Train Journey

We are all heading somewhere. Outside the smoking carriage on the way to Newcastle fields are flying by, not mustard, more baby-shit, but beautiful in their own way ' like sand.

A woman claiming to be from Yorkshire is doing her best to strike up a conversation. It's not something I want to get involved with so I'm looking every which way but at her: out the window, down the aisle, even at the book perched on my lap, but to no avail ' this is one determined lady. She's got something to say, or so she thinks.

So here's the deal. She's engaged. Big deal. She's easily fifty-plus, greying, wrinkling, sagging and widening, but shit happens. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that. But get who she's engaged to ' a dread locked fisherman from Tobago in his thirties. She loves it out there, has been loads of times, just come back in fact. It's so peaceful. Life is so different out there. So easy. Everyone is so laid back and friendly. Not like here. The journeys there and back are killing her though ' it takes so long and the damage it's doing to her bank balance is criminal.

I lose her for a while as I look around the fugged up compartment. If you've never been in a smoking carriage on a train before it's like an aviary of assorted, vaguely asthmatic wildlife. A tube full of weak, socially despised lowlifes lacking in willpower, who can't even last three hours without a smoke and so are willing to sit through a journey blighted by blue fog just so their civil liberties aren't infringed upon by pinko, green-fingered rabbit kissers.

In here are bronchial Glaswegians with cans of Carling and cheap cigarettes, smoking and coughing deep phlegmy coughs, all the while complaining the carriage is too full of smoke and needs windows. There are Geordies with loud voices and strong accents, also drinking at two in the afternoon. Warm beer and shaved heads.

And then there's our heroine, gushing the story of her three-month whirlwind romance at me without the slightest trace of irony. She's amazed she's found love at this point in her life, how even her sceptical daughter is coming round to the idea.

My Cockney saviour enters stage left. We are talking a plethora of accents in this place ' cosmopolitan carriage. This guy is one of many who pop in and out from time to time, who haven't got the willpower not to smoke for three hours but do have an innate disgust of smoking carriages. And well they should well have. He diverts attention away from me, and I'm grateful. I look down at my book but I'm too engrossed in the ensuing conversation to take much in. I don't know why I'm so interested, especially considering it's one of those one-upmanship type conversations people have when they think they're world fucking travellers and every place the other person has been is great but hey, have you ever been here, it's like what you're saying but even better. Find a backpacker and you'll know what I mean.

As she talks I'm wondering if old Steve Harley is feeling as cynical about the whole thing as me. Within three months visas are a high priority for 50s woman and her Caribbean Caruso ' she can't take the to-ing and fro-ing and neither can he so they've decided they need to be together ' right now. She has all her family and friends back here and they'd be distraught if she moved ' and this is where my eye starts twitching knowingly ' but they'll have to put up with it because he wants the wedding over. My eye stops twitching, momentarily.

I'm almost convinced. I'm almost taken in at this point, that visas aren't the driving force behind the star cross'd love between an ageing 50s Doncaster mother and her 20-years-younger Trinidadian fisherman, until she says about him coming over here straight after the wedding. "He just wants to visit, she says, "See the sights. I start thinking I'd love to meet this guy because this has to be the smoothest way I've ever heard of it being done ' he "visits and whoosh! he's gone. Of course, I won't be buying a used car off him once he's a resident, this is obviously a boy who can spin a yarn.

In case you're wondering, our Doncaster damsel isn't the point. Neither is our next entrée, who arrives when fifties and flirty and chatty Cockney chappy have exited carriage right and left respectively.

The second hors d'ouevre is an old, sweet-looking, soft-voiced, prim brunette bobbed lady who alights at York and feels ashamed smoking near me ' obviously not realising I'm there long haul. She isn't what's interesting, not directly at least. What's interesting is what's sitting next to her. A small, innocent looking little girl, nine years old, tops, being completely ignored as bob lady (mother/grandmother/auntie?) eats her apple with middle-class care, conscientiously attempting a £2,500 top prize word puzzle. The little girl looks up at her bored, hoping, longing for some form of attention, but gets no response whatsoever. Women have great peripheral vision apparently ' much better than men, so I know prim Pam must see her there, must be aware of the forlorn look she's getting and yet it remains ignored.

All of a sudden I notice how this woman looks rather than how she's earning the £2,500 and I see something I hadn't seen before, something that strikes me as sinister ' a sneer? I start to wonder if this woman, who looks for all the world to be completely normal and nice has a nasty streak beneath the veneer, a hatred of children, a deep-rooted dislike of the younger generation, or whether she's just engrossed in her puzzle. I can't tell, and I still can't work it out even long after York has faded away on the tracks behind me and they're gone.

In the short distance between York and Newcastle I am joined by, in order: a woman with a small baby (in this day and age!), a model-like redhead that I don't have the courage to talk to, a kindly old Peter Ustinov (as Poirot) lookalike, a guy who is surely too young to be as emphysemic as he sounds, and a nervous-looking hippy chick teenage girl obviously hiding from her parents. However, what really holds my attention is a couple sitting directly to my left. I hadn't noticed them previously, not properly at least, possibly because they're nothing like as loud as some of the others in the carriage, but when I do finally notice them, I can't stop myself from regularly glancing over at them as inconspicuously as I can manage.

The man sits on the left, by the window, and his face is so red it looks like his blood pressure is trying to force the stuff out of his pores. She's not far behind either. They're smoking incessantly and, like almost everyone else in the carriage, drinking straight from two lager cans. I can almost see how maybe they were once fairly attractive, but considering they can't even make a relatively short train journey (think India, China, Australia!) without a few cans and a pack of fags each it's no wonder their faces are the colour of boiling magma getting ready to explode. Considering that's what their faces look like I can only begin to imagine how overworked their hearts are must be ' I almost get a twinge in my chest just thinking about it.

And as I'm thinking about it, about the heart attacks just waiting to happen, I think too about that sinister feeling under the bob, about the fisherman hiding his runaway nature. I wonder as I make these judgements, if any of my fellow train-travellers have spotted what's lurking underneath my surface. I think about how I can see this stuff, or think I can, inside others, and whether they can also see it in me. I think about packing bags and boxes and my ex ' about how I left, again. I wonder whether she saw stuff in me that I didn't see, and whether my ex-ex, and my ex-ex-ex saw it too. Did the people sitting opposite me at varying points during our respective journeys consider why I'm sitting here alone? They never asked, but maybe they didn't have to ' maybe they made judgements too.

Did they know, somewhere inside themselves, without needing to ask, that I'm on my way to my friend's wedding and I'm going to be sitting there alone, watching from the sidelines, again? Maybe they didn't ask because they already saw why, they already knew why, I'm alone. Maybe we've all come from similar beginnings, who can tell? Two things are certain though: we're all sharing the journey at some point, and we're all heading somewhere.