Christmas 2012 - There is but one...

Tunnel Vision

keeping on the rails
for Christmas 2007
with
Paul Brazier & Juliet Eyeions

?Into the darkness of the railway tunnel, the robot train rolled at top speed. To save energy, it had dimmed its interior lights when it sensed its last passenger leave the train and none had boarded, so it was running light on the final leg of its southbound service into Brighton. It was on time and satnav reported the track ahead was clear. A northbound service was approaching, also on time and at top speed, on the other track.
Unfortunately, the foreman in charge of the overnight engineering works was tired and in a hurry to get home and snatch some sleep before going to the sunlighting job he had taken to be sure there was enough money for the kids for Christmas. In his rushed final check before handing off the permanent way to live service, he missed the note that a computer glitch had prevented the automatic diversion of northbound trains to the southbound line, so the gang had had to switch the points manually. Had the computer done its job properly, it would also have reset them automatically – but it had done neither, so they remained switched.
As the foreman climbed wearily into bed, the accelerating northbound train rocked over the unexpected points change and tilted crazily – but remained upright and on the rails and had just reached its cruising speed as it entered the tunnel. Thus, roughly in the middle of the tunnel, at full tilt, the two trains met.

“Darling, I’m home!”
    “You’re very late, aren’t you? Or, should I say, not very early?”
    “Ho, ho, ho! I only took on these overnight shifts to make us some extra Christmas cash. But I’ve just had to spend the first night’s earnings on a taxi home from Haywards Heath. Some kind of problem at Brighton meant all trains were terminating there.”
    “What sort of problem?”
    “I didn’t wait to find out. The minute they made the announcement, I legged it down to the taxi rank. I didn’t want to wait the whole morning while they organised replacement buses. I need my beauty sleep.”
    “No, you don’t. You’re beautiful enough already. Cup of coffee? It’s freshly made.”
    “No, thanks, sweetheart. Coffee will keep me awake. I wouldn’t mind a hot chocolate though.”
    “That’s what I thought. Abracadabra!”
    “Oh, sugar plum, you’re so good to me. Mmmm! That’s nice.”
    “Was it a good night?”
    “It is strange being in the newsroom at night. It’s darker and quieter but just as chaotic – no interesting new stories, though. Just the usual – Gordon Brown losing his pen and missing the plane to sign another Euroform of surrender, too much rain in one place and not enough in another, too much food in the West and not enough in Africa, global warming making this the coldest winter on record – but they had enough reporters for all that, so they gave me a nice little filler feature to write, on why people love ghost stories so much at Christmas.”
    “That’s right up your street, isn’t it?”
    “Since I did my dissertation on ‘The Psychological Psignificance of the Paranormal in 20th Century Phiction’, you mean? You betcha! But I had to dumb it down a bit. You can’t go too deep in 400 words. I just wrote a piece of fluff based on ‘A Christmas Carol’ that showed how Scrooge’s three ghosts were just manifestations of his unconscious – regret for the past, guilt about the present and a wish for the future to be somehow better – which allowed him to realise that none of this was inevitable, he was responsible for it and it was in his power to change it if he wanted to. So the tradition of the Christmas ghost story, like the simple Christmas gift, is a manifestation of the desire for wishes to come true.”
    “Sounds brilliant.”
    “But the eerie thing was that, coming home on the train, I met this man who told me a ghost story!”
    “You met a man! Should I be jealous?”
    “Don’t be silly, sweetikins. You know you are the only person I will ever love.”
    “Hmmm.”
    “He was the ticket inspector, or guard, or whatever they call them now. And, anyway, he was old enough to be someone’s grandfather. He had a big, bristly moustache all salt and pepper and a nice hat with a badge on the front – yes, it said ‘guard’ on it – and a satchel and red and green flags and a lantern – oh, yes, and a big whistle.
    “At Three Bridges, everyone else got off and I was sitting there feeling lonely and sorry for myself when he came along the carriage, leaned out the door, blew his whistle really loud, waved his green flag, and then sat down across the aisle from me as the train pulled away.
    “ ‘Bloomin’ people,’ he said. ‘Did you see those three? They were having a moan at me for not coming along and checking their tickets. He screwed his face up comically and whined in imitation: “It’s your job to make sure everyone pays, otherwise we have to pay more. It’s not fair!” ’.
    “I got my ticket out to show him and he took it but didn’t look at it – he was far away, gazing vaguely along the corridor.
    “ ‘I went down that carriage, right to the end of the train,’ he said, ‘and there was no one there. Now this ain’t the first time this has happened. Every year, around this time, whenever there aren’t so many people about, I get this. ’Course, people complain all the time, but during the day when it’s busy you don’t get time to wonder where they were sitting. But when someone up and complains who I could swear wasn’t on the train in the first place, it makes me doubt my sanity.’ ”
    “I’m beginning to doubt yours.”
    “Don’t be silly, my lovely. No, listen, it’s true, and that was when he started to talk about ghosts – he said he thought he was haunted! Haunted by the ghosts of truculent commuters. ‘But I don’t understand what they want!’ he said. ‘Aren’t ghosts dead people who have unfinished business with the living? What have I done that they need to haunt me? And what can I do to make them go away?’
    “And then his eyes came back into focus and he saw my ticket in his hand. ‘Preston Park? Change at Haywards Heath,’ he said, all professional again. I explained that I was rather tired and would rather go into Brighton and get a taxi home as that would be quicker and asked if my ticket would be valid. He said that was okay but, if he were me, he wouldn’t do it. He said there was some kind of delay at Brighton which would mean it would take a lot longer going that way and anyway there should be a slow train about five minutes later that I could catch.
    “By this time, we were pulling in to Haywards Heath. And blow me if he didn’t take his ‘guard’ cap off, stuff it in his satchel, and replace it with one of those old-fashioned Santa Claus hats, you know, the red velvet ones, with white ermine trimmings. ‘Merry Christmas,’ he boomed as I stepped out of the train. He leaned out after me, blew his whistle and waved his green flag, then the doors closed and he was gone.”
    “Sounds like a jolly old soul. But what about his ‘truculent ghosts’?”
    “He was sweet. He didn’t tell me anything more about his ghosts and, to be honest, I don’t think they were really there. I think he was just a bit deranged from having had to deal with the public all his life and they were manifestations of his own anxieties about being reported for not doing his job properly. He must be near retirement and worried about losing his job and his pension. As I said in my thesis, ghosts don’t exist. They are just our subconscious desires made manifest.”
    “So why did you get a taxi from Haywards Heath?”
    “Oh, that. Well, there was a slow train, fifteen minutes later but, as it pulled in, this masterful voice came over the tannoy – ‘All change, please, all change. Due to an incident on the line, all southbound services will terminate here for the time being. Please wait on the platform for further information. All change, please, all change.’ So, as people started to get off the train, I legged it down to the taxi rank. It didn’t sound as if there would be a train home any time soon.”
    “I wonder what happened. Do you think it’ll be on the news?”

As the first hints of dawn paled the eastern sky, the lucky couple snuggled together and dozed on the sofa in the flickering blue television light and, by the time the newsreader spoke, they were both fast asleep.
    “Here is the seven o’clock news. We are receiving reports of a serious incident this morning in the Clayton railway tunnel on the London-Brighton line. Just before six am, two of the new type 666 trains were involved in a head-on collision. Both trains were travelling at high speed and it is likely the line will be blocked for several hours. No casualties have been reported. The type 666 was introduced recently to great controversy, as it has no crew and is controlled remotely. Passengers said they felt unsafe travelling in a ‘robot’ train. Many seasoned veteran railwaymen were made redundant.
    “Shop steward Bill Nicholas was one of many to lose their jobs. Working part-time as Father Christmas in Santa’s Grotto, he took time out to offer this comment.” As he appeared on the screen, he removed his false Santa beard to reveal a bristly salt-and-pepper moustache.
    “These toytown trains are an accident waiting to happen. You need a human hand at the controls – how can an automatic train know the doors won’t open and the carriages are filling up with flames? They’re deathtraps. But they save money, so we have to accept them.”
    Half an hour later, the newsreader said, “We have just had a call from a Mrs Christine Nicholas. She says her husband, Bill, who featured in our seven o’clock bulletin about the Clayton tunnel crash, died suddenly in the early hours of this morning. “It’s a shame he wasn’t here to see himself proved right about these toytown trains,” she said. We are very sorry for any distress we may have caused her and her family.
    “Our reporter is on the scene and has just managed to get hold of the engineer in charge…”
    In the tunnel, the dust had settled and the echoes of the screams of tortured metal and smashing glass had died away. Silence and darkness reigned over the crumpled, concertinaed metal tubes that had once been railway carriages – except for the buzzing and flickering of a solitary emergency lamp. And there, between the rails, beneath the wreckage, lay, red-velvet-trimmed-with-ermine, a rather old-fashioned Santa Claus hat.

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