Scene From A Train

1. Across the carriage a little boy no more than five curled asleep in his mother’s lap. He is rolled, perfectly formed, like a small shell or else some ancient ammonite. His eyes are closed shut but the eyelids are near translucent, and underneath the muscles flicker and jump, milky full and purpled opaque. He is draped in layers of stripy scarf, and laced into tiny leather boots against the winter cold. He is dreaming of the spring, when he will run again.

2. A woman comes wafting up the carriage arrayed in heavy furs that have settled magnificently over her ample figure. She moves in a tailspin of cloying parfume, thick gold smelling, clutching a fistful of lead ends. At her heels trot nine brown dachshunds, like little furry worms to the ground, their nails tapping one two one two with the rock of the train. They seem to move perfectly in sync.

3. A hand raised in greeting and seen glancingly at a junction as the train courses by; the hand is still and fixed static while the body below turns within the curving velocity of the train’s passing like the spinning figurine of a ballet dancer in a jewellery box.

4. Some way up the carriage an old man plays his little wooden pipe quietly. He has a block of four chairs to himself; a great column of sunlight lances through the window’s plastic warp and hits him in his centre, blindingly. Through the thin cotton of his shirt, his ribs are thin and brittle, pneumatized like the hollow bones of the birds, tacky and aerated as raw dough. He looks as light as a baby, lighter than a swallow — but his lungs are swimmer’s lungs, gusty and powerful, and the playing comes steady and full. His music wobbles on, loops in reeds and flutes enclosed and amplified in the channel of light that blocks him to his seat.

5. Hawk from the train, brown crown speckled gold with the canny eye and muscled wings, caught in an instant perched on a dead tree with white branches bare and sanded to smooth by the wind, old familiar skeleton cracked against a perfect blue sky. The proximity of the hawk and its size is always surprising and it takes the breath away, thrown out at the passing train like a snapshot of a chocolate Easter egg adorned in banners of cream piping and upright in its box for the windowshopper to see. The bird has something in its talon, glimpsing pink, a little field mouse or unlucky rabbit baby.

6. Behind, two children supervise their avid photographer of a father, who has saucer eyes made flat against the window and who holds a camera reverently in both hands, angled through the grimy and scratched plastic pane to take photo after photo of the same field repeating in a thousand different variations. When he scrolls through the camera roll later, he will see a whole forest of blurred trees and scrubby landscapes dancing in stop motion, and at each photo the furrows of the fields will shift slightly to the left. In one corner will be the outline of old graffiti on the train’s window. His children don’t mind him; they trace the fabric patterns of the train seats and discuss tax returns and what they had in their packed lunches.

7. Outside on the hill; the horse. Always that same horse, magnificent on the ridgeway, always about to plunge down into the valley and away from me. Gone in an instance.

8. Opposite, a very little man — with seven pink and white striped octagonal hat boxes dotted about him. He is asleep now, sitting very erect still, with his feet dangling five inches above the floor, but for the first half an hour of the journey he carefully gets out each of his new hats one by one and tries them on. Atop his head now sits a beautiful velvet beret in seaman’s navy, midnight blue. It droops over his right eye like a drunk or the hand of some wayward uncle, shadows the little man’s eyes in his sleep from the prying light of a winter sun caught and concentrated in each disc of the tiny spectacles that have slipped down the end of his nose. His boxes are gathered in his arms lovingly. In one, the threadbare corduroy cap he was wearing when he first alighted is now carefully entombed is its bed of perfumed tissue papers. It will stay there forever and ever and he will never throw it out.

9. Out of the carriage the county rugby team race alongside the train’s arc across the edge of the playing field. Muscled and fit to bulging in their red kit, they are now no more than a scattering of crimson blobs stilled streaking over the green grass. Spotlit against the blue black shadows at the edge of the pitch where the trees cast dark towards the late afternoon, the breath of the winger plumes in pale steam caught blown like glass in the cold air. Then the ball is kicked, up and up and up, shining Olympian gold as it catches the edge of the light, momentarily in line with the windows of the train as they shutter past on the siding one two one two, momentarily hanging eye to golden eye in shared gaze, and then gradually, gradually, it curves away and plummets and then their shared speed is lost and the cries of the team fade behind into the distance.