Disclaimer: I own the plot, nothing else.
The Train Graveyard
By Sinful-Metaphor
The year was 1975.
Vincent Price was still alive, though not nearly as fresh he had been a century ago, and David Bowie enjoyed the glamour and vices of living the life of a criminal in drag. It was a simpler time, when punks stood up for their beliefs and people didn't give a damn. Joanna zigzagged through the rain, pretending to miss the teardrops. It was a stupidly funny pastime of hers, but not in that cold morning of November. Not with that claustrophobic baby inside her, kicking the inner wall of her uterus and demanding to be fed and cleaned and pampered, as the plump gentle hospital nurse would later predict.
I wouldn't gamble on that one. As a child I hated being pampered just as much as I hated wet willies or chocolate and nuts. Which was a lot. Human contact took some years to grow on me, and it was not until late into my adulthood that I found out why was that of any good.
Still. I was indeed claustrophobic, so it might have been that.
The delivery was exhausting, the seventeen year-old girl barely surviving to hear the loud screams of conquered freedom. Seven years later, over a mug of sweet coffee and biscuits, she would then admit she had been practising at home, a couple of days before the final performance, so that her moans and gasps for dear breath sounded right – sounded real – and she couldn't feel second to anyone.
I grew up to the sound of T. Rex and The Beach Boys, and other rock 'n' roll crap Grandma Grace kept smoking her cigar to. She was a fine lady.
For many years Sid Vicious was the bassist I wanted to become, and I simply assumed I would die at the age of twenty-one just like him, only seventeen years later. I even tried to dye my hair black when I was sixteen but he said he wouldn't bear to lose sight of my golden locks. So I remained a blond through the eons of sawdust and silence that were yet to come.
He was the shadow that haunted my sleepless nights in my excuse of a bedroom, in a room that would be better served as a pantry. Back in Little Traverse our house was smaller than average, like most of those that together brought Chocobo Street to life. What a stupid name for a street, I always thought…
"Cloud, you Chocobo!" he barked out loud from the midfield, throwing the rugby ball high into thin air, aiming at my unprotected body and oblivious mind.
And as soon as my name and his ball were launched, the defensive team ran wildly and blindly at me, scoring my face on the mud with the care and gentleness of an elephant. This was what civilised people called a playful, made-up ball game between friends. I called it Doormat. For obvious reasons.
"Sorry 'bout that. You alright?" he outstretched a hand to help me up. I took it.
"Didn't break a tooth or nothing" it was a sappy ungrammatical response that made him smirk. Or maybe he was just mocking my face covered in dirt, which had been reasonable and excusable enough.
We walked side by side out of the open field that belonged to no one, though Cid often claimed it as his own as the natural leader he was when it came to pointless things such ball games. The sole purpose of me ever joining them was to spend time away from a so-called household I no longer recognised. Joanna's boyfriend had ruined it for me. The endless death row.
"It is the only way to get your attention, you know?" he then explained, resting his folded arms on the back of his raven-haired head and shooting me a fleeting glare.
We'd started to climb up the road, me still hands in pockets. I refused to get them out most of the time, as my uncontrolled habit of biting my nails had placed me in the awkward position of a sensible ten year-old towards how ugly his hands really looked. More so when covered in mud and dirt from falling and falling, over and over again in that court.
"Where does it go?" he asked very matter-of-factly.
"What?" I asked back, quizzically.
"Your mind. All the time, wandering away…" he said, stopping on his feet with his eyes locked ahead.
I first thought him to be meditating on his own question, as if some bewildered philosophical matter only 6th graders understood. But then I heard the noisy, childish racket in front and ultimately understood he didn't want us to join the rest of them. The kids that had been playing Doormat with us just a few minutes before. They had stopped by Tellah's convenience store for sweets and soft drinks, and Cid patrolled each and every pocket to collect the necessary pennies.
Again, I entered and left the scene with little effort. I knew half of those kids from school, two or three from Chocobo Street, and the rest of them – the older ones – front those weekly encounters in the open filed. They meant nothing to me and I meant nothing to them.
"Hey!" he nearly shouted, nudging me on the side "See? You keep spacing out," he said.
I shrugged, gripping the insides of my pockets. "Sometimes I like to entertain myself," I answered.
He chuckled and shoved his hands deep into his pockets as well. Something people like us did a lot, maybe?
"I'm not picking you to be part of the team next Saturday." he said, resuming his walking.
I believe my eyes outstretched in shock then. "Because they tackled me once?" I asked.
"Not once. All the time." he laughed.
"Well, of course they did. You kept yelling my name!" I began to follow his steps again.
He looked back over his shoulder, a sprite-like smirk catching me red-handed. It was the very first smile I had noticed on him, the one that only later I learnt to reveal his elfin thoughts in the most devilish and bluntest way. It stood about only for a second or two…
I like saying your name, it said.
Most of the times I didn't understand half of our conversations.
First I blamed it on him who dragged way too much sense into things. Then I began to blame it on me, partially from being younger than him and most likely not as wiser, partially from spacing out a lot. Which I did and went on doing for years hence. Our subjects never changed much, though. We talked either of rugby or TV programmes that really sucked but that we did watch anyway. Sometimes we talked of Grandma Grace, but only the necessary to laugh a little and then stop. She was a bit of a magic woman; she could hear us anywhere for all we knew.
It was during a rainy afternoon of springtime that I learnt she had been an actress once. In Bone Village, she had explained, stressing the name with a husky accent that could've been French.
"I was about to embrace the world…" she said, exhaling the strong scent of her cigarette which she held tight and gracefully between a bonny wrinkled forefinger and index. The turquoise and crimson feathers around her neck would breathe-in that smoke, embedding it till it became Grace's natural scent.
"Why didn't you, then?" I asked, minding my tiptoes, butt freezing on the cold floor.
Grandma Grace sucked a deep breath, smashed the cigarette on the oak ashtray. Then, she laughed.
"Well, Greta Garbo and alike moved in to America and fucked some old entrepreneurs that would open them doors just as they opened their legs!" gulped down the last of her gin "It's a shit world."
"It's a shit world," I repeated to myself, not because it made perfect sense but because I had liked the sound. And I would repeat it again and again, light-years from that cosy afternoon in the living-room, and they would finally make sense.
Because Grace, you were right all along.
Except for Greta Garbo, Joanna would complain, and I would then realise that I had succumbed to the feminine sphere that was my social life.
We were strong then, and I never quite understood why Joanna needed an outsider to feel it.
The day he entered our lives, purring like a skilled cat, changed everything. She had met him back in January, 1984. I was nine and clueless. He drank martini at breakfast and read Aristotle and Plato, knew Latin and Italian, talked of cashmere as if it was a woman with voluptuous breasts and dark, almond eyes. He wore reading glasses and amused her with his impressions of dead people she had never heard of.
Sephiroth had conquered her heart over escargot and dry toasts. One year later he was moving in with us, buying me jumpers and pretending to care for my school projects. One year later he was drinking too much, locking Joanna for days in the bedroom and telling me too fuck off of adult's business.
This was when I started spending time outside, leaving early in the morning and arriving late into the night, having eaten already at Grace's.
It was tiresome but it had been sustainable, see? If only he hadn't beaten me up once, because some older kids had taken my lunch money and stolen my bright-red parka and he thought I should have fought back. I did, actually, but they laughed and disappeared into the snow.
He beat me then and he beat me during the following weeks, mostly because the first time had felt nice.
I only cried once about it: the day that changed my life. And Zack's.
It was the middle of December and everyone else was worried about Jesus. Honestly, I wasn't…
He decided that we should make a snowman contest, just the two of us, and see which one was better –something he explained to me with some strangely complicated expressions like virile dominance.
I didn't want to do it because I felt stupid playing with the cold snow when I could've been drinking eggnog and warming my feet with thousands of socks. If I were to wear boots instead, I couldn't dress thousands of socks – it was simple math!
"Come on, you little fucker. We have to define our status somehow," he said and laughed. And I laughed too, only to realise I had not understand a word.
"Why is that so important?" I then asked. It sounded like a plausible question inside my head.
"Because…" he kicked the snow about. Lightly. "There can't be two alpha lions in the same pride."
I drove a skeletal cold hand to my mouth and started biting my nails again.
He chuckled, perhaps innocently unaware of the fact he loved the concerned, albeit generous way I ruined my fingers.
"Still makes no sense to me," I finally said.
"Don't make me hit you" he said, squatting on the snow and picking up a handful.
I sighed, folded my arms. "I could've been older than you. People wouldn't tell the difference."
He smiled, "Let's get this over with, so I can take you there with me."
"Where to?" I asked, squinting.
"The Sanctuary." he said in a mutter, and I knew right away what he was talking about.
Of course Zack won the contest. I could have won it too if I wanted, but I really didn't feel like bending over the frozen snow and grabbed it so many times. I did, however, because he asked me to, and because he promised me he would take me to see the Train Graveyard as soon as he declared himself the winner. It was fast and pointless, but he seemed truly happy at the result.
Something to do with the virile dominance, I suppose.
We then left his front garden, which was beautifully fenced and taken care of, and accelerated our pace towards the Lower District and town centre, both equally lit up and decorated for Christ's sake – literally. The graveyard was just around the corner, behind the industrial area and the thick charcoal cloud of smoke that protected it. And once in the graveyard we could still see it hovering up and towards the sky, melting into the white clouds, colouring them grey and forlorn.
The dying and dead trains whispered as we crossed the bright-yellow sign that read NO TRESPASSING, capital red letters and all. Their rusty chains bristled with the wind and their unlocked broken doors stuttered, wondering whether or not we were welcome.
Later I would understand Zack and I were always welcome wherever normal people weren't, wherever God's eye didn't reach.
Wherever sound took the shape of colours and love was love in whatever form.
"Wicked, isn't it?" were his first uttered words.
I didn't answer. Couldn't bring myself to…
It was decay and loneliness, abandon and freedom. It smelled of burnt oil and rubber, of decomposing metal and something acid I couldn't quite put my finger on. Age, maybe. The snow huddled around their rails and feet, softening their fall into oblivion, tucking them in at night, kissing their forehead. The dead ones, the dying ones, the lost ones.
And I saw Sephiroth's spiteful sneer, his contemptuous hand reaching out towards the golden locks that Zack would learn to love so much, his coarse mouth spitting every ugly name I already knew of and those I was to understand the meaning of later on. And I saw Joanna in the doorway, crying for me, unable to stop it. I saw him too, in his usual chestnut parka and jeans, a childlike smile calling for my mind again, because I had spaced out again.
And I finally cried.
I'll keep uploading if you want me to :)
On a side note: I use a lot of time references that don't belong to same decade or country but that I take as universal knowledge - such as The Beach Boys or David Bowie. It's not comparing apples and oranges, it actually has a reason.