Train Lord by Oliver Mol

Author:Oliver Mol [Mol, Oliver]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241525098
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Circles

Let’s start over: the migraine had gone, mostly, but I didn’t trust it. I was twenty-eight, and broke. I’d left Brisbane and returned to Sydney, and had little, if any, practical, employable experience. That I was pain-free, initially, felt like nothing short of a miracle, though, in the end, certain activities – looking at computers or phones or screens or anything up close, sitting in a chair – would trigger a relapse so violent I would forget the pain had gone at all. I had become a reader who no longer read and a writer who no longer wrote: the two things I felt, above all else, I knew vaguely how to do.

But I kept trying. One day, I took two painkillers and opened my computer. I typed Sydney + No experience + Full time into Google. Sydney Trains was hiring train guards. I speed-typed an application, and sent it in. I don’t remember what it said. I passed two exams, a role-play, three interviews and, miraculously, a drug and alcohol test. Three months later I began train school. Six months later I became a guard. Eight months later I began to write, again, in pencil, in fragments, between stations, while working on the train. I wrote on the back of old train diagrams, and placed them in the stack on my desk when I got home. On good days, I made jokes. On bad days, when the migraine returned, I cried. I didn’t know it, then, but I needed time to think, to process, to go around and around, physically, mentally, without going anywhere at all. My base was Central, and I travelled in circles, over 200 kilometres a day. I no longer cared for books, and I’d given up being a writer, but I knew if I could tell it, trap it, here, for me, just once, then maybe everything would be okay.

That first day, after I relieved the guard from that suicide at Hornsby, I returned to Central and sat in the break room, staring at the show Think Tank on the TV. The game wanted to know the name of Richard Flanagan’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel. All the words were there except for the end word, and you had to pick the end word. I remember the contestant laughed and said he should know this one; he was a writer, but then he went silent. He scratched his head. Then he apologized and said he didn’t know. Books? one of the train guards said. Who gives a flying fuck? and then he walked out of the room.

I remember that first train, first lap around the Quay. I’d been sitting in the break room when another train guard offered me half of her lunch. I protested, told her I had already eaten, but she just snorted. Skinny thing like you? Couldn’t hurt to have two lunches. Go on, eat up. And so we sat, talking about the suicide rate on the network, eating her chicken and rice and salad that she had divided in two, when my phone rang.

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