Stranger on a Train by Jenny Diski

and love. The everything S saw me as having was for me parents who hated each other and sometimes hated me. The everything I lost had not been the perfect family security that S perceived. But now, as an adult, it crossed my mind that perhaps S might have made a better job of being my parents’ child than I had. I felt she thought something like that too as we perched on our stools in the café. My fury at S must have built up from all those moments I now remembered when my mother would shout, sometimes with S standing by, ‘Why can’t you be like S? She’s a nice, loving child. She doesn’t complain when I brush her hair. Why couldn’t I have a daughter like her? What have I done to God that he should have punished me with you?’
    It wasn’t that I minded my mother thinking I was bad, it was that I hated the idea of S being good. I guess I wanted to consume her goodness, chew it up and spit it out. I discovered not just that I didn’t want to be good, but that I did not want S (or others) to be good either. If I envied S her place in my mother’s fantasies of a good daughter, I did not want to replace her with myself. I found that not being good was a characteristic I had to pursue, because the idea of my own goodness sent me into a delirium of rage.
    Conforming to a non-smoking world belonged in the same emotional arena. It was not simply a matter of physical addiction – nicotine-replacement products work quite well in that respect – which prevented me from giving up (even on a pragmatically temporary basis) when confronted with the difficulties of smoking in the face of North American puritanism, it was the puritanism itself. I didn’t want to do as I was told, I didn’t want to be more comfortable by conforming, giving in, as I saw it, to the pressures of an anti-smoking policy that was reinforced by moral imperatives. Very childish. Yes, exactly. I also didn’t want to become an ex-smoker, not if it meant that I became someone who tsked and sighed whenever I caught a whiff of smoke in the air. The tension in my solar plexus began to agitate as soon as I thought of it. It was almost organic, my desire not to be a virtuous, self-righteous non-smoker. I was deeply, fundamentally of the other party. And this, it turned out, was all to the good, because the other party was a three-day affair I wouldn’t want to have missed.
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    The smoking carriage was an oasis of tawdriness. It was a slum at the centre of the train that was in every other part designed to please the paying customer. Even in coach the seats reclined and were upholstered, there were carpets, windows that had been cleaned at least at the start of the journey, air-conditioning that worked. The observation car and restaurant offered an approximation of old-fashioned comfort and hospitality, swivel armchairs, side tables, a bar, panoramic windows through which to see America slide past. The sleeping compartments added to these conveniences the details of flowers in vases and starchy antimacassars. The intention throughout the train was to attract the public back to an old form of travel by offering them a degree of physical pampering even if they weren’t going to get where they were going on time. The smoking coach, however, was the sin bin, the punishment cell, a capsule of degradation where those who were incorrigible would suffer the consequences of their obduracy. And it was wonderful.
    It was entirely correction-facility grey: the lino floor, the dull-putty coloured walls and the moulded polystyrene chairs that ran along the length of the short carriage, eight chairs on either side, bolted at their base to a shiny steel girder fixed to the floor. Between every two or three chairs was a small plastic table, also attached to the girder, on each of which was an individual-tart-sized disposable tinfoil ashtray. As grey as sin. As grey as smoke. These are the