White and Other Tales of Ruin

“Glad?” I said, but nobody answered. I already knew what he meant. I tried looking from the window instead, and right then I’d have given anything to be able to see my reflection. It was light inside the coach but the windows were a matt black, offering me no glimpse of how my eyes had changed over the past few minutes. First I had been in the waiting room and now I was here, and whatever had happened in between was lost time. Perhaps I’d been drugged.

“Were you drugged?” I asked the woman across the aisle.

She turned to me and I saw for the first time how striking and wretched she was. I had never thought to find beauty in sorrow, but her hooded eyes and down-turned mouth, the sallowness of her brown skin and her lank black hair … I found it all so alluring. Perhaps because I saw a reflection of myself at last.

“My son was drugged,” she said.

“He’s on here too?” I looked around, straining against my straps to see if there was someone else with this woman’s eyes. But however hard I tried I could see no one else, only the grey tuft of hair rising just above the seat before me. It wavered in an unseen breeze.

“No, he’s dead,” she said. I thought she smiled, but it was a grimace preceding an outpouring of tears. “They took him from school and gave him drugs, fed him them like they were candy, made him an addict and made him dependent. He couldn’t move without his fix, couldn’t wash or eat or shit. They turned him into their slave. His chains were drugs, his life was theirs, and there was nothing … nothing I could do. Nothing anyone could do. People say they care until they realise that they’re helpless, then they fade away into the background, try to make you forget they were ever there. Maybe it’s guilt. I lost a lot of friends after my son was taken from me. Just at the time I needed them they left, because they couldn’t help and they couldn’t live with not helping.”

She wiped at her eyes but the tears had already ceased. Perhaps there weren’t that many left. “Then they sent him back to school with a pocketful of drugs and a flick-knife. He was expelled quickly, my Paul, expelled and arrested and beaten and arrested again and released and beaten, beaten by everyone. Helpless. I’d lost touch with him by then … long before then … but I wouldn’t have been able to do anything anyway. I was helpless. When they found him … he was half the weight he’d been when I’d last seen him.”

“Sorry,” I said when she seemed to stop talking and fall into a trance, staring at my feet or somewhere far beyond. “I didn’t think — ”

“He always wanted to be an architect,” she said. “He was nine years old when he died.” She saw me properly for the first time then, her eyes seeing instead of looking, perhaps probing to discover whether I was someone she could really talk to. “So young, and yet he knew his future so well. How can they steal that from someone so young? How could they?”

I turned back to the window after offering her an awkward smile. I thought of Laura and how, at least, she was still alive. I assumed. I had to assume.

“Hell is other people,” the grey-haired man murmured.

“And what the fuck is that supposed to mean?” I didn’t raise my voice, but I was angry.

“I’m not offering an opinion,” he said, “merely quoting.”

There was nothing I could say to that, and I felt ridiculously admonished. I glanced across at the woman but she was staring down at her hands, twisting them in her lap. In this strange light it looked as if she was kneading shadows.

I wondered how this could be helping her, and in doing so I realised that it was already making me forget my own problems. Laura was still on my mind — she would always be there — but after the woman’s horrible story my own problems felt lessened. Probably not exactly what Hell had intended … but one of my fellow passengers had greater problems than me. I often told myself that there were a lot of people worse off, but I’d never actually met them.

“Oh Jesus!” said a voice from further along the coach.

And the windows lit up again.

They were moving us through a town that was dying.

I glanced at the woman across the aisle but she was staring from her window as well, seeing all the same things, probably equally shocked.

“I never thought there was anywhere like this left,” I whispered. Nobody answered me, and I hoped that it was because they agreed rather than because they thought I was naive.