Not This Time

The carriage was half empty and very dimly lit. No-one else had noticed it in the rush to get on the train. As he sagged into a corner by the door Sen felt a sense of calm triumph, of a risk well taken. It had been Sen who’d said they should try for the train instead of skiing down through the muddy porridge of the lower slopes. It had been Sen who’d led the mad charge at insane speeds down the woodland tracks. It had been Sen, ‘dopey Sen,’ who’d spotted the short cut that got them to the back of the crowd on the station platform seconds before the gates were locked and the train arrived. And finally it had been Sen and Sen alone who had risked public humiliation by trying the door of the darkened carriage that everyone had been ignoring. Sen, and Sen alone. Terry was on the train, he was sure of it – Swiss mountain trains don’t leave people behind – but Terry was in one of the steam-filled people-filled carriages crushed into close encounters with a crowd of overheated one-white-shirt-a-week sweaty lads.

Sen would hear all about it from Terry afterwards, but he didn’t mind. Love was good, but coming out on top sometimes was nice as well.

Sen wedged himself between the doorway and the glass partition at the end of the nearest row of seats, and sagged carefully until he was perfectly wedged, with every muscle relaxed. He’d had a dog once that used to try to sleep standing up so as to catch the last rays of the afternoon sun. The dog had always failed and gone crashing to the ground, but Sen had worked out how to do the trick. Not only was it very comfortable but it also looked really cool.

Safely cocooned in his inertia, Sen gazed lazily round. Nobody had got on with him and the people in the carriage must have come from higher up. Either they’d got tired early or they were the rucksacked avalanche-transceiver types who consider the lower slopes beneath them. In one direction his view was blocked by the broad shoulders of an unpleasantly large man. For Sen, anyone taller was unpleasantly large, particularly if they stood too close.

In the seat opposite Sen was a very small, very old, very upright Swiss woman. Her face was unreadable. She could be going home to bake cakes or wring the necks of chickens, and whichever it was, she would do it with the same detached and unsentimental expression.

Next to her, two adolescents dozed, their heads close together because they were sharing the same headphones, and beyond them a very small girl in furs was sitting on her father’s lap as if it was a throne and she was a queen requiring homage from every person on the train. On Sen’s own side of the train, just the other side of the glass panel from him, a rather pretty girl was staring intensely into a mirror and applying lipstick of exactly the same colour as her violently pink headband.

Across the way stood a couple. The man was tall and solid and his face was that oily stubbly reddish brown that you get from a long day’s skiing and frequent applications of suntan lotion. Sen loved that texture and would often spend several minutes in the bathroom rubbing his own chin hard against his palm before regretfully shaving it all off and getting ready for dinner. The woman had her back to him; but he could see from the man’s eyes that she was beautiful. It was there in the way he looked at her and it was there even more when one of them whispered something into the other’s ear, and the eyes and the black brows dissolved into a smile that, even at a distance of eight feet and out of the direct line of fire, made Sen feel he was drowning.

The eyes were what had first drawn him to Terry. A mouth that smiled easily and often, with eyes that never did; and just below the eyes, a look of defiant vulnerability. It had taken Sen weeks to unlock that face and now he was beginning to wonder if he had ever really succeeded at all. Strange, he thought, how you could love someone so badly that just thinking of him made you feel dizzy, and yet at the same time feel such enormous frustration.

Take their arrival here, for instance. Terry had grumbled all through the journey – no, not grumbled, whinged, which was worse – about how they were sure to be given the worst room and perhaps even separate beds. And then when they’d turned out to have the best and largest room with the best and largest bed (‘because you’re the first and anyway you’re bound to be the biggest’) he’d switched effortlessly to grumbling about condescension instead of prejudice.

Yes, Terry was a couple of years older than Sen. Yes, Terry had a mind-numbingly stressful job and Sen didn’t. Yes, Terry would regularly come home on autopilot, sterile cynical zombie mode that lasted long past bedtime. But that was back home, they were here now, they were on holiday. It was a time for relaxation and healing, so when was he going to start?

Sterile cynicism wasn’t part of the real Terry, the Terry who reached out in the night. It was just an icy crust that was shutting him in, and Sen had to melt through that ice and reach the warm heart underneath. He could feel it beating sometimes, so close, so close… and then something would happen and he was far away from it again. It was as if the ice was working inwards and the faster he tried to melt through it, the deeper the ice would penetrate. It seemed like a race to see who would get there first, to free Terry’s heart or to freeze it. Sen wasn’t sure yet whether he’d win.

Superstitiously, Sen turned to the glass of the door and breathed on it.

In Rome, among the quiet expensive villas of the Aventine Hill where few tourists go, there is a wide terrace high above the Tiber. It has a broad balustrade round it, and it’s the place where Rome’s lovers make their mark. Sometimes there are simple initials or a heart, sometimes there is a name, and once or twice you see a long, sad letter in desperate felt-tip soaked into the stone, addressed to someone who will never read it and probably doesn’t even know it exists. On one of the pillars of that balustrade, eight months before, Sen had taken a key and scratched their first monogram, a T with an S twining round its stem like a snake.

The T.S. had appeared in many places since then: in jam on the surface of porridge; in cream poured onto a bowl of coffee (not very successful); in the dirt on the back of a coach; and even, a couple of nights ago, in unsteady yellow lines in the snow, with neither of them able to remember afterwards who had drunkenly written the T and who had done the S.

It hadn’t been Terry’s idea in the first place but he’d been strangely understanding about it, even reassuring: ‘Just because it’s disappeared,’ he’d said when Sen was upset by a short-lived T.S., ‘it doesn’t mean it’s gone.’

So now Sen turned to the glass of the door and breathed on it. He drew a T and then he drew an S on top. It wasn’t very elegant, the S didn’t twine or anything, it just sat; but it would do.

The old woman opposite was staring at him as if he’d committed a major crime. Well, let her. Probably it was. Most things were. But the evidence would have disappeared by the time they got to the next station. In fact it was already fading: the misty circle was getting smaller and smaller and the blank glass was eating into the top bar of the T.

Now that he’d twisted round to make his mark, Sen could see a little past the large man. A vertical pole stood between the two rows of seats and holding on to it was a young, scantily bearded snowboarder. His skinny arms were wound round the pole as if without them he’d collapse into a pool on the floor. His legs were half bent and they really weren’t holding him up at all. His belly sagged, his whole body sagged. His head was turned away, but Sen had the feeling that the snowboarder had been looking at him until a moment ago.

If two male animals look each other in the eye then there is trouble. This applies to wolves and dogs and it applies to men as well. Once the eyes are locked the only way out of a fight is for someone to look away, and that someone is the loser. And no-one wants to be a loser.

Avoiding someone else’s gaze also marks you down as a loser, so animals have evolved ways of looking away while making sure that honour is preserved. Cats wash; seagulls furiously tear up tufts of grass; executives check their messages – and skiers polish their sunglasses.

The snowboarder might look round at any moment. Sen became aware that his sunglasses were covered in greasy smudges, so he took out his handkerchief and started to polish them. He breathed on each lens in turn, rubbed it, and held it up to the light. If he found that a spot or a streak was left, he did it all again, until finally both lenses were spotless and gleaming. Satisfied, he put the glasses back in his pocket and looked up – and found that everyone was staring at him.

The old woman in black had gone deathly pale and was crossing herself as if she’d seen a ghost. The dark-haired man’s girlfriend had turned to look at Sen with a frozen expression on her face, while the man himself clutched her to him with fierce protectiveness. The little queen had wriggled round on her royal throne and was hiding her head in her father’s jacket. Even the music-doped adolescents were struggling towards some sort of awareness that the world existed.

Sen looked down to his side, and the lipstick girl on the other side of the glass panel looked up at him, quite white except for the shocking pink lipstick and two red spots glowing on her cheeks. She took out her mirror and breathed heavily on it. She turned it towards Sen with a nervous, propitiatory smile. Sen saw his own face reflected in the mirror, reflected clear and sharp without a trace of mist.

When something really terrible happens the mind goes limp, just as the body goes limp during a really bad skiing fall, until all the bumping and tumbling has stopped and it’s possible to work out what’s what. Sen had time to put together the clues he’d already seen – the shiny mirror, the darkened carriage, the clean fresh air, everyone’s shock when he breathed – but he had no idea what they could add up to. He stood still, his mind detached, all thought suppressed. His face went cold and then hot, and a tingling sensation started in the front of his thighs and spread up the sides of his rib-cage.

The pink lipstick girl was tapping on the window to attract his attention. She was trying to explain something else.

‘Not now.’ It was the big broad-shouldered man who had spoken. He had a deep resonant voice. He’d spoken quietly, but with great authority.

The fact that such a quiet voice was audible made Sen realise that the train had stopped. It had to be a signal or something, because there were no lights visible outside.

Trying to see if there was still light coming from the steam-filled carriage in front, Sen found himself looking straight into the snowboarder’s eyes. Their message was not what he had expected.

Yes, you are allowed to look as long as you like, they said.

No, it doesn’t matter.

Nothing matters.

I am here.

That is all.

When eyes meet, there are two ways of not starting a fight without actually looking away. One is to be so utterly self-contained that nothing outside you can affect you. The other is to have been hurt so much that nothing really matters any more. You don’t try to defend yourself against further pain because in the end even suffering isn’t all that interesting. Pain is just something that happens. Everything is just something that happens.

It would have been easy for Sen to end it all by looking away – easy but impossible. In this quiet train where only one person was breathing, there could be nothing easier than to look away, polish your glasses again, and read the emergency exit instructions. A minor slip of attention, that’s all it would take, a simple accident quickly forgotten. But Sen couldn’t do it. He already knew he was incapable of being angry – it used to drive Terry round the bend when they quarrelled – but now he found he had another disability: he was incapable of being cruel. He kept his eyes gently on the young snowboarder.

The boy unwrapped himself from the pole and with an effort pulled himself up and stood straight. He took one awkward step forward on those thin legs and then one more, holding tightly on to the overhead straps each time as if to compensate for the lurching motion of the train; except that the train was still immobile.

Sen simply observed. One part of his mind kept him calm by saying that he could end this at any moment: look away for an instant and everything will be normal again. But another part of him was silently dismantling every defence, preparing to be unprotected and to accept whatever was about to happen.

Then a lot did happen, very quickly. Somewhere a signal clanged. The train jerked and shuddered and began to lurch into motion. The carriage lights came fully on and Sen could see the snowboarder’s face clearly at last. His soul crumbled into dust. The boy was young indeed – he must be younger than Sen – but his eyes were the eyes of someone who has seen terrible things. No-one that young should have seen that much: no-one of any age should be allowed to see that much. His vision blurred with tears, Sen tried to step forward; but the broad-shouldered man’s voice spoke out again, loudly over the growing clatter of the train. ‘Not this time,’ it said. The man turned and thrust Sen aside. Sen heard the smashing of glass, the clank of the emergency lever, the limp sound of the doors flopping open – then the man had seized his arm in a crushing, icy grip and hurled him from the carriage.

Sen landed awkwardly, one knee smashing hard onto unseen stones. He heard his skis land clattering beside him, and the sound of greased cogs meshing together as the train accelerated smoothly away.

Sen dragged himself to a crouching position by the side of the track. He watched the lights of the train disappear round a bend. He was all right. Nothing seemed to be broken, nothing was wrong – only an upper sleeve shredded to powder by the man’s cold grip, and the white bruise of frostbite beneath, and the pain just beginning.

This story is taken from "The Snow Cow: Ghost Stories for Skiers" by Martin Kochanski, published by Universalis. ISBN 978-0-956319-0-6.

Copyright 2009 by Martin Kochanski. All rights reserved.

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Not This Time