Box Hill Read online

  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.

  But when I did, it turned out I was braver than I thought. I wasn’t like the man who slipped down there, too stupid to be parted from his ticket, my first day on the road. I was as unhesitating as that other jumper, the one who sailed right past the risk and landed on the far side of it, relieved, disappointed and with absolutely no idea what was going to happen next. I didn’t even break an ankle.

  A couple of years ago I took my nephew Charlie up to London. Half-term treat. He was the baby that stopped Joyce from going on holiday in 1981, the pregnancy. But you can’t hold a grudge. Particularly as for a while yet he still thinks it’s cool to have an uncle that drives trains. We ended up in Whitehall, at Horse Guards. We’d spent the afternoon watching roller-skaters hurtling around in a theatre, pretending to be trains, and here was stillness. The Guards looked out from under their helmets as if the space was empty for miles in front of them, as if the other side of Whitehall was a white desert stretching far beyond the Thames. Charlie was fascinated, and seemed to want me to try and catch their eyes, by shouting or clapping or waving my arms, though he was reaching an age to be mortified if I had. He was at that stage when kids are trying to teach themselves to slouch and look surly, but he kept straightening up, watching the Horse Guards, his posture improving by leaps and bounds until he caught himself and forced himself to slouch all over again.

  The Horse Guards reminded me of Ray, of course. Being ignored has always stirred me up somehow. I feel unworthy, naturally, but I’m also tuned up by it, as if a change was suddenly going to come over this handsome blank of a face that won’t look at me, and when it does I will respond immediately and without question. As if a man is only a man if he takes no notice of me.

  You could say the Horse Guards reminded me of Ray. Or you could say Ray reminded me of the Horse Guards, as I saw them when it was me that was the schoolboy at half-term. How far do you have to go back to understand how something started? Maybe Ray was a substitute for something, but still. There was no substitute for Ray.

  The Sound of Music was the show to see then, not Starlight Express, but it was always Whitehall and the Horse Guards. Charlie said he wanted to go to the London Dungeon, but I think that’s unhealthy, and anyway I told him London Bridge was too far from Victoria, where the show was. When I suggested the Horse Guards, and told him there were real horses, he brightened up.

  In fact you could call today’s Horse Guards only rigid and unresponding by comparing them to the watching crowds who slouch and shuffle round them. If you look closely, you can see all sorts of little fidgets. The Horse Guards I remember as a schoolboy were fidget-proof, and you could really believe they were going to faint before they’d blink. Each one of them was a unit with no subordinate parts, and they would either sit on their horses unmoving or fall from the saddle as a single mass.

  I’m not saying the old style was better, I’m just stating a fact, that a change has taken place. And it’s not particularly that I’m affected by the changes in me, now that I’m looking at a soldier who’s half my age and not twice as old as me. The Horse Guards used to look as if they were stone, and now they’re only fibreglass. A strong wind would blow them down. I don’t even regret the difference, it’s just that the whole ritual begins to look silly, now that soldiers can’t manage the discipline, that really mad level of self-control. Better to scrap it.

  It’s a change of attitude. People don’
t think it’s marvellous that the Queen sits so still on her horse for Trooping the Colour. It’s not just that she’s not a young woman any more, and that they wonder if her bottom is getting sore. They don’t think what they used to think, that as long as we can do pageantry better than anyone in the world we can hold our heads up. They think, Doesn’t she have something better to do on her birthday? Even if it is only her official one. We all know about her love of horses and her sense of duty, but if she had a birthday wish it might just be to Troop the Colour from the comfort of a golf cart.

  It was a long time after Ray that I even tried to get back into the swim of things. The swim of sex. In a way it’s much simpler these day, what with the phone lines, but I can’t help feeling it’s still always going to be a bit hit-and-miss. One fellow I was talking to asked my weight, and when I told him what it was he said it wasn’t going to work, and hung up. Fair enough. But he obviously felt bad about it. He phoned up again and said he’d felt rotten about hanging up. Nice fellow. I told him not to worry, I’m used to it. I don’t even mind. Being pear-shaped is fine, but only if you’re a pear. Then I suggested maybe I could wear a T-shirt, cover up a bit. So he said, Good idea, we can try that. And we did, and it was fine. But there wasn’t that spark.

  Not everyone is so straightforward, even on the phone when you can just hang up if things aren’t working. One man wanted me to visit him in Milton Keynes, gave me his mobile number and everything. Then when I’d got to the address he’d told me, it was a warehouse and his mobile was turned off. It wasn’t an expensive trip, thanks to the travel concessions that go with being on the road, but he wasn’t to know that. And it took five hours out of my life. One of these days he’ll switch his mobile phone on again, and I’ll give him a piece of my mind.

  Another chap, ex-squaddie, had the strength in the legs that was bound to appeal to me. Years since I had a good squeeze. Only thing was, he called me names. Dog, pig, slave. I don’t like to be called names. Still, if he called again I expect I’d put up with it. Maybe drop a hint that it doesn’t do a lot for me. Less than nothing, really.

  I’m not comfortable on my knees any more, for longer than a few minutes — I had an ulcerated leg a year ago, and it’s still not right. So I brought along some kneepads, not the biker sort but the ones decorators wear when they’re doing some sanding. So that my knees don’t let me down.

  I’m bolder with my eyes since Ray. If there’s something in front of me that I like, I’ll look at it squarely. It may be a biker. If it is, he probably won’t be wearing the neon shades of leather that are the style now. It’s likely to be black. I’m old-fashioned that way, though I have a little bit of a soft spot for the green-and-white Kawasaki colours. And if the biker wearing the black leather says, ‘What are you looking at?’, I’ll just say, ‘If you don’t want me looking, wear something else.’ Not just in my head but out loud. It’s as simple as that.

  If it’s not a biker, then it’s a sort of careless strength that speaks to me. It might be someone on a building site pushing a wheelbarrow, heading towards a plank balanced against a skip. He can’t hesitate if he’s going to get his load safely up the plank, but he doesn’t want the wheel to jar against the beginning of the plank. So what he does, the moment before he gets there he presses down hard from the shoulders. Just for a second, but it’s enough to compress the tyre. Then when he releases the pressure and it rebounds, the barrow bounces up onto the plank right on cue. I love to see that.

  Ray was good to me — he was. He even kept the promise he made, without using words, the night we met. He didn’t fuck anyone else in those six years. Fucking meaning actually fucking. You could say he was faithful, and he was good to me. But I could never have loved someone who was only ever good to me. That was true before I met him and it’s still true now.

  This year Mum and I went on an outing that ended in a place I didn’t expect. It was soon after my birthday, my forty-second. Normally I don’t have much free time, but one of my classes hadn’t materialised. It’s maddening when that happens. I’d done all the preparation. But the rules of the WEA — that’s Workers’ Educational Association — are strict. You need six people to justify a class, and if only five turn up, even if one of them swears blind his cousin can make it every other week without fail except this one, then that’s just too bad. You can wait ten minutes after the class is due to start, hoping some humble angel will turn up late and save the day, but after that you have to send them home. Trying only to feel sorry for them, and not for yourself. Romanesque architecture, too. One of my favourites. Something I love to teach.

  There are few things I’ve wished for more strongly than for that sixth person to come through the door. But there it is. So I had more free time this year than I’m used to. I was on leave covers, waiting to be told what my shifts were, but that way I always get a little notice of when I’ll be free.

  I hadn’t even asked where we were driving. Mum loves to potter, she loves junk shops and car boot sales, even though she only buys something once in a blue moon. She went to a flea market the day after she came out of hospital in 1975, in a borrowed wheelchair. They didn’t have car boot sales then, or they weren’t called that.

  And every now and then she likes a browse round a stately home. I always encourage her to get out of the house. For a while after Dad died she’d lost the habit of having a life of her own, let alone the habit of enjoying herself, but now she’s got what she calls her bits and pieces. The things she likes to do. It was almost worse when Marjorie died than when Dad did. She clung to that last excuse not to live for herself.

  Mum told me the name of the house when we were in the car, Polesden Lacey, and if I’m honest it rang some kind of bell, but I didn’t think anything about it.

  It was only when I realised we were getting close to Leatherhead that I twigged: the house is only a few miles from Box Hill. They’re even closer, for instance, than Hampton is to Isleworth. But I managed to put it out of my mind. This was supposed to be Mum’s day.

  We’ve always got on well, Mum and I, even if it’s only since Dad died that she said she knew I was gay and it was fine with her, as long as I was happy. Love is love, is what she said. I don’t think there was a real reason why she couldn’t say so with Dad alive, but all the same it would never have happened. Then the first Christmas after he died, taking some mince pies out of the oven, she just comes out with it.

  I was carving crosses into the bottoms of some brussels sprouts, you know, so that the stalk bit cooks as quickly as the floret, and it wasn’t really a discussion. It was more like part of Mum’s Christmas list of things to do. One step up from last-minute cards, the ones you send when you get ones you hadn’t expected, even though your one won’t get there in time for the day and looks like the embarrassed gesture it is. Stuff the turkey. Tell Colin I know he’s gay and it’s fine. Tell him love is love.

  Her last years with Dad were more like being under house arrest than like being married, and it’s only now that she’s beginning to recover, and to realise that she has a freedom, like it or not. There was never anything actually the matter with Dad. Of course, his powers started to fail when he stopped using them, but there was never a physical reason for him to do that.

  I tell a lie: Dad’s eyes got very dry when he got older, and I remember Mum would put artificial tears in his eyes for him. He’d grab hold of the arm that held the dropper, for some reason, and forget to let go, so Mum would gently peel the fingers back, one by one, until she was free.

  We parked as near to the house as we could. Polesden Lacey isn’t a great house, not especially old nor stately in any real sense, but it’s a popular attraction, being so near to London, and at weekends I’m sure it’s crawling with connoisseurs. The house was completed in 1824, but Mum told me that the National Trust have the rooms furnished in Edwardian style. Mum’s been reading up, Mum’s been doing research. It turns out that the Queen Mother sp
ent part of her honeymoon in the house, as Duchess of York, as a guest of the Greville family who lived there then.

  Mum’s doctor has told her he’d classify her as disabled like a shot, but she’d see that as giving up, until the time comes that she doesn’t have a choice. Till then she won’t go near the disabled spaces, even though she knows I’d be happy to have a word with the parking attendants.

  Mum’s walking is slow, even with her stick, and she doesn’t like to feel she’s slowing anyone else down. So we’d agreed ahead of time that I’d ramble round the grounds, and she’d just ruminate through the house. Then we’d meet up again in the tea room at our leisure. Mum loves good silver, old silver you can gaze at as long as you like and never needs polishing, at least by you.

  I expect I’m a bit the same about gardens. I can really quite enjoy them, as long as there’s no possibility of being asked to pick up so much as a pair of shears. This year they’re doing up the East Elevation, so I don’t expect the house was looking its best — lots of scaffolding.

  I wandered through the Rose Garden but it was too early for roses. There were only labels. I wonder if they named the rose Dorothy Perkins after the shop, or the shop after the rose, or both of them after something else altogether that used to be famous and isn’t any more. I noticed that there was a yew hedge in the walled garden that looked very stark and one-sided, so I read the notice next to it: One side of yew hedging will be sliced back to the main trunk. This will enable new and vigorous regeneration to take place. During establishment of the new growth, the yew stems will appear unsightly — we have to be cruel to be kind! We ask our keen and understanding garden-loving supporters to tolerate the initial period of regrowth. The other visitors to the garden, not that there were all that many, seemed very knowledgeable about plants, Latin names and all. It seemed pathetic that I’d worked as a gardener for years and had learned so little.