What a Trip!

My mind was racing, I didn’t know what to do, because the train I was in was racing too, and perhaps under the control of a maniac. I watched the world outside the window whizz by, the buildings blurring into indistinguishable lines, like the Enterprise entering warp speed. I considered my fate. How did I end up on a train? I hate train travel. This one doesn’t resemble my local trains. Am I even in my own city?

The carriage was empty of life, there was only me, and a phone lying on the seat opposite me. It wasn’t mine; I don’t do iPhone, I wouldn’t know how turn it on. I’m Android all the way. I ignored the phone, it seemed important, but I was still trying to reconcile my returning consciousness with what was unfolding before me. Do trains normally go this fast?

I don’t think I’ve ever had to use to the word ‘careening’ in my whole life, but I believe the train was careening. We, (like me and the train are old travelling friends), began entering a bend and from the screeching of the wheels on the steel rails, we were coming into it too fast. The carriage started leaning and groaning with the effort, twisting and contorting before me. It was like looking into a weird, bland kaleidoscope of cream and green. Was I on some hallucinogenic drug? My spinning mind would be happy if that were true.

The fluorescent lights flickering in and out, were doing my head in, then the phone shot across the floor. I let centrifugal force slide me off my seat and across the aisle to the opposite one; I finally picked up the phone. Assuming it worked in a similar way to my own, I pushed the button on the side. It was taking a long time to open, so I put it in my pocket and getting up, forced my way to the front. Looking through the door as the train straightened out of the bend, I could see that each of the forward carriages were also empty. I opened the door and stepped forward across the gantry, the ground beneath the train a blur of blue stone and sleepers. Suddenly the train shook as it crossed a switch, which forced me face first into the opposite door. Blood ran from my face where I smacked the glass, blood ran from my leg, where I had lost my footing and cracked it on some protruding metal.

As I awkwardly pushed forward, my gaze was drawn out of the windows, to the distant landscape that lay beyond the flash of the nearer buildings. It was foreign and familiar at the same time. A place I knew well once in a past life, or as a child. There was something familial in its familiarity. I paused for a second in an effort to remember, then a tunnel darkened everything, making me jump with fright and bringing me back to my current reality. Again, the fluorescent lights strobed, reminding me of the dance clubs of my youth.

Painfully, I made my way through the remaining carriages until I reached the driver’s room. Expecting to find a wide-eyed lunatic, drooling at the controls, I saw no one. “Panic my old friend, where have you been? It’s been lonely here without you.” I began to panic. Through the glass of the door, I could see, some way ahead, there was an object blocking the track. It was too far off to discern what it was, but it was certainly big enough to derail this juggernaut. Trying in vain to open the door, I looked desperately for something to smash the glass. Just then the phone pinged, it was a text which read, ‘use the key’. Searching the carriage, I found nothing, but something made me put my hand in my pocket. “These aren’t even my pants!” A strange T-shaped key, with a square indentation in the shaft was there, at the bottom of my very deep pocket. Looking at the door I found the hole and quickly had it open.

Now what do I do? I sat in the driver’s seat and then it started, ‘Driver’s Seat’ by Sniff n the Tears, began playing in my head. God my mind is weird, I should be thinking about how to save myself.

With imminent death and destruction only a few hundred metres away, I concentrated on the control panel. With all the dials and buttons and gauges before me, the only thing that seemed obvious was a small handle that looked like it needed pulling. I pulled it. It broke off in my hand. “Crap!” I then went about flicking switches and pushing buttons to make the train react. It reacted by blaring alarms at me and increasing speed. I never want to be a train driver.

Seeing the bright red fire extinguisher out of the corner of my eye, I grabbed it and began wildly smashing the console. This wasn’t helpful. It only helped increase my panic. Defeated, I slumped back in the driver’s seat. There’s that damn song again. My life was coming to an end and my only worry was that this would be the last song I hear. It should have been ‘Halleluiah’, the Jeff Buckley version of course. Then finally relief flooded my mind as the sublime guitar of the afore-mentioned mister Buckley, filled the space. I can die happy now.

Resigned to my fate, I leaned back in the, (don’t say the words), and watched as the object that would finish me became clear. It was another train. The locomotive was straddling the tracks like some giant child had carelessly left it there after playtime. Strange way to go I thought; so be it.

I stared down ‘the death of me’ with mild contempt. I couldn’t hate it. There was nothing to be done now, I’m just glad it will be quick. Then right at the point of impact, I felt something slam into the side of my head. “Dave! Wake up you idiot! You’ve gotta stop doing this mate.”

I opened my fuzzy eyes and scanned my periphery. The control panel was intact, though it did have drying blood on it. The room was the driving compartment of a train. Before me stretched dry, open land, as far as the eye could see and a pencil-straight stretch of rail that got lost on the horizon. Looking through the side window at the rear-view mirror, I could see the length of a freight train which seemed impossibly long. Long aluminium bins, I knew were filled with wheat.

“Oh shit! Sorry Bruce, I don’t know why this keeps happening.”

“It’s OK mate, this is a bloody boring job, but maybe you’ve been doing it too long. Not many of us make twenty years. Maybe it’s time you pack it in. Was it the same dream?”

“Yeah, pretty much. Only I think I saw my home this time”

“Jesus mate, you have blood on your head, I’ll get the first aid kit.”

As I watched my long-time co-driver leave, I considered what he said, ‘go home’. Home is why I still do this job. Home was once a lovely place to go back to. It was warm and inviting. It smelled of flowers I didn’t know the names of, but any hint of that scent would always take me back there, no matter where I was. Only I had no reason to go back there. She was no longer there. Her ghost is all I would find, in the photos and the garden and the kitchen, the bedroom. It would be too much. How could I disturb that shrine? That haunted place. The ghost of my guilt was what stopped me. Guilt for not being there for her when she needed me. It had been like a heavy chain holding me back. In some way, I wish the dream was real, but perhaps the dream was her telling me something, maybe that I’m done driving trains.

I never liked train travel anyway.