Playing Out by Paul Magrs

Author:Paul Magrs [Magrs, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Contemporary, Short Stories
ISBN: 0099735717
Google: Xu01AAAACAAJ
Goodreads: 644588
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1997-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

THE LION VANISHES

I was heavily involved reading something and I never noticed when we stopped. When I’m on a train I like to keep my head down much of the time. It doesn’t do to have people think you’re looking at them. Anything might result.

It was a busy train, a trans-Europe express—of Agatha Christie and Kraftwerk fame—and we were crammed into compartments that reeked of pine, tobacco and musty plush. The woman sitting across from me was clutching three sticky cases of Belgian chocolates, a leopard-skin pillbox hat resting ominously on the shelf above her head. Up to no good, I thought, and went to the dining compartment for lunch, not wanting to be involved.

At this stage our journey was all mountains and forests. I hardly knew where we were; if not hurtling through invisible, snow-stormed countryside, we alternated wildly between the dizzying clarity of the severest of altitudes and the vegetable dark of the woods. The landscape was something else, besides my fellow travellers, not to get too embroiled in.

I review books, novels. I had a suitcase of twenty-six in the luggage carriage and by Manchester, England, was meant to have read and commented on each. I was on number twelve, a heady and baroquely inaccurate account of the execution of Mary Queen of Scots and was anticipating another quiet afternoon in a semi-doze with somebody else’s fiction at my mercy, flipping the pages with a disrespectful haste.

The quiet of the train was fascinating. A quiet tamped down by all the snow, which we could see but, since we were kept in this Regency-stripe-flocked shuttle, not even imagine tasting or touching. The climate’s unaffected quiet infected everyone, I thought.

I had developed my sea legs, train legs, and I was buffeted all the way to the dining car, which was only two up from the last, the luggage car. I was very familiar with this last, since with each hardback book completed, I had to make another trip to replace it from my case. It was awkward, but I didn’t like to carry piles of books around with me the whole journey, drawing attention to myself.

In the luggage car, also, in that workmanlike place full of yellow dust and shunting boxes and cases and crates, were the magician’s stage props. I’d known we had a magician on board; I’d seen him clearing tablecloths for applause at dinnertime.

He was the shape of a purple pear and fit to burst through his immaculate evening dress, which he wore all day with a ludicrous top hat. He had a malevolent waxed moustache; as if he should stop the train and tie us all to the rails. He impressed everyone and we clapped at his antics with the crockery. After three days it palled and now he was quiet and not as showy. It doesn’t do to become too well known on a long trip, to be a prominent personality. We know that from disaster movies, don’t we? The mouthy characters (played by someone

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