Raspberries

by Peter Miller

I can’t really remember her coming into my compartment, it’s been a while now of course, but even so any kind of beginning to the whole incident seems indistinct in my memory. She wasn’t there when we left Gare de Lyon.

I’d made the train in time, just, after a frustrating argument with the officious little guy in the ticket office. Well, not so much an argument as him talking very fast French over my pathetic attempts to explain that I already had an onward reservation. He found it when he condescended to actually look. No apology of course, just a perfunctory punch of the ticket and a scribble in his book.

That much, and the train winding its way through the outer suburbs of Paris in a thick grey haze of rain, I do remember quite clearly.

She might have boarded at a station very soon after that, although I don’t remember us stopping anywhere that close to Paris. Or she may already have been on the train and merely changed compartments, I just don’t have an image of her opening the door and sitting down.

Her hair was wet and she had a little red valise and an umbrella, both of which were in the overhead rack, jammed up against my pack. I remember I had a momentary flash of guilt that I’d taken up so much space.

I’d have trouble starting up a conversation in those circumstances in English, let alone French, so I just smiled at her in a way that I hoped looked polite and went back to my book. She didn’t say anything and I instantly regretted not having spoken, even if it was in my appalling Franglais.

The train passed through a dark copse of trees. Thin skeins of water skittered across the window.

She was sitting opposite me, looking out at the rain, and I stole little glances at her as I pretended to read. I haven’t a clue now what the book was. It doesn’t feature strongly in my recollections so it was probably some rubbish that I’d picked up in the airport, as you do when you’re on holidays.

Each time I flicked my eyes up to her something had changed, just a little bit. Her head would be tilted slightly, or she might have shifted forward in her seat, or the light from outside refracting through the rain might be falling across her face differently. It was like looking at individual frames in a strip of film and trying to infer some kind of motion from each solitary still image.

I suddenly became very aware that I was sitting in a train, alone with a pretty girl, coursing across the rainy French countryside and at exactly that moment she moved her leg. Only a little, but enough so that it touched mine. It might have been accidental, but she didn’t move it away again.

The train went over some points and we swayed.

I glanced up and saw her eyes dance back to the wet countryside. Her breath misted the bottom of the window near her mouth and I imagined kissing her.

With a frightening thump of compression everything was suddenly dark as the train went into a tunnel. I felt the girl startle, a shiver of the muscles in her leg. A dim light overhead blinked on, fizzed feebly and went out.

She said something in the darkness and laughed but I didn’t catch it. A light flashed by outside, very bright. For that fragmented second her face was outlined sharply with blue light, looking toward where I was sitting in the dark. I noticed, very abruptly, her perfume, a light floral scent that reminded me of the plum trees in the lane behind our house when I was a kid.

Another minute or so of noisy darkness and we were back into the light, now green and grey, as the train rushed through saturated cypress forest.

The girl had leaned back into her seat, her eyes closed. I sat watching her, half expecting, maybe half hoping, to see her eyes open and catch me in the act. Her leg was still lightly touching mine.

The shadows of the trees outside the window flashed and shuddered as we sped across the landscape. We sat like that for at least an hour, leg against leg, moving against one another to the rhythm of the rocking carriage.

I fell into an almost hypnotic reverie. The hushing charge of the train over the sleepers formed itself into cryptic phrases:

“Passionfruit, passionfruit, passionfruit ...“; “Just kiss me, just kiss me, just kiss me ...“; “Josephine, Josephine, Josephine ...“.

Filaments of light float across the pebbles on the bottom of the river bed. The water is warm. A shadow ripples over me and I look up. The girl swims above me, still under the surface, breathing a thread of fine silver bubbles that stream back over her breasts and belly.

I turn and follow her. Long river grass, soft like felt, strokes my shoulders and arms. She climbs up onto the bank, beads of water shimmering on her back. I float up behind her and pull myself out of the river and onto the grass. I notice that her eyes are vivid green, almost the colour of the river weed.

I wrap my arms around her and we sit down against a smooth tree trunk. My hand moves over her breast and she turns her head and kisses me. Her lips and tongue taste of the river, like earth and moss and stone.

We lie there in the warm sun, cradled against the tree. Insects whir in the still warm air. Later she feeds me raspberries from a wooden bowl and I can feel the deep rumble of the river through the ground.

I faded into wakefulness. The train had come to a stop in some little town or other, I can’t remember now. The rain had blown away and boxes of blood red geraniums on the platform were picked out in mosaic detail by the late afternoon sun. I was alone in the compartment. The girl had gone while I’d been asleep.

I felt a deep sinking regret, as if I’d missed an important meeting, or fallen short of a friend’s expectations. The empty compartment was somehow emptier than when I’d first sat down.

I watched a guard resetting a clock further down the platform. The train sounded its horn and began to move. It was a languid picturesque scene, the pretty little station house, the stone paths wet from the rain and everything so perfectly foreign.

And then she was standing there, looking distractedly into the distance, her umbrella propped up against the red suitcase. As my window drew level she turned toward me, smiled and put her finger to her lips as if to say “Shhh ...”