Desert Train

The train slowed and stopped along a wide stretch of velvety silence, naked and vulnerable in the ice cold night. A full kilometre and more of carriages and wagons were strung out between the double engine up front and the carriage that Rask was in at the tail end, and no accurate account for the unscheduled halt was ever going to travel back that far from the driver, only rumour. It was the coldest, deepest part of the night and Rask hadn’t been asleep: the other passengers had been. They kept on sleeping for a while until their collective subconscious registered that the gentle rolling of the train had tailed off along with the distant chug of the engines that had been pulling them across the desert since early morning; their hypnotized bodies could not sustain sleep unaided. People began to emerge crossly into the cold night from the jumble of blankets and baskets that were littered all about the carriage, their eyes gritty and sore in the dim light that was feebly leaching out from behind the stained, murky globes on the ceiling. They took a while to re-orient themselves before fixing their tired confusion on the quest for someone they could blame. The silence began to fill out first with rumbles and then with shrieks of confused discontent. Babies cried.

Rask pulled his blanket about his shoulders and went to the door for a closer look at the night and the desert. The solid metal plate was heavy and stiff to open. It fitted snugly into the side of the carriage like a slab of dressed marble dropped neatly into paving around a grave. He struggled to swing it out and away from the train. When the handle finally turned and the door shifted, he was left standing alone on the edge of the chaos of growing anger behind him. In front of him a wilderness appeared that called for his trust; an invisible platform to walk out onto, a new world. The disturbance reaching to him from behind quickly faded as he gazed into the pitiless grandeur of the night that stretched away and always in every direction. The busyness in the carriage soon began to settle as the night came through the open door to establish its rule. Anger turned to resignation and people willed themselves to sleep away the unexpected, forever unexplained delay.

Rask leapt lightly from where he stood by the enormous door onto the ground which dropped away sharply from the tracks. Only away from a station platform could anyone appreciate the size of those carriages and how far off the ground they travel. The night was cold and confident. There were no clouds in the sky to wrap warmth tightly into the earth, but there was a great heat coming off the train; it had rolled tirelessly over the desert through the scorching day, soaking in heat, storing it in tons of metal to be released later in the chill of the desert night. Around Rask was nothing, at least nothing significant that eyes could see. No station, no town or village, no solitary house, no animal or tree, only great clumps of rock and the beaten-down earth. He walked around for a while, staying within the stretch of faint light that seeped from behind the shuttered windows of the closest carriages. He walked farther from the train and from the influence of its heat and light.

 He walked deeper into the dark silence until a crop of rock isolated him from the life of the train, away from the light and heat and low moans it gave off, away from the smell of hot metal, dirt and spent fuel that hung in the air. Soon he was alone on the earth. The desert became a welter of wilderness and exposure. There was nowhere to hide. All the laws that hold life together became unwritten, unheard of and pointless beyond that clump of rock that sheltered Rask from men’s desire for control and freed him into the bonds and dictates of distance and night and the star-prickled ether of the sky.

Rask sensed a call to participate in the terrible unity of splendour and majesty that furnished out the night; the option to remain a passive and appreciative observer was not his, but the sky, although close, remained distant and untouchable. He longed for connection with the stars and the grace-packed emptiness, to draw its attention to his love and longing and limitation. He wanted to express the need to be recognised. He took off his clothes, scattering them on the ground and stood with arms reaching up but with no gift to offer, bringing no tribute other than himself in all his weakness and inadequacy, shockingly unashamed. The night was black, but sheets of light began to fall directly onto Rask and under that liquid, searching light his pale body became brown like the sand he had come from, though separate from it, more significant. The desert was made for this moment; it had been made for Rask. This open corner had been created to be the dull but necessary backdrop against which the splendour of invisible light poured in and through him. This was a moment reserved for those who know that they have nothing to give, those who know that they are spiritually bankrupt.

A cry from Rask’s ragged soul rang out through his body into the night. A blood-soaked torment of anguish radiated in silent waves into the depths of the universe. He was a beacon in the desert to warn and to guide, but invisible to souls dulled with pride and talent and capability, hidden in mist from wealth and wisdom. Rask fell to his knees and touched the cold, warm earth with his face, smelling the dryness and the death of the generations that had decayed into it. Blood cruelly spilled over the centuries by marauding invaders was mixed in time with the sweat of brutalised labourers who laid the tracks for the trains, and the violence and memory of suffering tried to drag Rask away from the light.

He wrestled some unseen presence that held onto him. He felt pierced through by the swords of oppressors and bathed, almost drowned in the tears of the poor. He struggled; he overcame. He drew himself up on his feet, spent and weakened, sore and wounded. Slowly he straightened, bringing up in his bleeding hands fistfuls of loose, dry earth that he poured over his head. He let the wispy grains and the time-smoothed stones run down his body like water. The victims of the ages caught in the desert earth cried out through him as they slipped down over his skin. They troubled the night sky in one final anguished squeal, begging for recognition and justice before tumbling down onto the jagged rocks, quietened now that their wounds had been bathed in the light and love focused on Rask’s body. Grace came flooding from beyond the stars, travelling unseen and changing things, bringing heat to frozen spirits.

Exhausted and spent, Rask lay back on the earth and let his eyes fall shut, absorbing the last warm rays of the passing presence that had started to fade. Sleep began to weigh heavily on his tormented, satisfied body, but the shrill blast of the train’s whistle called out in the chill night air. Rask struggled to his feet and grabbed his clothes that were lying scattered around in the dust, bundling them into the blanket, and ran bare-foot over the stony ground to the tracks and the slowly-moving train.

Sleeping with danger.

Have you ever given any thought to how very vulnerable you are when you give yourself over to sleep in the company of another person? Even being married to that other person is no guarantee of safety – ask Wayne Bobbitt! Dozing off must be the most trusting act within the range of human experience, and yet millions upon millions of us do it on a nightly basis, and many of us even take tablets to make sure we stay asleep, vulnerable, and unarousable beside someone else for a good many hours.

Traditionally the hours of darkness are considered to be the scariest segment of each 24 hour period of our lives, when malevolence stalks the earth in the form of thieves, murderers, rapists and, I hear, the troubled souls of the dead. Now ghosts don’t bother me, and there’s not a lot I could do if they were to pay me any unwanted attention in my sleep, but thieves and marauders are another matter.

The vexed issue of night time vulnerability raised itself in my mind recently when someone reminded me of a childhood experience that, till then, had lain dormant somewhere in that part of my mind reserved for happenings I have no use for or would prefer to forget, an experience that thankfully had no traumatic effect on me….. I think.

I was 8 years old. My family was on holiday, staying with friends, but the house was small so while my father, younger brother and myself piled into the spare room, my mother and baby brother stayed with other friends up the road. That first night we were exhausted from the three day drive over roads that had been all but washed away in torrential rain, and we fell asleep easily in spite of the excitement of being on holiday and playing with friends we hadn’t seen for over a year.

Next morning when I woke my eight year old head knew something was wrong. My brain was all fogged over, I had a strange taste in my mouth and I sensed an unpleasantness which I first associated with wakening into a room where the walls and windows and door were all in the wrong place. Had I known the word disorientation I might have used it. The first concrete evidence that proved to me that this was more than just unfamiliarity brought on by sleeping in a strange room was that my watch was gone. Something had to be seriously amiss because that watch was my prize possession, a birthday present, and it only ever came off on bath night and was the first thing to be put on as soon as I got out of the water.

As I began to process the discovery of my loss in my hazy thinking my father woke and then my brother. They too had sore heads and bleary vision, and found difficulty focussing for a while. I could only sit and watch as my father looked around the room with anxiety and concern on his face, concern that soon turned into realisation, resignation and annoyance. After he surveyed the new country that we had woken into he gave us the strangely reassuring information that we had been robbed but that the robbers had gone and everything was alright.

The favoured method of thievery in that part of Central Africa at the time had been successfully applied to us, people who had just arrived in the city from the countryside and who liked to sleep with the windows flung open on humid, oppressive nights. The operation involved a gang of thieves. Some of them had the task of making sure the victims stayed asleep while the others fleeced the room. To keep us asleep cloths doused in some noxious vapour were held over our mouths and noses, and when the fleecing had been completed they left as easily as they had arrived and we were well and truly fleeced. The even more unpalatable detail that I didn’t learn of until much later was that these gangs usually operated totally naked, leaving all their clothes in the garden of the house they were robbing, and smearing themselves with grease so that if a victim woke they would have nothing of the burglar’s to grab hold of (that they were prepared to touch), and he could slip away easily.

Fortunately, and we should always look on the bright side, although we lost all our clothes, watches, wallets, sense of security and everything else, we survived being anaesthetised, and most of our belongings had been stored in the house our mother was staying in with the baby, and so far as I know our bodies were not tampered with.

Although the memory of all this hasn’t surfaced in over 40 years, it makes me think of all the occasions when I have drifted off into sweet unconsciousness in the company of strangers: on buses, trains and airplanes, in hostel dormitories and doss houses, in railway stations, on park benches and in doorways, vineyards and derelict buildings in towns, cities and open countryside all over the world as was my practice during my years of voluntary impoverishment as I travelled here and there with little money. Yet for all that irresponsible risk-taking and foolhardiness, the only time I’ve been robbed was as a child, safely tucked up in bed in a friend’s house with my father only feet away.

A night in the cells in Italy.

The train from Nice pulled into Porta Nuova train station in Turin after midnight then pulled out again for Milan a few minutes later. It left me standing on the empty platform watching as the red tail lights grew dimmer and disappeared into the cold, lonely night, and the only sign of life around was the ever-fading puffs of white, spent breath that escaped from my shivering lips every five seconds or so.

I had no money; I hadn’t eaten a proper meal for a few days and as for washing … I hadn’t done that any time in the recent past. I stood for a while with my small, rumpled and fairly empty travelling bag lying at my feet in the snow, looking around without much hope for somewhere warm and sheltered to spend the rest of the night.

There were a few dark corners, piles of something or other under canvas, stacks of crates, and any of them would have given a bit of shelter but not much. I’d been colder, hungrier, further from home and was content to settle down anywhere for the night. I chose a deep doorway at the end of the platform. It looked unused and away from any patrolmen or watchmen who might happen to come around late to check for the likes of me, but as I walked alongside the rails back in the direction of Nice I heard low voices that seemed to be coming from behind that door and a thin line of yellow light escaping from beneath it.

Men were talking but soon I heard women joining in too, with the crying of a baby mixed in to it all so I pushed on the door and it gave a little. The voices died down when the door began to creak and by the time I had put my head into the room an uneasy silence had fallen on everyone, even the babies. Packed into the small waiting room was a gathering of about twenty distinctive looking people, all Gypsies as it turned out, travelling people, whatever the politically correct term is.

The men around the two bar electric fire plugged into a socket made way to let me, the frozen newcomer, get a bit of welcome warmth and we soon established that there was not going to be any meaningful conversation what with none of them speaking English or French, and me not having very much Italian and none of whatever they were speaking. But there was a warmth, a solidarity I’d never come across anywhere that I’d travelled in Europe. These people drew me in and gave me tea.

After an hour or so, when people were beginning to fade and drop of into sleep the door was flung open. I jumped and some babies started to cry. A squad of armed policemen filled the small room and started shouting and pulling people to their feet, me with them. The children had frightened looks on their dirty, tired faces as they clung to their mother’s skirts. The adults were soon all laden with their bundles and boxes and everyone was paraded out of the room onto the empty, frozen platform.

This was 1974 but it could so easily have been 1944 and the police could so easily have been Fascist Militia rounding up Jews, Gypsies and others deemed undesirable for a trip across the frozen continent to a camp in Poland. But no, this was 1974.

The police station wasn’t far away; we arrived there in three black vans. From the waiting room people were taken one by one into another room and I never saw them again. Soon the waiting room was all but empty but for me and a woman with three young children. Then I was taken.

I hadn’t yet protested about being rounded up and transported to I didn’t know where; I still hadn’t waved my Irish passport and asked to speak to the Irish Embassy in Rome. But the laid back, genial young officer called Enzo soon came to the conclusion that I shouldn’t have been brought there in the first place as we conversed in a mixture of French, Italian and English. We got on well. He found me an empty cell for the rest of the night and brought in a blanket. I had a hot shower down the hall and Enzo threw me a fluffy white towel to dry off with. Coffee arrived and we chatted for ages under the harsh light of the single, bare light bulb before he said it was time for him to go home.

Warm coffee, a bed with a warm blanket, security, good company, a story to dine out on, but I never did find out what happened to the Gypsies who had shared with me their warm tea, their electric fire, the warmth of their company and their insecurity.

A reluctant traveller

Forty one years ago today (if you are reading this in December 2013) a British Airways VC10 shattered the clean night skies the length of Africa to drag me shouting and kicking to Belfast. Being uprooted abruptly from an idyllic childhood did not put me in good form, although the appearance of pimples was heralding the end of childhood anyway, idyllic or otherwise. Moreover, being grafted onto Northern Irish society, a procedure that still requires constant attention, was not the success my parents had hoped for, and yes, I still have issues.

However air travel in 1971 still held onto some scraps of its initial romance, danger and promise of adventure unlike the antiseptic experience it has now become. Anything could happen and often did. There was menace in the air.

Along the way from Malawi we stopped at Entebbe, Uganda. Those were the days when passengers could get out for a while when planes had to land for frequent refuelling on long distance flights, but we were not allowed to get out this time.

As soon as the doors of the plane opened, fuel-saturated air squeezed into the cabin around dozens of people who filed on board quietly. There was a hush as they filled every empty seat, no fussing about stowing bags in overhead lockers and holding everyone up as they took their time organising themselves. The new passengers went quietly to whatever seat they could find and sat there in stunned silence. Their anxious faces spoke for them, telling stories of fear and horror and weeping, and they were mostly elderly. What sounded like shots rang out from somewhere in the dark and an old man passing along the aisle near me froze, shut his eyes tightly, and held onto the head rest of the seat in front of me. No luggage carts drove out onto the tarmac – no possessions got through the airport that night.

When the plane eventually taxied away it felt heavier to me than when it landed bringing a few of us from Blantyre, somehow more sluggish. It gathered momentum as it raced down the runway towards the first traces of dawn, then up into the morning air. That’s when the palpable sense of relief poured through the cabin like welcome warm water from a shower in a winter bathroom falling over a shivering body. That was when the weary, worried cargo of Asians knew they were at last clear of Idi Amin and his drunken soldiers who had robbed them of everything except the clothes they wore as they were processed through the airport after being ordered to leave the country. Many never made it through the airport.

My mind, trapped somewhere on the route between childhood and adolescence spent the next few hours putting together worried looks, the whispered asides of my parents and the snippets of radio news I had picked up over the past number of weeks. Some sense of perspective started taking over, some unchildlike recognition of the reality of other people’s suffering, some knowledge of my problems not being as significant as those of my fellow travellers. They too were being forcibly transported from Africa to Britain, but at least I had all my family, a change of clothes and a guaranteed, if vague, future at the other end.

And so to Cyprus. We landed at Nicosia to pick up more fuel and hopefully to stretch our legs, but no. There was to be no stroll around the airport, no opportunity to breathe cleanish air and no chance to see what it would be like to be in Cyprus. I had been intrigued by the possibility of walking on an island. I thought I’d never been on an island before until I remembered that I lived my first six years in Ireland so that made it alright. But the reason for not getting out at Nicosia was not alright. There was a gun battle taking place in the airport so the pilot wanted to get away as quickly as possible. So did my parents. So did the Asian Ugandans.

Then London for an hour, and then to Belfast and more gun battles. Gun battles in my street, bombs exploding in the shops at the end of the street, people being put out of their homes, entire streets of house being torched, hijackings of cars and buses I was in, daily road blocks and searches by boy soldiers who were trained to fight a military army rather than police a civilian population. But hey, I had my dreams and no-one could stop me planning my escape back to Africa. Forty one years later I have never gone back.

Italy under rain, or one guest too many.

Brindisi, December 1975, and it had been wet all day. The dense, solid bank of uniformly grey cloud had been oozing an insipid, cold drizzle since I left Naples in the early morning, relentless, dirty rain, the kind of rain that can hold the whole of Ireland in an oppressive grip for days on end at any time of the year, but I expected better from Italy. Each town the train shunted reluctantly through gave the impression of having been dipped daily for decades in yesterday’s cold, grey, soap-greased bath water. All the towns were dismal, and the countryside looked like a wasteland of puddles and empty spaces peopled with poverty and hopelessness, a country of tatters, as if post-war regeneration had never arrived and it had indeed never arrived.

But the atmosphere inside the everslow, evergrey train was cheery. Young, single, foreign travellers gravitated towards each other over the course of the day till the lonely individuals from France, Canada, Australia, Chile and Ireland became a group and there’s always one from Ireland. We swapped stories and histories. We pooled our loose change to buy wine and stale sandwiches. We despaired about Italy and wished better things for her and played cards to pass the time when the train stopped just short of Brindisi for half an hour when the driver joined a strike.

But Brindisi was not a destination, not for any of us. Brindisi was a staging-post, a point of transit. Istanbul was the destination and we still had to negotiate Igoumenitsa and Patras as well as the port of Brindisi, and Brindisi was nothing more than a ferry terminal stuck on the edge of a poverty-stricken urban wilderness, all half derelict, shells of improbably inhabited buildings, decrepit with decay, rags that looked like clothes hanging limp on lines destined never to dry in the mist-saturated air.

The ferry wasn’t running that night. There were storms in the Adriatic, there was a strike, the boat needed repairs, all depending on who you asked, but any of those reasons was good and the group we had become decided to stay in a youth hostel. I didn’t want to, never wanted to stay in youth hostels, but the group warmth kept me on board.


The hostel was a long way out of town; a bus ride, a trudge through relentless, malevolent mizzle that found its way through waterproof boots and inside underwear. There were six beds available. We were seven but we told the guy at the desk we were six and improvised a spontaneous choreography of dripping wet hair, passports, shouts, interruptions and requests for tourist information to baffle and distract the desk guy and we managed to sneak number seven up the stairs. We never did decide who number seven was but took turns through the night to sleep on the floor. There were six beds in the room. We all took turns at being number seven.

We went in and out of the dining room in groups of two or three, sometimes four, someone always nipping out on their own, swapping pullovers, anything to prevent Fabio the desk guy from knowing, guessing. Adversity, sweet adversity. Mother of hunger, invention and fellowship.

We ate. We decided not to have the shower we all longed for till we were about to go to bed so as not to have to pull on wet clothes afterwards, but leave them hanging on the clothes line whose loopy gait ran the length of the corridor and then go straight into bed. None of us had dry clothes. None even had damp clothes, only clothes wet through, wet even through the waterproof bags we’d packed them in.

And so eventually we showered, leaving clothes dripping in the cold corridor where they had no chance of becoming dry by morning. Hot water after a day of rain-soaked wretchedness and shivers. It took a while to dissociate the warm, comforting torrents from the cold miserable ones but in a while it worked. Hot showers. We found the small shower room down the hall. Six shower heads dangling loosely from the ceiling and mould growing out of the spider’s web of deep fissures in the grubby tiles with soap scum tide marks showing where the water rose to when the drains were blocked. The window frames high in the walls had no glass and let the steam out where it added a waste of heat to the rainy night. We resented that and laughed at it.

Heaven-generated, smooth, hot water tumbled all over us, seven bodies in six showers moving around from one shower head to another so that no-one felt like number seven. The smell of soap and shampoo obliterated the misery of grime that hung about the hostel. More stories, more histories, no-one wanting to move on to the damp bedroom with damp beds, everyone still uncounted by Fabio at the desk, free to be seven.

Rebellious, subversive, sloshing our feet around in the grey, soapy water deepening on the floor, finding and unclogging the plughole choked with generations of travellers’ gunge, making us feel tired but reluctant to leave the comfort of friendship, to get dressed in anything other than the finery of incongruous camaraderie and shared confessions, the anonymity and confidence of nakedness; a great place to hide.

In the morning Fabio at the desk woke all seven of the six of us along with everyone else at the hostel when he piped a particularly dreary version of Bridge over Troubled Water through his sound system; all versions are dreary, even back in 1975 when it was still kind of fresh. And so breakfast. The smell of the coffee was weak and insipid and could hardly find its way out of the cups. So we skipped breakfast. Instead we all marched out single file past Fabio the desk guy, disguised and self-conscious in our still damp clothes, an honest line of seven defiant guests but Fabio never counted, never noticed.

Living in Ireland.

I felt particularly grateful getting up this morning. As the dull morning broke over the city I was struck by the opulent wealth I enjoy.

I know others who will look at a morning like this and complain that it's cold and grey and that rain's not far away.

I know plenty who will moan at the prospect of having to get out of bed, get washed and dressed and go to work. There is always something to complain about and if it doesn't come readily to mind they aren't long finding it.

I admit that I succumb at times to that negative, self-pitying attitude, grateful for nothing and wanting more. And it shames me.

Today as I step out of a warm, comfortable bed I have an abundance of hot water to shower under, though I opt for cold water. I have breakfast to eat and a family to care for. I have a job to go to and a car to drive, a garden to delight in and I'm surrounded by leafy avenues and open countryside.

I live in a country where I can believe what I want and say what I want so long as I don't harm anyone else. I have access to books and information and I know how to read.

The value of the health care available to me and my family and the opportunity for education outstrip the small amount of tax I pay.

I'm so grateful that I live in Ireland.

Christmas is all tidied away now.

It's so good to have the festive season behind us. I'm fed up looking at choclate, bottles of smelly stuff and new socks.

Disposing of the chocolates is easy -I  just eat them the same day I get them. I pay a price of course in terms of feeling extremely bloated and nauseated for a few days but once they're gone they're gone.

The bottles of smelly stuff are either re-gifted straightaway or donated to charity shops; only the socks can I put to good use. Unwanted and disgraceful looking sweaters are taken back to the shop where they were bought and exchanged for more needful items if I can't get a monetary refund.

I just like to get everything tidied up and put away after Christmas and get back to normal everyday living.

Belfast on New Year's Day.

The New Year is well under way now and we have to get used to writing the number 2015.

I love Belfast on New Year's Day. The streets are empty as are the cafes, and this is the day I reserve every year for browsing through my bookshelves and remembering old friends that I've read and can't give away. It was French poetry this morning: Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Verlaine. I'll probably move on to Dostoyevsky this afternoon.

Work also has to get fitted in too of course, and I've already spent time in two hospitals. The hospital corridors are as empty as the streets outside. The atmosphere is calm and muted. Only the very sick have been held on to over the holidays. They all feel left behind.