RAILWAY CARRIAGE BLUES

‘Gramma, do you have any nines?’
‘Any what?’
‘Nines?’
‘No, I haven’t got any nines.’

I could see that this was going to be a fraught journey. Two elderly Americans and a precocious child in the style of McCauley Culkin.

‘Grampa, do you have any fives?’
‘Any what?’
‘F-i-v-e-s.’
‘Nope, no sirree. I’m down to my last card and it sure ain’t a five.’

I sat back in my seat and tried deep breathing. I was on the eleven ‘o’ clock slow train from Edinburgh to Dundee. A bright sun nestled in a clear blue sky, but it did nothing to remove the chill from the early April day. I dropped off to sleep as we rumbled over the mighty metal bridge across the Forth. I dreamed that I was served up a baby alligator for my dinner in some seamy restaurant in Bangkok or somewhere equally wretched. I said: ‘I’m not eating this – put it in a bag and I’ll take it home.’ It transpired that it wasn’t dead after all, as it came round as soon as I got it back to the house. I spent the rest of the dream trying to kill it and also to escape its wicked teeth. I awoke just as it was about to devour the cat and I was hammering away at its snout with a cricket-bat. I awoke several miles north of Inverkeithing and found my shirt was soaked in sweat. That made me desperate for coffee, but the guard told me that there was no trolley on board.
‘Too few people to make it worthwhile’ he said, gleefully. A few fluffy clouds appeared in the east, but they weren’t threatening.
‘Hiya, Helen, I’m coming into Kircaldy. I’m on the train. Hello….’ I smiled as the strident woman’s signal was cut off in mid-sentence. ‘Serves you right,’ I thought to myself. A seal frolicked in the bay and a bald man paddled a tiny kayak amongst the restless waves. His naked pate reflected Aldis lamp messages from the sun’s rays. A young woman in jeans and a tremendous perm got on at Kircaldy and I tried to remember a quotation from an American comic about a celebrity who fell down and broke her hair. The permed one chewed gum and stared resolutely into her mobile phone, as if it were a crystal ball that would tell her future.
Several children were playing on Burntisland sands. One, a young girl in a pink dress, was walking on the sand as if land-mines were laid beneath it. She tugged at the lead of a tiny, nervous-looking mongrel. Three large ships stood sentinel out at sea, waiting for the tide to turn. At Ladybank, a sinister-looking bald man in sunglasses got on as well as a noisy family group, led by a dark matriarch with the beginnings of a moustache.
‘Who knows the story of the fairy and the cobbler?,’ the matriarch of the noisy family asked.
‘Me, me, me!’ a little boy replied, after which there was much jostling between the matriarch’s progeny. Eventually, he told the tale, with many repetitions, deviations and hesitations. I could feel the bow scrape across the violin of my nerves and hit several jarring notes. I tried to blot out the noise by concentrating on the throbbing hum of the diesel motors driving the train. That did the trick all the way through Cupar and Leuchars. I was fine until I got up to go, as the train lumbered across the Tay Bridge into Dundee Central Station.

‘Gramma, do you have a Queen?’