Night Train Read online

  “I really wouldn’t look down,” said Banks.

  Garland looked down. Then she closed them again.

  “Fuck,” she said.

  She opened her eyes. The train was racing along a narrow track on a bridge supported on long crisscrossed struts, over small flat pools of molten orange. One of the pools suddenly spurted out a gout of fire which nearly touched the bottom of the train. She could actually feel the heat from the gout.

  “What does this train run on?” she asked.

  Banks smiled. “I have no idea what it runs on, but it surely runs on something. Which means –”

  “Which means it has engines,” she said. “Which means it has machine parts that can get hot.”

  “Tell me,” Banks said. “Do you hear engines right now?”

  It was hard to tune in to anything over the rattling and the roaring of the carriages, but after a while Garland noticed that something was missing from the overall din of the train.

  “No engine,” she said.

  “You got it,” Banks said. “That’s why we have the run-up. I think the engine shuts down automatically when it comes to one of these bridges.”

  “The whole time? You said this bridge could be days long.”

  “Not the whole time, no, just long enough.”

  “Long enough for what?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” explained Banks.

  Garland looked out again.

  “So right now we’re freewheeling down a narrow track with no power over a lake of heat and fire?”

  “That’s about the size of it,” said Banks.

  “Fuck,” Garland said.

  “I knew you were going to say that,” said Banks.

  * * *

  “Now what?” said Garland, after they had tired of looking at the lake of fire.

  “You tell me,” said Banks. “You’re the one with the plan.”

  “Me? I don’t have a plan.”

  “You got me out of my carriage,” Banks said. “You’re moving forwards. Moving forwards is a plan.”

  “OK, but that’s all,” said Garland. “I have no idea where I’m going, or what I’m going to do when I get there. If I get there, you know, wherever there is. So yeah, moving forwards is the entirety of my plan.”

  “It’s enough,” said Banks, and took a can from the kitbag.

  “Have you thought about what you’re going to do when you run out of cans?” Garland asked as Banks opened it.

  “No,” said Banks. “Have you thought what you’re going to do when you run out of train?”

  * * *

  The next few hours passed quietly. The train shook and rattled, the fire below erupted and belched and occasionally the engine came on with a low whine, ran for a while, and then went off again. Banks and Garland got up from time to time to use the compartment’s bathroom which – like the other bathrooms on the train – was clean, supplied with rough tissues and toilet paper, and had hot and cold running water. Sometimes Garland napped for a while, sometimes Banks did, but mostly they just sat there and looked at their faces reflected in the fire-dappled glass of the window.

  Garland remembered something. She felt in her pocket for the newspaper she had taken in the carriage full of dead. She unfolded it and looked at it quickly, long enough to establish that trying to make out words still hurt her.

  “You can read, right?” she said to Banks.

  He looked offended. “Of course I can read,” he said. Then he saw what she was getting at. “Can’t you?”

  “It hurts my head,” she said. “Might be something I was born with, but I doubt it. Anyway, I found these –”

  She gave him the bits of paper. He flicked through them.

  “Photographs,” he said. “You should have brought the whole paper.”

  “I would have, if I’d known I was going to meet you.”

  Banks didn’t reply. He was sifting the pieces of paper, placing them side by side on the table between them.

  “Who are these people?” he asked.

  “No ideas?”

  “I can make guesses,” he said. “These people,” and he pointed at a picture of a young couple, looking gloomy in very few clothes at night, “are famous.”

  “You know that, or you’re guessing?”

  “Both. I mean, they look rich but not really rich, and they’re glamorous, so they must be famous. But also they look familiar in a way. Like if I could remember things, I would know who they are.”

  Garland nodded. “Anyone else?”

  “Not really.” Banks flicked through the pages. “And this – what is this meant to be?”

  He was looking at a drawing. It showed a giant with protuberant teeth and squinting eyes kicking a house. The giant had a military helmet on like he was an evil giant soldier. Inside the house, tiny women and children were apparently screaming. Beside the building a figure in black robes holding a farm implement stood, arms folded.

  “I have no idea,” said Garland.

  “I recognise that one,” said Banks, indicating the black-robed figure. “That’s Death.”

  Garland frowned. “Two famous people and Death. This is a great newspaper.”

  Banks flicked through the remaining pieces of paper.

  “Wait,” he said, and stopped at a photograph of a small crowd gathered round a man in glasses. The man was saying something and it was making the crowd excited and angry. Some of them were clapping and others had their fists in the air. Whatever he was saying was obviously both important and emotional.

  “What is it?” said Garland.

  Banks pointed at a figure at the side of the picture. Whoever it was had turned their back to the camera, and the photo was cropped so that they were partly out of shot. Only their back and shoulder were visible.

  “I don’t get it,” Garland said.

  “That person there,” Banks said.

  “What about him?”

  “What about her,” corrected Banks.

  “How do you know it’s a woman?”

  “Because,” said Banks, “it’s you.”

  * * *

  Garland snatched the photograph from him. She studied it closely, as though hoping the figure in the photograph would suddenly turn to the camera and reveal themselves.

  “How do you know it’s me?” she said. “It could be anyone.”

  “Look at the hand,” Banks said.

  Garland looked. “It’s just a hand,” she said.

  “The way she’s holding it,” Banks said. “Placing it at the base of her throat. You’re doing it now.”

  “No I’m not,” said Garland, moving her hand away from the base of her throat.

  “It’s you.”

  “Nonsense,” said Garland. She scrunched up the paper and threw it across the carriage.

  “What did you do that for?” cried Banks, and scrambled up to get it.

  Just then the train hit a sharp curve on the track, lurched, and threw Garland to one side. Banks, who was still moving across the train aisle, caught the full shift of the train’s mass, and was slammed into the wall opposite. Garland leapt to her feet and ran over to where Banks lay.

  He wasn’t moving. A drop of blood had appeared in the corner of one eye, while the other was half covered by its lid.

  “Banks!” she shouted. “Banks, wake up!”

  Banks moved, slumped back, and this time a yellow sliver of drool ran down his chin. He closed his eyes and began to moan. Garland looked around for some water. The kitbag was still on the other side of the aisle. She stood up and got it. The water bottle wasn’t in the kitbag.

  “Fuck,” she muttered, and realised Banks had been holding the bottle in his other hand when he had been looking at the newspaper photos. She stuck her head under the table and saw the bottle, bumping feebly under Banks’s seat. Reaching for it, she banged her forehead, said “Fuck!” again and rolled the bottle out with her fingertips.

  When she finally stood up again, Banks wasn’t there
.

  * * *

  “Banks?”

  She looked around. How could a man as tall as Banks just vanish?

  “Banks, where the fuck are you?” He was right, she really did say that word a lot. She turned round to look back down the compartment. Nothing. She crouched down – perhaps he had got under something. It seemed unlikely: he would have just as easily got into an eggcup as under one of the train tables.

  “Banks!”

  She threw open the door of the bathroom, but he wasn’t there. And then she saw the compartment door, the one they’d just come through. It was banging softly against something, and the thing it was banging against was Banks. Arms wrapped around folded legs, he was mumbling to himself rhythmically, almost chanting. She lowered herself beside him.

  “What are you saying, Banks?” she asked gently. Banks didn’t reply. He carried on muttering his chant.

  “Seven… four… nine… six… seven… fourteen… five… one…” he said.

  “What are you doing, Banks?”

  “Six… eight… twenty… zero… eighteen… nine…”

  “Banks? What are these numbers?”

  Banks lifted his head and looked at her. She recoiled. His eyes were completely white.

  “Four… eight… four… three… four… thirty…”

  There was nothing she could do, so she waited. She waited as Banks counted out his seemingly random numbers. She waited as his eyes stayed white in their sockets. After a while, she did what anyone else would have done (or so she told herself). She went and got a pen from the kitbag and wrote down the numbers.

  * * *

  “Twenty-nine… three… two… six… three… two… four… ninety…”

  The numbers made no sense to Garland but then, she reflected, they wouldn’t. She had no way of cross-referencing them or looking them up to see if they had some external significance. After a while, she did notice one odd thing about them. The bigger numbers, the ones she thought of as the two-digit numbers.

  Most number chains, so far as she was aware, didn’t have two-digit numbers in them. There was no need. You didn’t need to say “twenty-one”, you just said “two” and “one”. The same for “nineteen”, or “seventy-four”, or any other two-digit number. There was just no place for them. But every so often, Banks would say “thirty-seven” or “forty-six” or even, on one occasion, “ninety-nine”. He never, Garland noticed, went any higher than that, so presumably he hadn’t been – she didn’t want to, but she decided it was the right word – programmed to go any higher than that. So no three-digit numbers. None of it made any sense to her. There were no recurring groups of numbers. No mathematical formulas that she was aware of. Nothing. She was just writing down random numbers that a man with white eyes was chanting.

  After a while Garland gave up writing. She put down the pen and placed her hand on Banks’s arm. If he noticed this, he gave no sign. Soon, despite the cramped nature of their location, she grew sleepy, lulled by the repetition of the numbers.

  Beats counting sheep, she thought, and just had time to remember what sheep were before she fell fast asleep.

  * * *

  When she awoke, she could hear banging. She sat up and opened her eyes. Banks was thumping his head against the wall.

  “One,” he said, every time his head hit the wall. “One. One. One.”

  Garland tried to restrain him, but Banks was too strong.

  “One,” he said, again and again. “One.”

  Garland emptied the rucksack and placed it between Banks’s head and the wall. It softened the thumping at least and would ensure that Banks didn’t injure himself.

  The problem with repetition is that it is very repetitive. After fifteen minutes of unvaried “ones”, Garland longed for the sparkling variety of the previous number lists. She was about to look for something to block her ears with when Banks stopped chanting.

  The silence was unnerving, but no more than the terrified, startled look on Banks’s face. He was staring at her, tears pooling in his eyes.

  “What’s wrong?” she said. “What was that, some kind of countdown?”

  “What was what?” Banks replied, still looking stunned.

  “Never mind,” Garland said. “Are you OK?” It was a stupid question but it was all she had.

  At first Banks didn’t reply. Then he said, “I know who I am.”

  He grabbed her arms so hard she thought his fingers might crush them. When she cried out, he let go.

  “I know who I am,” he repeated. He got to his feet, and looked at his face in the window. He made a fist of his hand and smashed it into the plastic glass. His fist bounced back, bloody. He did it again, and again.

  “I know who I am!” he shouted, and began to batter both his fists against the door.

  Garland wrapped her arms around him and pulled him back to the floor, where he sat, sobbing.

  They stayed like that for a long time.

  Interlude One

  There used to be a boy called Peter.

  * * *

  When he was seventeen, Peter was called into the principal’s office.

  “You’re leaving us today,” the principal said.

  Peter wasn’t especially surprised. He seemed to spend most of his time in the principal’s office, sent there by teachers who took his lack of interest personally. Peter didn’t hate the teachers, he just found what they had to say dull, so dull that he would just get out of his seat and go and do something else. Sometimes he would get out a book and read that instead. Sometimes he would wander over to another student and start talking to them. Several times he accessed the school lesson program on his desktop computer (it was the kind of school where students had computers on their desk) and changed the lessons so they were more accurate.

  Peter had discovered long ago that some of the things they were being taught were wrong. A lot of the science was wrong, like someone had misheard it or written it down incorrectly. There were big gaps in the language and literature syllabus, where books would routinely lose three or four chapters without comment, as if they had been stored on corrupted hardware. Worst of all, Peter found, was the history syllabus.

  The history syllabus was pretty much nonsense. Events followed events with no explanation or apparent connection. Figures appeared and disappeared at random. Maps didn’t make any sense. Facts contradicted themselves. Peter tried to correct the syllabus, but history isn’t like science: it’s hard to fill in the gaps just using logic and equations. When Peter got into the university computer, which had a backed-up archive, he was able to access a lot more information and correct the course to a greater extent, but there were still enormous gaps, sometimes where the information had just disappeared (an entire country had apparently ceased to exist about three years back) and sometimes where the information still existed but it had been placed behind an impenetrable wall.

  Peter was about to break down the impenetrable wall when the principal called him to tell him he was leaving.

  “Your talents, if we can call them that,” said the principal, “will be better employed elsewhere.”

  * * *

  Peter had no time to say his goodbyes. This upset him, as there were one or two people he would miss. There was a boy called Andro, and he had the best hair Peter had ever seen. Peter could look at Andro’s hair the way other boys looked at sports shows or cars. It was absurd, there was so much of it, but it was beautiful.

  One day Andro had said, “You like it so much, touch it.”

  Peter said, “I don’t want to.” But he did. In fact, there was a lot of Andro he wanted to touch, but he couldn’t say that.

  Andro sighed. “Here,” he said, and shoved Peter’s hand into his excessive hair. Peter pulled his hand away, then put it back. He dared not stroke Andro’s head, but instead twisted his fingers around Andro’s hair and then dug his hands in as if bathing them.

  “That’s enough,” Andro said. “Someone’s coming.”

  La
ter, Peter saw Andro talking to some other boys. He was sure, he didn’t know, that they were talking about him. When Andro ran his fingers through his ridiculous hair, Peter was certain. He was a joke to them.

  * * *

  The car pulled away with Peter in the back.

  “You going to help us win?” said the driver.

  “I beg your pardon?” Peter said.

  “Fucking ponce,” the driver replied, and after that neither of them said anything at all until the car reached the big house.

  * * *

  The house was the oldest thing Peter had ever seen. There were stone pillars in front, holding up a porch with a triangular roof, and the statues on the lawn had noses and hands missing like petrified lepers. Even the front step was dented like a pillow from years of people walking on it. Inside the house were carpets that smelt of dust and paintings of people with round eyes and no chins. The men wore armour and the women and children wore dresses but apart from that they all looked the same, a defunct race of globe-headed, globe-eyed people who liked being painted.

  The driver shoved Peter into a room with a very long table in it and left, closing the door behind him. At the end of the table was a man sitting at a laptop computer and, improbably, smoking a pipe. When he saw Peter, he stood up.

  “Come here,” he said. “Look at this.”

  Peter looked at the laptop. On the screen was a film. In the film, ropes of different colours tangled themselves around a cartoon bear. The more the bear struggled, the more the ropes tangled themselves.

  “I can’t do these things,” said the man.

  Peter sat down. He looked at the keyboard, tapped a few keys tentatively, and having got the measure of the puzzle, untangled the ropes.

  “Good Lord,” said the man. “I’ve never seen that happen before. Although,” he added, “the aim of the game is not to free the animal.”

  He hit a key, and the ropes snapped back into place. They snaked and coiled around the bear, until they were so tight that the bear’s eyes popped out like those of the people in the paintings, and then burst.

  “There we go,” he said, and extended a hand. “Call me Mister Denning,” he said. “And welcome to Park.”