Andrew Martin - The Necropolis Railway

'Warm,' said Stanley, and then he was off again, pacing back and forth.

'But you just speak for money,' I said. 'You have no personal interest in any of what you say.'

'Intramural burial is a grievous wrong, and one particular aspect of the company's operations is of special interest.' 'Which is what?'

His eyes were on me again; they were not like fires, I decided, but like flowers. 'Trains.' He took another step towards me.

'Trains?' I said. 'Oh, they're a bit of all right, aren't they? Quite exciting, you know.'

Stanley nodded. 'As a means of conveyance for the dead, yes.' 1 am on the railways myself, on the London and South Western Railway, to be exact. I clean the funeral engines.' 'I know,' he said.

His eyes stopped dancing and went dead. He seemed to be in the grip of a fever; he was sweating freely – and this with the coldness of the night coming through the open window.

'It is written in the minutes of the Necropolis that you sent requests to the directors at their meetings of August, November and December.'

He was looking down at the jug again; he was very intent on the place where the handle joined the body. Then he looked up to me and his eyes were full of orange flame.

'What was your request?' I asked, letting the brake handle slide a little way into my palm. 'I asked for an increase in pay.'

As he swung the water jug, I said, 'You're off your onion,' and the water and the glass exploded against my head as he said in his fast voice: 'I did not receive it on the first occasion, and nor did I receive it on the second or the third, by which time the company's indebtedness to myself for services provided had… oh, it had not decreased, oh, it had most certainly not decreased, and yet I was to be content merely with the restoration of the Tuesday Address as a weekly -'

I had sunk to the ground as Stanley raved, and that wasn't the end of the matter. I was sinking through the floor as my murderer spoke, and the blood in my eyes turned into the red flowers among those that the board of the North Eastern gave 'I. 'I. Crystal for his shows. No, the certificates. They gave him certificates for the flowers that were everywhere. You couldn't see out of the waiting room for them, and you couldn't properly see out of the signal box either – they were dangerous, those gardenias. On the platform you can see very well, though – the hills of Eskdale rising and rising, and here is the bird train coming down from Whitby at half-past eleven on a summer Saturday morning: 137, that silly little dock shunter that would have been better off banging cod waggons about at West Cliff, two waggons full of pigeons, and my old favourite, Mr Saul Whittaker, the pigeon conveyer, who tells no end of yarns, and is semi-drunk at all times.

Number 137 stops, and this time there is a flat-bed truck tagging along behind, with something under a tarp. In the first pigeon waggon, Mr Saul Whittaker rolls open the door and slides down onto the platform like a heap of brown sand. 'Bugger me!' he says – I don't know why, maybe it's the smell of Crystal's blooms hitting him – and then, squatting down against the truck, sweating Old Six and breathing hard, he says, 'Sporting challenge, lad?'

'I'm on for any mortal thing,' I say, while pulling the baskets for Grosmont out of the vans. I set them up in a dead straight line along the platform, having a look onto the footplate as I move towards the 'up' end. All is too dark inside, the firehole door being closed: just two pairs of boots, maybe, one fellow singing a Moody and Sankey hymn in a little voice.

'Ow do,' I say, but nothing comes back, and the singing doesn't even stop.

Behind me the station clock goes clunk, which is twenty-seven past eleven, which is no good because it is Whittaker's watch that counts, and this he is holding high in the air while tipping his head backwards, looking about ready to sneeze. The silence carries on as I watch old Father Whittaker, whose thin red head is tipping ever backwards… 'Go!' he shouts.

'Hold on, you rotter!' I shout back, but I'm pelting along that platform in any case, lifting the lids, with the birds flapping and crashing straight up into the air like bombs going off behind me. At the end of the line I stop, gasping in front of Whittaker and his watch, with the birds in a cloud above us. He's nodding, grinning all around his head, and I am blowing my nose on my sleeve, even though it is a North Eastern Railway coat and I'm proud to wear it. I've let the birds go within one minute. The two of us look up and see them, still hanging over the platform like a Piccadilly Circus in the sky. As we watch they make a bigger circle, turning fast before beginning to go off in all directions like sparks from a Catherine wheel at a bonfire carnival.

I start to load the boxes, and when I've finished Whittaker seems to be sucked rapidly backwards into his van; he doesn't exactly stand up. I move along to the back waggon, where I see, underneath the tarpaulin, the shafts of a yellow gig rocking on its blocks in the sunlight. As 137 starts barking and pulling away from Grosmont, I say goodbye to that old gig, because very soon there will be no more of its kind. I am seventeen years old, and it is a very special time. High-speed is coming. But then I somehow moved my head again. There was a shortage of secondary air; people were appearing and disappearing at a great rate all around Nine Elms, and I was dragging my feet, which sounded like rain. But then I had to go on a railway journey in Portugal to meet a man who wrote an article in The Railway Magazine, and if only the wind had died down I might have been in with a chance. I was staring into the firebox on Thirty-One, closing my eyes but it was still light. Every time I closed my eyes the music hall began, for I had that damn firebox leaping in my head.

I wanted three more on the right side, three more on the night side. 'It's Welsh coal,' said a voice in my head: 'damned slow to ignite.' The voice went and I found that half of my face was my face and the other half was joined on to something else. When I tried to move, my mouth was dragged into a kind of smile. All was darkness and there was again a shortage of secondary air. I moved my hand up and something at the same time hard and soft came quickly down upon it. I lifted my hand again but not so high, then higher again and the thing came down swiftly once more. So I slid one of my hands up towards the half of my face that was still there, moving my fingers until they touched a rock, which was what joined me to the hard and soft. The voice came back again and this time gave me three words in the softness and the darkness: dart, pricker, paddle. Well, they were the fire irons to be found on any engine. I was grateful for the words because I liked them, but did not know why they had been given to me.

In a funny sort of way I went back to sleep and in a funny sort of way I woke up – I did both, I mean, without really doing either. All was the same as before, but I was being shaken in a way that I had been shaken before.

'I am on a train,' I said, and I realised that the whispering voice had been mine all along. The rest of it came to me quickly: I was now in Mrs Davidson-Hill's coffin, or Mrs Lampard's, and heading for the grave of the one or the other in Brookwood, and when this knowledge came to me I found I could not suck in enough air to keep alive, and sweat began rolling off me in an instant. I jerked and there was a tearing in the rock, and a great boiling of the blood underneath it. I thrashed at the solid darkness, only I could not thrash. And yet I was not blind, at least, for there was a very thin line of light going all around me like a halo, happily around and around and around like a song being sung. The sight calmed me somewhat, and I started on smaller breaths, which seemed to serve, and with them came a return to the state of semi-sleep into which I let myself go gladly, until I heard my own voice speaking. 'First class,' it said, and I felt the water from my mouth that those two words had produced trickling across my cheek towards the rock, where I stopped being able to feel it.