Short story · Trains
Two strangers, a two-berth sleeper and twelve hours through a snowy landscape. She has a violin that isn’t allowed on the luggage rack, he has a stone in his pocket – and neither of them intends to sleep.
The cabin had been built for two people who already knew each other. Beth realised that the moment she slid the door open and saw the man on the lower berth, his knees almost touching the fold-down table and a grey stone in his hand.
‘Sorry,’ he said, and stood up so fast he hit his head on the upper berth. ‘Ow. No. It said two berths on the ticket, but I didn’t think anyone would take the other one.’
‘I did,’ she said. ‘Four weeks ago. It was the cheapest.’
He rubbed his scalp and smiled in a way that made him look younger than he was, which she guessed was somewhere around thirty-five. Stubble, a wool cardigan with darned elbows, hands that looked as if they had carried things out in the cold. On the floor stood a rucksack with a geologist’s hammer strapped to the side.
‘Will,’ he said.
‘Beth. And this is Viola.’
She lifted the violin case so he could see it. It was black, sturdy and plastered with stickers from concert halls she had long since stopped counting.
‘She’s called Viola even though she’s a violin?’
‘I was nineteen when I named her. It seemed clever at the time. She doesn’t go on the luggage rack, she doesn’t go on the floor, and if the train comes off the rails you save her before me.’
‘Understood,’ he said gravely. ‘Violin first.’
The train jolted and began to roll. The city lights slid past the window, street lamps, a petrol station, a multi-storey car park with every level lit, and then it all thinned out until there was only snow and spruce and the odd farm with a yellow window far away. The snow wasn’t falling, it simply lay there, blue in the dusk, heavy on the branches.
She laid Viola at the very back of the upper berth, on her own pillow, and sat down opposite him on the fold-down seat. He unscrewed the lid of a flask. It smelled of ginger and honey.
‘Would you like some? I’ve only got one cup, but it’s clean.’
‘I’ve got chocolate. Dark, with sea salt. We’ll call it a trade.’
They shared the cup. She broke the chocolate into pieces on the fold-down table, and he watched her left hand while she did it.
‘You’ve got hard fingertips,’ he said.
‘Twenty-seven years of steel strings. I started when I was seven. Want to feel?’
She held her hand out across the table, palm up, and he took it the way you take something fragile. He ran his thumb over the tip of her index finger, middle finger, ring finger. It was an unusual way to be touched. Nobody usually took an interest in her calluses.
‘Like quartz,’ he said. ‘Polished quartz.’
‘That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about my hands, and it was a comparison with a rock.’
‘It was a compliment. Quartz is the hardest common mineral in the bedrock. It survives when everything else weathers away.’
He didn’t let go of her hand straight away, and she didn’t take it back.
He told her he was heading north to drill core samples where a new road was going to be built across a stretch of bog. That the rock beneath them was nearly two billion years old. That the land was still rising after the Ice Age, a few millimetres every year, like a mattress when someone has just got out of bed.
‘So we’re going uphill all night,’ she said.
‘A little bit. If you measure carefully.’
She told him she was depping as second violin in a chamber orchestra, that the concert was tomorrow evening, that she had the rehearsal at eleven and really ought to be sleeping. He asked what they were playing, and when she said Schubert he hummed a few bars of the wrong piece with great conviction, and she laughed so loudly that someone in the next cabin knocked on the wall.
The guard came by and checked their tickets. He looked at them, at the flask and the chocolate wrapper and at her hand lying next to Will’s on the table, and said goodnight with a face that gave away nothing at all.
They took turns brushing their teeth at the little basin in the corner. She changed into a big vest top and joggers while he stood facing the window and talked about the different kinds of snow, non-stop, to show he wasn’t looking. Then she climbed up to Viola, and he turned the light off.
The dark in a sleeper cabin is never truly dark. There was a gap under the blind where the snow-light got in, bluish-white and cold, and every time they passed a level crossing a red flash swept across the ceiling. The train rocked in a rhythm that ought to have been soporific. She lay on her back listening to the wheels over the rail joints, and to him down below, who wasn’t asleep either. She could hear it in his breathing.
‘Will?’
‘Mm.’
‘Are you asleep?’
‘No. I’m counting rail joints. I’m up to four thousand.’
She lay quiet for a while. She had stood on stages in front of two thousand people without her heart pounding like this.
‘I want to say something,’ she said. ‘And you’re allowed to say no. If you say no, we go back to talking about rocks, and that’s completely fine, I mean it.’
‘Go on.’
‘I’ve been thinking about your hand since you let go of mine. I’d like to kiss you. And maybe more than that. But I want us to decide how much before we start, because otherwise I’ll lie here afterwards wondering whether you were just being polite.’
It went quiet down below. Then she heard him sit up.
‘I’m not especially polite,’ he said. ‘Come down. If you want.’
She climbed down the little ladder, barefoot, and sat on the edge of his berth. He had pulled the duvet back and made room. In the snow-light she saw his face in grey and blue, serious now.
‘So,’ he said. ‘How much?’
‘Kissing. Hands. Everything that isn’t ... all the way. Not tonight, on a train, with someone I met four hours ago.’
‘That sounds good. I haven’t brought anything either, and it’s not something I want to improvise. And if you want to stop, whenever it is, you say so, and we stop.’
‘Same goes the other way.’
‘And if the neighbour knocks on the wall again?’
‘Then we’re two strangers discussing the rising land.’
He laughed quietly, and then he kissed her, and it wasn’t a stranger’s kiss at all. It was slow and warm and tasted faintly of ginger and toothpaste. His hand found the back of her neck. Hers found his chest under his T-shirt, the heartbeat, the warmth of someone who had been lying under a duvet for an hour. She drew her legs up and crept under the duvet with him, and the berth was too narrow for two, so they had to lie close, her back against the cold wall and his knee between hers.
‘You’re cold,’ he whispered against her throat.
‘The wall’s cold. I’m not cold.’
He kissed her along the collarbone, over the edge of her top, slowly, and asked with his eyes before he pushed it up. She nodded and raised her arms. The air in the cabin was cool on her skin, and his mouth was warm, and the contrast made her draw a breath through her nose. He stayed there a long time, at her breasts, as if he had all the time in the world, and he did – the train would be rolling until seven in the morning.
When his hand slid down over her stomach and stopped at the waistband of her joggers, she put her hand over his.
‘Wait,’ she said.
He stopped at once.
‘No, not like that,’ she said. ‘Please, carry on. I just wanted ... I’ve got something in my wash bag. If you don’t think it’s weird.’
‘What sort of something?’
‘It’s about the same size as your stone.’
He lay quiet for a second. She felt him smile against her shoulder.
‘Now I’m very curious about your wash bag.’
She reached up to the shelf above the window, fumbled among toothbrush and hair ties and found it: a little We-Vibe Tango X, barely longer than her little finger, and a small bottle of lube beside it. She pressed the plus button. Nothing happened.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No, no.’
‘Is it dead?’
‘It’s locked. Travel lock. I locked it myself this morning so it wouldn’t come to life in my bag in the middle of the carriage. Hang on.’
She held down both buttons and silently counted to two, with the concentration she usually saved for difficult passages, and when she then pressed plus it woke up in her hand, a soft, insistent buzz against her palm. Will laughed into the pillow.
‘You think of everything,’ he said. ‘I like that.’
She put it in his hand and guided his thumb over the buttons in the dark.
‘Plus. Minus. The middle one changes the pattern. There’s no screen, so you have to count.’
‘I’m a geologist. I count layers all day long.’
He held it the way she had shown him, between thumb and forefinger with the angled tip facing out, and weighed it in his hand. She gave him the bottle too. He poured a little into his palm and warmed it between his fingers before he touched her, and that small bit of thoughtfulness, that he had considered it might be cold, did something to her she hadn’t expected.
He touched her with his fingers first. Unhurried, taking nothing for granted. She pulled her joggers down herself and kicked them off under the duvet, and his hand was slick and warm, and she heard herself breathing in time with the wheels. Then he let the Tango X take over where his fingers had been, on the lowest setting, just above, and she grabbed hold of his T-shirt.
‘Like that?’ he whispered.
‘A little higher. No, there. There.’
‘More steps?’
‘Two more.’
He counted silently, his lips against her ear, one, two, and the vibration deepened, became something she felt through her whole pelvis, in her thighs, right out to her hardened fingertips. The train lurched on a bend and pressed them against the wall, and she laughed and whimpered at the same time. He stayed where she wanted him, attentive, adjusting the angle with tiny movements of his fingers as if he were playing an instrument he had only just learned but already understood.
It took time. She let it take time. She kissed him, lost the kiss, found it again. She took his other hand and laid it on her breast, and he understood. The heat built slowly, like a crescendo written out over many bars, and when she was close she whispered:
‘Hold down plus.’
He did, and it went straight up to the top setting, and she pressed her face into his shoulder to keep quiet, and came, for a long time, in waves that didn’t want to end, with his arm tight around her and the rhythm of the train beneath her. He switched it off the very second she flinched and pulled away, as if he had read it in her before she knew it herself.
They lay still. Her heart was beating in her throat. Outside they passed a level crossing, and the red flash swept across the ceiling, once, twice, three times.
‘Say something,’ he said at last.
‘You counted right.’
He laughed, quietly and happily, and she felt how hard he was against her hip through the fabric. She laid her hand there, lightly, and asked:
‘Your turn? If you want.’
‘I want. Very much.’
She helped him out of his boxers under the duvet, which was quite a project on such a narrow berth and involved an elbow in his ribs and an apology and more laughter. Then she took him in her hand, with lube in her palm, slowly, and he breathed out as if he had been holding his breath since dinner. She let the little vibrator hum on its lowest setting against the underside, where he was most sensitive, and his hand reached for her wrist, not to stop her but to hold on to something.
‘OK?’ she asked.
‘More than OK. Keep doing exactly that.’
The train slowed. The brakes squealed, and suddenly they were standing still at a platform, and the yellow light from a lamp fell in through the gap under the blind. Someone walked past outside with a suitcase bumping over the snow. Voices. A door slamming. They lay motionless, her hand round him and his face in her hair, giggling so much the berth shook.
‘The rising land,’ she whispered. ‘We’re discussing the rising land.’
When the train moved off again she picked up the rhythm, and she felt him tense under her hand, felt his hips lift towards her, heard him say her name in a voice that was completely bare. She kept going until he was done, and a little longer, more gently, until he laid his own hand over hers and said stop with a smile she could hear.
Afterwards she switched off the little vibrator and laid it on his folded scarf on the shelf rather than on the fold-down table, so it wouldn’t rattle against the laminate if it happened to switch on. He wiped them both off with a towel from the basin. Then they stayed in the narrow bed, skin to skin, and he pulled the duvet over her shoulder.
‘Viola will have to sleep alone tonight,’ he said.
‘She’ll cope. She’s been through worse.’
She woke because the light had changed colour. He had pulled the blind up a few inches, and outside lay a frozen lake, white and flat, and behind it a ridge where the sun was just breaking through the spruce. The sky was pink and gold. She lay with her cheek against his chest and felt him breathe.
‘We’re nearly there,’ he said. ‘Forty minutes.’
‘How many millimetres have we gone uphill?’
‘Not a single one you could measure. But it feels like it.’
She climbed out of bed, pulled her top over her head and rinsed the Tango X under the tap at the basin with a little of the soap from his wash bag, dried it carefully on a clean towel and then held both buttons down until it pulsed twice in her hand. He watched her from the berth with his hair sticking up.
‘You’re locking it again.’
‘You never know who you’ll be sharing a cabin with.’
She put it in her wash bag along with the little bottle, and when she turned round he was holding something out in his hand. The stone. Grey and white and banded, the size of a hen’s egg, worn smooth by something that had happened too long ago for anyone to remember.
‘Gneiss,’ he said. ‘It was here before there was anything here. I thought it could live in the violin case. If Viola doesn’t mind.’
She weighed it in her hand. It was warm, because he had been holding it for a while.
She opened her bag and took out the programme for that evening’s concert and a ticket the orchestra had given her for a friend, though she had no one to invite. Second row, far left. She wrote her number on the back and put it in his hand, where the stone had just been.
‘From there you can see the left hand,’ she said. ‘The fingertips.’
‘The quartz.’
‘The quartz.’
The train braked into a platform full of snow and people in thick coats. She lifted Viola down from the upper berth, and as she stepped out into the corridor she turned round in the doorway. He was still sitting on the berth with the ticket in his hand, looking at her as if he were already counting the hours.
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