Amy Winehouse

A piece of fiction written for the Write On Track writing competition, celebrating the 200th anniversary of the Stockton to Darlington railway line. I was delighted to win second prize in the Short Story category. The musical interludes are all tracks that were rattling around in my head when I was writing – and a couple of them ultimately found their way into the story.

THE ETERNAL HEREAFTER VIA THORNABY STATION
By Bob Fischer

PART ONE: NINETEEN SEVENTY SEVEN

The noise woke me up at the same time every night.

Rumble rumble, clackety clack. Rumble rumble, clackety clack.

I didn’t like it. It made me feel scared.

I asked my dad what it was, and he said “It’s the ghost train”.

“Where does it go?” I asked.

“It takes all the dead people to the eternal hereafter. Although they might have to change at Thornaby Station first”.

“Ignore him,” smiled my mam. “It’ll be a goods train. Or the Royal Mail. It might be bringing you a letter from your grandma”.

There wasn’t even a station in Yarm at that point. We’d moved into Spital Cottage in the January, and the house was filled with its own mildewed spectres of post-war poverty. Old Mrs Wilson had lived (and died) there before us, and her lingering presence was still felt in every nicotine-stained room of the house. She had washed in a tin bath by a crackling coal fire. Her toilet was an “earth closet” outdoors in the yard, just a hole in a plank beneath a rusty tin roof. There were none of the trappings of late 20^th century life: no phone, no gas, no electricity. We listened to Showaddywaddy on my mam’s transistor radio while my dad and his friends tore down walls and fitted pipes.

It snowed heavily that winter. When my dad was finished for the day we’d walk the dogs across John Blake’s field and I’d see the trains going past for myself. The railway line was imprisoned by brambles, on the other side of a rickety fence, and we’d stand in the twilight and wait for the noise. Rumble rumble, clackety clack… I’d try to count the carriages, but I never made it past five.

One, two, three, four, blue-grey, clackety clack.

At that age, my senses seemed constantly overwhelmed. The days were an avalanche of brand new smells and noises. The dogs went yap-yap-yap, the trains went clackety clack, the snow went squeak-squeak crunch as we picked our way home across white, moonlit fields.

That was my favourite sound of all.

“Are there ghosts on that train? Being taken to the hereafter?”

“Not that one,” smiled my dad. “That’s just people going to York.”

Sometimes I played with Helen, the little girl who lived on the farm. She put her dad’s pipe in our snowman’s mouth, and I pulled her down the bank on a sledge made out of cattle feed bags. She was nice and she laughed at everything. I tried to tell her about the train that made me frightened but she said she’d never heard it herself and that it was probably just a dream.

But it wasn’t a dream.

I heard it every night.

Rumble rumble, clackety clack. Rumble rumble, clackety clack.

I didn’t like it. It made me feel scared.

PART TWO: NINETEEN NINETY

“There’s a only a mouthful left,” said Helen.

“You have it,” I said.

“We’ll share it,” she smiled.

She raised the plastic bottle and swilled the final dregs of Merrydown cider around her mouth before craning her neck upwards as my heartbeat thundered like a summer storm. We kissed, and the last of the booze from Stevo’s party fizzed and trickled from her lips to mine.

She flung the empty bottle away and shrugged. It landed in the bramble bushes on the other side of the rickety fence by the railway line.

“Are we going to regret this?” I asked.

She shook her head silently with a gentle, pitying smile.

We hadn’t really been friends at school. When we were little she was Helen from the farm, when we were older she was Helen from Mrs Kirkby’s class, but by the time we’d reached the sprawling, twisting corridors of Conyers comprehensive she was just the girl who once went out with a mate of Stevo’s brother. It had never occurred to me that she might be there that night. But there she was, dancing in the front room in her Stone Roses t-shirt while the CD itself pounded from Stevo’s dad’s new stereo.

“Do you wanna be adored?” I’d shouted, already fortified by two cans of Gaz’s lager. I would never have had the nerve to speak to her otherwise.

“Why, are you made of stone?” she’d laughed.

Twenty minutes later we’d been snogging on the stairs.

We’d danced and laughed and kissed for the rest of the night, and every time I caught Gaz’s eye he gave me a lecherous grin. But I wasn’t having any of that. This wasn’t about me and the lads, this was something new and exciting. This was about me.

Me and Helen from the farm.

Me and Helen from Mrs Kirkby’s class.

NO

Me and Helen from the party.

That was better.

We had no idea who had brought the cider, but at half past three we’d taken it from the kitchen worktop and stumbled out into a pale summer’s morning. It was already getting light, and a weak sun was peering nervously above the hedgerows. We’d walked hand-in-hand across the silent main road to the edge of John Blake’s field.

Walking and talking.

Talking and kissing.

The train had clattered past as she’d pulled me down gently onto cracked and blistered soil.

Rumble rumble, clackety clack. Rumble rumble, clackety clack.

“You won’t remember this,” said Helen. “But when you were little, you were scared of the trains. I remember you telling me one day on the farm.”

“Not all the trains,” I said. “Just the one that woke me up every night. My dad said it was taking dead people to the eternal hereafter.”

“Your dad!” laughed Helen, rolling over onto her side, but the rest of the joke remained untold. There were strands of dried grass stuck all over her t-shirt, and I picked one off and trailed it idly along the ground.

In that fleeting moment of nothingness, my senses were overwhelmed once more.

I heard my heartbeat. Helen’s heartbeat. Birds singing, and a distant milk float.

I smelled fresh grass. Flat cider. Stale cigarettes.

Helen’s perfume.

“Are you scared now?” she asked.

“A little bit,” I smiled.

She kissed me again, and this time she was just

Helen.

PART THREE: TWO THOUSAND AND SIX

I felt robbed.

I felt cheated. Ripped off.

Empty, angry and pointless.

I sat on the bench at Yarm Station and shivered in dull, October drizzle. I didn’t know how long I’d been there. Long enough to finish off a packet of damp cigarettes. Long enough to drain the acidic final dregs from a third bottle of cheap white wine. I let it fall onto the platform and rubbed my knuckles into my scalp until the skin on my head throbbed and throbbed and throbbed and then I just kept rubbing harder until it throbbed a whole lot more.

Because I needed to feel something.

All my senses had been muted for months.

How many years had we actually spent together?

My mam was telling everyone sixteen, but that was being generous.

One year of sixth form, of canoodling in the darkened corners of friends’ parties and student discos. Three years away at university, at opposite ends of the country, telling ourselves we could “see other people” but still getting together in drunken self-pity at Christmas and all through those long and listless summer holidays.

And then, in 1995, both briefly back in our childhood homes and languishing in the doldrums of dreary post-student torpor, we finally became a Proper Couple. Amid a drunken maelstrom of part-time jobs and hangovers and spiralling overdrafts, suddenly we were Me and Helen.

Helen and Me.

That was better.

Helen and Me.

And that’s how it stayed. Through flats, through proper jobs, through mortgage applications, through trying for a family.

Through symptoms, through treatment, through hospital beds, through palliative care.

It was the Christmas cards that had got me. I found them a month after she’d gone, in the bedroom drawer she had left for me to “sort out”. She’d written them in advance, over the summer, carefully addressed to all our friends and family, meticulously signed on behalf of us both, in handwriting that was already looking shaky and uncertain.

Christmas cards from Helen and me.

She knew she wouldn’t be here.

I pulled my phone from my soaking jeans pocket and glanced at its tiny orange screen as the rain hammered harder on the shelter’s plastic roof.

03:59

I did think about doing it, I really did. Wasn’t that why I’d come here, after all? To make sure I never had to post those rotten Christmas cards?

And then I thought of my mam, alone in her bed at Spital Cottage, being woken by the landline ringing at five or six o’clock in the morning. And I thought of the shock and the tears and the crushing loneliness that I’d be amplifying even further and passing directly onto her. Like a virus, like a contagion of grief and anger and despair.

I didn’t even look up as the train shuddered through the station. I just stared at my feet, my filthy trainers on the wet tarmac, and I let it rattle past, blue-grey, blue-grey, making the sound it had made every single night since I was four years old and still piddling in Old Mrs Wilson’s earth closet.

Rumble rumble, clackety clack. Rumble rumble, clackety clack.

I kicked my empty cigarette packet onto the railway line and shuffled back up the steps to the car park.

PART FOUR: TWO THOUSAND AND TWENTY FIVE

Finally, I drifted back home.

I think it happens to everyone in the end. I’d been away for a long time, and I didn’t recognise anything at first. There were new estates on John Blake’s field, executive homes built all around the railway station, and diggers in the fields surrounding Spital Cottage. The new owners had built a huge extension, a mass of new bricks where Old Mrs Wilson’s earth closet once stood. No rusty tin roof now, just a carport for two gleaming Range Rovers and a brand new bedroom with expensive-looking windows.

I floated past, felt a twinge of anguish, then let it go.

Good luck to them all.

I knew where I was going. Just like on that incredible night in 1990, the night of Stevo’s legendary party, I didn’t even have to think about it. There was snow on the ground, which made me smile, but I didn’t make it go squeak-squeak crunch this time.

The platform was deserted. The clock on the departures board read 03:55. Perfect timing, I thought. I settled as best as I could on the bench and waited in silence for the train to arrive.

Rumble rumble, clackety clack. Rumble rumble, clackety clack.

Screech.

There was no recorded announcement, no scrolling digital message to signal its arrival. But nevertheless the train drew to a halt, and I drifted up the steps into a carriage flooded with light.

At first, I thought it was empty. But then I saw them huddled together on a double seat with the armrest up. They looked different, maybe younger than I remembered, but there was no mistaking my dad’s playful smile.

“Told you it was the ghost train,” he said.

“Ignore him,” said my mam. “She’s in there, she’s waiting for you”.

I left them alone and passed through the corridor as the train began to pull away from Yarm Station.

I saw snowflakes whizzing past the window, then stars, then velvet blackness. And we didn’t change at Thornaby after all.

All my senses exploded at once and I smelt her perfume and felt her fingers on my cheek.

This time, there was no need to be scared.

The Write on Track writing competition was organised by Stop Write Hear, with support from Tracks Darlington and funding from Creative Darlington, Bishop Line Community Rail Partnership and the S&DR Heritage Fund.

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