly not had the same red as the original red. The gangway resolved, on close inspection, into two slightly different reds in conversation with each other. It was the kind of detail you noticed because you had nothing more important to notice yet.

The smell hit him second.

The Meridian smelled of oil, hot pipe, communal cooking, three thousand pairs of slowly dried socks, and a particular damp that lived in the middle carriages and was not, despite intermittent investigation, ever entirely accounted for. It was a smell Elliot had stopped noticing within a week of arrival, the way you stopped noticing the smell of your own house. He noticed it now, by absence.

The Calloway smelled of spice.

Not strongly. Not in any one direction. It was a low, steady undertone, threaded through with the same hot-metal background of any working train — but the cooking that had been done on this train, recently and not recently, had used different ingredients in different proportions with different priorities. It was a kitchen smell from a kitchen that did not belong to him. The way someone else’s house always smells, however clean, like the bodies and the breakfasts of people who were not you.

Music.

That was third, and closer than it had been from the gap. Up here on The Calloway’s platform deck, the music was not a single source but several — a cabinet wheezing somewhere amidships, a drum rhythm being kept by a young woman with a small frame between her knees, and somewhere further back, faintly, a horn line that could have been heard from a small indoor concert hall on a still night. The musics were not in tune with each other. They were not, as far as Elliot could tell, attempting to be. They were each operating on a slightly different theory of what the morning required, and the cumulative effect was not chaos exactly but the deliberate, layered noise of a train that had decided, at some point, that quiet was a vacancy and vacancies were bad for business.

He kept walking.

The deck on The Calloway was wider than The Meridian’s — or felt wider, which in a place this size was almost the same thing. Banners stood out from the carriage walls along its length: a deep, near-violet red on the carriages directly behind him, fixed to brass poles that flexed in the matched wind. The lettering on each banner was simple — a glyph or two, repeated — and it took Elliot a moment to read the system. Each carriage’s banner gave the carriage’s number and class colour. He was, he gathered, currently in the red. Two carriages forward, he would still be in the red. Eight or nine carriages back, the banners would shift to gold. Beyond gold, green. Beyond green, blue.

A simple system. Designed to be read at a glance. Designed, also, to be read.

“Token, friend.”

A man had stepped into his path. He was Calloway crew — the uniform was the same general idea as Albion’s, in the sense that it was a uniform, but it was finished differently: a band of dark red across the breast, a small enamel pin at the collar, the cuffs turned back to show a contrasting lining. He was holding out a hand with the brisk patience of a person who had done this work all morning and would do it all afternoon and would, in the doing, be friendly without being interested.

Elliot produced the brass token.

The crewman looked at it. He turned it over. He looked at Elliot’s face, then at the token, then at Elliot’s face again — a small, professional comparison that took perhaps two seconds and was the entirety of his interest in the question of whether Elliot was who Elliot’s seal said he was.

He returned the token. He nodded.

“Conductor’s man. Stay on the painted line if you don’t know where you’re going.” He pointed at the deck without looking, and Elliot followed the point. There was, indeed, a line painted along the deck — a thin orange stripe, recently refreshed, running along the carriage wall in the direction of the body of the train. “Follow it inside. It’ll get you off the platform. After that, you’re on your feet.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me, friend. Don’t thank anybody on this train without you’ve worked out first what they did for you. Saves confusion.”

He moved on. He was already lifting his hand for the next arrival.

Elliot logged it. The phrasing was warm — friend, friend — but the content was not warm, and the gap between them was, he suspected, going to be a recurring feature of the next four hours.

He followed the painted line.

He had been on The Meridian long enough to forget what it felt like to be new on a train.

He remembered now. The corridor he walked was not a Meridian corridor. The proportions were off — wider by perhaps eighteen inches, lower by perhaps two, so the cumulative effect was that of a corridor that had been stretched in the wrong direction. The light was different. Where the Meridian ran caged bulbs swung on cables, the Calloway ran shaded lamps in fixed brackets, and the shades were coloured — soft amber here, a pale green further on — so that the corridor’s lighting was not lighting in the functional sense but atmosphere, the way a restaurant has atmosphere, and the atmosphere said we have thought about how this corridor looks and we would like you to think about it too.

There were paintings.

Actual paintings — not photographs, not posters. Small framed paintings hung along the corridor wall at irregular intervals. He passed one of a horse standing in a field that looked like nowhere in the wilds he had seen. He passed another of a woman in a dark blue coat. The paint was old. The frames were not.

He thought of Plum, who would have looked at the frames before the paintings, and would have known something Elliot didn’t about the wood and the joinery. He thought of Fixer, who would have looked at neither and would already have worked out which of the paintings would fetch the most chits if traded forward.

He thought of the time.

He had checked it before stepping off the gangway and was checking it again now, the way he had checked watches in the old life when a meeting had begun and he was tracking how long he’d been in it. Six minutes from the bell. Eighty-five minutes of platform-to-platform credit consumed, on the Conductor’s clock. Two hours and thirty-four minutes of working time on The Calloway remaining, give or take.

People moved past him. Calloway people. They moved differently. That was the third or fourth difference and the one that took him longest to identify. Meridian people in a corridor flowed; Calloway people occupied. They stopped to talk in the middle of the corridor without acknowledging that this was a thing being done. They held conversations across the width of it. They rested a foot on a rail and leaned in a way that broadcast, very clearly, this corridor is mine for as long as I am standing here, and you may walk around me if my standing here inconveniences you.

He walked around them. He had walked around people in Bristol, on stations and pavements and in the narrow aisle of the Tesco Express, and the muscle memory was still in his legs. The walking-around was an art form on this train, he suspected, and he was, unhelpfully, fluent in it.

“You’ve come from the Meridian.”

A young woman had fallen into step beside him. She was perhaps twenty. She was wearing what The Meridian would have called overdressed and what The Calloway, evidently, called Tuesday. She had three rings in one ear and none in the other, and a cloth bag over her shoulder that did not, despite the weight of its contents, sag.

“I have,” Elliot said.

“You walk like one.” She said it the way someone might say you have something on your face — a small public service, casually offered. “Slow up, hands lower, look about three paces in front of you instead of six. People will read you for a beggar otherwise. We have beggars. They walk the way you walk.”

“Helpful.”

“Two chits.”

“For what?”

“For the advice.”

He looked at her. She looked back, perfectly serene, with the unembarrassed gaze of a person who saw no particular contradiction in offering free advice and then charging for it. Behind her, somewhere in the carriage, somebody had begun to play a stringed instrument badly. Or possibly very well — Elliot could not tell which.

“I’m not paying you.”

“Worth a try.” She did not seem put out. “Where are you headed?”

“Looking for someone. Carriage 27.”

“Long walk.”

“How long?”

“Twenty minutes if you don’t stop. Half an hour if you do, which you will, because you’re Meridian and you walk slow.” She tilted her head. “Friend or business?”

“Business.”

“Whose?”

“Mine.”

She grinned. It was a sudden, unrehearsed grin, and for an instant she did not look twenty but twelve, the grin of a child who had got an answer to a question she hadn’t expected to land. “Mine. That’s better.” The grin folded back into the working face. “Watch the green carriages around 24, 25. Apprentices’ market. Crowded. Loud. They’ll try to sell you something and they’re better at it than they look.”

“Thanks.”

“One chit.”

“I said no.”

“Different advice.”

He shook his head, and she fell back, and was gone.

He would be paying her, he reflected, if he ran into her again. Not because the advice was worth a chit but because a person who had positioned herself this efficiently in his morning had probably positioned herself in other mornings too, and a person who could be relied upon to appear was, in a place where you knew nobody, an asset.

He filed her face. He kept walking.

The carriage banners changed.

He had walked through the last of the red sometime in the previous five minutes — past a group of older men in matching coats playing what looked like dominoes on a folding table set up in the corridor, past a stand selling small rolled pastries that smelled aggressively of something sweet he could not name, past a doorway through which he glimpsed a room of perhaps thirty people listening attentively to a single speaker, the speaker delivering whatever it was with the fluent rhetorical confidence of a person addressing an established crowd.

The gold began. The banners snapped above his head. The walls in the gold section were panelled in a darker wood than the red had been, polished, the panels separated by thin brass strips that caught the lamp light and made the corridor read as more luxurious than it probably was. There were more shops here, or what The Calloway used as shops — small open-fronted alcoves built into the carriage walls, each manned by a person with a particular set of goods, each person calling, singing, or otherwise announcing the goods to the corridor traffic with a degree of vocal projection that would have got a Meridian shopkeeper a stern conversation with the carriage warden.

Elliot stopped at one of them.

It was a tea-bar. He recognised the function before he recognised the form: an L-shaped counter built into the alcove, an urn at one end, mismatched cups stacked on a shelf above, a small handwritten board on which were chalked some words he assumed were prices and at least one word he assumed was a name. The man behind the counter was perhaps his age, broad, bald, with a moustache that had been waxed at some point earlier in the morning and had decided, in the meantime, that it would prefer not to commit. He was reading.

“Tea, friend?” the man said, without looking up.

“Please.”

“Sweet?”

“As it is.”

“Money up.” The man glanced up, identified the foreign coat, and added without rancour: “Meridian cup is two of yours. Please don’t try to argue. I argue back, and I’m better at it because I’ve been doing it longer.”

Elliot put two chits on the counter. The man put a cup in front of him.

The tea was — different. Not bad. Not Birdie’s, either. It tasted of something herbal that Elliot had not encountered before, and it was hot, and it was, by the standards of a man who had been moving for two hours on a single Meridian cup and a slice of yesterday’s bread, exactly what he needed.

“You’re looking for somebody,” the man said. He said it in the way that meant I have already known this for several seconds, and I’m letting you catch up.

“How do you know?”

“You came in alone, you put your money down without bargaining, you didn’t sit, and you’re holding your cup with one hand. That’s a man who’s drinking on his way somewhere.” The man closed the book and set it aside. The book was thick and the cover had been wrapped in oilcloth at some point in its life, and the oilcloth, like the gangway slats, had been touched up. “Who are you looking for?”

Elliot weighed it. The Conductor had told him to be brief. The Conductor had also told him that Calloway records were oral, supported by paper rather than the reverse. The man with the moustache had not asked him to sit but had set down a book and engaged, which was, in the language of this train, a gesture.

“Maren Toll,” Elliot said.

The man’s expression did something. It was not a large thing. It was a brief, controlled adjustment of the muscles around the eyes — the expression of a man recognising a name he had heard recently, not the expression of a man recognising a name he had not heard in years. Recently. Elliot logged it.

“Old Maren,” the man said.

“That’s the name I have.”

“What do you want with him?”

“Business from the Meridian.”

“What kind of business?”

“His.”

The man looked at him for a long, considered moment. The moustache’s intentions for the morning remained unclear. He looked, Elliot thought, like a person trying to decide whether the answer to a question would cost him anything.

“Carriage 27,” the man said. “Berth eight. Down the wall on the east side, second curtain along. He’ll be in. He doesn’t go out before second bell.”

“What’s second bell?”

“You weren’t told?” The man’s expression did something else. This one Elliot did read. It was the small, fond exasperation of someone who has just been reminded that not every person standing in front of his counter has had the benefit of growing up the right way. “Bell at the platform marks T-zero. Second bell’s two hours in. Half-time. People who’ve finished their crossings start moving back. Anyone trading hard waits for it because the rates settle by then. Maren’s a settled-rate man. Always has been.” A pause. “Was.”

“Was?”

“Is. Is. Slip of the tongue.” The man’s hand found his moustache and gave it the small encouragement it had been failing to give itself. “Tell him Vesh sent you, if it helps. It probably won’t help. Maren’s not a man who needs brokering. But the courtesy is the courtesy.”

“Vesh.”

“Vesh. Two chits if you’d like another tea.”

“I’m fine for now.”

“Fine for now is not a thing you should say on this train. Fine for now is what people say before they’re not fine. But it’s your tongue. I won’t lend you mine.”

He picked up his book. He resumed reading.

Elliot stood at the counter for a moment longer than the conversation required. Vesh did not look up. The moustache, in its quiet way, was waiting him out.

“Vesh.”

“Yes, friend.”

“You said was.”

“I did. I corrected it.”

“You said it first.”

The book lowered. The eyes met his over the top of the page. They were tired eyes, Elliot saw — not in a momentary sense but in a long, settled sense, the eyes of a man who had been running a tea-bar at a corridor crossroads for longer than he had been doing anything else and who had become, in the running, a small unwilling expert in the gossip of his train.

“I said was because Maren has been keeping inside more than usual the last while,” Vesh said. His voice had not changed register, but the words came out with more care. “He’s been a quiet man for seven years and he’s been quieter, lately. People notice. I notice. I’m not saying anything by it. I’m saying I corrected myself for a reason I can’t put a finger on, and I won’t pretend I didn’t.” He held Elliot’s eye. “Now drink up, friend. I’ve a queue forming behind you, and I don’t make money chatting.”

There was, Elliot saw, no queue.

He drank the rest of his tea. He set the cup down. He nodded at Vesh, who returned to his book without further acknowledgement, and he stepped back out into the corridor with the small, settled feeling of a man who had paid for tea and received, in addition, a piece of information he had not been expecting.

He had a name now. Old Maren. He had a berth — Carriage 27, east wall, second curtain. He had a broker’s name to drop, Vesh, and he had something that was not yet evidence and not yet rumour, the feeling-in-the-middle that was, on The Meridian, the thing he had learned to pay closest attention to.

He’s been a quiet man for seven years and he’s been quieter, lately.

He filed it. He kept walking.

The gold gave way to green four carriages later.

The transition happened not at a doorway but along the length of a single carriage — the banners above shifted, the panelling lost its brass strips, and the corridor, almost imperceptibly, narrowed. The shops thinned. The voices, which had been loud through the gold, dropped to a working murmur. People in the green were moving with intent, for the most part: not the standing-and-occupying of the red, not the calling-and-trading of the gold, but the head-down, get-it-done movement of people on their way somewhere they had to be.

This part of The Calloway, he thought, looked like the part of any city where people lived. Where the performance got shorter because the audience got familiar. He recognised it. It was the part of London he had felt at home in. The part of Bristol he had actually missed, when he’d missed anything.

The numbers on the carriage walls climbed. 22. 23. 24. 25.

The young woman from earlier was correct about the apprentices’ market in 24 and 25. The corridor through both was thick with stalls and stall-keepers, none older than perhaps eighteen, all of them shouting prices for things Elliot did not have time to look at and would not have understood the value of if he had. He kept his pace. He kept his eyes ahead. He had, he was pleased to note, mostly stopped walking like a beggar — or so the absence of further unsolicited advice suggested.

He stopped in the corridor.

The carriage was a residential one. The corridor ran its full length with curtained berths along both walls, each berth marked with a small wooden plaque — a number, a single line for a name, sometimes a second line for a trade. East wall. Second curtain along.

He counted. Berth one. Two. Three —

The plaque came up at eight. The number was carved into it, painted black; the name line read M. TOLL in a steady, unornamented hand, the kind of hand that wrote names because names had to be written and saw no reason to make a performance of it.

The curtain was drawn.

Elliot stood in front of it for a moment. He could hear the train around him — wheels, voices, the working sound of a thousand small lives being lived through the wall — but from the berth itself he could hear nothing.

He raised his hand.

Behind him, a long way down the corridor, somebody was playing a horn.

He knocked on the wooden frame beside the curtain.

“Mr Toll,” he said. “My name is Elliot Marsh. I’m from The Meridian. The Conductor sent me.”

The horn played on. Nobody answered.

He waited. He counted, for reasons he did not entirely understand, to ten.

Then he reached for the curtain.