Stranger on a Train by Jenny Diski Page A

surroundings you deserve. An environment you can’t spoil with your befouling habit. Something that won’t be wasted by your obvious inability to appreciate decent conditions. It had only two smallish windows at each end on either side, the larger middle sections which in all other coaches were windows seeming to have been deliberately blanked out. At the far end, opposite the only door (the smoking coach was a dead end), a black bin-bag holder was fixed to the wall. Above it, a sign said, ‘Do Not Bring Beverages Into The Smoking Coach’. Beside the door a handwritten notice instructed, ‘Do not stay more than fifteen minutes at a time. Only cigarettes are permitted to be smoked.’ The ashtrays were always overflowing, the tables dusted with ash, the bin bag between three-quarters full and overflowing, the floor scarred and scratched. The air was fogged grey with smoke, sometimes thick enough to choke someone coming in from outside. There was a small air-conditioning grille at the top of the far wall, but mysteriously it never seemed to work. The smoking coach was closed for one hour in each twenty-four, in order it was said for it to be cleaned, but there never was a time during the day or night when it was cleaner than any other, and the conductor responsible for the coach was seen only when he came through the door to enforce the rule about not bringing drinks in. Then he would peer through the grimy glass in the door before pulling it back with a look of disgust on his face as what remained of the air assaulted him. ‘Jeez,’ he would moan, and then bark at the offenders who had failed to hide their clear plastic glasses or bottles in time. He’d jerk his thumb towards the notice on the wall.
    â€˜See the sign? Get it outta here.’
    Later he’d return and find things just as before.
    â€˜You want me to lock the coach? I want them drinks gone.’
    â€˜C’mon,’ someone would call to him, inviting him to live and let live. ‘Give us a break.’
    He remained sullen. ‘I didn’t ask for this job. You keep the rules then I don’t have to come into this hole and suck up a lungful of your cancer.’
    Bet had her own way with the non-drinking rule. Wherever she went she carried in her bag a small, 300ml Coke bottle half-full of gin concealed by an insulating silver sleeve designed to keep cold drinks cold. Some became quite adept at keeping their drinks on the girder under their seat and bending down away from the door to take swift surreptitious sips. Others simply risked temporary expulsion and the wrath of the conductor with blatant cans of beer or liquor in clear plastic tumblers from the bar, right out in the open for any passing representative of authority to see. It probably depended, like so much else, on what kind of childhood the individual had been dealt. Concealment, sneakiness, risk-taking, defiance are learned characteristics instilled early in life. It was, in some way, thoughtful of the Amtrak authorities to retain an embargo that the tolerated, neutralised, exiled smokers could each in their own manner transgress. It left just a little edge in a smoothly rounded world.
    The misfits and miscreants of the train, obviously in the real world a complete range of society, were equalised in their smoking-coach selves into a homogenous group with a fundamental set of values. Whatever our place out there, we were as Shakers or Albigensians in our train life: a despised community existing on sufferance in a world that no longer permitted itself the luxury of burning heretics. Between ourselves, and to outsiders, we stood for something, allied in our determination to persist in our desire in spite of all the effort of the moral majority and the do-gooders who would have saved us from ourselves and for their own satisfaction. It gave us a feeling of fellowship, a purpose even, that supplemented the mere journey that all of us, smokers or not,