Stranger on a Train by Jenny Diski Read Free Book Online Page A

to myself at night: ‘I will be dead one day.’ Or, ‘One day I won’t be.’ I have a great determination to feel the sentence as a reality, but it always escapes me. ‘I will be dead’ comes with a picture of a dead body on a bed. But it’s mine, my bed, and a nine-year-old body. When I make a picture of the body as old, it becomes someone else. I can’t imagine myself old, or dead. I can’t imagine myself dying. Either the effort or the failure to do so makes me feel panicky.
    Being fifty is not being dead, but it is being old, inconceivably old, for me at nine, that is. I know other people are fifty, and I will be fifty if I don’t die beforehand. But the best I can do is to imagine someone who is not me, though not someone I know, being fifty. She looks like an old lady: the way old ladies currently looked. She looks like someone else. I can’t connect me thinking about her with the fact that I will be her in forty-one years’ time. She has lived through and known forty-one years to which I have no access. I can’t believe I will become her, although I know, factually, that I must. I can’t dress myself in her clothes or flesh and know what it feels like being her as I know what it feels like being me. This is immensely frustrating. I do the next best thing: I send a message out into the future, etching into my brain cells a memo to the other person, who will be me grown to be fifty, to remember this moment, this very moment, this actual second when I am nine, in bed, in the dark in my room, trying to imagine being fifty.
    In my cabin moored at the dock in Tampa, Florida, I have been fifty for the past year, and I am recalling the nine-year-old who tried to imagine me. I mean that I am recalling her trying to imagine me, at that moment, in bed, in the dark in her room, some forty-one years ago. It is easier for me to acknowledge and know her than the other way around, for all that I have learned about the unreliability of memory, because I have lived the missing forty-one years that she could know nothing about. There is a track back for me. The vividness of her making a note to remember the moment in the future when she is fifty is startling. But it is not a simple, direct link. I have the moment, but the person I connect with is someone whose future I know. I do not know the nine-year-old as she was then, at all; the one who had not yet experienced the life I led between her and me. I can’t imagine her as a reality, in her striving to understand what kind of fifty-year-old woman she would be, because she doesn’t exist any more except as a pinpoint in time. But she now has an indelible relation to me looking back through time, that I could not have for her aiming forward. There is a sense of vertigo, something quite dizzying about having arrived at the unimaginable point she reached out towards, at recalling her message and being in a position – but not able – to answer her question: here I am, it’s like this.
    It’s not just the nine-year-old’s illusive reality that prevents me from responding, it is also my own present inability, aged fifty, to imagine what it is like to be fifty. I know no better than she. I’ve heard a lot about it, read plenty, seen numbers of fifty-year-olds, both depicted and in real life, but that seems to be no help at all. This isn’t surprising. The fifty I seek to understand in order to answer her question is the same fifty I wondered about as a child, and it turns out to have nothing much to do with having lived for fifty years or more. I don’t know what it means to be fifty. I have no idea what to say to my nine-year-old self who thought that she would know what fifty was like once she had reached it. And I suppose the other question she asked herself, the one about the reality of death, will also remain a question, even though I etch into my brain cells a memo for the time of my dying